On a spring evening in 1836, a middle-aged woman walked out through the wrought-iron gates of the Ursuline convent in Old Quebec City and vanished, never to be heard from again. Women of that era often left the thinnest of traces for historians to follow. But this particular woman, a cloistered nun, had never been one to go quietly.

Mary Anne Moffatt, or, as much of the American public knew her, Sister Mary Edmond St. George, had just two years before been the proud superior of the Mount Benedict Community in Charlestown, Massachusetts. On the night of August 11, 1834, in an act of anti-Catholic violence that stood out even amid widespread animosity toward Catholics, a Protestant mob burned the convent and school to the ground. Instead of retreating into life in a cloister, Moffatt confronted the public's gaze. She published a defense of her convent that became a best-seller. Her testimony at the trial of the arsonists' ringleader, spread by newspapers and a hastily printed popular book, gripped readers around the country.

Today no one knows what Mary Anne Moffatt even looked like. A formal portrait in the Quebec Ursuline collection, like the subject herself, has mysteriously disappeared. Only a cartoon printed in an account of the trial survives, but it depicts her as an old hag.

I first encountered Mary Anne Moffatt through the writings of those who despised her. I had just completed an article on Harriet Beecher Stowe, and had become interested in that author's ambivalence toward Catholicism. I was astounded to discover that a liberal abolitionist family like the Beechers had members who were virulently anti-Catholic. Stowe's father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, had given three anti-Catholic sermons in Boston on the day before the convent riot. In retrospect, they had helped ignite the violence.

When I first learned of the convent fire, I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts, where, in a section of town that had once been part of Charlestown, Moffatt's academy had stood high on a hill. In a neighborhood still known as the Nunnery Grounds, the hill has been razed for landfill. A faded plaque on the Gold Star Memorial Library marks its location. But if you walk east a few blocks from the library's door and take a left up Austin Street, you can climb a segment of the hill that remains and look out toward the Atlantic Ocean. From the windows of her convent, Moffatt could have viewed the white sails of clipper ships.

The attack had been personal, in part. A complex web of tensions--ethnic, religious, economic, misogynistic--had contributed to Mount Benedict's destruction. But the trial records and news accounts show that it was Moffatt who drew out the resentments of the working-class Protestant men.

More historical records survive about Moffatt than about most 19th-century women. I was fortunate to locate 20 letters in her hand, sent to friends, colleagues, and her attorney, in addition to a considerable number reprinted in documentation of the convent's burning. All convey a refined but headstrong voice. In archives scattered from Quebec to South Carolina, I found some 50 letters about her by convent patrons and Church authorities, some laudatory, many highly critical. From these texts, a portrait emerges of a woman out of joint with her time.


According to Canadian land-grant applications and notary records, Moffatt's parents were Protestant British loyalists who settled near Montreal after the American Revolution. Moffatt was born in 1793 and educated in Catholic schools. In 1810, at the age of 16, she converted to Catholicism and joined the elite Ursulines.

The Roman Catholic ecclesiastical tradition of meticulous record-keeping has preserved many aspects of her life, routine and significant. And so I learned that, at the age of 30, Moffatt was sent by her monastery to assume leadership of a new convent and school for poor Irish girls in Boston. Within two years, in collaboration with Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick, she succeeded in moving the facilities to a 24-acre farm in Charlestown on Ploughed Hill, newly renamed Mount Benedict in honor of the Bishop. Moffatt and Fenwick had an ingenious plan: By educating rich girls, the genteel Ursulines would elevate Catholicism's image while contributing to the coffers of the diocese. The institution became a European-style boarding school catering to the Protestant elite who could afford a tuition of $160 a year.

Moffatt employed Scots-Presbyterian brick makers from the nearby neighborhoods to construct her elaborate hilltop mansion. (It was from their number that the future arsonists' leaders would come.) She oversaw the cultivation of the land into terraced gardens, orchards, and pastures that looked out on the surrounding working-class precincts. Her letters from this period reveal a savvy businesswoman accustomed to setting her own terms. To a student's father she once remarked, "It would be difficult for any man to control me." She signed her letters with a distinctive flourish, sometimes writing simply "The Superior." For 10 years, she was, in effect, the CEO of a prominent and profitable enterprise. By 1834 the Ursulines' spacious farm with its splendid structures was worth more than a million dollars in today's currency.

