The three-story brick convent building standing atop a hill in what is today East Somerville had been eighty feet in length. Its two wings projecting from the rear led to vineyards, orchards and terraced gardens that stretched nearly to the Middlesex Turnpike at the base, now Mystic Avenue. Also on Mount Benedict were a farm house and a cottage. Mount Benedict had been known alternately as High Field, Ploughed Hill, and Nunnery Hill, and had been fortified during the American Revolution. (Today only Austin and Benedict Streets in Somerville at the far eastern edge of Mt. Benedict give any indication of the previous elevation of the site, which was ploughed for landfill after 1870.) The Western end had been chosen by Ursulines as the site of their convent school. According to Sarah Josepha Hale's Ladies Magazine, Mt. Benedict "commanded the most varied and delightful scenery. Charlestown, Cambridge, Boston, the river and the harbour with its islands might all be viewed from the windows of the convent. But when they purchased the estate, its 'capabilities' was all it had to recommend it; Mt. Benedict was a rough, bleak hill, and the land around it a broken looking waste. In eight years the institution and its grounds were the admiration of strangers and the pride of Catholics."

But around 9:00 Monday night, August 11, rioters massed on Mount Benedict demanding to be admitted to the convent to conduct an investigation. Wild rumors had been circulating in Charlestown that the convent harbored a terrifying secret: inside, it was whispered, young women were being held captive and forced to undergo conversion to Roman Catholicism. Resistors were put to death. Gossip and popular literature of the day fed these fantasies. A charity pupil named Rebecca Theresa Reed had reportedly escaped from the convent in 1832 and spread stories of atrocities within. In the way that today's horror movies feed the popular imagination, so the citizens of Charlestown melded imaginative productions, especially the stories of Rebecca Reed, with a local and more recent incident. Sensational signs appeared around Charlestown on Sunday, August 10. "Leave not one stone upon another," they read, "of this worst nunnery that prostitutes female virtue and liberty under the garb of holy religion. When Bonaparte opened the nunnerys of Europe, he found crowds of Infant skulls!"
 

According to another:
"To the Selectmen of Charlestown!! Gentlemen--It is currently reported that a mysterious affair has lately happened at the Nunnery in Charlestown, now it is your duty gentlemen to have this affair investigated immediately, if not the Truckmen of Boston will demolish the Nunnery Thursday night--August 14.

The "mysterious affair" involved a twenty-eight year old music teacher at the school, Miss Elizabeth Harrison, known as Sister Mary John, native of Philadelphia, who had lately been unwell, suffering from mental derangement. She had lived at the school for about twelve years, and it is speculated that concerns about her father's recent reversal in fortunes, the stifling heat, and a heavy teaching schedule of twelve lessons a day at forty-five minutes each (a total of nine hours) had led to the onset of her illness. On July 28, about two weeks before the convent riot, she suffered a particularly violent fit of hysterics, leaving the complex and wandering to a neighbor's house. The neighbor, Mr. Edward Cutter, conveyed her to the home of the parents of a former pupil who lived in West Cambridge, now Arlington. Elizabeth Harrison's brother, accompanied by Bishop Benedict Fenwick himself--for whom the Mount had been named--brought her back to the convent the following day, her senses having been by then restored.

Between August 1 and August 11 Harrison resumed her teaching duties and had frequent visits from friends and relatives. Her brother confirmed that Elizabeth's wish was to return to the convent, that she had willingly chosen the life of the veil. But his reassurances were not enough to quell the circulating rumors. On the Friday before the riot, the Boston Mercantile Journal published a notice under the heading "Mysterious" that contained the story of the nun's alleged imprisonment, stating that "her friends called for her, but she was not to be found, and much alarm is excited in consequence." On Monday, the same paper published a small retraction: "the version we lately gave of the 'mysterious' affair at Charlestown, is materially incorrect..."
 

But rumors around town were more powerful than Harrison's own brother's report, more powerful than an obscure newspaper retraction. Hearing the circulating stories and wishing to assuage his own mind, Edward Cutter, who had sheltered Harrison the night she fled, looked in on her on Saturday finding her much improved and satisfying himself that she was not being detained against her will. In fact, the Lady Superior remarked to Cutter, "In the present state of public feeling, I would prefer that Miss Harrison leave us." To quell the rumors, Cutter wrote and personally delivered a statement to the local newspaper The Post before sunset Sunday night. The editor declined to publish it until Tuesday, by which point the crowd had already taken matters into its own hands. Had the notice appeared on Monday, it is interesting to speculate if history would have taken a different course.

