Autumn has passed now, and the trees are barren. Fall colors have given way to a winter spectrum of blacks and whites, grays and browns. It’s the season when the sky grows bigger, the horizon lower, when what was once hidden by foliage comes into sight.
Over at Stone Zoo, it’s easier to catch a glimpse of the Mexican gray wolves as they slip between the trees on the hillside. And the snow leopards on their ledges. I also look for the arctic foxes, now in their white coats for the season.
And if you walk up Cowdrey Street onto Farm Hill, as I sometimes do, you can look out over Stoneham to Winchester and Woburn. If you climb the tower on Bear Hill in the Fells, you can see Boston and the shimmering sea beyond.
Stoneham’s hills are a good place to see sunsets, the evening planets, and the new moon.
Living for many years in the Southwest, where clouds are rare, I grew accustomed to the presence of the moon. Like the agrarians of old, I slipped into a lunar calendar, feeling hopeful at the slivered new moon, happy in its fullness, and wistful with its waning.
Even though the Western world moves mostly in solar time, the lunar calendar is embedded in our observance of special days. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. Passover, the 15th day of the month of Nisan, begins at the full moon. I think of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt. Nice to have light in the night sky.
Hanukkah, with its hopeful lights, carries us through the last quarter of the moon, when the sky is darkest.
Although the Jewish calendar follows the lunar cycle, every three years an extra month is added, keeping it close to the solar year.
Many Asian cultures observe a lunar calendar. China’s traditional calendar is lunisolar, that is, combining lunar and solar cycles. New Year occurs between January 20 and February 20.
This year we have a happy convergence of lunar and solar time, coinciding with our winter holidays. We started December with a new moon, which becomes full this weekend, December 14-15. Then it begins waning, so that by Christmas we will see but a thin crescent, early in the morning. After this, the moon will go dark as we pass through long nights before it returns with the New Year.
This dark period also coincides with the winter solstice, a solar time marker, and with Hanukkah, a lunar holiday, which, like Passover, is a “movable feast.” Hanukkah, also called the Festival of Lights, begins on December 25, and extends through the moon’s dark phase. On each of the eight days of Hanukkah, a candle in the menorah is lit, marking the miraculous lighting of the temple lamp, even though there was no more lamp oil. The holiday concludes, just as the new moon reappears in the sky.
In the Genesis creation story the heavenly lights were established “to divide the day from the night [and] for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”
And so it is today. Winter is a good time to look around. The leaves are down, the nights are long, and the stars are bright.
May the lights shine for you, this holiday season.
Last week Becky and I attended the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards celebration in Cambridge. It is held each year by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden to honor immigrants for their outstanding achievements in business and community enrichment.
The first honoree this year is Erdem Kaya from Turkey, who started a community-oriented jewelry business in Newburyport. The second is Krenar Komoni from Kosovo. Komoni founded a company that designed a new system for tracking shipping around the world. His innovations produce savings for everyone on the supply chain.
The third honoree is Mariana Matus from Mexico. Based on her research at MIT, she founded and became CEO of BioBot Analytics in Cambridge, which uses wastewater analysis to improve public health. During the COVID-19 epidemic, her company was the first in the world to provide data on COVID-19 levels, based on wastewater monitoring. This information saved countless lives.
Matus’ company continues to monitor for other public health threats, including influenza, RSV, monkey pox and high-risk substances such as opioids.
Listening to awardees’ inspiring stories, we couldn’t help but think of the thousands of immigrants in Massachusetts and how they benefit and enrich our towns and communities. Like the three above, they bring not only economic benefits, but engagement in civic life, mentoring and culture that enriches all our lives.
At the ceremony, we also learned a few “fun facts” about immigrants. For example, that 31 percent of all new businesses in America are started by immigrants. Immigrants also have a higher workforce participation rate than U.S.-born residents, as well as a higher self-employment rate. And, despite what you have heard, immigrants have a lower crime rate than other Americans.
Attending the Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards program, we are left with the realization that immigrants have always made our country better. And that the current hype that immigrants are to blame for our woes, is not only wrong but terribly short-sighted. We need immigrants, not only like Kaya, Komoni and Matus, but the people who grow and pick our food, who feed us in their restaurants, who care for us in hospitals and nursing homes, who build our houses, and bring their stories and art to remind us of our own humanity.
Looking at the big picture, we see a continued need for newcomers to replenish and support us. Recent dips in fertility rates have pushed us below the population-replacement level. A 2024 study by the University of Pennsylvania projects that as we grow older, the U.S. population growth will decline. Also, the worker-to-retiree ratio is expected to drop from 3-1 to 2-1 by 2075. Both factors signal dire outcomes. Preventing these outcomes “will require faster immigration by several multiples of its current rate.”
The simple truth is that we need immigrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, to keep building our societies. We need workers, but we also need imagination and ideas. We need problem solvers, like the honorees named above.
As the descendant of immigrants, I would like to say to my immigrant friends and neighbors, Thank you.
Note: The awards program was sponsored by the Immigrant Learning Center in Malden. It honors Barry Portnoy, the entrepreneur and philanthropist, late husband of the school’s founder, Diane Portnoy.
This summer when our cousins, the Haegelens, arrived from Germany, east and west came together. Irina grew up in a village in Siberia, Manfred in Ufa on the slopes of the Ural Mountains. When they were 15, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, their families emigrated to Germany.
