Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

1 Michael Nash Arrives

1. Michael Nash Arrives I ∞ When young Michael Nash and his five companions climbed down from their New York and Harlem Railroad car at the Fordham station on Sunday evening, August 9, 1846, he was not quite twenty-one years old, the age at which today most Bronx Fordham graduates are heading for law school or graduate study or are looking south, toward Manhattan towers, with dreams of careers in finance or the media. Lincoln Center graduates are looking in all directions, and a good number on both campuses are setting dates for their weddings. The weary six had just traveled through an America at war—a nation at a turning point in its history. President James K. Polk, a Democrat swept into office by a wave of national expansionism called manifest destiny, had set his sights on the vast territories known as California and Oregon, and in April, American troops had crossed the border from recently annexed Texas into Mexico. To the north, a short walk from Concord, Massachusetts, young Henry David Thoreau had settled into a little cabin built with his own hands on Walden Pond, where he raised beans, measured the depth of 1 16950-01_Fordham_001-042 6/4/08 11:43 AM Page 1 the water, lamented the surge of industrialization personified in the railroad that roared by within earshot, scoffed at the telegraph that had been set up two years before, and recorded the voices of frogs, the reverberations of the church bells, and his conversations with visitors in his notebooks. Twenty miles south of the Fordham station, young Walt Whitman sat on the porch of his office at the Brooklyn Eagle and watched the ferry pull into the Fulton Street dock just a few yards away. II ∞ But Michael Nash, up until a few months before, had not been that sure of what he intended to do with his life. Born in County Kilkenny in 1825, he had come to America in 1830 with his father, James Nash, who was making a trip to investigate a family legacy in Kentucky that, depending on what the father discovered, the Nashes might accept or turn down. Michael’s older brother Thomas had been slated for the trip, but three days before sailing, their mother refused to part with her first son, so, since the ticket had already been bought, the family sent little Michael in his place. The voyage to New York took forty-three days, followed by eleven days on steamboats, canal boats, stagecoaches, and railroads in uninterrupted travel to Louisville, where James Nash evaluated the farmland that had been bequeathed to him and decided that it was too far from priests and the Mass. He decided he should turn it down. By 1832, the seven-year-old Michael had determined that he wanted to stay in America for reasons not very clear to himself except that perhaps he would head out for the frontier and become an Indian scout. His father not only agreed with this, but as James Nash boarded the riverboat that would take him away from his son up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh and the boy tried to change his mind, James Nash refused to let his son so easily switch a very young man’s first major decision. Besides, James Nash had handed his son over to Fr. Quinn, the vicar general of the diocese of Bardstown. As Michael’s guardian, Fr. Quinn would take charge of his schooling for two years and then, perhaps, send him home to Ireland. After placing the boy for five years in a little 2 F O R D H A M 16950-01_Fordham_001-042 6/4/08 11:43 AM Page 2 academy run by a semiretired priest in a church basement, Fr. Quinn transferred Michael to St. Joseph’s College, which was run at the time by diocesan priests, in Bardstown, about forty miles southeast of Louisville. III ∞ Prior to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV and the rulers of several European countries, the Society had 669 schools or colleges spread over every country of Europe and across the world. In France, there had been 91 colleges and 20 seminaries with forty thousand students, manned by three thousand Jesuits. Following the restoration in 1814, Jesuits strove to reevangelize France, specifically through eight minor seminaries, with the hope that their spirituality might revitalize...