Sale by the Jesuits in Maryland
On June 19, 1838, the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus agreed to sell 272 slaves to two Louisiana planters, Henry Johnson and Jesse Batey, for $115,000 (equivalent to approximately $ in 2023). This sale was the culmination of a contentious and long-running debate among the Maryland Jesuits over whether to keep, sell, or free their slaves, and whether to focus on their rural estates or on their growing urban missions, including their schools.
In 1836, the Jesuit superior general, Jan Roothaan, authorized the Maryland provincial superior to carry out the sale on three conditions: the slaves must be permitted to practice their Catholic faith, their families must not be separated, and the proceeds of the sale must be used only to support Jesuits in training. It soon became clear that Roothaan's conditions had not been fully met. The Jesuits ultimately received payment many years late and never received the full $115,000. Only 206 of the 272 slaves were actually delivered because the Jesuits permitted the elderly and those with spouses who were living nearby and not owned by Jesuits to remain in Maryland.
The sale prompted immediate outcry from fellow Jesuits. Some wrote emotional letters to Roothaan denouncing its immorality. Eventually, Roothaan removed Thomas Mulledy as provincial superior for disobeying orders and promoting scandal, exiling him to Nice for several years. Despite coverage of the Maryland Jesuits' slave ownership and the 1838 sale in academic literature, news of these facts came as a surprise to the public in 2015, prompting a study of Georgetown University's and the Jesuits' historical relationship with slavery. Georgetown and the College of the Holy Cross renamed buildings, Georgetown granted legacy admissions preference to the slaves' descendants, and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States pledged to raise $100 million for them.
Background.
Emergence of Jesuit manors.
The Society of Jesus, whose members are known as Jesuits, established its first presence in the Mid-Atlantic region of the Thirteen Colonies alongside the first settlers of the British Province of Maryland, which had been founded as a Catholic colony and refuge. Three Jesuits traveled aboard "The Ark" and "The Dove" on Lord Baltimore's voyage to settle Maryland in 1634. The Jesuits received land patents from Lord Baltimore in 1636, were gifted land in some Catholic Marylanders' wills, and purchased some land on their own, eventually becoming substantial landowners in the colony. As the sole ministers of Catholicism in Maryland at the time, the Jesuit estates became the centers of Catholicism. From these estates, the Jesuits traveled the countryside on horseback, administering the sacraments and catechizing the Catholic laity. They also established schools on their lands.
Much of this land was put to use as plantations, the revenue from which financed the Jesuits' ministries. While the plantations were initially worked by indentured servants, as the institution of indentured servitude began to fade away in Maryland, African slaves replaced indentured servants as the primary workers on the plantations. Many of these slaves were gifted to the Jesuits, while others were purchased. The first record of slaves working Jesuit plantations in Maryland dates to 1711, but it is likely that there were slave laborers on the plantations a generation before then. When the Society of Jesus was suppressed worldwide by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, ownership of the plantations was transferred from the Jesuits' Maryland Mission to the newly established Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen. Several of the Jesuits' slaves unsuccessfully attempted to sue for their freedom in the courts in the 1790s.
By 1824, the Jesuit plantations totaled more than in the State of Maryland, and in eastern Pennsylvania. These consisted primarily of the plantations of White Marsh in Prince George's County, St. Inigoes and Newtown Manor in St. Mary's County, St. Thomas Manor in Charles County, and Bohemia Manor in Cecil County. The main crops grown were tobacco and corn.
Due to these extensive landholdings, the "Propaganda Fide" in Rome had come to view the American Jesuits negatively, believing they lived lavishly like manorial lords. In reality, by the early 19th century, the Jesuit plantations were in such a state of mismanagement that in 1820, the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, Tadeusz Brzozowski, sent Irish Jesuit Peter Kenney as a canonical visitor to review the operations of the Maryland Mission. In addition to becoming physically dilapidated, all but one of the plantations had fallen into debt. On some plantations, the majority of slaves did not work because they were too young or old. The condition of slaves on the plantations varied over time, as did the condition of the Jesuits living with them. Kenney found the slaves facing arbitrary discipline, a meager diet, pastoral neglect, and engaging in vice. By the 1830s, however, their material and religious conditions had improved considerably.
One of the Maryland Jesuits' institutions, Georgetown College (later known as Georgetown University), also rented slaves. While the school did own a small number of slaves over its early decades, its main relationship with slavery was the leasing of slaves to work on campus, a practice that continued past the 1838 slave sale.
Debate over the slavery question.
Beginning in 1800, there were instances of the Jesuit plantation managers freeing individual slaves or permitting slaves to purchase their freedom. As early as 1814, the trustees of the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen discussed manumitting all their slaves and abolishing slavery on the Jesuit plantations, though in 1820, they decided against universal manumission. In 1830, the new Superior General, Jan Roothaan, returned Kenney to the United States, specifically to address the question of whether the Jesuits should divest themselves of their rural plantations altogether, which by this time had almost completely paid down their debts.
