America Aflame Read online

  Rebecca Reed had a more colorful if brief career after the fire. Her “spiritual autobiography,” Six Months in a Convent (1835), appeared several months after the trial and sold ten thousand copies in the Boston area alone during its first week in print. Reed recounted her “imprisonment” and how the nuns forced her to renounce the Protestant faith. Mother Superior published a sharp rejoinder a few months later, An Answer to Six Months in a Convent Exposing Its Falsehoods and Manifold Absurdities (1835), refuting all of Reed’s allegations, noting that it was a strange prison that kept the front door unlocked. That book sold well, too.12

  Reed’s supporters responded to the Mother Superior’s book with Supplement to “Six Months in a Convent” Confirming the Narrative of Rebecca Reed … by the Testimony of More Than One Hundred Witnesses (1835), a screed whose strongest appeal lay in its conclusion: “It [the convent] was wholly foreign; having been founded, in 1820, by two foreigners, who imported four Ursuline foreigners into this country for that purpose, and … established [with] foreign money, collected by a Mr. John Thayer in Rome … who rejoiced in the American Revolution only as the means of accomplishing a ‘much more happy revolution’ in the supremacy of the Pope in America!”13

  The vast evangelical network created by the Second Great Awakening and the steam printing press advertised Reed’s books to a broad audience. Reed saw little of the profits; she died of tuberculosis, allegedly brought on by the rigors of convent life, shortly after the publication of the Supplement.

  The popularity of Reed’s books and the credulity of a public receptive to almost anything sensational about the Catholic Church inspired a more extraordinary tale. Maria Monk’s problem was more immediate than Rebecca Reed’s: she was pregnant in an era when unwed motherhood was decidedly unfashionable. The solution: write a book, a strategy concocted by a team of prominent evangelists and abolitionists, including Theodore Dwight, great-grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the leading light of the First Great Awakening. The result eclipsed the mild perturbations of Rebecca Reed. The book, Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery (1836), sold more copies than any other book in America before the Civil War, with the exception of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Awful Disclosures, true to its title, chronicled the debauched life of nuns and priests in a Montreal convent. Mother Superior parceled out nuns to priests and issued orders for the murder of their babies. Licentious priests roamed the halls, feasting on young virgins at will. “Often they were in our beds before us,” Maria wrote. Especially fascinating for readers were the detailed descriptions of the convent’s Gothic rituals. The ceremony marking Maria’s entrance into the novitiate required her to lie down in a coffin, after which three priests ravished her (accounting for her pregnancy). Mother Superior forced her to reveal her most secret thoughts and desires to priests in the confessional. Maria concludes her story with a tour of the convent for the reader, probing the secret recesses and passageways down into a subbasement where she discovers an enormous lime pit employed to devour the bodies of the murdered infants.14

  All was fantasy. Contrary evidence poured in almost immediately. Maria’s mother told a reporter that a Protestant minister had impregnated her daughter and had spun the tale to cover up the deed. A New York lawyer, William Stone, sympathetic to Maria, traveled to Montreal to inspect the ribald, murderous Hôtel Dieu Nunnery. Stone discovered only a placid religious community whose residents lived with “confidence, esteem, and harmony among each other.”15

  But these contradictions only confirmed the perfidy of the Catholic Church for convinced Protestants. The conspiracy of silence and secrecy confounded investigators. Further revelations that Maria was actually a prostitute did not erode the book’s popularity, or that of a sequel. Like Rebecca, Maria gained little from her book’s success. She died penniless on Welfare Island in New York in 1849.

  The destruction of the Ursuline convent underscored the challenges facing the still new nation. Despite Lyman Beecher’s disingenuous denial, religious discord played a major role in the conflagration. Irish Catholics were unwelcome in New England, especially in the Puritan Protestant strongholds in and around Boston. In the volatile religious marketplace of the era, Catholicism more than held its own. By the time Bishop Fenwick arrived in Boston, more than two thousand Protestants had converted to the Catholic faith.

  The convent represented more than religious rivalry. It was an outpost for a religion deemed incompatible with Revolutionary ideals. The convent also subverted ideals of the family and gender; celibate women were training young Protestant girls into womanhood with an ambitious curriculum the equal or better of comparable boys’ schools. Mount Benedict and Bunker Hill were more than two elevations in a Boston suburb. The elegant convent rising alongside the sacred hill provided a bricks-and-mortar threat to the Revolutionary legacy, a reminder that, perhaps, the future lay with Rome.

  The Protestant brickmakers, truckmen, and carpenters also wondered about the future. Artisanal labor was beginning its long and precipitous decline from a worthy craft with the potential of entrepreneurial status to one of semiskilled drudgery with little prospect of advance. If the economy offered diminishing prospects for the Charlestown artisans, the convent and the Irish Catholic hierarchy that sponsored it represented a source of that declension.