When their jet touched down at Logan, they brought their two children, Friedrich and Johanna. They also brought stories, not only about their busy lives near Dusseldorf, but about family history.
Their branch of the family connects to the same tree as my paternal ancestors. We share great grandparents, Mennonite farmers who settled in Southern Russia, along with other ethnic Germans invited to Russia in the 18th century by Catherine II.
In 1914, at the start of the Great War, my grandfather was arrested and exiled to Siberia. The next year, however, he escaped to China, then boarded a ship to San Francisco. The rest of the family remained in Russia.
Now, in our backyard, children and grandchildren were playing together. We made day trips to Walden Pond and Rockport, hiked in the Fells and visited Stone Zoo. In the evening we played dominoes and bingo, calling out numbers in two languages.
Arriving in Germany as teenagers, Manfred and Irina found opportunities unavailable in Russia. Excelling in their studies, they both earned doctorates, Manfred in engineering, Irina in pharmacology.
In the evening we shared old photos and stories. Irina remembered carrying milk in cans from their small farm to the depot. She also remembers her grandfather, who taught math in the village school. He saw her potential and encouraged her.
We also talk of our beloved Tanta Anna, who with two of her five children left their kolkhoz, a collective farm in Southern Russia, to find a new life in Cologne. I have a photo of her on a motorcycle.
When she was 17, during World War II, she was forced to work in the forests, cutting and hauling trees. It happened like this. After Hitler’s tanks crossed into Russia, Stalin, fearing that the nation’s ethnic minorities would rise up against him, ordered their removal and banishment. It was the Great Deportation of 1941.
On September 1, 1941, some 440,000 ethnic Germans living along the Volga were told to report for deportation. Treated as prisoners, they were herded into freight cars for the long trek east. The journey—the trains stopping only every three or four days for food and water—took weeks, sometimes months. On the way four of ten deportees died, their bodies left inside the cars or thrown out beside the tracks.
The mass deportations were also accompanied by summary executions. Manfred’s grandfather, who taught German in the village school, was taken out and shot.
Siberia was not the only destination. Thousands were deported to Kazakhstan and other eastern republics. Cousin Lena, who also emigrated to Germany, told me her grandmother’s account.
“When the soldiers came, they took everything. If a woman had two skirts on, she had to take one off and give it to them.”
They traveled in horse-drawn carts across Kazakhstan almost to the Chinese border. If someone died, they had to leave them lying there. There was no time for burial.
At their destination, there were no houses, so to survive the oncoming winter, they dug shelters in the earth. The next year they built crude houses. They could travel no more than three kilometers in any direction.
Russia’s Germans were not the only ones deported. In all, there were at least 1.5 million, including the Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Chechens and others.
As we sat on the couch sharing family photos, or watched the kids swinging in the hammock, I realized how lucky we are. How lucky the Haegelens are to have found good lives in Germany, and how lucky we are in America. Yet somewhere in my consciousness, as it is in theirs, is the shadow of history. A history of deportation, compulsion and violence. I pray it is something our children will never know.
Woodie Guthrie wrote the lyrics. Martin Hoffman set them to music. Since then, It’s been sung by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Bruce Springsteen and a dozen others, including Arlo Guthrie. The ballad tells of an airplane crash in California’s Los Gatos Canyon. On board were 28 migrant farm workers from Mexico.
The year was 1948, six years after the start of Operation Bracero, a government program which recruited Mexican laborers to work in American fields. Now the braceros were being rounded up and flown back to Mexico. At the same time, to keep prices high, the government was paying growers to leave their crops in the field. Peaches were rotting and oranges piling up in dumps.
The song is called “Deportee.” Guthrie wrote it after news reports listed the names of the pilots, attendant and immigration guard, but referred to the farm workers only as “deportees.” Unlike the four Americans, the braceros were buried in a mass grave without names, marked “Mexican Nationals.” As the song goes,
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon, A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills, Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? The radio says, “They are just deportees”
The roundup of the Los Gatos laborers was just one episode in several government campaigns to remove Mexicans from American soil. Mass deportations began during the Great Depression and continued through the 1940s. Then in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) brought out “Operation Wetback.” Under this federal program, officials used military-like tactics to arrest tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. Caught up in the raids were farm and factory workers, including some American citizens.
In July of 1955, several thousand deportees were found wandering the streets of Mexicali, a desert town bordering California. Yanked from their jobs and families, they had simply been dumped across the border. According to one account, 88 died of heat exposure in the 112 degree heat.
In Texas, thousands of deportees were crammed onto boats bound for Mexican ports in conditions comparable with those on slave ships. Others were packed into trucks. By the end of Operation Wetback, the INS claimed it had “repatriated” 1.3 million Mexicans.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita, Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria; You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane, All they will call you will be “deportees”
Accompanying the mass deportations were media depictions of Mexicans as dirty, disease- bearing and irresponsible. News coverage focused on border and immigration officials planning and conducting raids. Only in time did most Americans come to see this as something shameful. In 2012 the state of California formally apologized for its role in deporting hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens.
On Labor Day in 2013, United Farm Worker President Arturo Rodriguez joined hundreds gathered at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Fresno, California, to memorialize the 28 farm workers, 25 men and three women, killed in Los Gatos Canyon. This time, inscribed in the headstone, was each person’s name.
