This is an excerpt from “The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church” by Rachel L. Swarns. Published this week by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House.
Some prayed that such heavenly spectacles meant their liberation was near. Others viewed them as omens, signs of agony to come. On the St. Inigoes plantation in southern Maryland, the Mahoney sisters needed no celestial sign to know of the darkness that lay ahead.
The sisters, Louisa Mahoney and Anny Mahoney Jones, had been sold, along with scores of other Black people enslaved by the nation’s most powerful Jesuit priests. The leaders of the Catholic order were convinced that the sale was the only way to save Georgetown College, the nation’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, from being crushed by its debts. Even opposition from many of their own priests did not deter them from the steps they were about to take.
The Jesuits had made a list of the people they planned to sell: 272 enslaved men, women and children who labored on their Maryland plantations.
The prospective buyers were prominent men from Louisiana: Henry Johnson, a congressman and defender of slavery who’d once served as governor, and Jesse Batey, a doctor who had established himself as a planter.
When the two men had disembarked from the stagecoach that carried them from Washington to the countryside of southern Maryland just a few months earlier, they had found Rev. Thomas Mulledy, the former president of Georgetown who now ran the Jesuit province, waiting to give them a tour of the plantations and the scores of people he’d put up for sale.
At St. Inigoes, one of the Jesuit plantations in St. Mary’s County, the enslaved numbered more than 80 people. There were toddlers and young mothers, young men in the prime of their lives, middle-aged couples, and elderly men and women.
Harry Mahoney, Louisa and Anny’s father and the patriarch of the extended Mahoney clan, was described as the oldest enslaved person on the plantation. He had worked faithfully for the Jesuits for decades, hidden the church’s wealth during the War of 1812, and secured a pledge that his family would never be sold. Would the Jesuits keep that pledge?
His daughter Nelly seemed safe. She was working in Alexandria, Va., helping the Jesuit priest who was tending the flock at St. Mary’s Church. But what about his wife, Anna? What about the rest of his children? One of his sons, Gabriel, a blacksmith, was married to a woman on another plantation. Would he be safe?
After weeks of haggling over price, Mulledy, Johnson, and Batey had come to an agreement. They met in Washington, to put the deal into writing: 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. The handwritten agreement, signed by all three men, ran to eight pages.
There were the financial details, of course — a payment plan in installments with interest — and there was a delivery plan, which described when and how the enslaved people would be handed over. The men agreed that $25,000 would be paid on the delivery of the first group of 51 people, who were to be shipped to the port of Alexandria “as soon as practicable.”
Johnson and Batey did get some assurances written into the agreement to ensure that they would be protected if the enslaved people turned out to be sickly or older — and therefore less valuable — than Mulledy claimed. The priest promised to reduce the price of the enslaved people purchased “for such difference in age, or for such defects as shall lessen their value” and to go to arbitration if the parties could not come to an agreement on a reasonable reduction in price.
The three men signed the document one after another — first Mulledy, then Batey, then Johnson — setting into motion the machinery of what would become one of the largest documented slave sales of the time.
The rest of the enslaved were to be delivered between Oct. 15 and Nov. 15.
But nearly half of the agreement was devoted to scores of names, those of nearly every enslaved person owned by the Jesuits: grandfathers such as Isaac, a 65-year-old man enslaved on the White Marsh plantation; children such as Francis, an 8-year-old boy enslaved at St. Thomas Manor; mothers such as Susan, a 20-year-old woman, and her 7-year-old daughter.
Mulledy, in his zeal to wrap up the deal, failed to mention that several of the men listed in the agreement had run away and no longer lived on the plantations. The agreement also failed to note that a number of the enslaved on the list had spouses who were owned by other slaveholders and that Rome had ordered the Jesuits not to separate such couples.
The document provided the first hint that Mulledy was prepared to do what many Jesuits viewed as unconscionable and immoral: to break up families, if necessary, to get the money he needed to save Georgetown, founded in 1789 and destined to become one of the nation’s elite universities.
The people most deeply affected by the deal were miles away, laboring at St. Inigoes and the other Jesuit plantations in Maryland. The sale document included only their first names, but to one another, they were the Queens, the Goughs, the Hawkinses, the Campbells, the Butlers, the Browns, the Dorseys, and the Wests. And all of them had been sold, including, despite the decades-long pledge, the Mahoneys.
Within days of the agreement being signed, Horatio Trunnell, the man hired to handle the roundup, headed out to St. Inigoes. He and his men arrived without warning and swept through the plantation rounding up frantic families, about 41 people in all. The youngest were toddlers. The oldest were two men, both aged about 45, both with wives and children.
One of those men was Robert Mahoney, Harry’s oldest son. A similar roundup took place at the White Marsh plantation, where nearly a dozen people were forced to leave their homes and their extended families. Word spread from one estate to another, radiating through the enslaved communities and the small circle of clergy responsible for the plantations.
“Without any notice or preparation the slaves were seized violently and by heathen hands,” Father Thomas Lilly wrote in a letter to Rome, describing what had happened at St. Inigoes and White Marsh. “They were treated as animals in every respect.”
