Accordingly, about nine o’clock in the evening, a mob began to collect in the neighborhood of Mt. St. Benedict. Bonfires were lit and exciting harangues were made, but still there were many persons reluctant to believe that the rioters were in earnest. They would not admit that any great number of Americans could be found base and brutal enough to attack a house filled with defenceless and delicate women and children. They were mistaken, however; they had yet to learn to what lengths fanaticism can be carried when once the evil passions of corrupt human nature are aroused. Towards midnight a general alarm was rung, calling out the engine companies of Boston, not to quell any fire or disturbance, but, as was proved by their conduct, to reinforce the rioters, if necessary. The first demonstration was made by firing shot and stones against the windows and doors of the main building, to ascertain if there were any defenders inside; but, upon becoming satisfied that there were none, the cowardly mob burst open the gates and doors, and rushed wildly through the passages and rooms, swearing vengeance against the nuns.
Trusting to the protection of the authorities, the gentle sisters were taken by surprise. The shots of their assailants, however, awakened them to a sense of danger. Hastening from their beds, they rushed to the dormitories, aroused the sleeping children, and had barely time to avoid the fury of the mob by escaping through a back entrance in their night-clothes. Everything portable, including money and jewelry belonging to the pupils, was laid hold of by the intruders, the furniture and valuable musical instruments were hacked in pieces, and then the convent was given to the flames amid the frantic cheers of assembled thousands. “Not content with all this,” says the report of Mr. Loring’s committee, “they burst open the tomb of the establishment, rifled it of the sacred vessels there deposited, wrested the plates from the coffins, and exposed to view the mouldering remains of their tenants. Nor is it the least humiliating feature, in this scene of cowardly and audacious violation of all that man ought to hold sacred, that it was perpetrated in the presence of men vested with authority and of multitudes of our fellow-citizens, while not one arm was lifted in the defence of helpless women and children, or in vindication of the violated laws of God and man. The spirit of violence, sacrilege, and plunder reigned triumphant.”
The morning of the 12th of August saw what for years had been the quiet retreat of Christian learning and feminine holiness a mass of blackened ruins; but the character of Massachusetts had received even a darker stain, a foul blot not yet wiped from her escutcheon. It was felt by the most respectable portion of the citizens that some step should be taken to vindicate the reputation of the State, and to place the odium of the outrage on those who alone were guilty. Accordingly, a committee of thirty-eight leading Protestant gentlemen, with Charles G. Loring as chairman, was appointed to investigate and report on the origin and results of the disgraceful proceeding. It met in Faneuil Hall from day to day, examined a great number of witnesses, and made the most minute inquiries from all sources. Its final report was long, eloquent, and convincing. After the most thorough examination, it was found, those Protestant gentlemen said, that all the wild and malicious assertions put forth in the sectarian pulpits and repeated in the newspapers, regarding the Ursulines, were without a shadow of truth or probability; they eulogized in the most glowing language the conduct of the nuns, their qualifications as teachers, their Christian piety and meekness, and their careful regard for the morals as well as for the religious scruples of their pupils. They also attributed the wanton attack upon the nunnery to the fell spirit of bigotry evoked by the false reports of the New England press and the unmitigated slanders of the anti-Catholic preachers, and called upon the legislative authorities to indemnify, in the most ample manner, the victims of mob law and official connivance.
But the most significant fact brought to light by this committee was that the fanatics, in their attack on Mt. St. Benedict, were not a mere heterogeneous crowd of ignorant men acting upon momentary impulse, but a regular band of lawless miscreants directed and aided by persons of influence and standing in society. “There is no doubt,” says the report, “that a conspiracy had been formed, extending into many of the neighboring towns; but the committee are of opinion that it embraced very few of respectable character in society, though some such may, perhaps, be actually guilty of an offence no less heinous, morally considered, in having excited the feelings which led to the design, or countenanced and instigated those engaged in its execution.” Here we find laid down, on the most unquestionable authority, the origin and birth-place of all subsequent Native American movements against Catholicity.
But the sequel to the destruction of the Charlestown convent was even more shameful than the crime itself. Thirteen men had been arrested, eight of whom were charged with arson. The first tried was the ringleader, an ex-convict, named Buzzell. The scenes which were enacted on that occasion are without a parallel in the annals of our jurisprudence. The mother-superior, several of the sisters, and Bishop Fenwick, necessary witnesses for the prosecution, were received in court with half-suppressed jibes and sneers, subjected to every species of insult by the lawyers for the defence, and were frowned upon even by the judge who presided. Though the evidence against the prisoner was conclusive, the jury, without shame or hesitation, acquitted him, and he walked out of court amid the wildest cheers of the bystanders. Similar demonstrations of popular sympathy attended the trials of the other rioters, who were all, with the exception of a young boy, permitted to escape the penalty of their gross crimes.
