Slavery at Georgetown College
The 1838 Slave Sale as a Jesuit Response to Slavery Between Rome and American Acceptance
University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Katharina Kunze Supervisor: George Blaustein
Abstract
Recently, much public and scholarly attention has been paid to how universities have historically benefitted from and participated in slave trade. One example for this is Georgetown University, where the Jesuits running the university sold 272 people to Louisiana in 1838. The sale was a point of contention amongst Jesuits in Maryland and abroad for several years, before it was finally decided. This thesis is concerned with the arguments in this dispute and the political and religious implications of the decision. Using Joseph Miller’s approach of contextualizing slaving as a historical strategy, I explore the web of political, religious, and economic factors that the sale was embedded in. Transatlantic tensions between Jesuits come to light, between ultramontane Jesuits in Europe and American Jesuits in Maryland. The American Jesuits were divided amongst themselves, however. A new group of American Jesuits who strove for American acceptance and advocated for shifting resources towards the urban centers was facing a branch of established Maryland Jesuits who came from a long slave-holding tradition. With the decision to sell the slaves, this new brand of American Catholicism prevailed against opposition at home and ultramontane influences in the United States and abroad. When analyzing the web of shifting power dynamics surrounding the sale, the decision to sell the Jesuit slaves in 1838 emerges as a strategy of emancipation from Rome and a shift in power dynamics towards American Catholicism.
Contents
Introduction ...... 1
Setting the Stage – Jesuits in Maryland ...... 8
“Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?” - The 1838 Slave Sale ...... 16
In Fear of a Papal Conspiracy - Protestant Anti-Catholicism and Abolitionism in Maryland . 32
Strategies of Emancipation ...... 45
Conclusion ...... 51
Bibliography ...... 53 1
Introduction
In recent years, many universities have begun to investigate their historical ties with slavery, Georgetown University among them. In October 2019, the university announced that it would raise $400,000 a year to benefit the descendants of the 272 enslaved people who were sold by the college in 1838.1 Many questions have been raised about the implications of this sale and the responsibility the university bears today. One topic of discussion has also been, however, what led the Jesuits who were running the university to sell these 272 people in the first place. Many of the newspaper articles that were published in connection with the slave sale named economic necessity as the sole factor leading to the sale.2 While financial pressure undoubtedly played an important role, it becomes clear that the circumstances surrounding the sale were a lot more complex than mere financial difficulties. The Jesuits who debated the sale navigated a complex web of political, religious, and economic circumstances. In this thesis, I attempt to contextualize the sale and detangle the layers and components of this web. In doing that, shifts in a transatlantic power dynamic amongst Jesuits come to light. Following along these shifts, I argue that the sale can be interpreted as an act of Jesuit emancipation from Rome and one of Americanization for the American Jesuits in Maryland. This new “brand” of American Catholicism reacted to Protestant nativism at the time, and to the fear of a Catholic conspiracy to undermine American values. The sale marked a shift in power dynamics in a transatlantic relationship with Rome, solving the conflict of a potential sale according to the political and economic interests of the American Jesuits, not their continental counterparts. The methodological framework for this thesis is based on Joseph Miller’s concept of historicizing and contextualizing slaving as a historical strategy instead of thinking of slavery as a static institution. In his book The Problem of Slavery as History he encouraged historians to understand and interpret acts of saving as strategical actions performed by humans in
1 Rachel L. Swarns, “Is Georgetown’s $400,000-a-Year Plan to Aid Slave Descendants Enough?” The New York Times, October 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/us/georgetown-slavery-reparations.html. 2 The Guardian wrote: “Students at Georgetown University in Washington DC have voted in favour of paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved people who were sold by Jesuit founders to pay off college debts.” (Pengelly, “Georgetown Students Vote to Pay Reparations for Slaves Sold by University,” The Guardian, April 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/15/georgetown-students-reparations-vote-slaves- sold-by-university) Family Tree Magazine wrote: “[…] when the school ran desperately short of funds, the priests sold Georgetown’s slaves to a Louisiana Congressman and one of his fellow sugar plantation owners.” (Jane Morton, “Remembering the GU272: The Georgetown Slave Sale,” Family