Nancy Lusignan Schultz - Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834
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- Book:Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834
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In the midst of a deadly heat wave during the summer of 1834, a woman clawed her way over the wall of a Roman Catholic convent near Boston, Massachusetts and escaped to the home of a neighbor, pleading for protection. When the bishop, Benedict Fenwick, persuaded her to return, rumors began swirling through the Yankee community and in the press that she was being held at the convent against her will, and had even been murdered. The imagined fate of the Mysterious Lady, as she became popularly known, ultimately led to the destruction of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts on the night of August 11, 1834 by a mob of Protestant men.
After battering down the front door, the men destroyed icons, smashed pianos, hurled the bishops library into a bonfire, ransacked the possessions of both sisters and students, and finally burned the imposing building to the ground. Not satisfied with this orgy of vandalism, they returned the following night and tore the lovely gardens up by the roots. The ruins sat on Mount Benedict, a hill overlooking Boston Harbor, for the next fifty years. The arsonists ringleader, a brawny bricklayer named John Buzzell, became a folk hero. The nuns scattered, and their proud and feisty mother superior, Mary Anne Moffatt, who battled the working-class rioters and Church authorities, faded mysteriously into history.
Nancy Schultz brings alive this forgotten moment in the American story, shedding light on one of the darkest incidents of religious persecution to be recorded in the New World. The result of painstaking archival research, Fire & Roses offers a rare lens on a time when independent, educated women were feared as much as immigrants and Catholics, and anti-Papist diatribes were the stuff of bestsellers and standing-room-only lectures. Schultz examines the imagined secrets that led to the riot and uncovers the real secrets in a cloistered community whose life was completely hidden from the world. She provides a glimpse into nineteenth-century Boston and into an elite boarding school for young women, mostly the daughters of wealthy Protestants, vividly dissecting the periods roiling tensions over class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education. Although the roots of these conflicts were in the Puritan migration to America, it was ultimately the mobs perverse fantasies about cloistered women in an independent community that erupted in a combustible night of violence.
By unearthing the buried truth and bringing alive these fascinating characters, Nancy Schultz tells a gripping story of prejudice and pride, courage and cowardice in early nineteenth-century America that not only restores a clouded chapter in the countrys history but also has a poignant resonance for our own times.
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THE FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
Copyright 2000 by Nancy Lusignan Schultz
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Prior publication: An earlier version of some of the material on Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk appears in my introduction to A Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales (Purdue University Press, 1999) and in my article on captivity narratives in Studies in Puritan Spirituality: Literary Calvinism and Nineteenth Century Women Authors, Vol. 6, 1997, 7199.
Schultz, Nancy Lusignan, 1956
Fire and roses: the burning of the Charlestown convent, 1834 / Nancy Lusignan Schultz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. Ursuline Convent (Charlestown, Boston, Mass.)History19th century. 2. RiotsMassachusettsBostonHistory19th century. 3. FiresMassachusettsBostonHistory19th century. 4. Charlestown (Boston, Mass.)History19th century. 5. Boston (Mass.)History19th century. 6. AntiCatholicismMassachusettsBostonHistory19th century. I. Title.
F74.C4 S35 2000
974.4'1dc21 00-041714
ISBN-10: 0-7432-1256-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1256-4
FOR JACKSON, JACKSON III, AND JONAS
AND
IN MEMORY OF HENRY ABRAM
James T. Austin: Attorney general and the prosecuting attorney in the trial of the convent rioters.
Mary Barber: Sister Mary Benedict, the beautiful daughter of Virgil and Jerusha Barber, who became the third superior of the Boston-area Ursulines.
Mrs. Barrymore: The dancing instructor at the convent.
Reverend Lyman Beecher: Congregationalist minister and father of Harriet Beecher Stowe who gave three anti-Catholic sermons on the day before the riot.
Elizabeth Bennett: Sister Ambrose, choir nun.
James Bowman: Painter of portraits of Benedict Fenwick and Mary Anne Moffatt.
John R. Buzzell: Brick maker and leader of the convent rioters who was acquitted of the crime to cheers and acclamation.
Sarah Chase: Sister Mary Ursula, lay sister.
Bishop Jean Louis Cheverus: First bishop of Boston, recalled to France in 1823.
Maria Cotting: Silver-medal-winning student to whose home Sister Mary John fled on the night of her escape.
Reverend William Croswell: Episcopalian rector of Christ Church (Old North) in Boston, who encouraged Rebecca Reed to write SixMonths in a Convent.
Edward Cutter: Member of the Massachusetts legislature and owner of a local brickyard who investigated the case of Elizabeth Harrison.
Rebecca DeCosta: Sister Mary Claire, lay sister.
Commodore Jesse Elliott: Catholic Commander of the Charlestown Navy Yard and friend of Mary Anne Moffatt.
