Confronting Georgetown’s History of Enslavement

The next year, John Carroll, who had become the first Catholic bishop in the new United States, founded Georgetown College on a hill adjoining the Potomac. To erect the college, where classes began in 1792, he drew funds produced by the plantations, among them the proceeds from the sale of people enslaved at White Marsh, starting with Nell and her son, Perry; a woman named Esther; “a Negro girl,” Sarah, and “a negro boy,” Jerry. In the years just following, Swarns reports, profits generated by the estates were used to help “cover the costs of building a hall, a ‘study-place’ and dormitories at Georgetown.”

By 1804, forty-one people were enslaved at St. Inigoes. A tax-assessment document, which Swarns quotes and paraphrases, suggests that they bore the wounds of enslavement: “Charles, fifty-one, had a broken arm. Will, sixty-three, was described as ‘a cripple.’ Tom, sixty-seven, was blind in one eye. Dorothy, forty-nine, was described as bedridden ‘for life,’ while Cate, sixty-two, was ‘always sick & helpless.’ ” Harry Mahoney, known to some priests as “Big Harry,” was characterized as “consumptive & sickly”; his wife, Anna, had dropsy. They would have eight children. At St. Inigoes, some enslaved people labored alongside free Blacks. Some were sold to slave markets in the South: a family of eight; an elderly couple; a single man, Watt. After a group of enslaved men rose up in 1816, they were sentenced to death—but, instead of executing them, Maryland’s governor ordered “Harry Jack Abraham Joe and John . . . sold as Slave for life” in the Deep South “for the benefit of the State of Maryland.”

Slavery was a widely accepted practice in Maryland, fundamental to the state’s economy, but the Maryland Jesuits’s practice of enslavement was challenged by other Catholic clergymen. A Jesuit who had served in New York, Anthony Kohlmann, deemed slaveholding on the plantations an obstacle to the order’s expansion to the swiftly growing cities of the North. Irish Dominican priests accused the Jesuits of trafficking in slaves. A German priest, Maximilian Rantzau, seems to have scolded slaveholders in a homily he gave during Mass at St. Inigoes, with enslaved people also in the congregation. John Carroll, by then archbishop of Baltimore, faulted Jesuits at White Marsh for selling enslaved people, but did not dismiss the practice elsewhere.

A powerful and affecting argument came from one of the enslaved people themselves. In 1833, Thomas Brown composed an extraordinary petitionary letter, probably addressed to William McSherry, the head of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus: “I have been a faithful servant in the Society going on 38 years; & my wife Molly has been born & raised in the Society,” he began. “We live at present in [a] rotten logg house so old & decayed that at every blast of wind we are afraid of our lives.” He went on: “To prevent the Evil, I am willing to Buy myself & wife free if you Accept of 100 dollars 50 dollars I can pay down in Cash, the rest as soon as I possibly can. Rev. Father, Consider this is as much as I can raise, & as much as our old Bones are worth; have pity on Us, let us go free for one hundred dollars or else we will Surely perish with the Cold.”

With another Jesuit, Thomas Mulledy, McSherry ran Georgetown College, where a combination of expansion, a drop in tuition fees, and unpaid debts put financial pressure on the school. They pondered a mass sale of people who the order kept enslaved at White Marsh and St. Inigoes. Mulledy, in particular, maintained that an eventual sale would enable the order to distance itself from the practice of slavery—an outcome he sought not because slavery was immoral but because he thought the economic costs of slavery outweighed its benefits and that the responsibility of overseeing enslaved people left the priests involved in plantation life dispirited. “More and more, daily experience forces me to believe that these plantations will be a kind of curse for the society in this region,” Mulledy wrote to the head of the Jesuits in Rome in March, 1835. “Blacks behave most wickedly in many plantations and priests themselves suffer ruin of both the soul and the body.” Meanwhile, he had drawn up a plan to expand the college by erecting (another priest recalled in a letter) a new facility and had taken out a loan from a wealthy man enrolled as a seminarian to do so.

Maryland Jesuits met in July, 1835, and considered the possibility of a sale. To familiar complaints about slaveholding (that it wedded Jesuits to rural life, distracted priests from their callings, and drove them to drink) was added the argument that if the order didn’t sell the enslaved people it owned, it might get nothing in return if the government emancipated them. “A mass slave sale,” Swarns writes, “would enable the Jesuits to establish colleges in Philadelphia, Richmond, and beyond.” And yet a sale would be against the order’s sense of its mission to “take care of souls.” One Jesuit, Joseph Carbery, once a student at Georgetown, had advocated for providing a degree of independence to the enslaved and enabling them to work as tenant farmers, as that would increase productivity and improve living conditions, and his arguments were enumerated again at the debate.