Tree Magazine, January 8, 2020, https://www.familytreemagazine.com/premium/georgetown-slaves-gu272/#) 2 distinct historical contexts.3 Since I base my analysis in the last two chapters of this thesis on Miller, I elaborate on his method and arguments in more detail in chapter three. For the purpose of this introduction, it is most important to emphasize Miller’s focus on trying to contextualize acts of slaving from the perspective of the individual performing it. As Miller put it: “We must put ourselves in others’ places, whether or not we like them or what they did.”4 He also emphasizes that understanding and presenting dilemmas of the past does by no means imply an endorsement of the actions that are contextualized.5 The historiographical starting point for this thesis was Craig Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. It was published by the historian in 2013 and offered the first comprehensive analysis of how slavery and racism were intertwined with the founding, development, and intellectual culture of America’s institutions of higher education. He discussed how the founding of American colleges was closely interlinked with the slave economies of the colonial world. He also showed how “scientific” theories about race coming from the academy supported hierarchies of power. Wilders argued that “the academy never stood apart from American slavery – in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage.”6 It made an important contribution to the scholarly debate since it was the “first comprehensive monograph on the linkages between race, slavery, and higher education.”7 While there has been scholarship on particular institutions or shorter time periods, Wilder’s book “stand outs from previous scholarship in both its range and its daring.”8 When we move away from the concept of slavery as a static institution, however, we have to move beyond looking at the slave sale at Georgetown University as yet another example of how a university was financed through slavery and thereby benefitted from human bondage. While this is undoubtedly true, it does not help to historicize this particular event in its unique dynamics and contexts. It was not the university as an abstract institution that sold the slaves, but the Jesuits running the farms which in turn financed the university. This thesis therefore builds on secondary scholarship concerned with the history of American
3 Joseph Calder Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 18. 4 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 9. 5 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 10. 6 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 11. 7 Frederick Bell, “Race, Class, and Education in Early America,” Education's Histories, June 29, 2015, http://www.educationshistories.org/race-power-education-early-america/. 8 Bell, “Race, Class, and Education in Early America.” 3
Catholicism, Jesuits in Maryland, Anti-Catholicism in America, Catholic teachings on slavery, as well as biographical accounts of the actors involved in the debate surrounding the slave sale. John T. McGreevy published Catholicism and American Freedom in 2003 and the book was praised to be “a splendid achievement that integrates Catholicism into American social, political, and cultural history more firmly than has ever been done before” by Philip Gleason, another leading scholar in the field.9 It is concerned with “the interplay between Catholic and American ideas of freedom.”10 In this intellectual history, McGreevy used different topics such as education and slavery to show how Catholic and mainstream American positions often differed drastically. McGreevy emphasized the international aspect of American Catholicism with liberal influences coming from Europe as well as conservative Jesuits and other Catholics who fled the revolutions of 1848. While McGreevy’s focus here lay on the years leading up to the Civil War and figures such as Orestes Brown, the transnational influences he described are also highly relevant to this thesis.11 When the Jesuits at Georgetown debated whether to sell their slaves, keep them, or set them free, they were acting in a climate of rising nativism and anti-Catholicism. W. Jason Wallace published Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelism, 1835- 1860 in 2010.12 The book is relevant to this thesis in at least two ways. Wallace showed how antebellum Protestant abolitionists saw slaveholders and Catholics as threats to a Protestant national identity that they were establishing. This helps to contextualize anti-Catholicism as an historical strategy that Jesuits were reacting to. Since Wallace portrayed northern evangelicals in his book, it provides background to illustrate the nuances of anti-Catholicism and abolitionism in Maryland as a border state. The second way in which Wallace’s study is useful to this thesis is in its methodology. Wallace based his discussion on the analysis of antebellum Protestant journals. I will employ a similar method in the third chapter of this thesis by analyzing a Protestant journal from Maryland, the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine.
