Fanatical Protestants, Treacherous Catholics, Faithful Muslims: Political Re-Visions of the Charlestown Convent Riot, 1834-1855

Daniel A. Cohen

On August 11, 1834, a Protestant mob ransacked and burned an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. Although viewed by many antebellum Americans as an infamous acts of religious intolerance, the convent riot helped launch the first of several successive waves of anti-Catholicism that would only crest with the enormously popular Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s. Over a period of more than twenty years, politicians, journalists, fiction writers, and (occasionally) graphic artists offered competing accounts or images of the controversial event, reflecting very different interpretations of its social and political significance. This paper will examine several different polemical re-visions of the riot produced over the course of that period. In 1835, the well-known caricaturist David Claypoole Johnston—who would later convert to Roman Catholicism—published a series of satirical sketches ridiculing both the “fanatical” Protestant preachers who spread venomous anti-Catholic calumnies and the ignorant Protestant rioters who acted on that hateful propaganda. In 1845, Justin Jones, a popular lowbrow fiction writer and occasional Whig politician, produced a short romance based on the Charlestown convent riot in which he, on the one hand, propagated crude anti-Catholic stereotypes and yet, on the other hand, condemned the riot of 1834 as a “disgrace” and urged the state to provide financial compensation for its victims. Jones also concocted an elaborate subplot in which one of his heroes, a Yankee sailor, converted to Islam and led a stalwart crew of Turkish sailors to rescue his sister from the convent on the night of its destruction. (During the 1840s, some Protestant Americans were evidently more willing to see virtue in militant Islam than in Roman Catholicism.) Finally, during the fall and winter of 1854-55, a nativist author published two viciously anti-Catholic retellings of the convent riot in a popular Boston “story paper.” Republished as novelettes that quickly went into multiple editions, those polemical tales contributed to a crescendo of anti-Catholic and anti-convent propaganda that accompanied the stunning electoral conquest of the government of Massachusetts by the insurgent Know-Nothing party. Twenty years after the burning of the Ursuline convent, Massachusetts voters—and readers—had tacitly vindicated the Charlestown rioters and handed the nativist movement its greatest political victory.