America Aflame (3 page)

It was not coincidental that the white southerners who took back their governments from black and white Republicans were called Redeemers, nor that the process through which it occurred was called Redemption. The term “redemption” was, of course, in widespread use in America prior to the Civil War, especially among evangelicals. It referred to the process by which Jesus sacrificed His life to rescue sinful mankind from God's wrath. The term implied a new birth as those who come to Christ are cleansed of their sins and saved “unto a new life eternal.”

Confederates talked of “redeeming” their states from Union control during the Civil War. After the war, the term usually implied a two-step process. Redemption would cleanse southern sins and therefore restore the Lord's blessing on the South that He had withdrawn, as evidenced by defeat. It would also remove “the yoke of Yankee and negro rule.” Redemption, therefore, would secure for white southerners the victory denied to them in the Civil War. The process toward Redemption was clear. As an Alabama editor declared in 1871, “The road to redemption is under the white banner.” White southerners employed evangelical Protestantism to re-create an antebellum regime cleansed of sin. White religion in the South became the handmaiden of white supremacy.

Northerners focused their attention on the cornucopia of opportunity opened up by innovation, invention, and industrialization. The South was only a peripheral concern. And then it was not a concern at all. In fact, many northerners felt they understood the concerns of white southerners, with their allegedly incompetent and corrupt Republican governments. White northerners felt similarly burdened by incompetence and corruption, though in their case the culprits were immigrants and venal local politicians rather than blacks and white outsiders. The mutual empathy caused the northern press and citizens to underplay or even excuse the mounting violence against Republicans in the South. Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 gave many Americans pause concerning the potential for democratic movements to spin out of control and result in a greater despotism, so the news of the Paris Commune in 1871 affirmed the evils of too much democracy. Given the racial attitudes of most white northerners, such empathy was not difficult to come by. Also, the scientific wisdom of the period mandated a more cautious role for government in the affairs of men.

Science assumed the reputation of religion after the Civil War: infallible and ignored at one's own peril. Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
(1859) became enormously popular in the United States, not only for its value in explaining the process of evolution but also because it seemed to offer a blueprint for ordering society—and order was a perennial concern of Americans. The popularization of scientific theories is not always a good thing, however. Subtleties become lost in translation. “Survival of the fittest,” a term Darwin never used, became shorthand for natural selection.

Society, like the animal world, worked on immutable natural laws, Darwin's social interpreters claimed. Uninformed intervention in these natural processes was not only unwise but also potentially destructive. While it was appropriate for government to complement these processes by assisting lesser races in attaining their fullest potential, paternalism could only go so far. Legislatures and other policy-making institutions, public and private, must devise actions based on scientific data and facts. Research must displace intuition in the public sphere.

Americans also interpreted Darwin as positing a natural hierarchy. Darwin himself wrote of inferior races. These ideas circulated at a time when Americans were making major decisions on Indians and African Americans. For both the red and the black, the consensus was that sedentary farm work or simple mechanical labor in environments controlled by whites provided the best opportunities for these lesser races to reach their full, though limited, potentials.

Science replaced evangelical Protestantism as the nation's primary faith and policy arbiter. Science did not posit an end to government, but rather a public policy carefully calibrated to incorporate scientific evidence as the basis for legislation. In that respect, the advocates of a political science were more measured than their evangelical Christian predecessors, who wanted to use the government as an arm of the Lord. They wanted a Protestant constitution and a Protestant public policy to speed the millennial advent. Political scientists looked less to the millennium than to professional stewardship as their ultimate goal.

Evangelical Christianity did not disappear after the war. Rather, it was increasingly secular, a function of the prevailing postwar culture rather than the other way around. Dwight L. Moody packed his revivals with the simple message of eternal salvation and banned politics from his pulpit. He offered little in the way of theological exegesis. Most of his “sermons” took the form of secular stories sprinkled with treacly aphorisms much more than biblical texts. As the Wild West and minstrel shows made caricatures of Indians and blacks, Moody succeeded in making religion a spectacle. Many of his middle- and upper-class congregants came to see a show and to be part of an event. It was comfort religion, part of the culture of affluence and prosperity, a turn taken to its ultimate by Russell Conwell, whose sermon “Acres of Diamonds” unabashedly preached the Gospel of Money. The sermon stayed in print for over a century. When evangelicals ventured to influence public policy, such as the periodic attempts to impose a Christian amendment on the Constitution or to legislate against Catholic influence in the public schools, their efforts fell flat. Their great crusade became alcohol. Personal behavior rather than national sin became their focus.