9 Philip Gleason, “Reviewed Work(s): Catholicism and American Freedom: A History by John T. McGreevy,” Church History 72, no. 4 (2003): 910-911, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009640700097699). Philip Gleason is an authority in the field of the history of American Catholicism and American Catholic higher education. One of his major publications on the matter was Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10 John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 14. 11 Orestes Brown was an intellectual who converted to Catholicism in the 1840s and became an influential Catholic voice during the following years. For more information on Brown, see: McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom. 12 William Jason. Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). 4
Maura Jane Farrelly gave a good overview of the history of anti-Catholicism in Anti- Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 which was published in 2017. She argued that Catholicism was perceived as a “threat to national identity, individual liberty, personal salvation, and the stability of free government” throughout American history.13 According to Farrelly, “Catholicism was at all times seen as antithetical to freedom,” which was seen as “the foundation of ‘American’ identity.”14 Five years earlier, she had elaborated on the relationship between Catholicism, the idea of freedom, and slavery in the article “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism.”15 Here, she emphasized that from the 1780s until the 1830s, Catholics in the United States were generally comfortable with republicanism and individualism, contrary to their European counterparts. With the large influx of ultramontane, Irish immigrants, this relationship became more complicated. Farrelly argued that the fact that American Catholics were comfortable with American liberty and accepted by their neighbors was largely due to the fact that most Catholics at the time lived in slave holding states, “where republicanism was based not on individualism, but on the order and mutual obligation that were defined by race-based slavery.”16 Her main argument was that American Catholicism was actually “born in a slaveholding context” and should be regarded as such.17 This thesis builds on Farrelly’s observations that Catholic slave holding in Maryland was a central aspect in defining the relationship between Catholics and their American identity. Zooming in further on the history of the Jesuits in Maryland, Robert Emmett Curran and Thomas J. Murphy stand out as authorities in the field. Thomas Murphy published Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 in 2001.18 Murphy gave a comprehensive account of Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland and mapped out common Jesuit positions towards slavery at the time. He discussed how by the nineteenth century many Jesuits began to oppose slavery. He argued that the slaves were not freed by the Jesuits in 1838 because abolition was so strongly connected with anti-Catholicism. He further made the argument that they were finally sold because of rising immigration and the shift to
13 Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xi. 14 Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, xii. 15 Maura Jane Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 1 (2012): 69-100, https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2012.0005. 16 Maura Jane Farrelly, “Paper: American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism (125th Annual Meeting (January 6-9, 2011)” (American Historical Society), accessed May 20, 2020, https://aha.confex.com/aha/2011/webprogram/Paper6890.html. 17 Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism,” 100. 18 Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 (New York: Routledge, 2018). 5 urban centers. This thesis builds on Murphy’s discussion of the slave sale but adds the argument that the sale also presented a shift in transatlantic power dynamics towards a more Americanized Catholicism. Robert Emmett Curran published Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 in 2012, which is structured in essay form.19 Especially the first half on Maryland is relevant to this thesis, since it provides context and information on topics such as the slave sale itself and the Maréchal dispute. Patrick Hayes pointed out in his review that the book should not be “considered the last word on these subjects” but rather a “spur to further research,” which is how I attempt to treat it in this thesis.20 In this thesis, I apply Miller’s approach of contextualizing human actions to explore the slaving which occurred in the slave sale of 1838 as a historical strategy of adaptation and emancipation on the part of the American Jesuits. This approach allows us to dive deep into the web of political, economic, and religious arguments that surrounded the sale. This thesis therefore attempts to historicize the slave sale as thoroughly as possible to better understand the motives behind it and its implications. This is done on several levels. First, I explore the historical background of Jesuits in Maryland and the relationship they had with their superiors in Rome. The chapter explores the administrative particularities as well as the self-image of the Maryland Province as an American as well as a Catholic administrative and ideological body. In addition to that I look at the lives of two ultramontane Jesuits from Europe, who would go on to vehemently oppose the sale, to get an insight into their world, which had been marked by revolutions and upheavals. If we want to understand the slave sale in its historical context, a previous dispute between Maryland Jesuits and the Catholic Church in Rome concerning a pension for archbishop Ambrose Maréchal also has to be considered. This dispute with its political implications is therefore also covered in the first chapter. The second chapter then maps out the discussions amongst the Jesuits in Maryland and abroad concerning the slave sale itself. Drawing mainly on primary sources from the Georgetown Slavery Archive, I explore how different parties in the conflict used political, economic, and religious arguments to argue in favor or against the sale.21 European Jesuits argued mainly against the sale, as did traditional Jesuits from Maryland, although they did so