Even the State legislature, though urged to do so by many of the leading public men of the commonwealth, refused to vote anything like an adequate sum to indemnify the nuns and pupils for their losses, amounting to over a hundred thousand dollars. The pitiful sum of ten thousand dollars was offered, and of course rejected; and to this day the ruins of the convent stand as an eloquent monument of Protestant perfidy and puritanical meanness and injustice.
The impunity thus legally and officially guaranteed to mobs and sacrilegious plunderers soon bore fruit in other acts of lawlessness in various parts of Massachusetts. A Catholic graveyard in Lowell was shortly after entered and desecrated by an armed rabble, and a house in Wareham, in which Mass was being celebrated, was set upon by a gang of ruffians known as the “Convent Boys.” A couple of years later the Montgomery Guards, a regular militia company, composed principally of Catholic freeholders of Boston, were openly insulted by their comrades on parade, and actually stoned through the streets by a mob of over three thousand persons.
As there were no more convents to be plundered and burned in the stronghold of Puritanism, the war on those glories of religion was kept up in a different manner, but with no less rancor and audacity. Taking advantage of the excitement created by such men as Lyman Beecher and Buzzell, a mercenary publisher issued a book entitled Six Months in a Convent, which was put together by some contemptible preacher in the name of an illiterate girl named Reed, who, the better to mislead the public, assumed the title of “Sister Mary Agnes.” “We earnestly hope and believe,” said the preface to this embodiment of falsehood, “that this little work, if universally diffused, will do more, by its unaffected simplicity, in deterring Protestant parents from educating their daughters in Catholic nunneries than could the most labored and learned discourses on the dangers of Popery.” Though the book was replete with stupid fabrications and silly blunders, so grossly had the popular taste been perverted that fifty thousand copies were sold within a year after its publication. The demand was still increasing, when another contribution to Protestant literature appeared, before the broad, disgusting, and obscene fabrications of which the mendacity of “Sister Mary Agnes” paled its ineffectual fires. This latter candidate for popular favor, though it bore the name, destined for an immortality of infamy, of Maria Monk—a notoriously dissolute woman—was actually compiled by a few needy and unscrupulous adventurers, reverend and irreverend, who found a distinguished Methodist publishing house, not quite so needy, though still more unscrupulous, to publish the work for them, though very shame compelled even them to withhold their names from the publication. And it was only owing to a legal suit arising from this infamous transaction many years after that the fact was revealed that the publishers of this vilest of assaults on one of the holiest institutions of the Catholic Church was the firm of Harper Brothers. True to their character, they saw that the times were favorable for an assault on Catholicity, even so vile as this one; and true to their nature again, they refused to their wretched accomplice her adequate share in the wages of sin. Though bearing on its face all the evidences of diabolical malice and falsehood, condemned by the better portion of the press and by all reputable Protestants, the work had an unparalleled sale for some time. The demand might have continued to go on increasing indefinitely, but, in an evil hour for the speculators, its authors, under the impression that the prurient taste of the public was not sufficiently satiated with imaginary horrors, issued a continuation under the title of Additional Awful Disclosures. This composition proved an efficient antidote to the malignant poison of the first. Its impurity and falsehoods were so palpable that its originators were glad to slink into obscurity and their patrons into silence, followed by the contempt of all honest men.
Just ten years after the Charlestown outrage the spirit of Protestant persecution began to revive. Premonitory symptoms of political proscription appeared in 1842, in the constitutional conventions of Rhode Island and Louisiana, and in the local legislatures of other States; but it was not till the early part of 1844 that it became evident that secret measures were being taken to arouse the dormant feeling of antipathy to the rights of Catholics, so rife in the hearts of the ignorant Protestant masses. New York, at first, was the principal seat of the disorder. Most of the newspapers of that period teemed with eulogistic reviews of books written against the faith; cheap periodicals, such as the Rev. Mr. Sparry’s American Anti-Papist, were thrust into the hands of all who would read them by the agents of the Bible and proselytizing societies; and a cohort of what were called anti-papal lecturers, of which a reverend individual named Cheever was the leader, was employed to attack the Catholic Church with every conceivable weapon that the arsenal of Protestantism afforded.