Evangelical Protestantism became culture-bound in the South as well, though in a quite different form. “Redemption” retained its born-again connotation, but in the South after the Civil War, it was indelibly connected to the restoration of white supremacy. Religion became a prop of the Lost Cause for whites. For blacks, evangelical Christianity became their community. The focus was less on the hereafter than on the here-and-now.

Science suited the new era well. It was rational. America's Romantic Age had produced a civil war. The Age of Reason would offer up the telephone, the incandescent bulb, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Public policy would be rational, too. Cities were inefficient because experts and professionals were not in charge. States in the South were ill governed because unqualified electorates ruled. Just as the second generation of Americans thought they could discern the will of God, so their postbellum offspring believed they could divine the secrets of science and apply them to their society. Both were wrong.

The North settled into prosperity. The Gospel of Money was apolitical, and it soothed the conscience by validating financial success as a calling unto itself. Entrepreneurs were the heroes. Industries blossomed that did not exist before the war, such as steel and oil, feeding the railroads, stoking home and commercial construction, and generating new white-collar jobs in accounting, insurance, finance, and managerial positions. Affluence and new technologies enabled families to move from congested inner cities to tranquil suburbs. Thomas Edison's successful experiments with electric lighting and the phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone were merely a few of the innovations that eased the lives of middle-class families, especially of women. Many of those women now had an array of employment opportunities open to them as well, including office work, education, and retail.

The transcontinental railroad completed in 1869 was a symbol of the innovative spirit and of the new role of government as a facilitator to the national economy. Stephen Douglas's railroad finally got built. It was a marvel, spanning the continent, conquering difficult terrain, enlisting over twenty thousand immigrant construction workers, and doing it all ahead of schedule. The railroad also accelerated confrontations with the Plains Indians. Here was some unfinished business, though now, instead of justifying Indian removal in terms of manifest destiny, the government rationalized it as a way to save the Indians and allow a superior civilization to develop the land to its fullest potential—a more scientific approach. By 1877, the last of the Plains tribes were entering reservations.

The African American fared little better. Like the Indian, he belonged to a subordinate race incapable of full equality with whites, so the prevailing scientific racial theories suggested. The Indians would fare best converted to sedentary farm life under the paternalistic protection of the federal government. The freedman would reach his full capacity as a worker for wages, on a farm preferably, under the supervision of whites. The aspirations of the freedman were not taken into account any more than the aspirations of the Plains tribes. The respective places of both races would serve each well, and together they would serve the country best.

The book concludes with the 1876 Centennial Exhibition celebrating the nation's hundredth birthday. The fair built an instant city of technological wonder. Here was the future, and the future of America lay in its cities. As a magnet for millions from small towns and farms, and from abroad, the city served as the nation's cultural crucible and economic engine. Americans would wax nostalgic over small towns and farms, but they invariably voted with their feet for the city. America's genius for invention and innovation, proudly displayed over the fairgrounds, took root and flourished in urban America after the war. That was the major story of the decade after the Civil War, not the persistent contention between black and white in the South, however heartbreaking that was. I hope this book restores a balance between what was happening in the South during this period we call Reconstruction and the beginnings of the industrial revolution and its accompanying transformations in demography, culture, and work in the urban North. The future of the country rested with the latter.

As in any economic transition, there were winners and losers. The fiction of an identity of interest between capital and labor crumbled under the weight of strikes and the reality of genuine suffering. Northerners recoiled against the deployment of troops to protect southern Republican regimes as a usurpation of federal power. They applauded, however, when President Rutherford B. Hayes rushed soldiers to put down the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. White southerners were merely ending the “unnatural” occupation of their government by mountebanks and incompetents. Workers, however, like the Paris communards, were sowing disorder that threatened the republic.