19 Robert Emmett. Curran, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 (Catholic University of America Press, 2012). 20 Patrick J. Hayes, “Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805-1915 by Robert Emmett Curran (Review),” American Catholic Studies 124, no. 1 (2013): 84-85, https://doi.org/10.1353/acs.2013.0002. 21 Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 23, 2020, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/. 6 for different reasons. Representatives of a newer “brand” of American Catholicism argued in favor of the sale and ultimately prevailed. Since both sides based many of their arguments on the “morality” of slavery, this chapter is also concerned with the official Catholic teaching on the issue of slavery up to the 1830s. When looking at the discussions about the slave sale, it becomes clear that especially American Jesuits were concerned about the political climate of rising nativism and anti- Catholicism at the time. The third chapter therefore extends Miller’s methodology of contextualizing slaving as a historical strategy by looking at Protestant anti-Catholicism in Maryland at the time. Using the Protestant Journal Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine as a case study, anti-Catholicism is explored as a historical strategy of defining a Protestant national identity.22 Protestant anti-Catholicism and abolitionism are often mention in one breath. Analyzing the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine shows, however, that their anti-Catholicism was a lot more vehement than their abolitionism. As a main fear it was stated in the articles that a “papal conspiracy” with its roots in Europe would try to undermine and overthrow the American government. The suspicion that Catholics in the United States were controlled from abroad, rather than loyal to their country, was deep-rooted. The last chapter returns to the slave sale itself, and the interpretation of the slaving as a historical strategy. The sale can be interpreted as a strategy to adapt to the political climate of anti-Catholicism and nativism at the time. Since one of the main Protestant fears was that of foreign intervention and control, the Jesuits emancipating themselves from Rome would have been one of the most effective ways of adapting to political circumstances and emphasizing their “Americanness.” In the last chapter, I therefore explore the interpretation of the slave sale as an act of emancipation from Rome. Next to that, I put a different form of intellectual emancipation from Rome with the emerging tradition of liberal Catholicism. As an example, I use Félicité de Lamennais and his essay “Modern Slavery.”23 Lamennais followed a different path of emancipation, with an emphasis on personal liberty and the condemnation of slavery. In his writings, arguments from both sides of the dispute about the sale can be traced, however. We will never know for sure, what the intentions and motives were that led the Maryland Jesuits to sell their slaves in 1838. In this thesis, I attempt to reconstruct the web of political, religious, and economic factors that this decision was embedded in. While the larger ideological and political currents of the time are relatively easy to identify, the water gets
22 Robert Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835 and 1837. 23 Félicité Robert de Lamennais and W. J. Linton, Modern Slavery (London: J. Watson, 1840). 7 muddier the closer we get to the sale itself. Ultimately, we can only speculate about personal intentions and the moral imagination of individual actors. The endeavor is worthwhile and illuminating nonetheless since it allows for a detailed analysis and historical reconstruction of the factors leading to the sale of these 272 people, instead of thinking about it as an abstract act of slaving performed by a just as abstract institution.
8
Setting the Stage – Jesuits in Maryland
If we wish to understand the circumstances under which the sale took place in 1838, it is crucial to first trace back the origins of the Jesuit order in Maryland. They were the primary Catholic group settling in Maryland in the 17th century and held slaves on their farms and plantations from the beginning. With the profits from these farms they financed missionary and educational endeavors such as Georgetown College, which would later become Georgetown University. The suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 had long lasting effects on Catholicism in America. The Jesuits, who had been the dominant Catholic denomination in colonial British America, formed the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland in 1792 as a direct reaction to the suppression of the order. The fear was that Rome would take possession of Jesuit property in Maryland.24,25 In order to avoid this, John Carroll established the Select Body of the Clergy in 1783, which would eventually turn into the Corporation. The Select Body was responsible for managing the Jesuits’ estates which in turn supported the Jesuits financially.26 John Carroll served as the first bishop and archbishop in the United States and founded Georgetown College.27 The Corporation is a perfect example for the emerging republican American tradition in Catholicism that could be observed in the 1780s and which was championed by Carroll. He supported a division of church and state and believed that a right to property was central to republican values.28 In 1782, Carroll repudiated the “idea of any Roman authorities ever getting possession of a sixpence of our property here; and, if any of our friends could be weak enough to deliver any real estate into their hands, or attempt to subject it to their authority, our civil government would be called upon to wrest it again out of their dominion.”29 Carroll expected this arrangement to be temporal. He thought that once the Society of Jesus would be restored, the Select Body of the Clergy would no longer be necessary, and the Jesuit provincial superior would take over control of the corporation. This did not happen,