The advocates of a sale prevailed. While awaiting approval from their superiors in Rome, McSherry, who succeeded Mulledy as president, realized that the college’s debts, deepened by Mulledy’s expansion project, were double what Mulledy had previously acknowledged—and so the sale came to seem like an imperative. In 1838, Mulledy, in coördination with McSherry, sold two hundred and seventy-two enslaved people, the majority of those on the Jesuits’ plantations, “for the sum of $115,000,” Swarns records matter-of-factly, “roughly $422 per person,” to be paid in installments, with the bulk of the first proceeds directed to Georgetown for the payment of debts that Mulledy had incurred. Many of those who were sold were sent to Louisiana. Mahoneys were separated from Mahoneys. After a sojourn to Rome, where the sale had diminished his reputation among his Jesuit superiors, Mulledy was appointed president of the College of the Holy Cross, in Massachusetts, and the Jesuits of Maryland established what is now Loyola University in Baltimore.

Brown, Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other colleges and universities profited from slavery and have sought to make public amends. (Harvard has engaged Cellini, of the Georgetown Memory Project, to lead a new slavery remembrance program, charged with identifying the direct descendants of those enslaved people who worked on campus or were owned by the school’s leaders, faculty, or staff.) What makes Georgetown’s history different from theirs? In Swarns’s account, it is Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit heritage. “The priests in Maryland, who relied on the proceeds derived from slave labor and slavery,” she writes, “built the nation’s first Catholic college, the first archdiocese, and the first Catholic cathedral and helped establish two of the earliest Catholic monasteries.” The sale of the two hundred and seventy-two served not only to help the Maryland Jesuits pay down Georgetown’s debts but also to help the order extend its educational mission. The legacy of the sale can be seen in Jesuit education in the United States: twenty-seven universities (among them Fordham, Boston College, Santa Clara, and Gonzaga) and more than fifty high schools. And it can be seen, Swarns proposes, in American Catholicism as a whole. “Without the enslaved,” she writes, “the Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not exist.”

I was educated at Fordham in the nineteen-eighties. As I read “The 272,” I found the actions taken by the Jesuits wholly recognizable. This is not because I studied with many Jesuits there and have known many since. It’s because the Jesuits who I studied with taught me how to recognize such actions. They maintained that the most pernicious form of moral reasoning is the one whereby the ends justify the means. In their account, such reasoning was the fruit of utilitarianism and other modern strains of thought; and the whole Catholic moral enterprise, the basis of the Jesuit education and their own callings as priests and professors, was set against such reasoning. The Church’s teaching was clear: one could never do evil in order to bring about a real or apparent good.

So they taught. And yet that form of reasoning had guided the Maryland Jesuits’ participation in the institution of slavery: the end that was the maintenance of the Church justified the means. In 1838, the apparent goods of clearing Georgetown College’s debts and producing funds to advance the Jesuit order’s prerogatives in this country were used to justify the sale of human beings, even as voices within the Church maintained that such a practice was against their mission. The Jesuit leadership made a fine distinction specifying that profits from such a sale would be used to fund future projects, not to pay everyday expenses. They may have arranged the sale of the two hundred and seventy-two people in order to precede an apostolic letter issued the following year, in which Pope Gregory XVI denounced the slave trade. They arranged for the enslaved people to be shipped from Maryland to Louisiana, having been assured that at least enslaved family members would be kept together and would “be permitted to attend to their religious duties.” However, they didn’t act on repeated requests to send money to Louisiana to fund a plantation chapel.

Today, Georgetown, Holy Cross, Gonzaga, Fordham, and Santa Clara are led by Catholic lay people. Affiliated law, business, and other professional schools are as prominent as the storied colleges and secondary schools. The Society of Jesus, with fewer than fifteen thousand members, around two thousand of them in the United States and Canada, is less than half the size that it was in 1965 (a high point), and it is possible to obtain a Jesuit education without studying with a Jesuit, or even meeting one. In these circumstances, the enslavement and sale of Black people by the white Jesuits who led Georgetown nearly two centuries ago might seem to belong to the clerical past more than to the educational present. But Swarns’s book, like Georgetown’s efforts of remembrance and contrition, offers strong evidence to the contrary. “The 272” brings the “original sin” of slavery close and renders the practice—and the efforts to justify it—all too recognizable. ♦