The second generation of Americans had succeeded in eliminating or neutralizing the threats the nation confronted beginning in the 1830s—Catholics, slaveholders, Mexicans, and Native Americans. Republicans still worried about the Catholics, but they would not think of burning convents to get their points across. They resurrected the slaveholder every four years as a reminder of the treason, though he was more a mascot than an imminent threat. And they tacked on a crusade against alcohol, as it reinforced their anti-immigrant base and added a nice alliterative quality to their campaigns against “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” African Americans and Native Americans were in their science-ordained places. The nation was now secure and indivisible.

The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised as the reward for so much sacrifice proved more elusive. The carnage did not translate into a universal application of the Declaration of Independence. The fates of the Indians, the African Americans, and the Chinese during and after the Reconstruction era testified to that serious shortcoming. Yet the folly of the second generation in exposing the great experiment of self-government to a bloody civil war had the redeeming feature of preserving the founding ideals for another day. Gradually, the excluded gender, races, and religions would find inclusion, even if incompletely. I believe that the political system established by the Founders would have been resilient and resourceful enough to accommodate our great diversity sooner without the tragedy of a civil war. Of course, that is impossible to know. We
do
know that the transformative nature of the Civil War did not include liberty, equality, and justice for all. Lincoln's vision would wait at least a century, and it is yet a work in progress.

CHAPTER 1

CRUSADES

CONVENT LIFE NO LONGER SUITED
Sister Mary John. Born Elizabeth Harrison in Philadelphia, she had converted to the Catholic faith and entered the Ursuline order at the age of eighteen in 1824. By all accounts, Sister Mary John was a gifted teacher and musician. Now, in this sweltering summer of 1834 at the order's convent school in Charlestown, Massachusetts, she walked out. The oppressive heat, teaching fourteen forty-five-minute lessons a day, conducting music classes, and attending to administrative duties as the Mother Assistant became overwhelming. She needed some time off.
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Sister Mary John appeared at the doorstep of a neighboring farmhouse sweating profusely, thinly clad, and incoherent. The following day, Benedict Fenwick, Boston's Roman Catholic bishop, came to retrieve the errant nun. She agreed to return to the convent. The matter might have ended there were it not for an unfortunate convergence of events.

The Ursulines had arrived in Boston from their mother convent in Quebec in 1819. They opened a modest school serving the city's growing Irish community. Bishop Fenwick, installed in 1829, had more grandiose plans for the Ursulines. The Church purchased land in nearby Charlestown to erect a convent. The new facility included a new mission. The school would educate Protestant girls from wealthy families, not the offspring of poor Irish immigrants, though the nuns would accept a few charity pupils.

The new convent occupied a hill, called Mount Benedict after the bishop. The main building, a barn, stables, an icehouse, a restored farmhouse, and gardens sprawled across twenty-four acres offering commanding views of the spires of nearby Boston and its harbor. The complex rose next to another Charlestown promontory, Bunker Hill, a sacred Revolutionary site to area residents.

Bishop Fenwick viewed his project as a fund-raising enterprise. He also hoped to ingratiate himself and his religion with prominent Protestant families at a time of increasing hostility to “Romanism.” Perhaps that influence might leave a deeper impression. At least four of the six nuns who taught at the convent were converts to Catholicism, including Mary Anne Moffatt (Sister Mary St. George), the Mother Superior, and Elizabeth Harrison (Sister Mary John), the Mother Assistant.

The possibility of conversion did not weigh heavily among the up-and-coming Unitarian families who sent their daughters to the new convent school in Charlestown. What impressed them most was the rigor of the curriculum. This was no “finishing” school. In an era when girls' education was still haphazard—Boston did not allow girls to attend its public schools until 1827—the Ursuline course of study was unique. Reading, writing, math, history, geography, poetry, astronomy, philosophy, and language lessons filled the school day, which went from early morning to late afternoon. The school also included an excellent music program directed by Sister Mary John. Students learned to play instruments, compose, sing, and dance. Boston's Congregational churches—the dominant denomination in New England—alarmed at the success of the convent school, established a girls' academy in 1831, but enrollment was meager.