24 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 15. 25 Jesuit property was held by laymen or individual Jesuits since it was not allowed by Maryland law for ecclesiastical entities to hold property. (Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 15) 26 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 16. 27 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 11. 28 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 16. 29 Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America Colonial and Federal. Documents (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 1037. 9 however. When the Society was restored in 1814, the trustees of the Corporation continued to be in control of the property.30 These events created a web of power, loyalties, and responsibilities woven between a European Catholicism which looked at Rome for guidance, and a tradition of republican Catholicism in Maryland whose members were highly aware of their rights as American citizens. Jesuits immigrating from Europe had to navigate this web of everchanging power relations. A dispute between the Jesuits in Maryland and the Catholic Church on the matter of a pension for archbishop Maréchal brought these difficulties to light. What is more, we can only try to understand the slave sale from 1838 in its full complexity, if we are aware of how it grew out of the Jesuit dispute with Maréchal. The dispute with archbishop Maréchal centered around the of whether the Corporation was obliged to pay him a stipend the way they had done to John Carroll and Leonard Neale, his predecessors.31 While Maréchal argued that they were, the Corporation disagreed. They argued that Carroll and Neale had received their stipends as former Jesuits and because they had been members of the Select Body. Since Maréchal was neither of those things, they refuted his claim and offered him a stipend which would end after three years. Maréchal appealed this decision in 1820 without success.32,33 The dispute left American soil for the first time at this point. Maréchal asked the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome for help. He explained the situation and asked for the Jesuit plantation White Marsh since he argued that this plantation had been given to the Church, not only the Jesuits. The appeal did not have the desired effect, however, and Robert Gradwell, who represented Maréchal in Rome, was not successful either. Maréchal therefore decided to take his fight to Rome himself.34 Since the Jesuits in Maryland and Maréchal were unable to come to an agreement, the superior general of the Society, Luigi Fortis, wrote to Propaganda that if they wanted the Jesuits in Maryland to hand over property to Maréchal, the pope would have to order them to
30 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 16. 31 He based his claim on the fact that Carroll had wished the stipend to be extended to his successors. He also referred to the Carroll-Molyneux agreement in which it had been stated that the stipend should continue to be paid to Carroll’s successors. Maréchal further argued that the property of the Corporation should be used to support all Roman Catholic clergymen of Maryland, not just Jesuits. (Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 17) 32 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 17. 33 Maréchal was a Sulpician, or a member of the “Society of the Priests of the Seminary of St. Sulpice.” Another Catholic order, they established their first mission in the United States in 1790, after the Jesuits had established their first mission in 1634. By 1790, there were only 35 priests however, catering to a Catholic population of 30,000. Therefore, the Superior General of the Sulpicians at the time, Jacques-André Emery, proposed to Carroll to establish a Sulpician mission. (“Beginnings,” The Sulpicians, Province of the United States, accessed June 23, 2020, http://sulpicians.org/who-we-are/beginnings/) 34 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 19. 10 do so. Pius VII did just that in 1822 by issuing the brief Ad Futuram Rei Memoriam, in which he ordered the Maryland Jesuits to hand over White Marsh to Maréchal by the end of the year. The mission superior, Charles Neale, protested this decision fiercely. Neale wrote to Anthony Kohlmann that “the laws of the country do not permit our property, or the property of any citizen, to be taken away from us or him by the decision of any foreign court. The General himself, I believe, has not the power to do it.”35 The Maryland Jesuits insisted on a separation between religious and civic affairs and felt that they could not hand over the property in good conscience since they had been entrusted with it. They argued that the property was theirs as American citizens and not as Jesuits and Rome therefore could not force them to give it up. They also emphasized that the American government would not appreciate a foreign entity meddling in their civic affairs.36 The next phase of the conflict went as high up as the United States government. Maréchal was asked by the Congregation to ensure that the American government would approve if the Jesuits were to hand over property to him. This was not successful, however. John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State at the time, was not impressed with the foreign intervention. Daniel Brent, who was the chief clerk of the Department of State, warned Maréchal not to pursue the matter of transferring property any further.37,38 He made himself very clear by stating that “the government of the United States, […] can never view with indifference any future appeals to such foreign states, touching the administration of temporal concerns under its own jurisdiction.”39 Not only did Maréchal not receive the support he had hoped for from the State Department. The papal brief was also published in the Protestant Daily National Journal and received fierce criticism for foreign intervention in American affairs. The pressure from the public and the government led Maréchal to abandon his claim to White Marsh and ask for a pension instead.40 In 1823, Francis Dzierozynski followed Charles Neale as the mission superior for the Jesuits in America. He would play a central role in this conflict, as well as later on in the discussions surrounding the slave sale. Fortis thought it essential to have a non-American superior in the mission to finally reach an agreement with Maréchal. He also insisted that a solution could only be reached if the trustees of the corporation signed over their property to
