University of Virginia Library

CHARLESTOWN.

The traveler who seeks the cool northeast
seaside is scarcely aware how near it is to him
when, after his wearisome journey, he crosses
the narrow and crooked streets which are Boston's
crown of picturesque glory, and leaves
the city by the Eastern Railway. For no sooner
has the train moved out of the station than the
sea-views begin to open on him as he goes—
vistas of the broad, blue bay; streams just
emptying in; salt marshes, rich with every tint
and every odor; the bold bluffs of Nahant; the
long lines and lonely houses of the Chelsea
beaches; forts far away in the harbor, where
the flag waves like a blossom on its reed; and
town after town, all more or less historic, and
all full of the wild sea-breath that gives such a
bloom to the faces of their women, and such a
vigor to their men. He has hardly crossed the
first bridge before one of these towns rises on
his sight, sitting on her hill the while as fair as
any pictured city of walls and towers, and over-looking
the Mystic and the Charles, and the
wide and windy bay. Indeed, a lovelier view
of any town I do not know than Charlestown,
when seen from the car window, her lights reflected
in the water at her feet, and her streets
lifted in tier over tier, till the lofty spire of the
hill-top church glitters in the moon or starlight
far above them all.

It is not so charming a spot, however, upon
nearer acquaintance, for most of its streets are
as narrow as those of the neighboring metropolis,
and not one-half so clean, and it is more interesting
as a congregation of workshops,
foundries, and great industrial establishments,
than in any other light; for, owing to the circumstance
of five towns having been set off
from it, and a part of four others, it has now
the smallest territory of any town in the State
of Massachusetts, and is necessarily crowded.
Running along the waterside is the Navy Yard,
surrounded by a massive granite wall, ten feet
high, and encircling the barracks both for marines
and officers and their families, together
with the great machine-shops, ropewalks, shipyards,
wharves, dry-docks, and other Government
works on a vast scale, thronged with two
thousand busy artisans, and all guarded by sentries
pacing their perpetual round, and by the
receiving-ship Ohio, anchored in the stream
beyond. This whole agglomeration of men
and trades forms a strong political element in
its locality, and a prominent and potential
member of Congress has been heard to declare
that he once staid six weeks in Washington
after the session in order to secure the appointment
of a common painter in the Navy Yard,
and failed at last.

The State Prison, another lion of the place,
is a machine hardly less powerful, as any one
might easily imagine who saw it entrenched
behind its perpendicular fortifications and rows
of spikes, and thought of the number of officials
necessary to carry on its operations and
maintain order among its unhappy denizens.
It is a gloomy-looking fabric, like all the traditional
prisons “that slur the sunshine half a
mile,” and a satirist has mentioned the fact as
characteristic of certain inconsistencies between
theory and practice common in Massachusetts,
that almost the only place within her borders
where a liberty-cap is displayed is at the top of
her State Prison, not so glaring an inconsistency,
nevertheless, as it at first sight appears,
since the imprisonment of criminals means the
freedom of all the rest of society.

In quite another portion of Charlestown
stands the famous Bunker Hill Monument,
making the most attractive feature of the
town, with its gray shaft rising in perfect
symmetry from the ample space at the summit
of a lofty and smoothly-swarded green
hill. Here the statue of Warren is to be found,
with various trophies of the Revolution, less
interesting in themselves than are the suggestions
of the scene—a scene that calls up one
morning, almost a hundred years ago, with the
unquailing farmers gathered behind their
breastworks of sod and hay, and the flashing
bayonets and scarlet lines of British grenadiers
moving up the hill, while the town below was
blazing in a conflagration of every dwelling
there; that calls up another morning fifty
years later, where trembling old hands, that,
when youth and chivalry were at flood, helped
to lay the corner-stone of the Republic, now
in the midst of its success laid the corner-stone
of this monument to one of its first struggles
for existence, and, in the presence of the survivors
of that struggle, the thunders of Webster's
eloquence were answered by the thunders
of the people's applause. Who is it that

