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HOW BONDAGE BUILT THE CHURCH  
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Tiya Miles
May 7, 2024
The New York Review
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_ Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people
by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the
legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance _

Members of the Mason family, St. Inigoes, Maryland, circa
1890–1909. The woman seated at left is believed to be Louisa Mahoney
Mason; standing at right is her son Robert Mason., Woodstock College
Archives/Georgetown University Library

 

Reviewed:

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American
Catholic Church [[link removed]]
by Rachel L. Swarns
Random House, 326 pp., $28.00

When the Florida State Board of Education approved new standards for
the middle school curriculum last July, there was an uproar. The
standards advised teachers to tell their students that enslaved people
had acquired skills that “could be applied for their personal
benefit,” suggesting an upside to dehumanization and forced
servitude. Historians, media commentators, and politicians from
Republican senator Tim Scott to Vice President Kamala Harris
criticized the rhetorical acrobatics of this guidance. The new
standards appeared to be in sync with the broader political agenda of
some Republicans to narrow the teaching of African American history in
public schools, avoiding subject matter that might make white students
feel guilt or discomfort—and hence potentially excluding nearly any
event, cause, or effect in Black history.

The question of how to teach slavery in relation to the country’s
history has become an unfortunate proxy for polarized political views
(consider the 1619 Project controversy,1 or the former Republican
presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s reluctance to identify slavery
as a cause of the Civil War while she was on the campaign trail).
Because many Americans, especially Black Americans descended from
enslaved people, recognize the harms of minimizing slavery—both to
the memory of those who lived through it and to our ability to improve
race relations today—those who attempt to whitewash it face
opposition.

Rachel L. Swarns’s compassionate investigation, _The 272: The
Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic
Church_, joins the intellectual resistance to historical amnesia.
Swarns is a writer for _The New York Times_ and a professor of
journalism at New York University who previously researched Michelle
Obama’s enslaved ancestors for the book _American
Tapestry_ (2012). Her latest—on the history and legacy of slavery
at Georgetown University and within the US Catholic Church—joins a
swell of books, studies, reports, lectures, conferences, and
commemorations examining the links between historical race-based
bondage and institutions of higher learning.

These publications and events have revealed an intricate web of
institutional indebtedness to slavery, laying bare the dependence of
private and public colleges on human subjugation and capital
accumulated from slave trades, slave births, slave-produced materials,
unfree people used for financial leverage in mortgages, and the
intimate boosts to enslavers from personal bodily services like fly
fanning and chamber-pot emptying, derived from chattel bondage.
Descriptions (and sometimes images) of enslaved people serving college
presidents, tending campus grounds, feeding university students, and
being sold across the country and the ocean by faculty and affiliates
abound in this new material. In one particularly sensitive example at
the University of Georgia in Athens, the remains of what were likely
enslaved people were unceremoniously uncovered during a construction
project in 2015.

It is generally agreed that this movement began with the work of Ruth
J. Simmons. She is the former president of Brown University (the first
Black person to lead an Ivy League school) and the author of a
memoir, _Up Home: One Girl’s Journey_ (2023), which describes her
experience growing up in rural Texas in a sharecropping family. In
2003 Simmons authorized an investigation of Brown’s financial
entanglement with slavery and the international slave trade. The
resulting report, “Slavery and Justice,” was made public in 2006.
A string of universities followed Brown’s lead, researching the
history of slavery at their institutions, publicizing their findings,
and often creating memorials to the enslaved or setting aside funds
for further study, community programs, or scholarships for
descendants.

The University of Virginia is prominent among these institutions, with
its abstract, curvilinear memorial, completed in 2020, showcasing the
engraved names of the enslaved laborers who helped to build and
maintain the institution. In 2016 UVA founded the international
Universities Studying Slavery consortium, which spans the Atlantic
Ocean just as the trade once did. An initiative at Clemson
University—situated on former plantation grounds in South
Carolina—has expanded beyond antebellum slavery to investigate the
campus labor of mostly Black southern prisoners in
late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century convict-lease
programs, as well as the contributions of Black workers, artists,
students, and activists through to the present.

This work is ongoing in both the South and the North. In April 2022
Harvard released a report on the widespread ownership and sale
overseas of Black and Indigenous bondspeople by its donors, staff, and
fellows—including the early Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John
Winthrop—and to redress this historical wrong established a $100
million endowment, the largest pledge by a university to
date.2 Harvard later hired Richard Cellini—the Georgetown alumnus
who founded the Georgetown Memory Project and pushed for that school
to reckon with its past (and who makes an appearance in _The
272_)—to help identify descendants of enslaved people tied to
Harvard. Yale has just released a book-length report on slavery at the
university by the historian David Blight.3 And last December
Dartmouth—building on a 2019 exhibition created by the Black
feminist sociologist Deborah King and her students—released the
Dartmouth and Slavery Project website, which documents that Eleazar
Wheelock, Dartmouth’s founder, owned at least eighteen enslaved
people.