  This religious discord occurred as the second generation of Americans came of age. The passing of the Founders left the new generation with the responsibility of preserving and advancing the Revolutionary legacy, a difficulty compounded by the absence of a consensus on the specifics of that legacy. The second generation would both conserve and redefine the founding principles. America was still very much an experiment, and pundits, both abroad and at home, predicted its imminent demise from too much democracy, too much territory, or too much diversity.

  Threats abounded, as did severe solutions. If Indians stood in the way of fulfilling the Revolutionary heritage of a free, democratic, and prosperous nation, remove them. If slaveholders mocked the founding principles of American government, restrict their movement, and ultimately their livelihood. If foreign nations encroached on soil rightfully American, negotiate if possible, make war if necessary. If Roman Catholics flooded American cities with their foreign allegiances, secretive ways, and despotic hierarchy, then convert them, or limit their rights.

  Catholics menaced not only the Revolutionary legacy but also God’s plan for the New World. One way of securing the national experiment was to link its cause with God. Evangelical Protestants believed that it was more than coincidence that the Reformation had followed closely upon the European discovery of America, more than coincidence that the world’s first truly republican government based on the dignity and equality of men appeared on this soil. American Protestantism reinforced and complemented American republican government. The awakened cherished individuality, their personal decision to come to Jesus, their use of intuition and reason to determine the will of God, and the willingness to break with traditions and with the people and institutions that upheld those traditions. They cherished also their system of government, unique in the world, forged in blood, and dedicated to the self-evident truths of equality and government by consent of the governed. Catholics stood as the great historic threat, to both the Protestant God and the American nation. The rigid hierarchy of the Church denigrated individual reason, stifled dissent, and disdained democratic discourse. It was a despotic institution, accustomed to supporting like regimes in Europe.

  The Catholic threat seemed real and imminent to American Protestants in the midst of a religious revival. The Holy See under Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46) was an expansionist institution, allied with conservative regimes and deeply suspicious of republican influences. Catholic leaders in the United States often favored confrontation over conciliation. New York’s archbishop, John Hughes, boasted to Protestants, “Everyone should know that we have for our mission to convert the world—including the inhabitants of the United States.�
�� The Catholic Church clearly threatened America’s destiny as God’s Chosen Nation.16

  So did slavery, at least according to abolitionists. The anti-slavery and anti-Catholic movements shared a number of common characteristics and some of the same personnel. Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures was frankly pornographic by the conventions of the era, though its authors always took care to frame lurid passages within the context of victimhood, demurely apologizing to the genteel reader while at the same time whetting his appetite. This was a technique that abolitionists would put to good use in promoting slave narratives: providing details of life in bondage guaranteed to shock the reader while making the larger point that slavery itself was a violent and pornographic institution, destructive of normal family life, faith, and republican sensibilities, just like the Roman Catholic Church. It was hardly surprising that the Beecher family stood in the forefront of both the crusade against Catholics and the crusade against slavery. Both institutions, in their view, condoned slavish adherence to false doctrines, imprisoned their victims and stripped them of their humanity, and conspired to subvert American ideals of self-government and free thought. They were old, outmoded traditions and now deserved to be vanquished by the righteous.

  The anti-slavery and anti-Catholic movements both attained greater prominence during the 1830s as the Second Great Awakening peaked. The movements benefited from the print revolution and the persistent concerns about individual freedom as a threatened legacy from the Revolutionary era. Charles Grandison Finney, a New York lawyer who had heard the voice of God while researching a case and promptly dropped his law books for the Bible, reasoned that as long as evangelicals mailed Christian newspapers, sermons, and Bibles across the land, why not add anti-slavery tracts to the mailbag. Conversion to one cause might stimulate conversion to the other. While they were at it, why not employ the American entrepreneurial spirit and toss in anti-slavery kerchiefs, medals, and even wrappers around chocolate—build an anti-slavery franchise.17

  The flurry of evangelical anti-slavery mail and gewgaws produced precious few conversions, but it infuriated residents in southern port cities. Charleston’s mayor gathered the incendiary materials and lit a huge bonfire as a signal to the Yankee holier-than-thou preachers to stay the hell out of the South and stop mixing religion with politics. The southern reaction startled many northerners, including Lyman Beecher’s daughter Harriet. Slaveholders, she thought, threatened free speech and thought as much as the Roman Catholic hierarchy. She signed her name on an anti-slavery petition to Congress calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.18

  Northern lawmakers dutifully unfolded the reams of paper petitions and brought Congress to a standstill. The lawmakers voted to receive the abolition petitions but table them immediately so they could conduct the country’s business. Such a timesaving maneuver had occurred in the past, but this order was meant to last the entire session. Abolitionists called it a “gag rule” and declared that the issue now was not freedom for the slaves but freedom for all Americans. As William Jay, head of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, commented, “We commenced the present struggle to obtain the freedom of the slave; we are compelled to continue it to preserve our own.” Abolitionists understood that as long as northerners perceived slavery as a black problem, the prospects for liberation were dim. They set about to show their neighbors that slavery was everyone’s problem. They would receive significant and unexpected help from white southerners in this effort.19

  The suppression of the petitions energized the evangelical faithful. By 1838, more than a hundred thousand citizens, half of them women, had distributed one million pieces of anti-slavery literature and an additional twenty thousand religious tracts directly to the South. Petitions bearing two million names descended upon Congress. The gag rule remained in force.