declares the inclosure at Bunker Hill peculiarly
typical of our national characteristics, inasmuch
as, being badly beaten there, we built a
monument to the fact, and have never ceased
boasting thereof? One thing can certainly
be said in reply, that the moral effect in teaching
the enemy how sadly in earnest the brave
rebels were, and in encouraging the dispirited
patriots by sight of raw recruits thrice breaking
the form of the invading veterans, was
something inestimable; that rail fence stuffed
with meadow-hay was not merely the breastwork
of Putnam and Prescott, it was the first
redoubt of freedom the wide world over, and
from Bunker Hill began that march of noble
thought and grand action across this continent
which is destined to overthrow all tyrannies,
both of intellect and of empire, in this hemisphere
to-day, to-morrow in the other. It gives
one a very satisfactory emotion of patriotism to
stand on Bunker Hill, as well as a good idea of
the recuperative power of the country, for
when the enemy drove every soul out of
Charlestown, and burned every building there,
it was but five hundred houses in all that were
destroyed, while to-day the population approaches
the number of forty thousand. It is
a population, however, that must have undergone
many changes; as, for instance, one
would fancy that its action of thirty years ago,
in the destruction of the Ursuline Convent,
would, at present, be quite impossible, since
the Catholic Church now far outnumbers any
other single sect in the place—for the Catholic
Church has a subtle, self-healing way with it
like that belonging to some natural organism,
so that where it has received a wound, thither
it immediately sends its best and freshest blood
to repair the harm, as the case is with the limb
of an animal or the branch of a tree, and thus
mending itself and growing with greater vigor
where the hurt was, it presently outstrips injury,
and plants itself in the place of its assailant.

The Ursuline Convent just mentioned belonged,
at the time of its demolition, to one of
the congregations of Ursulines founded some
three hundred years earlier as a religious sisterhood
for nursing the sick, relieving and instructing
the poor, and named for the martyred
St. Ursula, a Christian princess of Britain, and
one of the first to associate maidens with herself
for devout purposes. Originally every Sister
remained in her own home, and performed
from that point such duties as were hers; but
shortly after the death of Angela Merici, the
foundress, they adopted a uniform dress, their
principles and plan of action became more
widely spread, and they gradually gathered
together under the same roof, chose a Directress,
or Superior, and took some simple vows,
vows afterward exchanged for others of a more
solemn nature. In the year 1860 there were
more than five hundred houses of Ursulines in
the world; and, never entirely abandoning
their original purpose, they are to-day principally
devoted to the tuition and care of young
girls; and of such benefit to the general community
have they always been considered, that,
when certain European Governments put an end
to the existence of convents within their territory,
the Ursulines were permitted to remain
unmolested, and were moreover aided and encouraged
in their work. The ruins of the
Ursuline Convent in Charlestown stand in a
remote part of the town, lately taken into the
village of Somerville, on a place known as
Mount Benedict, and smoke-blackened and
weather-beaten, the broken walls and chimneys
have stood for more than thirty years till becoming
picturesque with time. Wild cherry
trees have sprung up within the walls of the
cloisters, and have grown into full bearing of
their bitter fruit; cattle browse among them,
and lie beneath the great trees that have arched
themselves, untaught, over the old avenues;
sheep crop the turf where once the nuns' flower-garden
may have been, and where, long since,
the natural growth of the place has retaken its
own rights, and where here and there a weed
blooms, which is only a garden-flower returned
to its one original stock. One side of the hill commands
the harbor and the placid Charles, with
a view of the neighboring metropolis, just remote
enough for a haze of distance to render
it poetic; and on the other side, far away
across meadows and bending elms, the blue
and lovely Mystic winds to the sea, and soft,
low hills inclose the wide and varied landscape.
It is a retreat of peace, that now remains
unbroken by anything except the rudeness
of the winter storms, but it bears upon it
the moss-grown marks of a violence sadly in
contrast, for thirty-five years ago it was the
scene of an outrage on human rights and freedom
of thought, which, it is to be hoped, neither
this country nor this age shall behold again.
The convent had been founded in 1820 by Doctors
Matigon and Cheverus with funds contributed
for that purpose by a resident and native of
the city of Boston; and upon their urgency a
few Sisters of the Ursuline Order came to this
country, and made Boston their home. The
confinement and the city air, however, disturbed
their health, accustomed as they had
been to the out-door exercise of their gardens,
and, some half-dozen years after their arrival,
the bishop procured for them the estate in
Charlestown, to which they immediately removed,
occupying a farmhouse at the foot of
the hill till their own residence upon the summit
should be completed. This was done in the
next year, and it was shortly so crowded with
pupils from New England, the West Indies,
Southern States and British provinces, that a
couple of years afterward two large wings were
added to the establishment, the number of nuns
varying from four to ten, and the pupils from
fifty to sixty.