In his pathbreaking overview, _Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the
Troubled History of America’s Universities_ (2013), the historian
Craig Steven Wilder traced the many colonial and Early Republic–era
schools where bondspeople were held on campus, where enslaved laborers
maintained the grounds, where institutional programs depended on
proceeds from slavery, and where the knowledge and technologies
produced relied on enslaved people’s presence and contributions. To
the extent that national progress in the arts and sciences can be
attributed to university breakthroughs of the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries, the nation as a whole gained from
universities’ exploitation of Black and Indigenous people.

_The 272_ begins where it should, with the descendants of the
enslaved. The first words of the book are a living descendant’s
name: Jeremy Alexander. A devout Catholic and an employee at
Georgetown University, Alexander learned through DNA testing in 2016
that his ancestors had been owned by Jesuit priests in Maryland. They,
along with hundreds of other women, men, and children, had been part
of a mass sale in 1838, a move by Maryland Jesuits, with the approval
of church leaders in Rome, to stabilize the university’s mismanaged
finances.

Swarns first wrote an account of the Jesuit slave sale for _The New
York Times_ in 2016. Her article, “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save
Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?,” was widely read
and received an electric reaction. In her book she expands on that
reporting to explain that “for more than a century, the American
Catholic Church relied on the buying, selling, and enslavement of
Black people to lay its foundations, support its clergy, and drive its
expansion.” Her argument is that “without the enslaved, the
Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today, would not
exist.”

English Catholics came to Maryland in 1634, fleeing political
persecution and seeking a place where they could practice their faith
freely even as they evangelized to Native Americans and settlers.
Their sponsor was Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who, as proprietor of
the colony, encouraged Catholic settlement and reserved more than
20,000 acres for the Jesuits. Like other Marylanders with land and
privilege, Jesuits participated in plantation slavery from the early
1700s. Their embrace of the practice might partly be ascribed to
religious discrimination that included a tax on the importation of
indentured Irish Catholic servants. Jesuits acquired slaves through
inheritance and purchase and compelled these captives to practice
Catholicism.

After the Revolutionary War and ratification of a Constitution that
promised religious freedom in the young United States, Catholic
leaders set their sights on developing lasting institutions,
especially a place of higher learning. In 1789 Father John Carroll,
who would soon become the first Catholic bishop in the US, purchased
land for the site of Georgetown College. By this time Jesuits in
Maryland were heavily invested in plantation land and enslaved Black
labor. When Catholic leaders in Rome decided against funding the new
college, Swarns explains, Carroll knew that most of the financing
“would have to come from the priests’ plantations and the labor of
their enslaved workers.” There was also discussion about “the need
to cull the stock of surplus—‘supernumerary’—human beings.”

Just over a year later, Swarns writes, enslaved people on at least one
of these plantations, the Bohemia estate, “began to vanish”:

Nell and her son, Perry, were sold for $4 in July 1790. That same
month, the priest who ran the plantation received about £22 in
partial payment for the sale of an enslaved woman named Esther. Sarah
and Jerry, described as “a Negro girl” and “a negro boy” in
the plantation’s financial records, disappeared in January 1791,
sold for £50. By March 1792, four more people were gone, handed over
in exchange for a horse, blacksmith tools, and £112.

More than two dozen people from the estate were sold. As Swarns notes,
these early sales were “a harbinger of what was to come.”

Right away Swarns makes clear that the story she has to tell is not
just about Georgetown University or even the Catholic Church. She aims
to create a “portrait of an enslaved family” as much as an
institutional history. Swarns organizes her chronicle around the
experiences of two sisters, Anna and Louisa Mahoney, who were owned by
Jesuits and eventually separated by the 1838 sale.

It wasn’t easy to follow the trail of the sisters and their
relatives. But in a moving passage that reverberates throughout the
book, Swarns points out that even when individuals did not own
themselves, they owned their story:

They could not read or write, but they could speak. The elders passed
their story on to their children, who passed it on to their children,
who passed it on to their children, and on down, keeping elements of
the saga alive, in some branches of the family, well into the
twenty-first century.

Swarns reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the
legacy of resistance, a precious gift that ancestors bestow on
descendants and that scholars can sometimes hear in oral accounts or
glimpse in the written archive.