Prior to the start of the riot, the convent attracted other visitors. Elizabeth Harrison, the "mysterious lady" herself, escorted three Charlestown selectmen and two others while they explored the building, grounds, and the tomb to look for the dungeons rumored to hold her body. This was on Monday, the day of the riot, and the selectmen left, assuring the Mother Superior that she and her house were safe. Their exoneration of the convent also appeared in the papers on Tuesday morning.

But when darkness fell Monday evening, a crowd stood at the gates, shouting, "Down with the Pope! Down with the Convent!"

The convent's Mother Superior, Madame St. George, came to an upper window of the front apartment. She was an imposing figure, proud and used to being in charge. This made her something of an anomaly in the early nineteenth century, when frailty and subservience were the norm of female behavior. She gazed down at twenty or thirty dark forms as they rushed up to her dwelling, and demanded to know what they wanted.

"We want to see the nun who ran away!"

Noting their number, the Superior sent instantly for Harrison. But the roar of the crowd was too much for that sister's frazzled nerves, and she fainted. Since she could not produce the "mysterious lady," the Mother Superior began chastising the rioters on their savage conduct in assailing a community of women. She warned them of the danger they were in should they attack a peaceful dwelling house by night, a hanging offense in 1834.

Hadn't they heard from the selectmen that there was no mystery here, that the rumors were false? Hadn't she opened up her house for enough inspection? The Mother Superior wondered when these blockheads would leave her convent in peace.

"Are there any armed men in the house?" called a dark figure.

"We have legions of protectors," replied the Mother Superior. Now what the good Sister meant was that she believed her house was protected by hosts of angels and saints. Though she very well knew the mob outside took her literally, she did not try to clarify her meaning. But then a frightened lay-sister blurted out that they were entirely unprotected.

The mob, now numbering about two hundred, under the influence of rum and whiskey, gathered around their bonfire. A murmur ran through the crowd, and angry speeches began. 

"That cross must come down!" roared the crowd.

Whipped into a frenzy, a farm hand named Henry Buck, who would later turn state's witness, tore up a fence and threw sections of it into the bonfire. He seized a large fence stake and battered the door until it gave way. The rioters streamed into the room containing the altar. What happened next is recounted in The Jesuit, a Catholic newspaper of the day: "The tabernacle itself with the holy altar was rifled, the sacrament taken out of the blessed ciborium and thrown into the fields. A few species of it were afterwards picked up and restored."

Along with the Lady Superior, the occupants had included five or six nuns, one of whom was seriously ill with tuberculosis and confined to bed, and three female attendants. Fifty to sixty pupils, the majority of whom were daughters of upper-class Protestant families, resided in the convent. Fewer than ten of the students were Catholics. These girls were awakened in the middle of the night to see their possessions being carried from the building, stolen or destroyed. One resourceful twelve-year- old girl had the foresight to pack some dresses in a bundle after hearing rumors of the impending attack. The rest lost everything. The assailants pressed the evacuation of the house with such haste that, according to one account "...they laid violent hands on the lady superior to hasten her movements." The sisters rounded up their charges and fled out the back, taking shelter in front of the mausoleum, where the convent buried its dead.

Louise Whitney, a student at the convent, recalled later that, to the girls in their hiding place, the voices of the rioters sounded like "the hoarse growling of a pent-up sea." She told of the terror of the students as they stood before the tomb, which the young girls held "in as much horror as they did the rioters." When the mob drew near the hiding place, the Superior investigated whether or not she could escape by a side gate, but all were blocked. The Superior pried the pickets off the garden fence, and the nightgown-clad students and nuns, including the nun ill with tuberculosis (who died a few months later), made their way through the damp fields to the home of a neighbor, a half mile away.

The chapel, stables, and an old wooden nunnery were set on fire by the rioters who gleefully adorned themselves in the gingham and calico dresses stolen from the students. At the Bishop's lodge on the property, they made merry at the expense of an extensive classical library. A sixteen year-old boy, Marvin Marcy, acted the part of a mock auctioneer. As his companions called out competing bids, Marcy fed those books deemed "sold" to the flames. Eventually the mob moved toward the mausoleum. When the rioters burst in, expecting to find bodies of slaughtered Protestants, only the silent corpses of five or six nuns were there to greet them. They opened the graves, exposing the contents to view. A crucifix was trampled and broken under foot, a silver chalice was stolen. It is said that the rioters mutilated the corpses. 

Tuesday, the sun rose torrid over the smoldering ruins.

Most educated Protestants denounced the violence. Rewards were offered for the arrest of the perpetrators, but these monetary incentives were perhaps counteracted by the appearance in Charlestown of handbills threatening assassination of anyone who should provide evidence against the rioters. A committee of respected citizens, led by Harrison Gray Otis, later US senator and mayor of Boston, subsequently vindicated the Ursulines and provided evidence that led to the arrest of thirteen men. The damage was estimated at $50,000- $100,000 in the currency of the day. The convent was insured for $14,000, but the policy didn't
cover riots.

