Captain Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (1838-1862)

A beautiful soul was Captain Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff. graduated in 1859, who fell at the battle of Cedar Mountain, near Culpepper, Virginia, on the ninth of August. 1862, at the early age of twenty-four. He was related to some of the oldest Puritan families in Boston. His grandfather, Dr. Ben Shurtleff. came to Boston after his marriage, leaving Plymouth where his ancestors had dwelt since the first settlement of the old colony, nearly all of the most remote of them having come to New England in either the “Mayflower,” the “Fortune-‘ or the “Ann,” the three earliest vessels that conveyed the Pilgrims to these shores. Palmer, in his “Necrology of the Harvard Alumni,” speaks of Captain Shurtleff in these terms:

The eldest son of a family possessing an unusually large share of the Puritan blood of the first settlers of New England, and long identified with Protestantism, he became a Roman Catholic while at school, and for the remainder of his life was a devoted adherent of that Communion, gathering around him large numbers of the young and neglected, to whom he gave instruction, and over whom he watched with the strictest vigilance and almost parental care. Immediately after leaving Harvard Shurtleff entered the’ novitiate of the Order of Jesuits, ait Frederick City, in Maryland, and there continued until the following February, when, failing in health,he set aside his great purpose of life; and thereafter entered the law office of William Brigham in Boston, when the. Civil War broke out.

He was killed at Cedar Mountain, and his body was brought back to Boston. The whole city did him honor, thousands following his coffin on foot to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where a solemn Mass of Requiem was sung for his soul.Captain Shurtleff was a dear friend and co-laborer with Father Haskins in the work of providing a refuge for the homeless boys of Boston.

One example will serve as an illustration of his firm Catholic spirit: Shortly after his conversion, young Shurtleff undertook the charge of St. Mary’s Sunday-school in Endicott Street. On one occasion he insisted on entering a Protestant Sunday-school, in which he knew some of St. Mary’s children to be entrapped and detained, with the result that this honored son of the Puritans was arrested and marched through the streets to jail.

“Convert Sons of Harvard,” The Rosary Magazine, Vol. 33 (1909): 417.