The sale of 272 slaves in 1838 rescued the College from crushing debt. The records describe runaways, harsh plantation conditions and the anguish voiced by some Jesuits over their participation in a system of forced servitude. Anyone can read what you share. From the 2016 Washington Ideas Forum. As part of an ongoing consideration to this atrocity Georgetown is seeking to rectify their prior actions and, in a speech delivered to descendants of the identified descendants delivered this message: Today the Society of Jesus, who helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned, said Rev. As early as the 1780s, Dr. Rothman found, they openly discussed the need to cull their stock of human beings. Peter Havermans wrote of an elderly woman who fell to her knees, begging to know what she had done to deserve such a fate, according to Robert Emmett Curran, a retired Georgetown historian who described eyewitness accounts of the sale in his research. [53], With work complete, in August 2015, university president John DeGioia sent an open letter to the university announcing the opening of the new student residence, which also related Mulledy's role in the 1838 slave sale after stepping down as president of the university. He has contacted a few, including Patricia Bayonne-Johnson, president of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society in Spokane, who is helping to track the Jesuit slaves with her group. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Now students, professors and alumni want to know what happened to those men and women and what the university will do moving forward. ). [27] Johnson allowed these slaves to remain in Maryland because he intended to return and try to buy their spouses as well. ", New England Historic Genealogical Society, "They thought Georgetown University's missing slaves were 'lost.' It would be better to suffer financial disaster than suffer the loss of our souls with the sale of the slaves, wrote the Rev. We have been here since the founding of this country, and we are a significant part of the American experience.. Of the sum, $8,000 was used to satisfy a financial obligation that,[23] following a long-running and contentious dispute, Pope Pius VII had previously determined the Maryland Jesuits owed to Archbishop Ambrose Marchal of Baltimore and his successors. [49] There was periodic and sometimes extensive coverage of both the sale and the Jesuits' slave ownership in various literature. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, during a morning Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope. Georgetown University Archives The Jesuits had sold off individual slaves before. We also hope to work with you on additional opportunities for engaging with those who many not be able to attend in-person gatherings. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html. As Black Americans as descendants of enslaved people we have always been told youll never know who you are. THEY NEED TO BE FOUND AND LINKED. [8] 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. Mismanaged and inefficient, the Maryland plantations no longer offered a reliable source of income for Georgetown College, which had been founded in 1789. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the colleges survival? [70], In 2019, undergraduate students at Georgetown voted in a non-binding referendum to impose a symbolic reparations fee of $27.20 per student. Father Mulledy took most of the down payment he received from the sale about $500,000 in todays dollars and used it to help pay off the debts that Georgetown had incurred under his leadership. Continue to scroll for fascinating Videos and Books to enhance your learning experience. WIKITREE PROTECTS MOST SENSITIVE INFORMATION BUT ONLY TO THE EXTENT STATED IN THE TERMS OF SERVICE AND PRIVACY POLICY. Were sorry registration isn't working smoothly for you. The university itself owes its existence to this history, said Adam Rothman, a historian at Georgetown and a member of a university working group that is studying ways for the institution to acknowledge and try to make amends for its tangled roots in slavery. (Courtesy of Ellender Library) In 1838, two priests who served as president of Georgetown University orchestrated the sale of 272 people to pay off debts at the school. (RNS) A genealogical association has launched a new website detailing the family histories of slaves who were sold to keep Catholic-run Georgetown University from bankruptcy in the 1800s. Many have been located; however, it is difficult to determine exactly how many were exploited by the University in this financial transaction. They worried that new owners might not allow the slaves to practice their Catholic faith. We ask readers to log in so that we can recognize you as a registered user and give you unrestricted access to our website. The plantation would be sold again and again and again, records show, but Corneliuss family remained intact. He was valued at $900. Start Free Trial Now Our membership program offers special benefits for just $99 per year: *Unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows, *FREE Two-Day Shipping on millions of items, *Unlimited, ad-free