35 Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America Colonial and Federal, 1037. 36 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 22. 37 Brent was a Catholic, related to the Carrolls and good friends with the Neales. (Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 23) 38 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 24. 39 Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America Colonial and Federal, 1072. 40 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 24. 11 the Society so that the superior would be in control of it. This happened in 1825 when the trustees signed a document stating that they could not administer the property of the Jesuits without the consent of the Superior General. 41 This was the beginning of the end for the republican Catholicism in Maryland as it had been introduced by Carroll when he had established the Corporation. A suggested compromise with Maréchal, consisting of a lifelong pension of 1000$, fell through in the meantime. The Maryland Jesuits feared that this would lead to their economic collapse and draw criticism from the American government for the foreign intervention from Rome. To avoid public scandal, the Society finally accepted that the Maryland Jesuits would not pay Maréchal. The Society in Italy agreed instead to pay Maréchal a lifelong stipend 800$ and extend this arrangement to his successors. Maréchal died after receiving two of these payments.42 The issue was raised again in 1835. By then, Samuel Eccleston had become the Archbishop of Baltimore and was receiving the stipend. Jan Roothaan, who was the new superior general at the time, ordered McSherry to settle the matter for good. Ironically, he suggested to offer Eccleston a farm, which Maréchal had been fiercely denied only fifteen years previously. They finally agreed in 1838 to pay Eccleston 8000$ as a final settlement. This sum would be paid with the profits the Jesuits made by selling their slaves. In an ironical twist, many of those slaves worked at White Marsh, the very same plantation Maréchal had initially demanded.43 In this field of constantly shifting power dynamics and reactions to changing circumstances, Francis Dzierozynski, as well as Stephen Dubuisson, are interesting case studies of Jesuits who had been trained in Europe and emigrated to the United States, thereby serving as a bridge between two worlds. They brought with them an outsider’s perspective on Catholicism in America in the 1820s and 1830s while at the same time being intimately involved in decisions that shaped American Catholicism. Dzierozynski was born in Poland in 1779 and received a traditional, European Jesuit education. While the Society of Jesus had been suppressed in most countries in 1773, this had not been the case in Prussia and Russia. Polish and Lithuanian Jesuits, who had been incorporated into Russia, were therefore able to maintain the Byelorussian (White Russian) Province. These Jesuits were the “custodians of Jesuit traditions and life” during the period of
41 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 26. 42 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 27. 43 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 28. 12 suppression, as the Jesuit historian Kuzniewski argued.44 The province became a center for Jesuit education and Jesuits around the world were educated there and later identified with the province. This had effects in the United States as well, when five former Jesuits were officially allowed in 1805 to affiliate with the White Russian province.45 The historian Joseph Osuch even made the argument that the “American Society of Jesus is the daughter of the Polish Society of Jesus” and drew parallels between the political situation in the United States of America and Polish Jesuits living in Russia who felt to be part of the “United States of Poland.”46 After teaching in St. Petersburg, Dzierozynski was sent to the United States in 1820. He went there with instructions by the new Jesuit father general, Aloysius Fortis, to “maintain the spiritual and juridical character of the Society, strengthen the training of young Jesuits, and see to the efficient operation of Jesuit schools.”47 When he arrived at Georgetown, Dzierozynski found the American Jesuits divided on the question whether the traditional Maryland planter-lifestyle should be continued or whether a more progressive urban approach should be followed. Kuzniewski described how Dzierozynski experienced nativism from American Jesuits who were suspicious of European Jesuits coming from the outside with reform suggestions.48 The complicated dynamics become apparent here: Jesuits in America were confronted with nativism from Protestants who were suspicious of foreign intervention. American Jesuits meanwhile were suspicious of European Jesuits whose presence heightened the nativism they experienced through Protestants and reacted in turn with nativist sentiments towards their European counterparts. Dzierozynski is a good example of how European Jesuits were perceived by many native-born American Jesuits when they were sent to the United States and were given important posts. Even two years after Dzierozynski’s arrival, Benedict Fenwick, who was president of Georgetown College at the time, complained bitterly to authorities in Rome that Dzierozynski was “certainly too little acquainted with the country as yet and too ignorant of its language to act as Superior.”49
44 Anthony J. Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” The Catholic Historical Review 78, no. 1 (January 1992): 51-73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25023700, 53. 45 Curran, Shaping American Catholicism, 32. 46 Joseph C. Osuch, “Patriarch of the American Jesuits,” Polish American Studies 17, no. 3/4 (July 1960): 92-100, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20147550, 97. 47 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 54. 48 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 55. 49 Fenwick to Fortis, June 22, 1823, Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, Maryland Province, 2164, quoted in Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 55. 13
