Common Ground (16 page)

In the winter of 1871, a tuberculosis epidemic raced through the squalid warrens of the Lower End, felling men, women, and children by the hundreds. The Kirks’ two-year-old daughter, Mary, took ill in February and died in May. By then her mother had contracted the disease as well, putting up a longer fight but finally succumbing on July 26. A stunned Pat Kirk buried his wife and daughter side by side in Holy Cross Cemetery. For a few months longer he struggled to keep things together, working as a day laborer, but jobs were scarce, there was nobody to look after his four-year-old son, Bernard, and the cramped flat on Bolton Street was filled with painful memories of his two Marys. Late that fall, Pat packed his few belongings and took his remaining child back to Ireland, where they moved into the Roodstown cottage with his father, Bryan the tailor. For the next fifteen years, Pat worked other men’s land as a hired hand, earning ten pence a day. He never remarried, relying on his mother and in-laws to help raise Bernard.

By 1890, the Irish countryside was once more in turmoil. Falling agriculture prices and fresh evictions made tenant farming more precarious than ever. To Bernard Kirk, then twenty-three, Boston beckoned much as it had to his father a quarter century before. Pat Kirk had never forgotten the hardships endured, the terrible losses suffered, in that flinty Yankee town, but Bernard ultimately overcame Pat’s misgivings and, late in April, father and son set sail aboard the S.S.
Pavonia
. Pat’s premonitions proved all too sound; only four months after his return to Boston, he died of a heart attack and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, next to his wife and daughter.

The Irish colonized Boston by county: emigrants from Galway settled in Roxbury, those from Cork in South Boston, those from Kerry in Bay Village. Counties Louth and Meath were drawn first to the North End, replicating there the social landscape of northeastern Ireland. In 1891, Bernard Kirk lodged in a rooming house at 239 Friend Street, a narrow lane hard by the docks, where he worked as a day laborer. Among other Louthians in that house were Peter and Bridget Sharkey from Ardee and their twenty-four-year-old daughter,
Catherine. Confronting each other daily in those close quarters, Catherine and Barney fell in love and were married on February 5, 1893. Six months later, the Kirks left the North End, crossing the narrow strip of gray water to Charlestown, where they settled at 72 Chapman Street in the southern lee of Breed’s Hill. Like other North Enders who made that same move toward the turn of the century, the Kirks were known as “Dearos,” after their occasional bouts of nostalgia for “the Dear Old North End.” But, like other newcomers, they soon transferred their allegiance to Charlestown, which had huddled on that rocky coast for two and a half centuries.

On March 29, 1630, the brig
Arbella
set sail from Southampton, England, with a company of Puritans bound for Massachusetts. Aboard ship, the company’s leader, John Winthrop, delivered a sermon expressing the extraordinary intensity of their community-to-be:

“We must be knit together in this work as one man. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others’ condition our own … We must consider that we shall be like a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

On June 12, the
Arbella
landed at Salem, where an advance party of the Massachusetts Bay Company had established a commercial outpost. But Salem did not please the newcomers, and soon they resumed their search for their “city upon a hill,” selecting the narrow Charlestown peninsula between the Charles and Mystic rivers, where a small party from Salem had settled two years before.

The new party of one thousand made Charlestown a substantial community and the capital of the infant colony. But it was not to be Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.” The peninsula was too cramped and lacked adequate drinking water. The bloody flux flashed through the travelers. Then came word that the French were preparing to attack. Through the autumn, small groups left Charlestown, establishing settlements at Watertown, Roxbury, Medford, and, directly across the Charles River, on the Shawmut peninsula, soon to be renamed Boston. Winthrop himself left for Boston in October. His dream of a single consecrated city was dead. But his notion of a Bible Commonwealth lived on in the separate towns which now dotted the tidewater flats. Although Charlestown was temporarily depleted, it soon began growing again and by midcentury had taken its place as one of the principal towns of the colony.