  Abolitionists were yet a small and often despised group, and not only in the South. The same year that rioters destroyed the Ursuline convent, William Lloyd Garrison, the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, claimed that a “Reign of Terror” had descended upon fellow abolitionists. Citizens broke up meetings and at one point led Garrison through the streets of Boston with a rope around his neck. The objections against the abolitionists were manifold. They disrupted the public order by calling for an end to an institution clearly protected by the Constitution; they threatened the destruction of the Union with their incendiary rhetoric and publications; and they seemed oblivious to the dangers of unleashing four million freed slaves to migrate to the North to compete for jobs and live among whites.

  Some northern whites feared the black migration was already under way. The black population in the North had grown faster than any other segment of the northern population between 1800 and 1830 to nearly 320,000. Restrictions on their civil liberties and employment accompanied this increase. States excluded them from basic rights of citizenship such as serving in state militias and voting. Laws and customs barred them from hotels and restaurants and relegated them to segregated schools. The pattern of segregation in the North extended to cemeteries, jails, and churches, where blacks sat in “nigger pews.” Most states outlawed interracial marriage and prohibited blacks from testifying in court against whites. Employment options narrowed, especially after the 1830s when immigrants crowded into northern cities and competed with native-born whites and blacks for work. Even domestic service, long a preserve of black women, became less available as the growing urban middle class in the North found prestige in hiring Irish girls to cook and clean for them. Some states in the Midwest banned free blacks from entering altogether.

  As voting restrictions for whites fell away, blacks found less room under the broadened canopy of democracy. Every new state from the 1820s onward restricted suffrage to white males only, and in New Jersey and Connecticut, lawmakers amended constitutions to limit suffrage to white men. Barred from jury service in most states, either by custom or law, free blacks comprised a disproportionate number of prisoners and suffered wildly disparate sentences from whites for similar offenses. When the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, admitted black citizens to jury duty, the event became national news and elicited a warning from an Indiana congressman that such a precedent “would allow a white man to be accused of crime by a negro; to be arrested on the affidavit of a negro, by a negro officer; to be prosecuted by a negro lawyer; testified against by a negro witness; tried before a negro judge; convicted before a negro jury; and executed by a negro executioner; and either one of these negroes might become the husband of his widow or his daughter!”20

  Although northern blacks organized and protested against these restrictions, only in Massachusetts did they achieve some success, as the legislature in 1843 repealed the state’s ban against interracial marriage and railroad companies abandoned segregated seating. An English traveler at the time, noting the obstacles blacks confronted living in the North, concluded, “We see in effect, two nations—one white and another black—growing up together within the same political circle, but never mingling on a principle of equality.”21

  African Americans’ living conditions in the North reflected their limited work and educational choices. Housed in sheds, stables, run-down tenements, or not at all, dodging police who served more as tormentors than protectors, and targets of periodic violence—black life in the urban North may have been free, but it was not good. When southern whites countered anti-slavery arguments by pointing out that blacks’ living conditions in the North proved their unfitness for freedom, they were half right.

  Northern opposition to the gag rule and southern demands for a federal ban on abolitionist literature (and the arrest and extradition to the South of those responsible for the mailings) had much more to do with Revolutionary principles as embodied in the Constitution than with liberating slaves. Southern whites, in denying freedom for the black man, now threatened freedom for whites. As one northern white argued, southerners must not “require of us a course of conduct which would strike at the root of e
verything we have been taught to consider sacred.” The White Protestant Republic, as codified in the Revolutionary documents and ordained by God, had no room for those who threatened both the laws of God and those of man.22

  The political process might have contained the sectarian and anti-slavery conflicts, as it had in the past, were it not for the changing landscape of America. It was not happenstance that Lyman Beecher and Charles Grandison Finney both left their eastern homes and sought converts in Ohio. Beecher authored a blueprint for this crusade, A Plea for the West (1835). The book exposed the alleged Catholic conspiracy in the West to defile the virgin land, working through the “dread confessional” to manipulate elections and “inflame and divide the nation, break the bond of our union, and throw down our free institutions.” The mission of America to guide the world to grace depended on “the religious and political destiny” of the West. And this destiny depended on capturing the West for Protestants and whites.23

  Americans in the 1830s and 1840s were on the move—to the West, to the cities, to anyplace where they could pursue the main chance, a better life, more land, independence, or just a change of scenery. As God’s rule knew no boundaries, so the American continent offered a limitless expanse of opportunity. Space, the ability to pursue it, get it, and own it, set the American apart from the European and from Europe, where land was the prerogative of the elite and often closed to certain classes, ethnic groups, and dissenting religions. Yet not all religions or races were welcome in the American West. Their exclusion would become a contentious political issue, a holy crusade, a cause to violence, and eventually a call to civil war.