streaming of over a million songs and more Prime benefits, Join Amazon Prime Watch Thousands of Movies & TV Shows Anytime Start Free Trial Now. Georgetown and the College of the Holy Cross renamed buildings, and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States pledged to raise $100 million for the descendants of slaves owned by the Jesuits. The week also provided opportunities for members of the descendant community to connect with one another and with Jesuits through a private vigil on Monday night, a descendant-only dinner on Tuesday evening and tours of the Maryland plantation where their ancestors were enslaved. [46] Due to financial difficulties, Johnson sold half his property, including some of the slaves he had purchased in 1838, to Philip Barton Key in 1844. On November 14, 2015, DeGioia announced that he and the university's board of directors accepted the working group's recommendation, and would rename the buildings accordingly. Isaac Hawkins was the first enslaved person listed in the 1838 sale document. The enslaved were grandmothers and grandfathers, carpenters and blacksmiths, pregnant women and anxious fathers, children and infants, who were fearful, bewildered and despairing as they saw their families and communities ripped apart by the sale of 1838. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Join Amazon Prime Watch Thousands of Movies & TV Shows Anytime. If you login and register your print subscription number with your account, youll have unlimited access to the website. The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the term for the domestic trade of enslaved people within the United States that reallocated slaves across states during the Antebellum period.It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves was prohibited. He listened . Georgetown University in Washington, seen from across the Potomac River. Joseph Carberry, 1824 GSA29: Priscilla Queen petitions for her freedom, 1810 GSA30: Edward Queen petitions for his freedom, 1791 GSA31: Proceedings of the General Chapter at White Marsh, May 1789 GSA32: Fanny & her family, 1815 Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. His children and grandchildren also embraced the Catholic church. (Slaves were often donated by prosperous parishioners.) Georgetown has renamed one of its buildings Isaac Hawkins Hall named after the first enslaved on the list of the account of the sale. [29] The slaves Mulledy gathered were sent on the three-week voyage aboard the Katherine Jackson,[27] which departed Alexandria on November 13 and arrived in New Orleans on December 6. A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation A microcosm of the history of American slavery in a collection of the most important primary and secondary readings on slavery at Georgetown University and among the Maryland Jesuits Georgetown Universitys early history, closely tied to that of the Society of Jesus in Maryland, is a microcosm of the history of American slavery: the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the contradictions of liberty and slavery at the founding of the United States; the rise of the domestic slave trade to the cotton and sugar kingdoms of the Deep South in the nineteenth century; the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war; and slaverys persistent legacies of racism and inequality. Advertisement In Bayonne-Johnson's hands,. But few were lucky enough to escape. At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The date when the last slaves were freed in Texas 18 months after they had officially freed at the end of the Civil War. Dr. Rothman, the Georgetown historian, heard about Mr. Cellinis efforts and let him know that he and several of his students were also tracing the slaves. Thomas R. Murphy, a historian at Seattle University who has written a book about the Jesuits and slavery. [50], In 1981, historian Robert Emmett Curran presented at academic conferences a comprehensive research into the Maryland Jesuits' participation in slavery, and published this research in 1983. Georgetown Jesuits enslaved her ancestors. Only 206 of the 272 slaves were actually delivered because the Jesuits permitted the elderly and those with spouses living nearby and not owned by Jesuits to remain in Maryland. To see the posts, click here. While the school did own a small number of slaves over its early decades,[13] its main relationship with slavery was the leasing of slaves to work on campus,[14] a practice that continued past the 1838 slave sale. The notation betrayed no hint of the turmoil on board. But six years after he appeared in the census, and about three decades after the birth of his first child, he renewed his wedding vows with the blessing of a priest. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and the Catholic Church were among the largest slaveholding institutions in America. And she learned that Cornelius had worked the soil of a 2,800-acre estate that straddled the Bayou Maringouin. 