In some respects, New England towns were modeled on the English townships from which their settlers came, the ideal village they had left behind. But unlike those ancestral communities with their sturdy walls and mossy marketplaces, Charlestown and its neighbors were artificial creations, literally hewn from the wilderness and constantly in jeopardy—if not from wild animals or Indians, then from the vagaries and passions which can so easily rend such delicate human constructs. This perpetual state of crisis accounts, in part, for the intensity of their communal life, their almost desperate insistence on
mutual obligations. Perhaps the greatest fear of all was of violating the “covenant,” the sacred compact which the settlers had made with God and with each other. The covenant was the stone on which the community was built, the basis of its determination to become “a fellowship of visible saints.” A townsperson who broke its stern commandments endangered not only himself but all his colleagues, and risked bringing down God’s wrath on the entire community.

Thus the intense pressure for conformity to a shared set of beliefs, customs, and institutions. By the very act of joining the congregation, the Puritan accepted not only one God and one religion but one polity, one law, one allegiance. The town could not tolerate diversity; it could not live with aberration. So most towns took steps to guarantee homogeneity. Sudbury barred “such whose dispositions do not suit us, whose society will be hurtful to us.” Dedham banned “the contrarye minded.” In 1634, Charlestown’s town meeting voted that “none be permitted to sit down and dwell in the town without the consent of the town first obtained.” Even after a person was received into the town, he could be expelled by a process known as “warning out.”

Such rigid enforcement of uniformity was possible in communities engaged only in subsistence agriculture and fishing. But by the mid-seventeenth century, Charlestown, like Boston, was breaking out of such isolation, becoming a trading center for the region. Rampant individualism and the increasing specialization of a mercantile economy had largely eroded Winthrop’s dream of a community in which private concerns would forever be subordinated to public needs.

Still, Charlestown could never quite forget the purity of that vision. The less it resembled Winthrop’s model, the more seductive became the memory of that archetypal New England town, harmonious, consensual, cemented by a single faith and a devotion to the common cause. For more than three centuries to come, that notion burned like a beacon, summoning the people of Charlestown to an increasingly unrealistic ideal of community.

Through most of the eighteenth century, Charlestown shunned insubstantial myth for the solid clink of shillings in the coffer. Then, in the 1770s, it found itself transformed once again into a potent symbol, an example which would help bring down an empire.

Charlestown’s conspicuous role in the Revolution stemmed less from the revolutionary fervor of its populace than from its critical location. British-occupied Boston was like a pollywog, its tail connected to the mainland at Roxbury, its head pointing across the bay at Charlestown. It was to Charlestown that Paul Revere rowed on April 18, 1775, there to take horse and carry word of the British attack to Lexington; and twenty hours later, it was back through Charlestown that the battered British column retreated to Boston. By June, Roxbury and Charlestown were the fronts on which General Thomas Gage’s 5,000 redcoats were bound to confront the 15,000 armed colonists who had massed around Boston.

Early in June came word that the British planned to break out of that vise
by driving at Roxbury, then assaulting Charlestown. Resolving to fortify Bunker Hill, the Committee for Public Safety assigned the task to three regiments commanded by Colonel William Prescott. By error, Prescott built his redoubt on the lower, more vulnerable Breed’s Hill. So when the battle was joined on June 17, General William Howe’s light infantry, grenadiers, and Royal Marines could turn the colonists’ flanks and attack the hill’s defenders from three sides. Although Prescott’s farmers and minutemen fought valiantly, the British ultimately stormed the hill, sending the Americans streaming back along the peninsula.

At first, the battle was widely regarded as a British victory, but both sides came to recognize how dearly the “victors” had paid for the hill—226 killed and 828 wounded compared to 138 killed and 276 wounded for the defenders. Moreover, “Bunker Hill” demonstrated how wrong the British had been in assuming the Americans wouldn’t stand and fight. “Damn the rebels,” wrote one lieutenant, “that they did not flinch.”

Charlestown, too, paid a heavy price—the virtual razing of the town. When the Royal Navy in the harbor and British artillery on Copp’s Hill laid down incendiary fire, the meetinghouse with its slim steeple, the two ministers’ houses, the principal inn, and dozens of trim, clapboard houses crumbled in the inferno. “Beneath prodigious unextinguished fires,” wrote a contemporary poet, “ill-fated Charlestown welters and expires.”

But not quite. Armed now with a new myth to accompany Winthrop’s old vision of community, Charlestown soon adopted as its motto: “Liberty, a Trust to Be Transmitted to Posterity.”