Next week American voters will choose a new president. One of the candidates has promised to resurrect Operation Wetback, only under his plan the government, in a military-style operation, will deport 11 million undocumented immigrants (Trump put the figure at 18 million).
Trump would also end deferrals for children (DACA) and temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Such a massive deportation would throw our country into financial, legal and social chaos. As Slate authors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander have written, “To return to the era of Operation Wetback would be to return to an America ruled not by law but by terror.”
Perhaps worst of all, it would perpetuate the big lie that immigrants, asylum seekers, migrants and refugees are not like us, that they are less than human. That they don’t deserve names.
Once that lie is believed, we become silent to the cruel treatment of others.
In the fall of 1919, just three months after the Versailles Treaty marked Germany’s defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow army soldier. It is considered the first printed expression of his antisemitism. Composed most likely on an army typewriter, the letter lays out Hitler’s belief that Jews are not just people of a different religion. Rather, they are an “alien race,” intent on destroying society.
To counter their influence, Hitler proposed a “rational antisemitism,” a political movement to systematically take away their “privileges,” culminating in their “irrevocable removal” from Germany.
In time, their “irrevocable removal” became the “final solution,” the murder of six million Jews throughout Europe.
It’s not difficult to see in the candidacy of Donald J. Trump a similar convergence of nationalism and racism. Substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” and you see the same calculated dehumanization of a sector of the population.
Trump’s targeting of immigrants is built on racism. In 2018 he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” that is, from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Then he added, “We should have more people from Norway.”
In following years, Trump has ramped up his attacks. In 2023 he said “illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Hitler’s statement that “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.”
At the 2024 Republican Convention, Trump promised the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants—a figure he put at 18 million. In September he said the mass roundup would be a “bloody story.”
Since then, Trump’s attacks have intensified, including the assertion, repeated by his running mate and other followers, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.
Targeting immigrants, legal or otherwise, is not new in America, nor is “white nationalism.” The nation that opened its doors to European immigrants also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, denying citizenship to Chinese workers who built our railroads.
During World War II we imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. In the 1950s we deported a million Mexicans, legal and undocumented, who had harvested our crops. From 2017-21 under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, 3,900 children were taken from their parents.
We are also the nation that in 1939 prevented the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, from docking in Miami. Anchored offshore, the ship waited. On deck that night, children joined parents to gaze at the city lights sparkling in the distance.
When permission was denied, the St. Louis returned to Europe. For many it was a death sentence. Two-hundred-fifty-four perished in Nazi concentration camps.
As November 5 approaches, we again see an unholy convergence of racism and nationalism. A nation of immigrants, we are told to fear immigrants. We are urged to accept slander and misinformation as truth.
How we vote this year will affect the safety and well-being of millions. It will also determine our character.
Note: In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to the survivors of the St. Louis. In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.
Post-election analysis has included a lot of finger-pointing about why Kamala Harris lost. Yet the simple truth is that Donald Trump won because white people, the demographic majority, voted for him. About 60 percent of whites went for Trump. And a huge portion of these came from Christians. People like me.
“White Christians made Donald Trump president—again,” headlined the Religion News Service.
“Trump’s Path to Victory Still Runs through the Church,” proclaimed Christianity Today.
CNN exit polls revealed that 72 percent of white Protestants and 61 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump. Among white Christians who identified as evangelical or “born again,” the percentage was 81.
Among Christians of all races, Trump still won a clear majority: 63 percent of Protestants and 53 of Catholics. A significant boost in the Catholic vote, especially in swing states, helped put Trump over the top. “Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate,” ran an Associated Press headline.
But not all Christians voted for Trump, and a sizable minority has reacted with shock that someone known for racist and misogynistic behavior, vulgar language and threats of violence could win the support of those claiming to be followers of Jesus?
An answer may be found in the release in theaters this month of the movie, “Bonhoeffer.” The film is based on the life of the German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis in 1945. While the film highlights the dissident’s role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the real lessons for us can be found in the years leading up to World War II.
By 1933, when Hitler was elected chancellor, Germans were well aware of his hatred of Jews. As early as 1920 he had labeled them an “alien race” and called for their “irrevocable removal.” Once in control, Hitler began the progressive persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Soon after his inauguration, he released the Aryan Paragraph, barring Jews from civil service and multiple professions. In 1935 the Nuremburg Laws stripped them of citizenship.
In November of 1938 state-sanctioned mobs brutally attacked Jews throughout Germany and its territories, destroying businesses, homes and synagogues. Ten thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. By the time World War II started, the “final solution” of six million Jews throughout Europe was well underway.
From the German population, 95 percent Christian, the Nazis drew wide support, playing on anti-Semitic and nationalistic themes, heightened by propaganda and misinformation. Following Hitler’s election, one church leader wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands….The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor.”
In 1933 Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller, an openly anti-Semitic Lutheran cleric, as Reichbishof. In this role, he was to proclaim “positive Christianity.” Mueller presided over the consolidation of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany, representing a majority of German Christians.
In a revision of history, the bishop claimed that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a statement clarifying church policy, he wrote that Jews posed a threat by bringing “foreign blood into our nation.”
One of the Mueller’s early acts was to demand that churches fire any pastors of Jewish ancestry or those married to a Jew. He also ordered all pastors to sign a loyalty oath to the Führer.
Not everyone, however, submitted to the nazification of the German Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other dissidents, refused to submit to church control. In 1933 they formed the Confessing Church.