The sisters were descended from Ann Joice, who left England for
Maryland around 1676. Possibly biracial, or “mulatto,” in the
sources Swarns uncovers, she was a free woman who had signed a
contract of indenture to work for Charles Calvert, a prominent
Marylander and son of Lord Baltimore. When Calvert returned to England
in 1684, he reassigned Ann Joice, sending her to work for his cousin,
Colonel Henry Darnall, a wealthy plantation owner and the deputy
governor of Maryland.

At that time Maryland was tightening colonial slavery laws so that
Black people could no longer claim freedom based on Christian baptism
or conversion. Darnall burned her indenture papers, the only written
evidence of her term-limited position. When Ann Joice protested,
Darnall sent her to stay with a man who imprisoned her in a kitchen
cellar for months. She emerged a slave for life. Outwardly she played
the part, but inwardly she remembered that she had a right to her
stolen freedom.

Swarns, who reconstructed these events largely from family oral
history and court testimony, captures the poignancy of this origin
story in which Ann Joice, a free Black immigrant, was turned into a
slave—as well as Ann Joice’s determination to pass that story on:

She decided to tell her descendants and anyone else who would listen
how the Catholic gentry of Maryland had stolen her freedom. Darnall
had stripped her of everything. She would have no wealth, no land, and
no savings to leave her family, but she still had her story…. That
story would be her legacy.

Over time the ownership of Ann Joice’s descendants shifted between
Catholic gentry and Jesuit priests. Ann Joice became the ancestor of
individuals who would be owned by Catholic enslavers in Maryland, and
by others in Louisiana, for generations.

Early in the book Swarns introduces us to Harry Mahoney, whom she
describes loosely as “a Joice descendant” and places on a Jesuit
plantation starting in the 1790s. He became a trusted foreman on St.
Inigoes, a Jesuit plantation near the Potomac River in southern
Maryland. He and his wife, Anna, had eight children, the youngest of
whom were Anna and Louisa, born a year or two apart in the early
1810s.

Anna and Louisa grew up together within a close family, although they
all lived under Jesuit control. The sisters played and worked beneath
the Maryland sky, weaving ties of affection and interdependency that
Swarns effectively recreates. Anna married, becoming Anna Mahoney
Jones, and had children of her own. Swarns also describes the
experiences of extended Mahoney family members (including two men who
sued for their freedom in 1797, with mixed results—an inconclusive
jury decision followed by an escape), and other people owned and sold
by the Jesuits. This telling is not without gaps, as Swarns
acknowledges:

There are questions about their lives that I cannot answer, personal
experiences that I cannot depict. Sometimes, as I studied the spidery
script of the Jesuits’ handwritten letters, the sisters and their
ancestors seemed like ghosts passing through this world, leaving
barely a trace.

_The 272_ moves quickly across the decades toward the mass 1838 sale.
In 1835 Jesuit leaders in Maryland found themselves in dire economic
straits. Georgetown College was in deep debt, as was the
administrative organization of Jesuits in the region, known as the
Maryland Province. The president of Georgetown, Thomas Mulledy, had
contributed to the school’s financial troubles by embarking on an
ambitious plan to erect more buildings. His proposal for returning the
school and region to solvency was to sell the plantations and slaves
owned by the church.

Mulledy argued that the plantations and the people held there were a
burden for the church, antiquated assets that could be leveraged for
financial renewal. William McSherry, the provincial superior, agreed
that a mass sale would make economic sense. However, some priests felt
it would be wrong to sell away Black people who were also Catholics
and had long-standing ties to the church community. Even priests who
managed these plantations and espoused racially prejudiced views
objected to the callous treatment of Black workers. After a debate
that lasted about six days, the Provincial Congress elected to
liquidate some of their plantation holdings.

The process began with the immediate sale of four women from one
plantation days after the meeting in July, followed by the sale of two
families from another plantation in September. They were purchased by
Henry Johnson of Louisiana, a Protestant who would allow them to
practice Catholicism. In 1836 the Maryland Jesuits sought approval
from the church in Rome for a mass sale. Church leaders consented to
the plan with twenty stipulations, including that buyers must support
Catholic religious practice, and that couples and, “as far as it is
possible,” parents and children should be kept together.

Father Joseph Carbery, who oversaw St. Inigoes plantation and had
taken a liberal approach to management there, supporting Black
initiative and semi-autonomy, vehemently objected to this decision and
traveled to Georgetown hoping to intervene. According to stories that
were passed down in the family, when Harry Mahoney saw that the priest
had no appetite when he returned, Mahoney pronounced, “We’re
sold!”