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,[27] Ascension Plantation (later known as Chatham Plantation) in Ascension Parish and another in Maringouin in Iberville Parish. [2] As the sole ministers of Catholicism in Maryland at the time, the Jesuit estates became the centers of Catholicism. In all, the Jesuits sold 314 men, women and children over a 5-year period stretching from 1838 to 1843. But he said he could not stop thinking about the slaves, whose names had been in Georgetowns archives for decades. Maryland Province Archives at Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, A passage from the Rev. The university created the liturgy in partnership with members of the descendant community, the Archdiocese of Washington and the Society of Jesus in the United States. [42], Before the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, many slaves sold by the Jesuits changed ownership several times. He addressed his concerns to Father Mulledy, who three years earlier had returned to his post as president of Georgetown. We have committed to finding ways that members of the Georgetown and Descendant communities can be engaged together in efforts that advance racial justice and enable every member of our Georgetown community to confront and engage with Georgetowns history with slavery.. 2008 - 2023 INTERESTING.COM, INC. Today, the universitys leaders, students and alumni are grappling with how to confront that history. Remembrance Hall became Anne Marie Becraft Hall, after a free black woman who founded a school for black girls in the Georgetown neighborhood and later joined the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Alfred Francis Russell (1817-1884), 10th President of Liberia. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn) On Oct. 29, John J. DeGioia, president of Georgetown University, released a university-wide letter announcing that Georgetown would commit to raising around. That man, Thomas Mulledy, then the president of Georgetown University, had sold 272 slaves to pay off a massive debt strangling the university. As a result, he had to sell his property in the 1840s and renegotiate the terms of his payment. In total, there are 167 countries that still have slavery and around 46 million slaves today, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index.. The name had been passed down from generation to generation in her family. [45] Patrick and Woolfolk's slaves were then sold in July 1859 to Emily Sparks, the widow of Austin Woolfolk. The children with Mr.. This indispensable guide presents academic administrators and staff with advice on building an equity-minded campus culture, aligning strategic priorities and institutional missions to advance equity, understanding equity-minded data analysis, developing campus strategies for making excellence inclusive, and moving from a first-generation equity educator to an equity-minded practitioner. His owner, Mr. Batey, had died, and Cornelius appeared on the plantations inventory, which included 27 mules and horses, 32 hogs, two ox carts and scores of other slaves. The number of slaves transported to Louisiana (206) and the number left in Maryland (91) add up to 297, not 272, because some of the 272 slaves initially identified to be sold were substituted with replacements. It is better to prevent than to attempt to remedy. Photo by Claire Vail. Although modern slavery is not always easy to recognize, it continues to exist in nearly every country. Mr. Cellini is an unlikely racial crusader. Although the working group was established in August, it was student demonstrations at Georgetown in the fall that helped to galvanize alumni and gave new urgency to the administrations efforts. We also posted a 5 part mini-series on the 100th anniversary of one of the most horrific massacres in the history of America. Roughly two-thirds of the Jesuits former slaves including Cornelius and his family had been shipped to two plantations so distant from churches that they never see a Catholic priest, the Rev. We can't do it without youAmerica Media relies on generous support from our readers. This is not a disembodied group of people, who are nameless and faceless, said Mr. Cellini, 52, whose company, Briefcase Analytics, is based in Cambridge, Mass. [26] Johnson and Batey were to be held jointly and severally liable and each additionally identified a responsible party as a guarantor. [7] 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 debt. The presidents of Harvard University and Georgetown University discuss their institutions historic ties to slavery in a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. This coincided with a protest by a group of students against keeping Mulledy's and McSherry's names on the buildings the day before. Logging in will also give you access to commenting features on our website. What remains is what is owed to the descendants. Georgetown University (Daniel Slim/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) Article A genealogical organization launched a free website Wednesday to help those who want to learn more about the. In 2013, Georgetown began planning to renovate the adjacent Ryan, Mulledy, and Gervase Halls, which together served as the university's Jesuit residence until the opening of a new residence in 2003.
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list of slaves sold by georgetown university