Throughout Bonhoeffer’s years as pastor, teacher, author and seminary director, he struggled to find his role in the Third Reich. While his early protests centered on preserving church autonomy, he increasingly spoke out against the Reich’s treatment of Jews. He wrote: “Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
In time Bonhoeffer understood his mission as going beyond protest to political action. In 1939 he returned from the United States, where a position had been created at Union Theological Seminary expressly for his safety. Back in Germany, he joined the Abwehr, the German Intelligence agency. He was hired by his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, on the pretense that the cleric’s many ecumenical contacts would make him an asset. Unknown to the Nazis was his brother-in-law’s role in the Resistance.
In 1943, after the Gestapo found incriminating papers, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned. On April 9, 1945, just days before American troops liberated the prison camp, he was hanged.
Bonhoeffer was not the only Christian leader to stand against Hitler. The number, however, was small. Most church leaders, including those of smaller denominations, found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. Years later, Harold Alomia, a Protestant pastor and historian, would write: “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
As we begin life under a second Trump presidency, enabled largely by the votes of white Christians, Bonhoeffer’s story is a warning of what can happen when race hatred and Christian nationalism are joined. American voters, Christian voters, please pay attention.
As we celebrate our newest national holiday, the day enslaved folk in Texas finally learned of their freedom, we recall our own history of slavery and abolition:
1754—A census of enslaved people in Massachusetts that year shows there were eight slaves above the age of 16 in Stoneham. They were among at least three dozen slaves in our town during the Colonial period—men like Cato, belonging to Deacon Green, and women like Dinah, a slave of the teacher James Toler, “who waited upon him to the end of his days” (Silas Dean). And they were children, like the unnamed 8-year-old mulatto purchased by Captain Peter Hay in 1744, the same year the Rev. James Osgood paid £75 for a woman named Phebe.
1775—Six Black men from Stoneham, three enslaved and three free, fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, joining white colonists in the struggle for freedom from Great Britain.
1780—Four years after the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts voters ratify the Massachusetts Constitution, authored mainly by John Adams.
1781—A slave called Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman) and another named Brom sue their Sheffield owner for their freedom and win. This and other court cases bring about the eventual freedom of all slaves in Massachusetts based on the Massachusetts Constitution.
1790—The first federal census lists no enslaved people living in Stoneham.
1823—A former slave from Virginia named Randolph is seized in New Bedford. The state Supreme Judicial Court upholds the property rights of his owner, and he is returned to slavery.
1837—After an abolitionist meeting in Stoneham, a fight breaks out in the street, and a Stoneham man, Timothy Wheeler, is knifed and killed. He leaves a wife and four children.
1838-9—Sarah Richardson Gerry leads 27 women in founding the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men also create a chapter.
1839—Church deacons pass a resolution calling on all ministers of the Gospel to “bear faithful witness against the sin of slavery.”
1850—A thirty-year-old minister of First Congregational Church, the Rev. William Whitcomb, preaches a fiery sermon against the federal Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. He calls on his parishioners to aid all fugitives, even at the expense of their property and lives.
1850—Deacon Abijah Bryant’s home on Main Street becomes a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering fugitive slaves and enabling their safe passage to Canada.
1854—Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old former slave from Virginia is arrested in Boston and brought to trial. Thousands of abolitionists attempt to free Burns from the courthouse, but fail. In a widely reported trial, Burns is convicted and ordered sent back to his owner. Thousands line the streets as Burns is led in shackles to the docks and shipped back to his owner.
1861—Hundreds of Stoneham men join Massachusetts regiments responding to President Lincoln’s call for a voluntary army to defend the Union.
1864—54 Stoneham men die in the War of Rebellion: 11 killed in battle, 9 from wounds, 9 while in Confederate prisons, 25 from disease. These include Col J. Parker Gould, with others buried in Lindenwood Cemetery.
1862—Rev. William Whitcomb, is commissioned as a chaplain in the Union Army. He serves in hospitals in North Carolina until his death from malaria.
Over time we have learned to extend the human rights we hold so dear, those spelled out so eloquently in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender. From our Constitution we read:
“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”
Soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
By Ben Jacques
When President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1861, called for a voluntary army to protect the nation’s capital, the first to arrive in Washington were the Massachusetts Sixth Voluntary Infantry. Although the men came from all walks of life, most were mill workers and farmers.
One of them, Luther Crawford Ladd, was a 17-year-old worker in the Lowell Machine Shop. Another from Lowell, Addison Otis Whitney, 22, worked in the Number Three Spinning Room of the Middlesex Corporation.
Down river in Lawrence, Sumner Henry Needham, a 33-year-old lather, was also quick to enlist. Others came from Acton, Groton, Worcester, Boston and Stoneham. Of the 67 volunteers from Stoneham, 51 were shoemakers. One of them, 19-year-old Victor Lorendo, played in the regimental band.
Summoned to Boston by Governor John Andrews, the Sixth was a regiment of “patriot yeomen,” wrote Chaplain John W. Hanson, who chronicled the Sixth Massachusetts through three wartime campaigns.
What a sight they must have made as they mustered on the Common, each company in its own uniform. Privates Ladd and Whitney from Lowell wore grey dress coats, caps and pantaloons with buff epaulettes and trim, while Corporal Addison from Lawrence wore a dark blue frock and red pantaloons, “in the French style.” Company A volunteers sported blue frocks and black pantaloons with tall round hats and white pompoms.
