ted States. Its great
and sudden growth solely by immigration had made it distinctively a
church of foreigners, and chiefly of Irishmen. The conditions were
favorable for the development of a race prejudice aggravated by a
religious antipathy. It was a good time for the impostor, the fanatic,
and the demagogue to get in their work. In Boston, in 1834, the report
that a woman was detained against her will in the Ursuline convent at
Charlestown, near Boston, led to the burning of the building by a
drunken mob. The Titus Oates of the American no-popery panic, in 1836,
was an infamous woman named Maria Monk, whose monstrous stories of
secret horrors perpetrated in a convent in Montreal, in which she
claimed to have lived as a nun, were published by a respectable house
and had immense currency. A New York pastor of good standing, Dr.
Brownlee, made himself sponsor for her character and her stories; and
when these had been thoroughly exposed, by Protestant ministers and
laymen, for the shameless frauds that they were, there were plenty of
zealots to sustain her still. A "Protestant Society" was organized in
New York, and solicited the contributions of the benevolent and pious to
promote the dissemination of raw-head-and-bloody-bones literature on the
horrors of popery. The enterprise met with reprobation from sober-minded
Protestants, but it was not without its influence for mischief. The
presence of a great foreign vote, easily manipulated and cast in block,
was proving a copious source of political corruption. Large concessions
of privilege or of public property to Catholic institutions were
reasonably suspected to have been made in consideration of clerical
services in partisan politics.[313:1] The conditions provoked, we might
say necessitated, a political reform movement, which took the name and
character of "Native American." In Philadelphia, a city notorious at
that time for misgovernment and turbulence, an orderly "American"
meeting was attacked and broken up by an Irish mob. One act of violence
led to another, the excitement increasing from day to day; deadly shots
were exchanged in the streets, houses from which balls had been fired
into the crowd were set in flames, which spread to other houses,
churches were burned, and the whole city dominated by mobs that were
finally suppressed by the State militia. It was an appropriate climax
to the ten years of ecclesiastical and social turmoil.[314:1]

FOOTNOTES:

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