Swarns excels at scene setting and historical portraiture. She
dramatizes how the courageous Harry Mahoney saved the Jesuits’ money
and led enslaved girls to safety during a British attack in the War of
1812, how the cantankerous college president Thomas Mulledy was intent
on enlarging and embellishing Georgetown’s campus and selling people
to raise the funds, and how the persistent Archbishop John Baptist
Purcell of Cincinnati urged the church to adopt the cause of
abolition.

Mulledy became the provincial superior in 1837 (McSherry took charge
of Georgetown College) and negotiated the sale the next year. A
meeting in Washington produced an eight-page agreement stipulating
that

272 men, women, and children—many of whom belonged to families that
had been enslaved by the Jesuits for generations—were to be sold for
the sum of $115,000, roughly $422 per person.

Then the “roundup” began.

The man hired to oversee it set out first for St. Inigoes, where slave
catchers “arrived without warning and swept through the plantation
rounding up frantic families, about forty-one people in all,” Swarns
recounts. “The youngest were toddlers.” Robert, the oldest Mahoney
brother, was taken. The hired men then moved on to the next Jesuit
plantation. Sold down the river, the captives would be transported to
a ship, the _Uncas_, and then to Louisiana.

Several months later, word of another sale reached St. Inigoes.
Carbery urged members of the Mahoney family to run. Anna, who had
small children, deemed it too risky to escape, and her family along
with another sister, Bibiana, were among the many rounded up and sent
to Louisiana. Louisa fled to the woods for several days with her
mother but eventually returned; they, Harry, and several other Mahoney
siblings were able to remain. Over the decades many of the descendants
of those sold that day lost touch with their Maryland relatives and
history but continued to practice their Catholic faith, eventually
becoming pillars of a Black Catholic community in New Orleans.

Swarns exposes the church’s culpability—from individual priests on
plantations to Vatican representatives—but she does not present a
simplistic, one-sided account. There are craven priests and admirable
priests in this telling. The range of voices and philosophical
positions on the matter of slave owning and slave selling within the
church, as well as on the question of how to modernize an institution
heavily invested in old, morally compromised practices, is a
fascinating element of the book.

The argument frequently offered in our day by some defenders of
prominent slaveholders of the past—that these men and women were
just doing what everyone around them did, participating in a cultural
norm that was not obviously wrong—is belied by Swarns’s account.
She shows how every argument for slavery and human sale presented by a
Jesuit priest or church leader was countered by other members of the
faith—including white clergymen as well as enslaved Black Catholics.
Clergymen with the power to alter enslaved people’s lives for the
worse did so while being aware of strong counterarguments for Black
humanity.

Examples of the emotional vacuousness and moral corruption of some of
these so-called men of God are strewn throughout the text. There are
underfed and poorly clothed people owned by the Jesuit order. There is
a Maryland priest who sells children away from their parents as
punishment for the couple’s supposed infidelity. There are young
seminarians who lounge about on plantation grounds like privileged
sons of cotton planters, including the future Georgetown president
Mulledy. And although instructions from Rome loosely prohibited
dividing families in the mass sale of slaves, the Jesuits in Maryland
separated spouses, parents, and children. Swarns does not delve deeply
into the sexual abuse of Black women or children on these Jesuit
plantations, but forced couplings and sexual assaults were not
uncommon across the South.

The Civil War altered the lives of all these enslaved people—those
retained in Maryland and those sold away to Louisiana. By 1864, at the
urging of priests like Father Vincent M. Gatti, a Vatican official who
compiled a report on American slavery based on the arguments of
abolitionist priests like Archbishop Purcell, the Catholic Church
adopted a new position that condemned the owning, selling, and buying
of people, though it wasn’t publicized for years. That November the
state of Maryland formally abolished slavery.

Louisa Mahoney Mason—she had married and had children after the 1838
sale—experienced freedom for the first time at the approximate age
of fifty-one. Her sister, Anna Mahoney Jones, who had been sold to
Louisiana, was freed after Robert E. Lee’s surrender in 1865. Anna
and her daughter, also named Louisa, followed her son Arnold and his
family to New Orleans, a magnet for newly freed people. Anna died at
about age sixty-three, in 1874. Swarns writes, “She was gone, but
her faith burned inside her grandchildren.”

Anna Mahoney Jones’s grandson, James Alphonse Johnson (child of
Louisa), helped to establish a New Orleans community of Black Catholic
churches, becoming a trustee of Holy Ghost Church. Her granddaughter,
Helene Jones (child of Arnold), became a nun in the Sisters of the
Holy Family, one of the earliest Black orders in the country, taking
on the saintly name of Mary. As Mary Austin Jones, she later led the
Sisters of the Holy Family and established orphanages and schools.
Over the course of her career in service to her faith, Mary Austin
Jones led the development of social services and educational
institutions in New Orleans, Texas, Arkansas, and Belize, where she
founded the first international mission by Black Catholics.