Addison Whitney of Lowell
Unifying their appearance somewhat were the grey woolen greatcoats issued to all. Standard blue uniforms would come later, including the signature forage caps. The men were also issued Springfield rifles and pistols for the officers.
At the State House on April 17, Governor John Andrews addressed the recruits:
“Soldiers,” he said, “summoned suddenly, with but a moment for preparation…. We shall follow you with our benedictions, our benefactions, and prayers.” He then presented the regimental colors to Colonel Edward F. Jones, the regimental commander from Pepperell.
The next morning, April 17, to the ringing of bells, band music, gun salutes and the cheering of thousands, the 700-plus men of the Sixth Massachusetts boarded a train bound for the nation’s capital.
At each stop, Worcester, Springfield and Hartford, crowds cheered them on their way. Reaching New York that night, the men were feted with dinner and speeches. The next day they crossed by ferry to Jersey City, then by train to Trenton. Arriving that evening in Philadelphia, the troops received their most enthusiastic reception. Wrote Chaplain Hanson: “So dense were the crowds that the regiment could only move through the streets by the flank.”
That night in Philadelphia the officers “were entertained sumptuously” at the Continental Hotel, while the soldiers were quartered at the Girard House. Weary from travel and excitement, they were grateful for the chance to sleep. Their rest, however, was cut short when roll was called and they were ordered back to the train station. At 2 a.m, the Sixth Massachusetts left for Baltimore. It was Saturday, April 19, 1861, four score and six years to the day after Minutemen marched to Lexington and Concord to fight British Red Coats.
While the soldiers were sleeping, Colonel Jones had met with Brig. General P. S. Davis, sent ahead to arrange transport. Davis told him that pro-slavery agitators in Baltimore planned action against the Massachusetts infantry. Jones also met with the president of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad, who sent a pilot engine ahead to scout for obstructions on the tracks. Insisting that they must push on to Washington, Davis hoped to arrive in Baltimore before a crowd could assemble.
In the spring of 1861, Maryland was still a slave state, although it had not joined the Confederacy. While the mayor of Baltimore had promised safe passage of the Sixth Massachusetts, many Maryland citizens viewed their passage as an intrusion, if not an invasion.
Because steam engines could not pass through Baltimore, trains from Philadelphia had to stop at the north depot and the cars uncoupled. They would then be pulled by horse teams along tracks to Camden Station, the south depot, where they would be hooked to another engine headed south.
Arriving in Baltimore about 10 a.m., the Sixth Massachusetts at first faced little trouble. Wrote Hanson: “As soon as the cars reached the station, the engine was unshackled, horses were hitched to the cars, and they were drawn rapidly away.” So far, they had caught protesters unaware.
By the time the seventh rail car began its course, however, a mob had gathered and begun hurling insults, bricks and stones. It got worse the further they went, and three times was car was knocked off the tracks, then set back.
Fearing violence, officers had earlier issued 20 cartridge balls to each soldier and ordered their rifles loaded and capped. But they were not to fire unless fired upon.
After the seventh company reached Camden Station, Mayor George Brown signaled that “it is not possible for more soldiers to pass through Baltimore unless they fight their way at every step.” Yet there were still four more companies, two from Lowell, one from Lawrence and one from Stoneham, waiting to cross. Included was the regimental band.
Thousands now blocked the streets, tore up paving stones, and dragged debris onto the tracks. Unable to move the last two cars, the four companies disembarked and began to march. Lt. Leander Lynde from Stoneham would later write:
Companies from Lowell, Lawrence and Stoneham are attached by a pro-slavery mob in Baltimore.
“What impressed me most at the time was the terrible fury of the mob…. Not content with hurling flagstones, bricks, hot water, flatirons and every conceivable thing, the mob hissed us, called us names and taunted us with monstrous vocabulary. Even the women hurled things at us from windows.”
Lynde himself was struck in the head by a brick. “I fell stunned for a moment. The boys picked me up, thinking that I was dead, but I soon recovered and marched on with them.”
Leading the four companies was Captain A. S. Follensbee of Lowell: “Before we had started, the mob was upon us, with a secession flag, attached to a pole, and told us we could never march through that city. They would kill every ‘white nigger’ of us, before we could reach the other depot.”
As he stepped down from the train, Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence told a fellow soldier: “We shall have trouble to-day, and I shall never get out of it alive. Promise me, if I fall, that my body shall be sent home.”
Falling in, the companies pressed forward through a sea of rioters. Showered with missiles, the men doubled their pace. “We had not gone more than 10 rods further before I saw a man discharge a revolver at us from the second story of a building, and at the same time a great many were fired from the street,” wrote Lynde.
One of the first to fall was Lynde’s company captain, John H. Dyke, shot in the thigh. Wrote Lynde, “I decided it was about time for me to take the responsibility and ordered my men to fire upon the mob. The men in the other companies at once joined in with us.”
Especially vulnerable was the color guard—Color Sergeant Timothy A. Crowley of Lowell—who carried the flag, and his aides, Ira Stickney and W. Marland. Another company chaplain, Charles Babbidge, remembered: “Paving stones flew thick and fast, some just grazing their heads and some hitting the standard itself. One stone, as large as a hat, struck Marland just between the shoulders, a terrible blow, and then rested on his knapsack. And yet he did not budge. With a firm step, he went on, carrying the rock on his knapsack for several yards, until one of the sergeants stepped up and knocked it off.”