While Roothaan decided in 1831, based on the advice of the Maryland Mission superior, Francis Dzierozynski, that the Jesuits should maintain and improve their plantations rather than sell them, Kenney and his advisors (Thomas Mulledy, William McSherry, and Stephen Dubuisson) wrote to Roothaan in 1832 about the growing public opposition to slavery in the United States, and strongly urged Roothaan to allow the Jesuits to gradually free their slaves. Mulledy in particular felt that the plantations were a drain on the Maryland Jesuits; he urged selling the plantations as well as the slaves, believing the Jesuits were only able to support either their estates or their schools in growing urban areas: Georgetown College in Washington, D.C., and St. John's College in Frederick, Maryland.
Mulledy and McSherry became increasingly vocal in their opposition to Jesuit slave ownership. While they continued to support gradual emancipation, they believed that this option was becoming increasingly untenable, as the Maryland public's concern grew about the expanding number of free blacks. The two feared that because the public would not accept additional manumitted blacks, the Jesuits would be forced to sell their slaves "en masse".
The Maryland Jesuits, having been elevated from a mission to the status of a province in 1833, held their first provincial congregation in 1835, where they considered again what to do with their plantations. The province was sharply divided, with the American-born Jesuits supporting a sale and the missionary European Jesuits opposing on the basis that it was immoral both to sell their patrimonial lands and to materially and morally harm the slaves by selling them into the Deep South, where they did not want to go. At the congregation, the senior Jesuits in Maryland voted six to four to proceed with a sale of the slaves, and Dubuisson submitted to the Superior General a summary of the moral and financial arguments on either side of the debate.
Meanwhile, in order to fund the province's operations, McSherry, as the first provincial superior of the Maryland Province, began selling small groups of slaves to planters in Louisiana in 1835, arguing that it was not possible to sell the slaves to local planters and that the buyers had assured him that they would not mistreat the slaves and would permit them to practice their Catholic faith.
The sale.
In October 1836, Roothaan officially authorized the Maryland Jesuits to sell their slaves, so long as three conditions were satisfied: the slaves were to be permitted to practice their Catholic faith, their families were not to be separated, and the proceeds of the sale had to be used to support Jesuits in training, rather than to pay down debts. McSherry delayed selling the slaves because their market value had greatly diminished as a result of the Panic of 1837, and because he was searching for a buyer who would agree to these conditions. In October of that year, Mulledy succeeded McSherry, who was dying, as provincial superior.
Mulledy quickly made arrangements to carry out the sale. He located two Louisiana planters who were willing to purchase the slaves: Henry Johnson, a former United States Senator and governor of Louisiana, and Jesse Batey. They were looking to buy slaves in the Upper South more cheaply than they could in the Deep South, and agreed to Mulledy's asking price of approximately $400 per person.
Terms of the agreement.
On June 19, 1838, Mulledy, Johnson, and Batey signed articles of agreement formalizing the sale. Johnson and Batey agreed to pay $115,000, equivalent to $ in 2023, over the course of ten years plus six percent annual interest. In exchange, they would receive 272 slaves from the four Jesuit plantations in southern Maryland, constituting nearly all of the slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits. Johnson and Batey were to be held jointly and severally liable and each additionally identified a responsible party as a guarantor. The slaves were also identified as collateral in the event that Johnson, Batey, and their guarantors defaulted on their payments.
The articles of agreement listed each of the slaves being sold by name. More than half were younger than 20, and nearly a third were not yet 10 years old. The agreement provided that 51 slaves would be sent to the port of Alexandria, Virginia, in order to be shipped to Louisiana. Upon receipt of these 51, Johnson and Batey were to pay the first $25,000. The first payment on the remaining $90,000 would become due after five years. The remainder of the slaves were accounted for in three subsequent bills of sale executed in November 1838, which specified that 64 would go to Batey's plantation named West Oak in Iberville Parish and 140 slaves would be sent to Johnson's two plantations, Ascension Plantation (later known as Chatham Plantation) in Ascension Parish and another in Maringouin in Iberville Parish.
Delivery of the slaves.
Anticipating that some of the Jesuit plantation managers who opposed the sale would encourage their slaves to flee, Mulledy, along with Johnson and a sheriff, arrived at each of the plantations unannounced to gather the first 51 slaves for transport. When Mulledy returned in November to gather the rest of the slaves, the plantation managers had their slaves flee and hide. The slaves Mulledy gathered were sent on the three-week voyage aboard the "Katherine Jackson," which departed Alexandria on November 13 and arrived in New Orleans on December 6. Most of the slaves who fled returned to their plantations, and Mulledy made a third visit later that month, where he gathered some of the remaining slaves for transport.
Not all of the 272 slaves intended to be sold to Louisiana met that fate. In total, only 206 are known to have been transported to Louisiana. Several substitutions were made to the initial list of those to be sold, and 91 of those initially listed remained in Maryland. There are several reasons many slaves were left behind. The Jesuits decided that the elderly would not be sold south and instead would be permitted to remain in Maryland. Other slaves were sold locally in Maryland so that they would not be separated from their spouses who were either free or owned by non-Jesuits, in compliance with Roothaan's order. Johnson allowed these slaves to remain in Maryland because he intended to return and try to buy their spouses as well. Some of the initial 272 slaves who were not delivered to Johnson were replaced with substitutes. An unknown number of slaves may also have run away and escaped transportation.
Aftermath.
Scandal and reproach.
Almost immediately, the sale, which was one of the largest slave sales in the history of the United States, became a scandal among American Catholics. Many Maryland Jesuits were outraged by