The feeling in Charlestown toward them
could hardly ever have been of a hospitable
nature, for one of the Selectmen of the town,
who appears to have been of a very inflammable
temperament, told the Superior that it had
been his intention on the first night of the
occupancy of the farmhouse by the nuns to
come with thirty men and tear it down about
their ears, but he was deterred by the quiet
procession of the little company taking their
walks across the hill next day, which appears
to have been a moving sight to him. Welcome
or not, however, the school prospered wonderfully,
as indeed it could hardly help doing when
the teachers were so devoted to their duties,
the fact of their being devoted for life being
probably the chief secret of their success.
There was then comparatively little attention
paid to science and the severer studies generally,
and the education of women was confined
almost especially to the accomplishments

of language, music, and painting, which were
taught here to perfection; and, thronged with
pupils and applicants, it is possible the school
aroused the jealousy of those who conjectured
the good income which it yearly added to
the revenues of a Church they abominated.
There was no need, though, of adding this
jealousy to the elements at work in the neighborhood
already distrustful of Roman Catholic
institutions, keeping a vigilant lookout over
what it considered as little less than a branch
of the Inquisition introduced into the midst of
it, constantly fearful of Catholic supremacy—
not from any largeness of view concerning the
Church as a Church of authority denying the
right of individual opinion, and thus a drag
upon the wheels of progress, but with an imagination
inflamed by the wood-cuts of “Fox's
Book of Martyrs,” by such legends as that old
one of the unfaithful nun, sealed up alive in a
wall, and regarding the quiet building on the
hill not as a place of innocent merriment and
girlish study, but of severe penance, of horrible
punishment, of underground cells and
passages through which all the mighty power of
the Church walked abroad to crush any refractory
spirit into death or submission. There were
sad rumors of barbarities exercised upon the
sick, of a child sent away in an advanced stage
of scarlet-fever, of fearful penances imposed
upon a dying nun. It was also urged that the
Convent made great effort to secure the children
of Protestants for proselyting purposes,
excluding the children of Catholics; oblivious
of the truth that its doors were open to all who
were able to meet the cost of such expensive
education, that, its pupils being chiefly daughters
of the wealthy, there really belonged to
Catholic parents a proportion of them corresponding
to the proportion of wealthy Catholics
in the community at large, while for poorer
Catholics a free school already existed in Boston,
where their education was provided for
quite suitably to their probable station in life;
and in the meantime not a single pupil, in all
the number educated in the convent, had ever
become a nun, nor had one even been converted
to Catholicism. But more than this inherited
dread of papacy and its influence were
the swarms of suspicions of another sort. It
makes one doubtful of the inherent worth of
human nature to hear the baseness of conjecture
indulged in by these people; it seems as if
they were so vile themselves that they could
believe in the virtue of no others; because
priests assumed to be celibate and nuns to be
virgin, they denounced the good bishop as a
monster and the stainless Sisters as prodigies
of impurity. And as time wore on, and all
these unfortunate feelings and fancies glowed
more and more hotly, it needed but a single
spark to kindle the flame of intolerance into
open action among this population, watchful,
and ready to give the worst possible construction
to every simple circumstance.