When they reached the Pratt Street Bridge, they found a crowd had pulled up the planking, so “we were forced to creep over as best we could on the stringers,” wrote Lynde.
Arriving finally at Camden Station, the last four companies found the doors of the waiting cars locked, but used their rifle butts to gain access. Now in charge of Company L, Lieutenant Lynde saw his company and the color guard safely aboard. They were surrounded, however, by another huge crowd brandishing guns, knives and clubs. Running ahead, the mob placed telegraph poles, anchors and stones on the tracks.
Slowly, with rifle muzzles sticking out the windows, the train began to move. The engine stopped and men jumped out to clear the obstacles. The train started again and stopped. A rail had been removed. It was replaced, and again the train was in motion.
“The crowd went on for some miles out,” Chaplain Hanson wrote, “as far as Jackson Bridge, and the police followed removing obstructions; and at several places shots were exchanged.” At the Relay House, the train was held up until a train coming north had passed. Then it continued, unobstructed, to Washington.
On the train, the officers counted their casualties and the missing. Dozens had been wounded, and dozens more missing, including the regimental band.
Unarmed, the musicians had refused to march through the city. However, this did not stop the attackers. One musician, A. S. Young of Lowell, recalled: “We fought them off as long as we could; but coming thicker and faster . . . they forced their way in.” Fleeing the cars, one band member was urged by a policeman to “run like the Devil.”
Seventeen-year-old Victor Lorendo of Stoneham escaped by diving under the rail car, then racing off. Tearing the stripes off his pants so he wouldn’t be recognized, he somehow made it back to Philadelphia and eventually Boston. He then walked the last ten miles to his home town. He had been reported dead.
Not all citizens of Maryland were hostile. In several cases, shop owners and housewives sheltered and cared for wounded soldiers. Fleeing the mob, a number of the band members were rescued by “a party of women, partly Irish, partly German, and some American, who took us into their houses, removed the stripes from our pants and we were furnished with old clothes of every description for disguise,” wrote Young. Sheltered and fed, the musicians returned two days later to Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, the soldiers on the train wondered what kind of reception they would have in Washington. It was dark when, just four days after the President’s call, the locomotive steamed into the capital. To their relief, they found a crowd cheering their arrival. Among them was a Massachusetts woman who worked in the Patent Office. Her name was Clara Barton and she had come to the capital to organize nursing and relief services. As the injured left the train, she and her assistants dressed their wounds and arranged transport to area homes.
The rest of the regiment marched to the Capitol, where they bedded down in the Senate Chamber. It was a strange scene. “The colonel was accustomed to sleep in the Vice President’s chair, with sword and equipments on,” wrote Hanson. “The rest of the officers and men were prostrate all over the floor around him, each with sword or musket within reach ; the gas-lights turned down to sparks, and no sound but the heavy breathing of sleepers and the hollow tramp of sentinels on the lobby floors.”
On Sunday morning, April 20, the Sixth Massachusetts marched “in open order” up Pennsylvania Avenue, giving the appearance of a full brigade, so as to “intimidate the secessionists.” At the White House they were welcomed by a grateful President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward.
Over the next few days the Sixth Massachusetts cheered the arrival of the Seventh and Eighth Massachusetts as well as regiments from New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Setting up defenses around Washington, they prepared for a Confederate attack.
Back at the Capitol, the soldiers had time to write letters, and the officers to submit reports. Describing the ambush in Baltimore and casualties to his company, Lieutenant Lynde wrote:
“Captain Dyke was shot in the thigh…. James Keenan was shot in the leg, and Andrew Robbins was shot and hit with a stone, hurt very bad. Horace Danforth was hit with a stone and injured very severely, but all were in good hands and well cared for.”
What happened to Capt. John Dyke after he was shot was told later by Chaplain Hanson. Hobbling into a tavern, he was met by a Union sympathizer, who carried him to a back room. “He had scarcely left the barroom . . . when it was filled with the ruffians, who, had they known his whereabouts, would have murdered him.” Nursed and cared for, Dyke remained there for a week before being sent, disabled, back home.
Of the 67 in the Stoneham company, 18 had been wounded by gunshot, bricks or paving stones. The volunteers “had been worked very hard for green soldiers,” Lynde wrote, “but the men have done well and have stood by each other like brothers.”
Also attacked were the companies from Lowell and Lawrence, which, like Stoneham, had been forced to cross Baltimore on foot. Lowell’s Company D, marching on the exposed left side of the column, was especially hard hit. Nine men were injured, including Sgt. William H. Lamson, wounded in the head and eye from paving stones, and Sergeant John E Eames. From Lawrence, Alonzo Joy had his fingers shot off, and George Durrell was injured in the head by a brick. Three others were wounded.
From the two mill cities, four were killed. The first was the 17-year-old mechanic from Lowell. Having grown up on a farm, Luther Ladd had followed three older sisters to work in the textile industry. “He was full of patriotic ardor,” Hanson wrote. “When the call was made for the first volunteers, the earnest solicitations of his friends could not induce him to remain behind.” Marching along Pratt Street, Ladd was struck in the head and shot, the bullet severing an artery in his thigh. He is considered the first Union soldier killed in the Civil War.
Also in Company D, Addison Otis Whitney, the Lowell spinner, was shot and killed. Born in Waldo, Maine, he was 22. Before enlisting in the Sixth Massachusetts, he had joined the City Guards.