Their destination was the port in Alexandria, where they would be imprisoned as they waited to board the Uncas, the ship that would carry them to Louisiana. The 155-ton, two-masted ship had been purchased in 1836 by William H. Williams, a slave trader based in Washington.
During the very week that Robert Mahoney, his family, and the others were imprisoned in the port city, Williams announced in the pages of the Alexandria Gazette that his ship would be sailing “FOR NEW ORLEANS.”
No record has survived of Robert’s thoughts as he and the others descended into the hold of the ship. But on June 29, the newspaper carried the news of the ship’s departure: “Sailed, June 28, Brig Uncas, Cross, New Orleans.”
Mulledy was visiting St. Inigoes when the news of the Uncas’s departure appeared in the newspaper. The following day, he dedicated his Mass to the “poor negroes,” but his prayers did little to assuage the outrage of the priests who managed the Jesuit plantations.
“It is with the greatest pain of spirit that I take up the pen,” Lilly wrote. “Those men, I believe, had assured humane and Christian treatment, but I discovered their nature,” he continued. “What distress! What a scandal not only for the Catholics, but also for the Protestants! Many of them detest this sale as much as possible. And it will dispense such a wound to this religion and to this order.”
Worse still, he wrote, was the news that it was only the beginning, that the “remaining entirety” of the enslaved population had also been sold. It was only a matter of time before the slave traders returned for the rest.
Could Rome have “permitted and approved” such an inhumane plan? Could Jan Roothaan, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits, have given such a horrific sale his blessing?
Mulledy was well aware of the outrage bubbling up among his fellow priests, particularly those stationed on the plantations. And the stress of what priests would later describe as the ugly business of selling human beings was clearly taking its toll. Mulledy felt so “fatigued” and “unwell,” as he recorded in his journal, that on five occasions that summer he did not officiate at Mass.
Still he remained unbowed, and in August, he struck back against his critics. In a defiant letter to Roothaan, he addressed the mounting criticism of his leadership. He dismissed Lilly and the other priests criticizing him on the plantations, suggesting that their objections to the sale stemmed from their self-serving distress at losing their authority over scores of enslaved people.
“In no way is this matter pleasing to them,” he wrote, “because they will not be the great masters they were before, but I hope they will be better Jesuits.”
Jesuit administrators, meanwhile, made careful note of the money that poured into their accounts that summer, and where that money went.
“8000 to Archbishop Of Balt. to extinguish debt,” reads a line in one of the Jesuit cashbooks, describing a payment made to the Bishop of Baltimore to settle an old claim.
The rest of the down payment — some $17,000 — went to Georgetown. That hefty sum would help pay down the debts that Mulledy had incurred during a building campaign. And more money — much more — would be coming into the province over the next decade, Mulledy informed Rome, as Johnson and Batey made good on their payments to the Jesuits in annual installments.
While money flowed into the Jesuit coffers, the priests and enslaved people on the plantations prayed and waited. Only about 30 people remained at St. Inigoes’s Black community. They had witnessed the end of the world as they knew it. But the trauma wasn’t over. All of them — the young, the old, the married, the single, the strong, the feeble — had price tags on their heads.
That knowledge haunted the two sisters, Louisa and Anny, as they cooked and cleaned for the priest who lived in the manor house, comforted their elderly parents and tended to the young children who still laughed and frolicked, innocent of what was to come.
They had grown up together, the youngest girls in a sprawling family, and they had prayed, as many enslaved people did, that their family would remain intact, that they would always stay together. But soon, they knew, the members of their community would be rounded up and shipped down South, far from the world they knew and the people they loved. Any day now, any minute now, the slave traders would be coming. Who would be taken next?
Roothaan had ordered Mulledy to keep families together and warned that missteps might provoke divine retribution: “It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves.” Mulledy carried the weight of that warning with him as he prepared himself for the journey. But it did not dissuade him.
On Oct. 31, 1838, about six weeks after the luminous solar eclipse appeared in the sky, he picked up his diary. “Set out for St. Innigoes,” he wrote.
At the plantation, Father Joseph Carbery, another priest who opposed what Mulledy was doing, got word: The slave traders were coming.
In a flagrant act of defiance against his superior, the priest sought out members of the Mahoney family. Run! Carbery told them. Run!
Louisa ran with her mother. Anny gathered her children.
But for Anny, the news came too late. She and her two young children, Arnold, who was about 8 or 9 years old, and Louisa, who was about 6, were herded together with the rest of the enslaved people who would be loaded on the ship.
Harry, now an old man and the patriarch of the family, was spared. But it was the bitterest of blessings. He had done all he could to keep his family safe, trusting in the pledge from the Jesuits that the Mahoneys would never be sold.
He had raised his children and watched his grandchildren grow, buoyed by the belief that they would all remain together. His wife and his daughter, Louisa, had managed to hide in the woods and return safely to the plantation after the ship set sail. But the rest of his family was being wrenched apart.
In June, his oldest son had been stolen from him. Now two of his daughters, Anny and Bibiana, and his grandchildren were being taken, torn from their homes and marched away from St. Inigoes, all of them victims of the mundane brutality of American slavery.