The flame was kindled quickly enough. In
the summer of 1834 there were fifty-four young
girls, from all parts of the country, students in
the convent, and ten nuns resident there—two
of the latter being novices, and therefore doing
nothing in the schoolroom. Of these fifty-four
young girls, it is probable that nearly all took
music-lessons, while there appear to have been
but two of the nuns attending to music—one
of these an invalid already in consumption—so
that the greater part of the hundred and odd
music-lessons a week fell to the share of the
other—Sister Mary John, formerly, when in
the world and retaining the name of her birth,
a Miss Elizabeth Harrison. Miss Harrison was
a native of Philadelphia, had passed her novitiate
of two years, and had for four years been a
member in full communion. She had a brother
and a brother-in-law living in Boston, across
the bridge, and visiting her at the convent
whenever they chose; and as she had, besides,
unrestricted opportunities of reposing confidence
in her pupils, had she desired to be
taken from the convent nothing would have
been easier—all the more as no restraint was
put upon an individual there; and two nuns
who had taken the vail had left, without let or
hindrance, and still maintained friendly relations
with the Superior. She had been giving
steadily fourteen lessons a day of forty-five
minutes each; any one who has studied or
taught music, or who has been present during
a lesson in that art, knows what an exquisitely
trying thing to the nerves it is, and Miss Harrison
was not only tired and weak, but her
brain was in a state of high excitement. Several
members of her family had been subject
to occasional mental alienation—a circumstance
of which had the Ursulines been aware
upon her reception among them, they would
probably have allotted her less fatiguing duties.
Old Dr. Warren had already pronounced
Miss Harrison's health to be very delicate; always
in excessively cold or warm weather she
had trouble in her head, and feeling this quite
badly, at about the last of July, she had foolishly
taken an emetic which had acted strangely
with her; she began to manifest great restlessness,
went about the house acting extravagantly,
clamoring for new instruments, setting
the doors wide open as if to cool her fever,
and when, one afternoon, the Superior told
her that she looked too ill to be attending
to the lessons, she replied by a burst of
laughter, and her nervous excitement culminating
in delirium as the heat of the day increased,
she slipped out of the convent, into
the grounds, and away to a neighbor's house,
unobserved by the Sisters, who would never
have dreamed of such a thing, as she was a
person incapable of disguising her feelings, and
had never before been heard to express the
least dissatisfaction, but of whom, on the contrary,
it was thought that there could not be a
happier person than she in the whole Ursuline
Order. From the neighbor's house she was
taken by the Selectman, himself another neighbor,
and the one who had at first intended to
tear down the farmhouse about the nuns' ears,
to the residence of a gentleman in West Cambridge,
after which, going to the convent, he
notified the Superior of what he had done, and
on the next day the brother of the young lady
went to see her. Probably the rest from her
labors and the change of scene had already
acted beneficially on Miss Harrison's mind, for
she implored her brother to bring Bishop Fenwick
to her, as if she longed for his assistance
in regaining her self-control. It would seem
that the bishop had been disinclined to interfere;
but, on the solicitation of the Superior, he
went with Miss Harrison's brother in the afternoon
to visit her. Bishop Fenwick testified
upon oath that he found Miss Harrison in a
state of derangement, her looks haggard, her

[ILLUSTRATION]

ESCAPE OF THE "MYSTERIOUS LADY" FROM THE URSULINE CONVENT OF MT. BENEDICT.--"HER NERVOUS EXCITEMENT CULMINATING IN DELIRIUM, SHE SLIPPED OUT OF THE CONVENT.

[Description: 693EAF. Page 011. In-line image. A nun is running out of a picket gate. Her left hand is pushing open the gate. Her habit and her rosary are flying behind her. She looks with apprehension as she moves forward. Behind her is the garden of the convent and one of the convent buildings.] expressions incoherent, while she laughed and
cried in the same moment; that his one object
in going for her was to take her to the convent,
clothe her properly, and send her to her friends,
presuming that she left because dissatisfied with
her mode of treatment; but when he proposed
her return to her home, she begged and entreated
to be allowed to remain. Upon her
restoration to the convent, she declared that
“she did not know what it all meant,” and she
begged the people who called upon her not to
refer any more to the circumstances of her
brief absence, for she could not be responsible
for what she then said or did. To Miss Alden,
who in past times had heard her frequently say
that she could never cease to be thankful
enough for having been called to that happy
state of life, and who now visited her, she expressed
the greatest horror at the step she had
taken, and said that she would prefer death to
leaving. And upon being examined in court,
on the trial of the rioters, she averred that had
any one ever told her she should do what she
had done, she would have thought it impossible;
that nothing was omitted, in the conduct
of the institution, that could contribute to her
happiness or to that of the other inmates; that
her recollection of what took place after her
flight was very indistinct, for she was bereft of
reason; and she covered her face and burst into
tears.