The third soldier in Company D to perish was Charles A. Taylor, of whom little is known. Taylor enlisted at the last minute, wrote Chaplain Hanson, “and represented himself as a fancy painter by profession, about 25 years old, and was of light complexion and blue eyes.” A bystander later reported that Taylor, having fallen, was beaten to death by ruffians and his body thrown in a sewer. As Taylor wore no uniform but the regimental coat, his death was not confirmed until a bystander later returned the coat to a Union officer.
After the war, Col. Edward Jones made several trips to Baltimore to find Taylor’s body and return it to Massachusetts, but the burial site was never found.
Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence
The fourth fatality was Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence’s Company F, who had voiced a presentiment of his death in Baltimore. Struck by a paving stone, Needham fell to the ground, his skull fractured. A surgeon tried to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure, but in vain. The 33-year-old corporal died a few days later. In December, eight months later to the day, his wife, Hannah, gave birth to a son.
On May 2, Needham’s body, along with Ladd and Whitney, were returned to Massachusetts, where they were viewed by thousands at King’s Chapel and eulogized at the State House. They were then conveyed by train to Lowell and Lawrence. Needham lay in state in Lawrence City Hall before burial in Lawrence’s Bellevue Cemetery. The inscription on the granite memorial reads, in part, “[Needham] fell victim to the passions of a Secessionist Mob, during the passage of the Regiment through the streets of Baltimore marching in Defense of the Nation’s Capital.”
Meanwhile in Lowell, throngs turned out to receive the bodies of Ladd and Whitney, who, like the others, were mourned as martyrs in the cause of freedom. For the funeral, residents crowded into City Hall to hear clergy from seven churches officiate.
On June 17, four years later, Governor John Andrew dedicated a 27-foot-high obelisk memorial, honoring “the first soldiers of the Union Army to die in the great rebellion.” On it are the names of Ladd and Whitney. Later a brass plate with the name of the Charles Taylor was added.
Although the Sixth Massachusetts volunteers were the first to arrive at the nation’s capital, they did not participate in the humiliation of Bull Run, which took place on July 12. By this time, they had been ordered back to Maryland, as the state was now put under martial law. Taking control of its forts, ports and rail lines, the Sixth would in three months complete its first campaign and return home. Most of the men would re-enlist, either in the Sixth or other Massachusetts regiments, engaging in conflicts through the end of the war.
In the April 19 ambush in Baltimore, sometimes called the Pratt Street Riot, the yeoman soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts faced bullets, stones, and the hate of a pro-slavery mob. It was not Manassas, Antietam or Gettysburg, but it was the beginning. The volunteers from New England were attacked not by Confederate soldiers, but by fellow American citizens whose lust for insurrection would fuel a long and bloody war. The ambush was vicious and it took the lives of four Union soldiers and twelve civilians. It wounded, many severely, thirty-eight soldiers and dozens of rioters.
The battle in the streets was the “first blood” of the War of the Rebellion, a cataclysm that raged across our nation for four more years and took the lives of three quarters of a million. The scars are with us today.
Sources include:
Hanson, John W., Chaplain. A Historical Sketch of the old Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers during its Three Campaigns. Lee and Shepherd, Boston, 1866.
Hurd, D. Hamilton, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. J.W. Lewis & Co, Philadelphia, 1890.
Stevens, William B., History of Stoneham, Mass., F. L. & W. E. Whittier, Stoneham, Mass., 1891.
Stormtroopers holding German Christian propaganda during the Church Council elections on July 23, 1933, at St. Mary’s Church, Berlin.
By Ben Jacques
On a warm day in August, 1934, thousands of Baptists from around the world filed into the vast Tagungshalle in Berlin. From 70 countries, they were there for a week-long Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. Behind the podium was a portrait of three Baptist founders below a cross. To the right hung a red banner with a swastika.
At the conference the delegates were welcomed by the deputy mayor of Berlin, who stressed the good work the government was doing for children and the unemployed (Brown). They also received a greeting from Reichsbishof Ludwig Mueller, whom Hitler had appointed to head the consolidated Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany. An ardent supporter of Hitler’s “positive Christianity,” Mueller made no secret of his anti-Semitic stance.
The delegates also heard Paul Schmidt, director of the German Baptist Union, praise the good work of the new government, declaring that God had chosen Hitler to rescue the German nation (Norris).
On Tuesday the morning session was suspended so delegates could tune in to the funeral of German President von Hindenburg, whose death two days earlier had left Hitler in full control of the government. A wreathed portrait of von Hindenburg was placed on the stage. Wrote British delegate Eva Brown, “We listened to the chaplain of the German Army, to Hitler, to guns firing, and to a verse of ‘Ein feste Berg,’” Martin Luther’s famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress.”
In days to follow the international body debated and passed resolutions calling for separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Another resolution deplored “all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races in any part of the world” (Resolution 1934.7).
Despite these sentiments, however, a number of delegates sympathized with the Germans’ anti-Semitic policies. M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that Jews, while only one percent of the population, were using their disproportionate influence in professions for “self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people.”
Others expressed approval of the crackdown on immorality. John W. Bradbury, a Baptist pastor from Boston, wrote: “It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown” Bradbury continued: “The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries” (Allen, “How Baptists Assessed Hitler”).