After the Civil War the religiously devout Mahoney sisters
reconnected, “perhaps through letters passed through a network of
priests,” Swarns speculates, writing again into the gaps of the
archival record. The two siblings never reunited in person, but they
were able to take solace in knowing that they and their families had
weathered slavery’s brutal storm. Louisa Mahoney Mason died in 1909
around the age of ninety-six.

Swarns offers a clear demonstration of her main argument that slavery
aided the development of the Catholic Church in Maryland and the
broader US. The Jesuits of the Chesapeake Bay region anchored the
growth of the church, exerting influence across the country. Money
flowing from the ownership and sale of enslaved people in Maryland
supported colleges and secondary schools in Baltimore, Washington,
D.C., Boston, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Some priests trained by
Maryland Jesuits traveled to cities in the Northeast and the West to
serve new parishes and organizations, while other Jesuits landed in
the Midwest and Deep South, where they directed colleges that also
extracted enslaved people’s labor. Swarns estimates that in
today’s dollars, Maryland Jesuits invested approximately $2.3
million in Catholic schools and seminaries around the country. Their
crime stained a far-reaching and still-intact Catholic education
movement.

The Catholic Church shared company with the Methodist Church, the
Baptist Church, the Episcopalian Church, the Moravian Church, and
others in its acceptance of slavery. (Methodists, Baptists, and
Presbyterians divided into Northern and Southern conferences as a
result of the slavery debate.) Neither were Southern Catholics alone
within their Church in exploiting racialized groups in colonial and
early America. While the Jesuits in Maryland stand out for the scale
of their operation and lasting cultural imprint on Georgetown and
other colleges, Catholic priests and elites in Detroit, as I have
shown in a history of that city—_The Dawn of
Detroit _(2017)—owned Black as well as Indigenous people from the
early 1700s through the early 1800s. My research also revealed a link
between Detroit enslavers and the University of Michigan, which
received significant early donations from members of former
slaveholding families.

Craig Steven Wilder, whom Swarns quotes, points out the special
significance of religious schools like Georgetown in the history of
slavery’s entanglement with institutions of higher learning. This is
not just an educational and economic story but a moral one, with
strong implications for what Wilder calls “restorative justice.”
In 2017 Georgetown issued an apology and expressed the intention “to
restore the dignity of those from whom it was taken.” Together with
the Jesuits, they have donated $27 million to the Descendants Truth
and Reconciliation Foundation, and further plans for reparations are
still in progress. Meanwhile members of the Mahoney family continue to
hold dear their own history and legacy. In 2018 they and other
descendants of people owned by the Jesuits organized a reunion in
Iberville Parish, Louisiana, the location of Anna Mahoney Jones’s
enslavement.

Swarns concludes _The 272_ in the same spirit of her opening—with
a recitation of names. As Jeremy Alexander and his family reunite with
relatives separated across generations as the result of that fateful
sale, he finally learns the appellations of lost ancestors. “The
people who labored there are no longer invisible, no longer
forgotten,” Swarns writes, giving Alexander the last word: “‘We
can call them by name,’ he said.”

Given this poignant framing, it is surprising and disconcerting that
the title of the book is a number. Enslaved people have often been
relegated to numerical groupings and cold accounts in archival
records, plantation museum tours, and older histories that stripped
them of their human qualities and stories. This is the opposite effect
of what Swarns intends, and indeed achieves. Perhaps the title was
meant to honor the hashtag created by Georgetown students to draw
attention to the story (#GU272), or make clear its association with
the popular article that preceded the book.

One among many important things that histories like Swarns’s _The
272_ can teach us is that slavery in these lands that we now call the
United States knew few geographical, religious, or ethnic bounds. It
turns out that our most cherished places—churches and schools in the
North and the South—often have roots snarled in slavery. Our way
forward is not to disavow this truth, but instead to face it.

1 For more on the 1619 Project, as well as the Hillsdale 1776
Curriculum, see Adam Hochschild, “History Bright and Dark,” The
New York Review, May 25, 2023.

2 For more on the Harvard report, see Andrew Delbanco, “Endowed by
Slavery,” _The New York Review_, June 23, 2022.

3 David W. Blight, _Yale and Slavery: A History_ (Yale and Slavery
History Project/Yale University Press, 2024).

TIYA MILES is the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard and
the author of _All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack,
a Black Family Keepsake_, which won the National Book Award. Her new
book, _Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free
People_, will be published in June. (May 2024)

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English
language.” The New York Review began during the New York
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and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
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