The worst conjecture, one would have

thought, that, in uncharity, could have been
put upon this affair, would have been that,
never of very strong mind, and now worn out
with the unceasing recurrence of her labors,
she had suddenly imagined the life unbearable,
and in a wild moment had escaped from it only
to find herself grown unused to the world, and
more unhappy there than over her old tasks in
the convent. But that was truth beside the
calumnies that instantly sprang into being upon
the foundation of this unfortunate occurrence.
It was remembered, too, that another young
woman had left Mount Benedict not long previously,
and the atrocious slanders upon the
sisterhood which she scattered wherever she
went were revived with added burden, and
there was hardly any scandal possible to be invented
but was repeated and believed, till the
stately brick edifice on the hill was honestly regarded
far and near, by the bigoted and narrowminded
of the untaught population, as a den of
wickedness and filth; and a conspiracy for its
suppression was hurriedly formed, not only in
Charlestown, but throughout other towns and
extending into other States. Matters probably
were greatly hastened then by the appearance
in one of the neighboring newspapers of a paragraph
entitled “The Mysterious Lady,” and
containing the items of local gossip about Miss
Harrison's escapade, magnified and exaggerated
into the flight of a nun brought back by
force, and either murdered, secreted in the
underground vaults, or sent away for some
awful punishment in remoter regions; and this
was only the visible and audible expression of
what appears to have been in the minds of
nearly all, if not in their mouths; and the first
manner in which the general feeling outcropped
was by waylaying the convent-gardener and
beating him within an inch of his life, wreaking
in a vicarious way the vengeance that could
not yet arrive at his employers.

A few days after Miss Harrison's return to
Mount Benedict, the Lady Superior, whom Dr.
Thompson, a Charlestown physician, has mentioned
as “thoroughly educated, dignified in
her person, and elegant in her manners, pure
in her morals, of generous and magnanimous
feelings, and of high religious principles,” was
rude y waited on by one of the Selectmen of the
town—the same whose kind intentions respecting
the farmhouse have been mentioned—and
informed that the convent would be destroyed
if the Mysterious Lady could not be seen. The
Superior had already told this gentleman the
state of Miss Harrison's health, and the incidents
leading to her temporary aberration of
mind, and she knew it was quite in his power
to contradict any wrong impression abroad, and
to quell any uneasiness without troubling her
further; but, it being Sunday, she now appointed
Monday, the next day, for the five Seleetmen
to be shown over the establishment,
and included in her invitation two neighbors
who had been instrumental in increasing the
popular prejudice. On Monday the visitors
came, and ferreted the house through from
cellar to cupola, occupying three hours, looking
even into the paint-boxes, searching every
closet, opening every drawer, assisted by the
Mysterious Lady, Miss Harrison, herself, in person.
Their errand done, they declared themselves
satisfied that not only was there nothing
to censure in the least, but, on the other hand,
much to praise, and they adjourned to the house
of one of their number to prepare a pronunciomento
to that purpose for the morning papers.
They had but little more than left the building,
just before sunset, when a group of men
gathered about the gates of the avenue, using
impertinent language, but, upon the Superior's
notifying the Selectmen, she was assured there
was not the least prospect of the occurrence of
anything disagreeable. It was shortly after
nine in the evening when she became more
seriously alarmed by a great noise on the Medford
road, made by an advancing mob, with
cries of “Down with the convent! Down with
the convent!” With much presence of mind,
she instantly aroused the Community, telling
them she feared they were in danger—the rioters
on the road, meanwhile, constantly increasing
in force with new arrivals, on foot and in
wagons, from every quarter. After waking
those that were a leep, she went into the second
story of the building, and, throwing up a
window, asked the party of forty or fifty
gathered outside what they desired, adding
that they were disturbing the slumbers of the
pupils, some of whom were the children of
their most respected fellow-citizens. They replied
that they did not mean to hurt the children,
but they must see the nun that had run
away. The Superior went to fetch her, but
found that she had fainted with fright, and lay
insensible in the arms of four of the Sisters.
The Superior then returned to tell the people
that this was the case; she asserted to them
that the establishment had that day been visited
by the Selectmen, who had been pleased with
all they saw, and would assure them of it, and
that if they would call on the next day, at a
suitable hour, they should have every satisfaction.
They asked her if she were protected,
and she answered, “Yes, by legions!” invoking
the celestial guardians. But other parties
having come to swell their numbers, they replied
in indecent terms, calling her an old
figurehead made of brass, telling her that she
was lying, and that they had one of the Selectmen
with them who had opened the gates to
them. The Selectman then came forward, and
advised the Superior to throw herself on his
protection, but as he was the same Selectman
whose officiousness had already produced much
of the trouble, the Superior, after asking him
if he had secured the attendance of any other
members of the board, refused to trust her establishment
to his safe-keeping, telling him, if
he wished to befriend her, first to disperse the
mob. This he feebly attempted, deterring the
rioters from firing the building, when they
called for torches, by telling them that if lights
were brought they would be recognized and
detected—after which noble effort he returned
to his house, and valiantly went to bed.