Baptists weren’t the only ones to equate Nazi policies with Christian reforms. A year earlier, the president of the German Seventh-day Adventist Church, Adolph Minck, wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands…. The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor” (Alomia).
Methodist Bishop Dr. Otto Melle, speaking at the Oxford World Conference in London in 1937, claimed that “God in his providence has sent a leader who was able to banish the danger of Bolshevism in Germany and rescue a nation of 67 million from the abyss of despair” (Manchester Guardian Weekly, July 30, 1937).
Although they comprised only a fraction of Germany’s Protestant population, Baptists, Methodists and Adventists came under enormous pressure to conform. Like the Lutherans and Catholics, they struggled with threats to their beliefs. With notable exceptions, however, most found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. As Adventist minister and historian Harold Alomía would later write, “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
What they got in return was the survival of their organizations, a chance to evangelize, and an opportunity to play a stronger role in society.
What they should have foreseen, however, was the moral stranglehold they would encounter. While allowed to operate, the churches were counted on to support Nazi ideology. They were also asked to become ambassadors abroad.
In March of 1933, within days after Hitler took control, Nazi Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurth and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels met with Bishop John L. Nuelsen, president of the Europe Central Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Because he had ties with the large Methodist population in America, he and fellow clergy could be of great help in influencing public opinion abroad at a time when Hitler needed international good will (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
In response, writes historian Roland Blaich, Bishop Nuelsen “joined General Superintendent Hans Dibelius of the Evangelical Church in a short-wave broadcast assuring the outside world that all was well in Germany.” Methodist leaders also sent telegrams to the press in England and the United States “protesting reports of alleged atrocities” (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
The Nazis also reached out to the Baptists and Adventists. What followed were numerous trips by church leaders to the United States. Speaking at church, academic and cultural associations, they praised the achievements of the Nazi government and countered criticism of its treatment of Jews.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany sent the director of its reputable social service agency, Hulda Jost. Although the Adventist Church had been declared illegal in 1933, it had appealed, stressing its support for the government and its upholding of family values and healthy living. Within weeks, it was reinstated (Blaich, “Selling Nazi Germany Abroad”).
In 1936, on her way to a church world conference in San Francisco, Jost spoke to organizations across the country. Quoted in a Chicago Daily News article, she claimed that “Hitler does not want war.” When asked about persecution of the Jews, she said “Hitler has merely wanted to take leadership away from the Jews, but he doesn’t want to hurt them.” (Schroder, “Seventh Day Adventists”).
Meanwhile, Christians in Germany were being tested. In April 1933, the Nazis introduced the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases Act. This law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders. As a result, 400,000 Germans were sterilized in Nazi Germany.
In 1935 came the Nuremburg Laws, stripping Jews of citizenship and prohibiting racial intermarriage. Later came euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” which accounted for an estimated 250,000 deaths. “A curious path led from caritas, the caring for the less fortunate and weak, to elimination of the weak, as the work of God,” Blaich writes.
Churches were also told to purge their members of Jews. This spelled particular trouble for the Seventh-day Adventists. Because Adventists kept Saturday as Sabbath, and had similar dietary practices, they were sometimes associated with Judaism. Eager to show they were Christian, Adventists started calling Saturday “Rest Day,” rather than the Sabbath. Across Germany and occupied countries, signs appeared on church doors prohibiting Jews from entering.
There are several accounts of Christians with Jewish heritage being expelled and shunned. Some disappeared. Others died in concentration camps (Heinz, “Painful Rememberance”).
Not all churches in Germany made peace with the Third Reich. Some, like the Confessing Church, were outlawed, and many of their members persecuted or killed. Others fared even worse. Approximately 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses died or were killed in concentration camps.
While a majority of German Christians found a way to accommodate the Nazi agenda, there were also individuals, Protestants and Catholics, who risked or gave their lives to protect Jews and others. Their stories are a precious testament to the capacity of the human heart for courage and compassion.
From Christians who went along with the Nazis, however, we see how treacherous is the mix of religion and nationalism and how lethal when race hatred is added. From their tragic experience, we have much to learn.
Brown, Eva. “The Baptist World Conference in Berlin.” Baptist Quarterly, October 1934.
Brumley, Jeff. “What Happens When Church and State Merge? Look to Nazi Germany for Answers.” Baptist Press, Jan. 30, 2023.
“Church’s Relations with the State: The Oxford Conference and the German Delegates,” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 30 July 1937. The official report on the Oxford Conference is found in J. H. Oldham, The Oxford Conference (New York: Clark, 1937.)
Dodd, M. E. “My Impressions of the Baptist World Congress.” Baptist and Reflector, Sept. 13, 1934.
Heinz, Daniel. “Painful Remembrance: Adventists and Jews in The Third Reich.” Shabbat Shalom Magazine, Viewpoint 28 December 2017. This article appeared originally in German in Adventecho, May 2001, pp. 12-14. Translation by Martin Pröbstle.
King, Christian Elizabeth. The Nazi State and the New Religions. E Mellon Press, London: 1982.
Norris, Kristopher. “Baptists under Nazism and Baptists amid America’s current political crisis: a call to ‘disruption’” Baptist News, Nov. 21, 2019.
Roach, David. “Baptists ‘humbled’ by failure to oppose Nazis.” Baptist Press, Sept. 18, 2014.
Schroder, Corrie. “Seventh Day Adventists,” Oral History Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2002.
Ben Jacques Stories 