The Ursulines' success and the Congregationalists' struggles occurred in a context of growing religious antagonism in the Boston area. Protestant Americans had held suspicions about the Roman Catholic Church since the colonial era. They associated the Church with despotism, hierarchy, and orthodoxy, all enemies of American republican ideals forged in the blood of revolution. Most Protestants knew little about the rituals of the Church and understood their meaning even less. The secrecy surrounding convents and monasteries fueled imaginations already primed with suspicion.

The antagonism renewed in the late 1820s and the 1830s with immigration from Ireland and as the Second Great Awakening sparked an evangelical Protestant resurgence. In 1829, Protestant laborers stoned the dwellings of Irish Catholics on Broad Street in Boston. Protestants and Catholics clashed violently in Lowell, just north of Boston, in 1833. That same year, a sectarian brawl resulted in the death of an Irish worker in Charlestown. During that year, the convent's stable went up in flames under suspicious circumstances, and the convent's dog was shot and killed.

Charlestown's working-class Protestant population was especially prone to anti-Roman hysteria. Competition from Irish Catholic workers and the use of Irishmen to break strikes among Protestant brickmakers contributed to the animosity. Brickmakers and carpenters worked long hours for little pay and lived in squalid dormitories. Local politicians found that anti-Catholic diatribes garnered votes and diverted criticism from management, and the press knew that editorials denouncing encroaching “Popery” sold newspapers.

The Ursuline convent was a lightning rod for Protestant discontent. Run by celibate women in an era when society expected females to adhere to domestic roles revolving around childbearing and -rearing and deference to male decision-making, the convent invested women with administrative authority and demanded an unnatural sexuality. The Protestant girls in the school were of an impressionable age and subject to conversion. Once married, they would carry their new faith to their children, as mothers were responsible for the religious training of offspring. As one Protestant writer warned, “The sole object of all monastic institutions in America is merely to proselyte [
sic
] youth of the influential classes of society, and especially females as the Roman priests are conscious that by this means they shall silently but effectually attain the control of public affairs.”
2

The convent girls came from affluent families at a time when Protestant workingmen chafed under the growing gap in wealth, status, and living conditions in a region just on the cusp of an industrial revolution. The formation of a Workingman's Party in Boston in 1832 emphasized the class-consciousness of workers. The
Boston Recorder
, a prominent local newspaper, summarized Protestant fears of the convent in an 1830 editorial: that its students “may yet go forth, with their minds imbued with such principles which, if embraced by our descendents, will counteract every good for which our fathers fought.” The editor hoped for the day “when all false religion shall be overthrown, and the true religion of Christ pervades the whole world.”
3

Few Congregational ministers feared the Catholic menace more than Lyman Beecher, pastor of the Park Street Church in Boston, whose fiery sermons had earned the church the reputation as the city's “Brimstone Corner.” He attracted national attention with a series of sermons in 1830 denouncing the Catholic Church as a sworn enemy of the nation's republican ideals. Beecher practiced what he preached. He uprooted his large family from their comfortable New England home and moved to Cincinnati, then a raw frontier town, to establish a theological seminary. The purpose of this institution was to save the West, and especially its children, from the Catholic Church. To that end, he also encouraged his eldest daughter, Catharine, to open a school and dedicate her life to female children of “the rising generation in which Catholics and infidels have got the start of us.”
4

Resentment against Catholics and specifically the Mount Benedict convent grew through the early 1830s. The impressive school perched high above Charlestown was not the City on a Hill the Protestant burghers contemplated as the fulfillment of the Pilgrims' progress. A commemorative monument rising on adjacent Bunker Hill illuminated the perceived threat of the sprawling convent even more.

In the weeks before and after Sister Mary John's peregrination, an uncannily similar story circulated in the Boston area. Rebecca Reed, a Protestant girl, was the protagonist in this tale. She had allegedly fled the Mount Benedict convent to escape from a satanic environment. To silence her, Reed charged, the nuns plotted to carry her off to Canada. Mother Superior admitted that Reed had entered the convent in 1831 as a charity student but was dismissed after six months when she balked at the rigor of the curriculum. Sister Mary John's “escape,” however, lent credence to Reed's story, conflating the two episodes in the primed minds of Yankee residents.