The mob then fired a gun in the labyrinth
under the willow-trees, possibly as a token of
some sort to their accomplices, and withdrew a
little, while waiting for the fresh arrivals. At
about eleven o'clock the fences were torn up
and a bonfire kindled, which is believed to
have been a concerted signal for the presence
of all the conspirators, and the bells being rung
as for an alarm of fire, both in Charlestown
and Boston, multitudes pressed to the spot.
Several fire-engines also appeared—the Charlestown
ones halting opposite the bonfire, and
one from Boston passing up to the front of the
mansion, where it was seized upon by the mob

[ILLUSTRATION]

LEGEND OF CHARLESTOWN. RUINS OF THE URSULINE CONVENT OF MT. BENEDICT.

[Description: 693EAF. Page 013. In-line image. The ruined walls of the convent of Mt. Benedict appear bathed in moonlight. Spindly clouds pass in front of the moon's face. A picket fence remains in front of the remains of the convent walls along with some scrub brush.] and prevented from doing any service when
needed, if so inclined. Rumor still runs that
at this point, when Boston would have sent
other engines and further means to subdue the
disturbances, the drawbridges were lifted, and
it was found to be impossible to get them down.
The arrival of the engine from Boston was,
however, instantly followed by an assault upon
the building in the shape of a shower of brick-bats
and clubs against the windows, after which
the bold assailants waited to see if any defense
was to be made, or any resentment manifested
to this attack, which they knew might kill or
maim many of the helpless inmates. This brief
pause allowed the Lady Superior opportunity to
marshal her little flock, whom she had refused
previously to allow to leave the building, lest
that should be only betraying it to its destruction,
and under convoy of the terrified Sisters
to secure their retreat down the garden, into
the summer-house, and over the fence into the
adjoining grounds, where they were safe till
they could be collected in a friendly house:
there had been sixty children to be taken care
of, and of the nuns that night one was in the
last stages of pulmonary consumption, one was
in convulsive fits, and Miss Harrison had been
wrought, by the agitation of the evening, to a
raving delirium. The Superior, having performed
this duty, lingered herself, with the
true spirit of a leader in such situation, opening
the doors of every room and looking into
every dormitory, calling every child by name,
to be sure that none were left behind, and
then, last of all, descending to her own room
to secure the valuables there, together with a
thousand dollars belonging to the revenue of
the institution; but before the last of the
children had left the building the varlets had
poured in, and as she herself fled from it they
were but ten feet behind her. In a moment
afterward the house was filled with
the mob, shouting, yelling, and blaspheming;
torches snatched from the engines lighted the
way for them, they ransacked every room,
rifled every trunk, broke open every drawer,
stole watches, thrust the costly jewelry of the
Spanish children into their pockets, split up
the piano-fortes, shattered the splendid harps,
and even made way with the altar ornaments
presented by the good Archbishop of Bordeaux.
Having satisfied their curiosity and greed, they
piled up the furniture, curtains, books, pictures,
in the centre of the several rooms, and
deliberately set fire to every heap, threw in
the altar vestments, the Bible and the cross,
and, the act of virtue consummated, left the
building in flames. After this, the bishop's
lodge experienced a similar fate, the farmhouse
belonging to the institute followed, and
the grand demonstration of proper religious
sentiment wound up with tearing open the
tomb of the place, pillaging the sacred vessels
there, stealing the coffin-plates, and scattering
the ashes of the dead to the four winds.

Not a hand was lifted to stay these abominable
proceedings, by any one of the vast multitude
outside; the firemen, who declared frequently
that they could prevent the flames if
allowed, were hindered from acting—although
their sincerity may be suspected from the fact
that an engine returned to Boston decked with
the flowers stolen from the altar; the magistrates
neither made any remonstrance nor
read the riot-act, nor demanded help of neigh
boring towns, nor asked for the services of the
marines at the Navy Yard, nor made a single
arrest during all the seven hours of the riot.
And though the outside multitude, who took
no part in the crime, were all Protestants, not
one of them dared to protest against this outrage,
not only upon weakness and defenselessness,
but upon civil liberty, and all remained
paralyzed until the end, doubtful perhaps if
there were enough disapprovers among them
to be of any avail, and entirely forgetful that a
stream from a single engine-hose would have
dispersed the whole mob more quickly than a
battery could have done.