While Dzierozynski was not impressed with the republican mindset of some of the American Jesuits at first, he quickly began to adapt to a certain degree. He studied the English language and became an American citizen in 1828 – using the naturalization laws that nativists criticized so fiercely. 50 The legend said that he was friends with John C. Calhoun, who had a “fondness for talking metaphysics with the learned Russian father.”51 Kuzniewski argued that Dzierozynski even adopted American views on matters such as the proper relationship between Church and State.52 This became especially apparent in how Dzierozynski handled the dispute with Maréchal. He succeeded Charles Neale as superior in 1823, partly because Fortis thought that a non-American superior was the only way to a possible solution of the conflict with Maréchal. In the end, however, Dzierozynski avoided an initial payment made by the Maryland Jesuits with the help of the Secretary of State, in other words the American government. Kuzniewski pointed out that Dzierozynski had become “assimilated enough to accept the American position on the distinct realms of ecclesiastical and civil authority.”53 Dzierozynski passed his position as superior of the mission on to Peter Kenney in 1830.54 He continued, however, to be an important figure in the Maryland mission and at Georgetown College. Over the course of his life, he became more and more accustomed to American customs, for which he sometimes drew criticism by other European Jesuit immigrants. He lost touch with most of his Polish acquaintances over time.55 Emmett Current argued that Dzierozynski had “come to appreciate the Ignatian principle of adaptation according to circumstances.”56 The Ignatian principle of adaptation goes back to Ignatius Loyola who founded the Society of Jesus in 1534. His influential text The Spiritual Exercises was crucial in defining the spiritual identity of the Jesuits.57 One central aspect of the Ignatian spirituality which was
50 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 56. 51 James Fairfax McLaughlin, College Days at Georgetown (Philadelphia, 1899), 72-73, quoted in Kuzniewski, Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States, 56. 52 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 57. 53 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 62. 54 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 67. 55 Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 71. 56 Robert Emmett Curran, Troubled Nation, Troubled Province, 1833-1880 (Unpublished MS, n.d.), quoted in Kuzniewski, “Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,” 71. 57 Platt, R. Eric. Sacrifice and Survival: Identity, Mission, and Jesuit Higher Education in the American South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014, 18. 14 expressed in the Exercises was the necessity to adapt to various circumstances.58 Dzierozynski moved between worlds and ultimately ended up assimilating to a certain degree. Stephen Dubuisson is another figure who was “bridging two worlds”, as Ruth Cline put it.59 While Dzierozynski assimilated more and more over time, however, Dubuisson continued to hold strong ties to Europe in several ways. Dubuisson was born as an aristocrat in an age of revolution. He would grow up to be a part of the ultramontane movement which opposed the liberal ideas that fueled the revolutions in Europe and elsewhere. Dubuisson was born in 1786 in Saint-Domingue where his parents held slaves. The family emigrated to France in 1791, just before the slave uprising in Haiti. In France, however, the family was facing another revolution.60 Cornelius Buckley argued in his biography on Dubuisson that facing “the horror of Revolution in his adopted home” left a “permanent scar of fear and unarticulated anxiety […] branded on Stephen Dubuisson’s psyche.”61 Dubuisson joined the Jesuits after Napoleon’s fall against the will of his family. He joined the Society just after it had been restored in 1814 when he was 29. He arrived at Georgetown shortly after. He too, was instantly caught in the struggle that was going on between American and continental Jesuits. Cline described that the faculty was torn between educating “future republicans or future priests”, with the traditionalists prevailing in the 1820s. Dubuisson was made a prefect and was supposed to enforce greater discipline. To say that he was disliked would be an understatement, several students even plotted to kill him.62 Dubuisson was a successful missionary and preacher in the region but failed in his short term as president of Georgetown College in 1825. He stayed in the position for only seven months before he suffered a nervous breakdown. He became, however, an important advisor for Jan Roothaan on matters concerning the American mission.63 He was active in raising funds for the mission in American in Italy and France, especially with the Leopold Foundation which had been founded in Vienna in 1828. Dubuisson went on several trips to Europe in the 1830s and proved to be an effective fundraiser for the Maryland mission.64 He was so successful that it started to worry Roothaan.
58 George P. Schner, Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984), 96. 59 Ruth Harwood Cline, “Bridging Two Worlds: Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, Emigre Missionary,” The Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 4 (2004): 675-696, https://doi.org/10.1353/cat.2005.0017. 60 Cline, “Bridging Two Worlds: Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, Emigre Missionary,” 677. 61 Cornelius M. Buckley, Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, S.J. (1786-1864) and the Reform of the American Jesuits (Lanham: University Press of America, 2013), 8. 62 Cline, “Bridging Two Worlds: Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, Emigre Missionary,” 679. 63 Cline, “Bridging Two Worlds: Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, Emigre Missionary,” 681. 64 Cline, “Bridging Two Worlds: Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, Emigre Missionary,” 688. 15
Roothaan was aware that increasing donations to Jesuits from abroad were heightening Protestant distrust in the United States. He warned Dubuisson that “everything Jesuits do is watched.”65 Indeed, the efforts of the Leopold Society were described as a conspiracy in the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine in 1837. The journal’s editor Breckinridge wrote about the Leopold Society that “it is not possible to ascertain how much money is annually contributed by the papists of Europe, to Romanise the people of the United States.”66 The Protestant fear of Catholic foreign influences in the United States will be explored in more detail in the third chapter on the example of the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine. Both Dzierozynski as well as Dubuisson were perceived to be outsiders who did not fit into the new, American brand of Catholicism. This was also mirrored in the debate surrounding the slave sale. However, both ended up adapting, in varying degrees, to their new circumstances.