George F. Farley, and Samuel H. Mann: Counsel for most of the accused convent rioters.
Reverend Benedict Joseph Fenwick: Jesuit priest and second Roman Catholic bishop of Boston, for whom Mount Benedict was named.
Mary Anne and Jane Fraser: Probable nieces of Mary Anne Moffatt.
Elizabeth Harrison: Sister Mary John, the mother assistant and music teacher of the convent, who suffered a fit of insanity and ran away two weeks before the convent was attacked.
Ann Janet Kennedy: Sister Mary Francis, dissatisfied young novice from New York who befriended Rebecca Reed.
Peter A. Kielchen: The Russian consul stationed in Boston, and friend of Mary Anne Moffatt.
Father Maguire: Confessor to the nuns in Quebec, sent to Boston to escort Mother St. George to Quebec.
Marvin Marcy: The boy who burned Bishop Fenwicks books on the night of the fire and the only convicted rioter.
Father Franois Antoine Matignon: Executor of John Thayers will and a benefactor of the Ursulines.
Mary Louise McLaughlin: Mother St. Henry, superior of the Quebec Ursulines.
Jane (Genevieve) Moffatt: Mother of Mary Anne Moffatt, still living in 1836.
Mary Anne Ursula Moffatt: Sister Mary Edmond St. George, superior of the Charlestown Ursulines.
William Moffatt: Father of Mary Anne Moffatt, a loyalist who fled to Canada and died before 1810.
Catherine Molineaux: Sister Mary Angela, cousin of the Ryan sisters and one of the four foundresses of the Boston Ursulines.
Grace OBoyle: Sister Bernard, lay sister.
The OKeefe sisters from Ireland: Margaret, Sister Mary Magdalene, who, according to Rebecca Reed, had her life shortened by the austerities imposed on the religious; Frances, Sister Mary Austin, mistress of the junior class; and Ellen, Sister Mary Joseph.
Sister St. Henry Quirck: Niece of the foundresses who succumbed to tuberculosis shortly after the destruction of the convent.
Rebecca Reed: The novice who escaped from Mount Benedict in 1832 and wrote a best-selling expos called Six Months in a Convent.
Peter Rossiter: Irish caretaker at Mount Benedict who was beaten by John R. Buzzell two months before the convent was attacked.
John Runey: The selectman who was present when the convent was burned and whose daughter later suffered a fit of insanity.
Catherine Ryan: Sister Mary Magdalene, one of the four foundresses of the Boston Ursulines.
Margaret Ryan: Sister Mary Austin or Augustine. One of the four original foundresses and beloved friend of Mary Anne Moffatt.
Mary Ryan: Sister Mary Joseph, foundress and the first superior of the Boston-area Ursulines.
Lemuel Shaw: Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who presided over the trial of the convent rioters.
Reverend Joseph Signay: Bishop of Quebec who recalled Mother St. George to Quebec.
Reverend William Taylor: Priest in charge of the diocese of Boston, 182325, and friend of Mary Anne Moffatt.
Lucy Thaxter: Former student who wrote a letter in defense of the community at Mount Benedict.
Father John Thayer: Protestant convert and benefactor of the Boston Ursulines.
Dr. Abraham Thompson: Physician at the Mount Benedict convent whose daughters had attended the school.
Louisa Goddard Whitney: Former student at the Mount Benedict Academy and author of The Burning of the Convent (1877).
Catherine Wiseman: Sister Mary Frances, one of the original trustees in Boston.
FIRE &
ROSES
PROLOGUE
T HE ANGRY THUNDERSTORMS that shook the Massachusetts coastline early on Wednesday, August 13, 1834 may have seemed to some like Gods retribution for the events of the previous twenty-four hours. In the fishing town of Newburyport, about forty miles north of Boston, in a bar called the Bite Tavern, lay the bloodsoaked corpse of Henry Creesy. His hand still held the jackknife that he had used to slit his own throat. Earlier that evening, drenched with rain and sweat, he had stumbled into the dark tavern and ordered the first of several whiskeys. As the night stretched on, his behavior had become more and more erratic. Dark mutterings over the glass had escalated into horrified glances over his shoulder. Then, when a neighbor from the town rested his hand in friendly greeting on Creesys arm, the distraught man jumped up from his stool at the bar, spun wildly around, and flashed his knife. As the barman and others moved to subdue him, he broke from their grasp and stood frozen in the middle of the room. In the candlelit tavern, he must have imagined dozens of glittering demons eyes staring at him, as he stood helpless in the center of a magic circle of fire. The knife flashed once more in the candlelight, and Creesy toppled onto the wooden floor. His severed windpipe gurgled, then was quiet, and as the stunned patrons watched, a red stain spread, outlining his head in his own gore, like an infernal halo.
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