Meanwhile the nuns, escaping with difficulty,
and with yet greater difficulty supporting the
young consumptive, Sister Mary St. Henry, and
getting her across the fence at the garden's
foot, had found a kindly shelter, and were
shortly afterward invited by old General Dear-born
to his seat in Roxbury, called Brinley
Place, where they found once more a home,
although, before they were fairly settled there,
Mary St. Henry died, at the age of twenty.
Though an invalid, this young woman had been
able to give a lesson on the day of the destruetion
of the convent; all that night she lay in a
cold rigor, and eleven days afterward she was
dead. Her funeral was one of unusual pomp;
every Catholic in the vicinity made an object of
attending, half the citizens of Boston were
organized into a special police through expectation
of some requital, and so deeply roused
were the feelings of the injured party, that it is
probable nothing but the most unremitting exertions
of their clergy prevented severe retaliation.
The matter, however, did not end here immediately.
Loud expressions of disapprobation
were heard from all portions of the State, and
a self-constituted Committee, of the best names
in Boston, including such as Robert C. Winthrop,
William Appleton, Horace Mann, Theophilus
Parsons, and Thomas Motley, prepared
at once to investigate the affair, and bring, if

possible, the miscreants to justice. They examined
more than one hundred and forty persons,
and, chiefly by their exertions, thirteen
arrests were made, of which eight were of a
capital nature. The young woman who had
scattered the atrocious slanders was visited,
and she retracted everything but the assertions
relative to the severe penances of the sick nun;
but even on that point her word was discredited
by means of other witnesses, the sisters by birth
of Mary St. Henry; it was proved that she had
been a charity-student in the institute, desirous
of taking the vail, admitted on probation for six
months to discover if she had either capacity,
sincerity, or strength of character, failing to display
which she was about to be dismissed, when
she left secretly. Miss Alden, a young lady
who had taken the white vail at Mount Benedict,
and afterward freely left it, testified that, upon
living there two years, she became convinced
that she had no vocation for an ascetic life, and
made her feelings known to the Superior, who
advised her accordingly, strongly as they were
attached to each other, to depart if she could
not be happy there, of which no one could judge
but herself, and to her decision it should be
left, for their rules allowed no one to remain
except such as found their happiness there,
and there only. “She told me,” said Miss
Alden, “that I was at liberty to go when I
pleased, and should be provided with everything
requisite for my departure—which was
done two years after, having remained that
length of time merely from personal attachment
to the Lady Superior.” And it was
equally evident that others desiring to do
so had been allowed to separate themselves
from the Community in the same manner.
The charge of inhumanity to the sick was also
sifted, and found amounting to nothing; the
child with the scarlet-fever having been sent
home upon the first symptom of the disease, to
prevent the intection's reaching the remaining
children. And to an assertion in relation to
secret vaults beneath the building, the mason,
one Peter Murphy, who laid the foundations,
declared, under his own signature, that nothing
of the kind existed. Although unanimously
opposed to the Roman Catholic forms of religion,
the Committee published a most magnanimous
report of their investigation; and
finally a man by the name of Buzzell was
brought to trial as a ringleader in the late
atrocity. He received, however, a very singular
trial; one of the jurymen was several times
seen to be asleep; and though it was proved to
be he that had beaten the convent-gardener,
that had been seen actively encouraging the
rioters, breaking the doors, bringing tar-barrels
and firing them, and though on the retirement
of the jury they stood seven to five for conviction,
on the way from their room to the courtroom
they became unanimous for acquittal.
The only person ever punished for complicity in
the affair, was a mere boy, convicted on very
insufficient evidence, but for whom it was
probably supposed the penalty would be made
right; he was sentenced to imprisonment for
life, his mother died of a broken heart, and
finally he was pardoned out, ruined, and old
before his time. There all proceedings ended.
The nuns were invited to establish themselves
at Newport, in the land where Roger Williams
made religious toleration a fact, but the proposition
was declined, partly perhaps because the
attack showed where their work was needed,
and partly in the belief that Massachusetts
would render justice, inasmuch as having always
paid for protection, when then the protection
was withheld the State became responsible
for all damages. This responsibility has never
been met. Repayment has been constantly
urged by all denominations; Theodore Parker
made himself especially prominent in the matter;
but, owing to a mistaken judgment of what
the popular opinion may be, no Legislature has
yet been found with sufficient courage to make
an appropriation to reimburse the Convent for
its losses, and in refusing this demand for payment
the State has virtually repeated the outrage
year by year.

Perhaps no more scathing commentary on the
whole matter will ever be made than that to be
found in the following exact copy: