The Boston Irish and the Bunker Hill Monument

 The National Park Service is planning to remove several quotation boards at Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown, MA that pertain to slavery, women's suffrage, veterans and immigrants.  The action comes as a result of a nationwide directive issued by the Secretary of the Interior in May 2025 as a lead-up to America 250 celebrations.  

The quotes hang in the Bunker Hill Lodge, at the entrance to the Bunker Hill Monument, and offer modern interpretation of what the Monument means to multiple groups of people. 

The passage about 'foreign-born men' being excluded from the American Revolution pertains specifically to Irish immigrants living in Boston and Charlestown in 1875.  It was extracted from an editorial in The Boston Pilot, an influential Catholic weekly newspaper with a national readership in the 19th century.  

This is the passage in full, published in The Boston Pilot on May 8, 1875:

The struggle to tell the story of America has always been a contentious exercise, with various narratives competing to be heard.  This was the case in 1875, as the centenary of the Battle of Bunker Hill approached on June 17, 1775.  Elite Boston Brahmins, who traced their lineage back to the Puritans of 1630, had steadfastly refused to acknowledge the role of the Irish in the American Revolution.  They asserted that the Revolutionary War was waged almost solely by brave colonists of English descent, with a sprinkling of Protestant Scots-Irish to do the hard fighting.   

As new immigrants from Europe poured into the city and the country during this period,  Boston's working class, long resentful of Irish Catholic immigrants, doubled-down on the Brahmin narrative that America belonged to the original descendants and to no one else. 

The "public orator" referenced by the Pilot was George William Curtis, editor of Harper's Weekly and described by the National Park Service as "an abolitionist and advocate for women's suffrage."  Curtis considered himself enlightened when it came to suffering groups, but when it came to Irish Catholic immigrants, Curtis was a resentful bigot.  He despised Catholics, immigrants and especially the Irish struggling to survive in Boston. He didn't believe they were fit to be Americans. 

In its May 1, 1875 issue the Boston Pilot took Curtis to task for his mean-spirited and incendiary speech at the Battle of Concord commemoration that spring.  True statesmen, the Pilot suggested, "would find hope and power in the thought that our generous country is great enough to take to her breast the people of all races and creeds, there to live in peace and good will."  Curtis, it continued, was not that man.  The editorial was liked written by the paper's chief writer, John Boyle O'Reilly, an Irish rebel who arrived in Boston in 1870 and immediately embraced the democratic principles of American freedom and liberty for all, especially the downtrodden.

The Irish in Charlestown challenged the Brahmin narrative, knowing that many heroes of the American Revolution were in fact Irish Catholic immigrants. In New England alone, there was Patrick Carr, a martyr in the Boston Massacre and Hugh Cargill, who fought at the Battle of Lexington and at Bunker Hill.  In Philadelphia, Commodore John Barry, won the first and last naval battles of the Revolutionary War, and was considered the Father of the US Navy.  Numerous other Irish Catholics included Stephen Moylan, Charles Carroll, Thomas FitzSimmons and John Fitzgerald - as well as Catholics from other nations - Marquis de Lafayette, Comte de Rochambeau, Tadeusz Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski.

The Charlestown Irish were rightly sensitive to the nativist mentality in their midst, mindful of several episodes in recent history:

• In May, 1832, Charlestown selectmen refused to allow Catholic infants to be buried in the Bunker Hill Cemetery.  Bishop Benedict Fenway had to take the town to court to get reverse the edict.
• In August, 1834 a mob of Know Nothing nativists burned the Catholic Ursuline Academy to the ground.  The all-girls boarding school included both Catholic and Protestant students. 
• Even as the USS Jamestown sailed from the Charlestown Navy Yard in March,1847 bringing relief to starving Irish immigrants, Charlestown nativists were preventing Irish refugees from landing.  
• On June 9, 1847 local nativists blocked the British ship Reliance carrying Irish refugees from docking in Charlestown. 

The certitude of the Charlestown Irish of their 'love of freedom and loyalty to the Republic' was strengthened by their knowledge that 150,000 Irish immigrants had volunteered in the Civil War to help preserve the Union and to end slavery, including the valiant 28th and 9th Irish Regiments from Boston.   The Charlestown Irish understood that they were part of a proud tradition of Irish immigrant patriotism that stretched back to the American Revolution. 

In 1872, Charlestown unveiled its Civil War Monument on Winthrop Square, a homage to Charlestown residents who had found in the Civil War.  Its sculptor was Martin Milmore, an immigrant from County Sligo whose family endured anti-Irish bigotry since arriving in Boston in 1851 and whose patriotism is exemplified by dozens of Civil War memorials he and his brothers created.

See more Irish landmarks in Charlestown and in the Charlestown Navy Yard. 

Learn more about the Irish and Scots-Irish role in the American Revolution on Boston's Revolutionary Irish Trail.