As the founder of one of the first academies for women in New England--one with a challenging curriculum--Moffatt might well have gone down as a trailblazing educator. Instead, on a sweltering summer night in 1834, she looked out of an upper window and saw a mob of drunken workmen gathering outside her convent. Moffatt shouted that if they did not leave her property, she would see to it that an army of 20,000 Irishmen destroyed their houses. The ringleader, a strapping brick maker named John R. Buzzell, later called her "the sauciest woman I ever heard talk." When the men battered down her front door, Moffatt, her community of 10 nuns, and about 50 students fled to the safety of neighboring homes. They watched as the vandals reduced the compound to smoldering rubble, while a crowd of thousands cheered.

Three brick makers, two shoemakers, two mariners, a rope maker, a gardener, a carpenter, a painter, and a baker were indicted for the arson. Testifying at Buzzell's trial, which seems to have cast the Catholic religion in the role of defendant, Moffatt suffered the indignity of unveiling her face before a packed courtroom and answering such questions as whether two nuns ever slept together in the same bed. The jury found Buzzell not guilty, to great rejoicing throughout the city. Eventually, every rioter was set free.

Like the legendary dragon-slayer St. George, whose name she had adopted, Moffatt fought on. When men calling themselves "The Convent Boys" threatened her new home in West Roxbury, she raised and commanded an armed guard. When, in 1835, a former novice named Rebecca Reed published Six Months in a Convent, accusing the superior of torturing her frailest nuns with severe penances, Moffatt published her rebuttal, An Answer to "Six Months in a Convent." It sold well at 20,000 copies, but Reed's volume sold 10 times that number. In the end, Moffatt's unyielding disposition appears to have left her without real allies. Her former supporter, Bishop Fenwick, in an apparent ploy to relieve growing anti-Catholicism in his territory, conspired with Church authorities to have her recalled to Canada.

When the order came down, Moffatt argued so forcefully with the bishop of Quebec that Fenwick wrote letters pleading with his northern colleague not to be influenced by "her representation of things." The priest sent to retrieve her went so far as to confide to the Canadian bishop that it might not be such a bad thing if her new convent were also destroyed. Finally, in June 1835, Moffatt returned to Canada.

Well over a century later, in Somerville, I turned the soil in my back yard each spring just a few miles west of where Moffatt's gardens once bloomed. Remnants of pottery--sometimes white pieces etched with delicate indigo vines--and shards of glass in green and ocean blue worked their way to the surface, pushed up, perhaps, by the freezing and thawing of the ground, or by the force of bulbs shooting their way to the light. Letters, diaries, and other archival materials form the remnants and shards that help us read the lives of the dead for the act of resurrection that is history. If we find enough pieces, we might fashion a mosaic or solve a mystery.

I had hoped to solve the mystery of Moffatt's disappearance. I had expected that genealogical research and documents from the Ursuline monastery in Quebec would finally uncover her fate. But the death of Moffatt's father before 1810 closed one trail, since 19th-century records primarily detailed men's lives, and only incidentally sketched the women connected to them. Stringent Quebec laws that protect the privacy of individuals have blocked another path.

What I know of Moffatt after the debacle in Boston is this: On May 18, 1836, at five o'clock in the evening, she exited the Quebec monastery to begin a thousand-mile journey south. Moffatt had asked for and received permission to transfer to an Ursuline convent in New Orleans. Strangely, there is no record that she ever wrote to anyone at her professed destination, and she never arrived there. Letters from other Ursulines and from the bishops in Boston and Quebec express bewilderment over her whereabouts. When the monastery door closed behind her, Moffatt seemingly stepped off the pages of history.

Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Ph.D. '84, is a professor of English at Salem State College and the author of Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834, just published by Free Press. Schultz maintains a clearinghouse for information on Moffatt and her ill-fated convent at www.fireandroses.com.


top of page