The convent riot severely divided the community. The selectmen of Charlestown published handbills blaming mobs from Boston. The Boston Fire Department, at the time made up of a crew of volunteers, mostly unsavory types, refused to offer fire protection for Charlestown unless the statement was retracted. Many Boston papers blasted the Charlestown selectmen for incompetence. And ignoring the Bishop's pleas to "turn the other cheek," The Jesuit lamented that "the Convent, instead of the selectmen, was the object of the mad fury of the midnight robbers."

The Catholics were a relatively small group in the Boston area; but the population was growing primarily because of the large numbers of Irish immigrating during this period. In 1800 there were 1200 Catholics in Boston; by 1834, they numbered 20,000. These newcomers faced many of the same obstacles to assimilation as do some of today's immigrants. Like many new groups, the Irish were seen as threats to the jobs of the laboring classes in Charlestown. But the elaborate school on Mount Benedict served as a class symbol that cut both ways: there the daughters of Boston's richest families were receiving a fancy European-style education.

Certainly, a mingled fascination and fear of Catholicism was fed by popular novels of the day. The same intrigue that attracted pupils to the convent led to its demise. Louise Whitney, the pupil from the School, recalled, "[The] whole establishment was as foreign as the soil wherein it stood, as if, like Aladdin's Palace, it had be wafted from Europe by the power of a magician." Catholicism's foreign quality fed the rumors of women captured and held in dungeons in the basement of the convent. Mrs. Hale's magazine termed the Elizabeth Harrison story a "Monk Lewis story" referring to a popular turn of the [19th] century Gothic writer. The popularity of convent captivity narratives among nineteenth century readers leant credence to Rebecca Reed's wild tales. Even long after the convent had been burned and the full story brought to light, The Daily Whig persisted in printing insinuations alluding to suspicious vaults beneath the ruins.
 

According to one scholar, Jenny Franchot, Catholicism in nineteenth century American culture functioned as a prime taboo, representing the forbidden and unknown, marginal, but powerful. To the Protestant mind, Catholicism seemed to offer an alternative sense of space and time, a medieval past lost to an industrial present. Not only did Catholicism feature in popular literature, but it played an important role in elite texts as well: think of Hawthorne's use of the role of confession, monasticism in Melville (Benito Cerino) and Poe, and the role of sacrifice in Prescott's history of the decline of Aztec civilization.

A community of women headed by an outspoken woman would have also been in violation of the norm of the day. Barbara Welter describes the nineteenth century "Cult of True Womanhood" as having four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put together, she says, these spelled mother, daughter, sister and wife. Religion was highly valued in this culture because it did not typically take woman away from her proper sphere, her home; but convent life in many ways opposed this cultural value.

Not only was the Ursuline community of females headed up by a woman, but they were engaged in educating female students in a century which primarily valued "accomplished women" who could sing, speak French, and do needlepoint -- women expected to adorn their husband's homes. In 1847 Dr. Charles Meigs told the graduating class of medical students at Jefferson College that woman "has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love." For over 150 years girls had been excluded from Boston's public schools, allowed in by 1790 (but then for only six months a year). Ladies' Magazine, a publication deeply concerned with female education, praised the seriousness of education at the Charlestown convent, and bemoaned the lack of proper education for women elsewhere: "Female education is left entirely to private experiments, to chance, caprice, and the shifting breath of fashion; and it is not to be wondered at if the prevailing style is superficial, showy and often useless." About the Ursulines, an order dedicated to the education of women since 1537, the writer adds, "And surely some regard is due from our sex to that order of women who, through the ages of ignorance and darkness, devoted themselves to the instruction of female youth."

The original charter of the Ursulines called for free instruction for women, and the fact that many of the students at the convent were from upper-class Protestant families was a source of constant criticism of the convent. Since the population of Catholics had increased nearly twenty times in thirty years, the school's mission had not yet shifted to the education of the poor Irish, though in all likelihood, the Ursulines would have adjusted for this. Ladies' Magazine points out that despite the fact there was much discussion in the public journals about the impropriety of Protestants placing children in Catholic seminaries, "not a single individual has embraced the Catholic faith." Still, this sympathetic publication made disclaimers: "We certainly should not select a Catholic seminary as the place of education for our own daughters; yet candour obliges us to say, that from all we can learn of the system pursued at the Ursuline convent, we think it offers, when compared with 'young ladies' seminaries, in general, its fair proportion of advantages."

While Ladies' Magazine seems to sit on the fence about the merits of a convent education, others were more vocal in their opposition, especially prominent clergymen like Dr. Lyman Beecher (father of Harriet Beecher Stowe) who had preached three anti-Catholic sermons the day before the riot. There was a deep mistrust of the motives of the Catholics for wishing to educate Protestant children, a belief that a plot was afoot to convert the cream of Protestant youth. An article in the Christian Watchman, for example, stated that the establishment of Catholic schools is "a dark and cunning feature of their system" in which "every art is made use of to shackle the young mind with the harness of popish doctrine." Dr. Beecher was especially suspicious of Popery and critical of the affluent convent for its elegant and costly furnishings. About this kind of suspicion of Roman Catholic wealth, Clare Booth Luce has remarked that Protestants will never understand the Catholic church because they "cannot separate, as the Catholics do, the possession of material wealth from the idea of moral and spiritual bankruptcy."

This is perhaps where the class issues can be seen at their most paradoxical: while Beecher and others criticized the convent for only serving wealthy Protestant families, to the Protestant workers of Charlestown, the building on the hill signified economic strife. They did not distinguish between the small, genteel community that sponsored the convent and the masses of poor Irish Catholics settling in Boston, willing to provide cheap labor. The Jesuit reflected, or perhaps added to this class warfare after the fact with comments like these: "We have often heard it deplored notwithstanding the great beauty of the site on which the late Convent was erected in Charlestown, that the spot had ever been selected for such an institution, on account of its proximity to a class of ignorant, low, ill-bred, prejudiced people...poorly calculated to appreciate a literary establishment of such refinement." Certainly, issues of social class, gender and politics all contributed to the ferocity of the riot.
 

Or maybe it was the heat of the summer of 1834, for riots broke out against abolitionists in New York and against African-Americans in Philadelphia, prompting one Newburyport writer to editorialize, "Mobbing is like the cholera; it flies from place to place, carried by infection, or at the same moment breaks out suddenly and more mysteriously in places wide asunder." The riots that summer indicated to one writer that the entire country was in a "progress of general demoralization." Others speculate that the Elizabeth Harrison story was merely a pretext for a well-planned conspiracy by important citizens who persuaded a mob of working men to do their dirty work.

Certainly, the trials that followed the convent riots in December 1834 seemed to point to a breaking down of justice. The ringleader, John Buzzell, a brawny six-foot six bricklayer who two decades later would lead the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party, was acquitted, to thunderous applause, of both arson and burglary. To the dismay of the Catholics, every rioter but one was acquitted in the trials that followed, which from the transcripts seem to have offered merely a forum for more anti-Catholic diatribe. Only Marvin Marcy, the sixteen year old mock auctioneer who burned the books at the Bishop's lodge, was sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor. At the request of 5,000 citizens, including Bishop Fenwick, whose name headed the list, and even of the convent's Mother Superior, Marcy was pardoned. 

In 1835, Bishop Fenwick asked for compensation to help rebuild the school. The lawyer, George Tichnor Curtis, passionately argued that "The state that does not protect the rights of property... especially against open and public violation... breaks its contract with the individual, and weakens all its members." When the effort failed, the Bishop sent the Ursulines back to Quebec, against the protests of Madame St. George, the Mother Superior. (In 1836, she asked to be transferred to New Orleans.) The Bishop waited until 1841 to bring the matter before the legislature again. In 1846, compensation of ten thousand dollars, one tenth of the value of the property was approved by the legislature, but rejected by the Catholics. The last attempt to gain compensation died without passing in 1854, twenty years after the event. One final irony is that the Irish Catholics, who built the railroads that rendered the Middlesex Canal obsolete, themselves contributed to the razing of the Hill, ploughed down and leveled for canal landfill.

An editorial in The Jesuit of November 1834 seemed prophetic of the next fifty years before the last of the ruins completely disappeared from Somerville. "The property of Mount Benedict," it said, "will never be alienated... and its ruins, unless the convent shall be rebuilt there at the public expense, will be left to stare the proud monument of Bunker Hill in the face, and give it the lie, as long as that monument shall proclaim in this land anything like civil and religious freedom." 

Today, all that remains of the Ursuline convent are the bricks which form the arch of the front vestibule of the Boston Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Nancy Schultz is an associate professor in the English Department, where she co-directs the Writing Center. She began working on her book, Nuns in the Dungeon: Imagining Convents in Nineteenth Century America, while on sabbatical leave in the spring of 1992. Her recent work includes as article on Harriet Beecher Stowe which appeared in the Spring 1992 issue of Studies in American Fiction. She has received a Research Seed Money Grant from the Graduate School of Salem State College as well grants from the Somerville Arts Council and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.