Broad Street Riot
Nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment was strong, especially among working-class men whose jobs and wages were threatened by an influx of poor Irish immigrants.
In 1832, Mayor Charles Wells received a petition "praying that some measures may be taken to suppress the dangerous riots, routs, and tumultuous assemblies in and about Broad Street.
[4] As Mayor Eliot's grandson later noted in his account of the incident, the pub must have been operating illegally as it was a Sunday, and, in Massachusetts, blue laws were then in effect.
[3] The men had just emerged from the pub "in a more or less bellicose mood,"[3] when they collided with a crowd of about a hundred Irishmen who were on their way to join a large funeral procession on Sea Street.
Nearly all of the firefighters had passed through the crowd without incident when 19-year-old George Fay, who had reportedly had too much to drink, insulted or shoved several of the Irishmen, and a fight broke out.
As more fire companies arrived, and Irishmen poured out of nearby houses into the street to help their friends and relatives, the fight escalated into a full-blown riot.
[7][note 1] Protestant workmen came running to the aid of the firefighters, while underfoot, injured and unconscious men lay sprawled on the pavement.
A "gang of stout boys and loafers" raided nearby houses, breaking doors and windows, in some cases beating the occupants.
[1] According to one historian, "Featherbeds were ripped up and their contents scattered to the winds in such quantities that for a while, Broad Street seemed to be having a snowstorm...the pavement in spots buried ankle-deep in feathers.
"[4] After raging for about three hours, the riot was quelled when Mayor Samuel A. Eliot called in the National Lancers—a newly formed cavalry company—and some 800 other members of the state militia, with fixed bayonets.
Among them were the Montgomery Guards, a short-lived Irish-American infantry company which was forced to disband the following year due to the extreme nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment in Boston.
A local paper announced the following Monday, "There have been many battered and broken heads, and many bodily bruises; but we are inclined to believe there has been no actual loss of life.