Far from expiring, Charlestown grew faster than ever: in 1810, with nearly 5,000 residents, it was Massachusetts’ third-largest town. Once more it benefited from its strategic location. Enfolded by two navigable rivers and Boston Bay, with the Lowell Railroad and the Newburyport Turnpike funneling goods in from north and west, Charlestown became a “vestibule” through which New England’s produce was shunted into Boston’s spacious mansion. The Charles River Bridge poured goods and vehicles into the capital. In 1800, the infant United States Navy had opened a shipyard in the bustling Charlestown harbor, which produced virtually all the Navy’s rope on its giant rope walk and where many a fighting vessel was shaped from New England oak and yellow pine. Clustering around the shipyard were wharves and warehouses, tanneries and brickyards, banks and insurance companies.

The Navy Yard and ancillary industries drew laborers from rural Massachusetts as well as Irish immigrants who, by the 1820s, were trickling into Boston. Before long, Charlestown housed a thousand Catholics—most of them Irish—who found it difficult to attend Mass miles away at the Boston Cathedral. Bishop Benedict Fenwick resolved to build Charlestown a separate church. When the cornerstone was laid in October 1828, overwhelmingly Protestant Charlestown witnessed the novel spectacle of a Catholic procession winding through its narrow streets led by a bishop in full regalia. For a town once indistinguishable from its church, the opening of St. Mary’s Church, and
later of a Catholic cemetery on Bunker Hill, must indeed have been disturbing. Soon religious tensions erupted into violence. After townsmen insulted a group of Irishmen coming home from a dance at Roger McGowan’s restaurant, fighting broke out in which one Protestant was killed. The next night a gang of Protestants destroyed McGowan’s house.

Another symbol of Catholic encroachment in Charlestown was the Ursuline Convent, established in 1826. From the start, the convent’s presence had inflamed the Puritan imagination with wild images of torture and immoral practices. As stories spread, placards went up in town exhorting the people of Charlestown: “To arms!! Ye brave and free, the Avenging Sword Unshield!” On August 12, 1834, a mob of the “brave and free”—mostly bricklayers, apprentices, and sailors—laid siege to the convent and, after nuns and students had fled, burned it to the ground.

The Ursuline Convent affair grew only in part out of Catholic-Protestant contention. Most of the convent’s forty-four students weren’t Catholics at all, but Unitarians, daughters of Boston’s aristocracy. To working-class Congregationalists, it seemed as if upper-class Unitarians and “foreign” Catholics had joined hands to undermine what they still regarded as their civil religion. Instinctively, the indigenous mob lashed out at this “unholy alliance.”

Soon the Irish emerged as the principal threat to Charlestown’s homogeneity. The great wave of Irish immigration began with the potato famine of the 1840s, during which millions of impoverished peasants were driven from the land. Between 1846 and 1856, some 130,000 Irish disembarked at the port of Boston. By the end of the Civil War, more than a third of Charlestown’s residents were first- and second-generation Irish. Most of the newcomers settled along Warren Avenue, soon called “Dublin Row,” where the town’s old residents were horrified to find “any quantity of filth, rubbish, misery, and degradation.”

By midcentury, the Protestants of the Native American Party were ready to launch an open assault on the alien influx. In 1845, the
Bunker Hill Aurora
warned that foreigners were landing at the rate of “13,400 a month!!! 466 a day!!! 19 an hour!!!” Three years later, the same paper declared: “Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, vicious, and unclean paupers of the old country.” Within days, the city fathers voted to expel illegal paupers—an echo of colonial Charlestown’s “warning out” of undesirables.

But the influx continued, helping to trigger the greatest assault yet on Charlestown’s autonomy—the movement for annexation to Boston. As Boston’s Irish swelled toward a majority, a union with predominantly Protestant Charlestown appealed to many Bostonians as a means of containing “the foreign element.” In Charlestown, the Protestant establishment sought a comforting alliance with State Street’s bankers. In both cities, the Irish welcomed the merger as a way to pool their growing strength. Not surprisingly, the most virulent opposition came from Charlestown’s Congregationalist artisans, who once more detected an unholy alliance among the Irish, the upper classes, and “outsiders” of all kinds. Opponents invoked nostalgia for ancient New England
towns, “the best nurseries of freedom, independence, and personal individuality.” But it was too late. Irredeemably riven now by conflicting interests and mutual fears, Charlestown was swallowed up by Boston in 1874.