On August 8, a story appeared in a Boston newspaper headlined “Mysterious.” It read: “We understand that a great excitement at present exists in Charlestown in consequence of the mysterious disappearance of a young lady at the Nunnery in that place.… [A] few days since, her friends called for her but she was not to be found, and much alarm is excited in consequence.”
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The Charlestown selectmen who governed the community now rose to action. They marched over to the convent on Monday, August 11, and demanded to search the facility for the “missing” nun. Mother Superior obliged and presented Sister Mary John as their tour guide. The selectmen reported to the press that “Miss Harrison was entirely satisfied with her present situation, it being that of her own choice, and that she has no desire or wish to alter it.”
6

The retraction came too late to save the convent. Forces were already in motion that created a frenzy of hate and revenge beyond the control of local leaders. Lyman Beecher made a hasty return from Cincinnati to deliver three violent anti-Catholic sermons on August 10 exhorting congregations to action against “Popery.” Beecher was not alone in his diatribes. Protestant ministers throughout the Boston area that Sabbath reminded churchgoers of their responsibility to fight for faith and country. Placards appeared all over Boston and Charlestown: “Go Ahead! To Arms!! To Arms!! Ye brave and free the Avenging Sword unshield!! Leave not one stone upon another of that curst Nunnery that prostitutes female virtue and liberty under the garb of holy Religion. When Bonaparte opened the Nunnerys in Europe he found cords of infant skulls!!!!!!”
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John R. Buzzell, a brawny six-foot-six brickmaker, required no such encouragement. A year earlier he had severely beaten the convent's Irish caretaker. He still harbored resentment over the use of Irish strikebreakers. The selectmen had scarcely departed Mount Benedict when Buzzell and a mob of sixty Protestant men marched toward the front gate shouting, “No Popery” and “Down with the Cross.” Charlestown's lone police officer stood off at a discreet distance.
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Ursuline convent aflame. (Harvard College Library, Widener Library)

Mother Superior came out to meet the mob. Seeing that her pleadings did not diminish the crowd's determination, she warned that “the Bishop has twenty thousand Irishmen at his command in Boston.” That threat only stoked the mob's fury. The men battered in the front door and ransacked the main convent building, finding, to their dismay, nothing more incriminating than the books and clothing of the students and nuns who had already fled the premises. Within the hour, flames consumed the convent and its contents.
9

Certain that dark secrets lay somewhere on the grounds, the mob turned to the small chapel behind the convent. A dozen men armed with clubs and pickaxes burst through the portal. They found a trapdoor, smashed it, and rushed down the stone steps to the crypt. Seven coffins lay in front of them. Here, they believed, were the remains of murdered Protestant girls. They pried open the coffin lids and pulled out the bodies. Arrayed before them were no defiled Protestant damsels but the corpses of seven nuns. One of the men clubbed a skull in frustration, sending its teeth skittering across the stone floor. The men picked up the teeth for souvenirs and moved on to other targets. By dawn, the school and all of the outbuildings lay in smoldering ruins.

The episode appalled some of Boston's leading citizens, including Harrison Gray Otis, a future U.S. senator, who told an audience in Faneuil Hall, “The destruction of property and danger of life caused thereby, calls loudly on all good citizens to express individually and collectively the abhorrence they feel of this high-handed violation of the laws.” Lyman Beecher also condemned the violence, though he noted that preventing the conversion of innocent Protestant girls represented a noble cause. He assured anxious civic leaders that “the excitement … had no relation whatever to religious opinions.”
10

The authorities rounded up thirteen rioters and tried them individually in December 1834, beginning with John R. Buzzell. It soon became clear, however, that the Catholic Church and not Buzzell was on trial. Witnesses for the prosecution were difficult to find, particularly after the posting of a warning on Charlestown Bridge, “All persons giving information in any shape or testifying in court against any one concerned in the late affair at Charlestown may expect assassination.” Rebecca Reed was a star witness for the defense, spinning her fantasies to the delight of the packed galleries. After twenty hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. All of the subsequent trials found each of the defendants innocent of the charges, except for a sixteen-year-old boy who led a book-burning spree on the property. He received a life sentence. At the behest of Bishop Fenwick, the governor commuted the sentence and released the prisoner.
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