65 Buckley, Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, 200, quoted in Catherine O’Donnell, “Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, S.J. (1786–1864) and the Reform of the American Jesuits, Written by Cornelius Michael Buckley,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2, no. 1 (2015): 123-126, https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00201005-06, 126. 66 Robert Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 213. 16
“Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?”67 - The 1838 Slave Sale
In 1838, the Jesuits in the Maryland Province sold 272 enslaved people to Louisiana. At the time, they were amongst the biggest slave- and landowners in the region. Especially when we look at the sale in connection with the Maréchal dispute and the need to raise the money for the final settlement, one might easily reduce the sale to a reaction to economic pressures. Financial concerns were undoubtedly an important factor in the decision, especially since the missions and plantations which in turn financed colleges such as, most prominently, Georgetown College, were struggling with lack of funds and pressing debt.68 Matters were not that simple, however. The more we zoom in on the sale, the more entangled the web of political, economic, and religious arguments becomes. Throughout the discussions surrounding the sale, different interests within the Jesuit order became apparent. European Jesuits met young American priests as well as Jesuits coming from an old Maryland tradition. A field of tension emerged, balancing influences that were European and American, religious and republican, urban and rural, traditional and progressive. It became apparent that the younger American priests, Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry in particular, pushed for an American Catholicism which focused on education in urban centers and was very much aware of the political pressures the Jesuits were facing at the time. They were strongly opposed by European Jesuits who emphasized theological and moral arguments and did not seem particularly concerned about American political consequences. They were also opposed by traditional Jesuits from Maryland who did not appreciate the changing economic realities and the shift towards the urban centers. Mulledy and McSherry ultimately got their will with the slave sale in 1838. Leading up to the sale, however, a chapter in history began which would end in a “morality play worthy of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”69 The following chapter will map out the discussions amongst Jesuits in Maryland and Europe about whether selling the slaves was economically and politically advisable and morally feasible. It is illuminating to first explore the Catholic moral framework on the matter of slavery at the time, to better understand what a “morally correct” solution to the problem would have been from a Catholic perspective.
67 Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, “"Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?": The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed March 16, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/95. 68 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 41. 69 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 51. 17
As McGreevy pointed out, many Catholic intellectuals at the time accepted slavery as “a legitimate, if tragic, institution.”70 McGreevy pointed towards a pervasive fear of liberal individualism and social disorder that was prevalent especially during the nineteenth century. He also gave the anti-Catholicism of many abolitionists as a reason for Catholic opposition to slavery.71 John Maxwell traced the position of the Catholic Church on slavery in his book Slavery and the Catholic Church. He showed that since the sixth century and right up until the twentieth century it has been common Catholic teaching that the social, economic and legal institution of slavery is morally legitimate provided that the master’s title of ownership is valid and provided that the slave is properly looked after and cared for, both materially and spiritually.72
A central idea was that while people were created equal, there was still a “hierarchy of merit and rulership, in that the differences between classes of men have arisen as a result of sin and are ordained by divine justice,” as Gregory I stated in 600.73 Maxwell pointed out that throughout its history, the Catholic church made a difference between “just” and “unjust” slavery, condemning unjust enslavement of non-Christian and Christian Indians in 1741, for instance.74 In 1839, pope Gregory XVI would condemn transatlantic slave trade but not declare domestic slavery as such to be immoral. He would not contradict the general approval of “just slave trade” and “just slavery,” where masters fulfilled their duties.75 Catholic teaching made a difference between chattel-slavery which was unjust and ameliorated slavery which was just and therefore morally legitimate. The idea was that with chattel-slavery, the master owned the slave as his personal property. In “just Christian slavery,” the master owned only the work of their slaves and what they produced. In this ameliorated slavery, the slaves “alienate their work and activity into the ownership of their master” who are then able to use it as they please in this supposedly just form of slavery.76 This theory was useful for the Catholic Church to emphasize the duty of the master to care for the well-being of their slaves, it was of course difficult to separate these forms of slavery in
70 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 52. 71 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 52. 72 Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 10. 73 Diana Hayes, “Reflections on Slavery,” in Rome Has Spoken: A Guide to Forgotten Papal Statements and How They Have Changed through the Centuries (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 81. 74 Hayes, “Reflections on Slavery,” 82. 75 Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 74. 76 Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 87. 18 practice. The master did buy the slave and legally owned them as his personal property, whether this was his spiritual intention or not.77,78 The Catholic Church embraced corporatism and the idea of organic relationships within society. A paternalistic concept linked the relationship between a slave and his master to other relationships within a family.79 Jon Gjerde furthermore pointed out that abolitionists and Protestant abolitionist groups in the United States represented a dangerous drift in modern society for many Catholic apologists of slavery which represented an increasingly human- centered understanding of religion and endangered the authority of the church.80 We will see different aspects of these teachings mirrored in the debate surrounding the sale. It becomes apparent that the “morality of slavery” was a rather flexible construct which was employed by both sides in the debate to support their positions. To put the discussions about the sale into perspective, we will go back in time to when the considerations to sell the Jesuit slaves in the Maryland province first gained traction. In 1820, Peter Kenney, an Irish Jesuit, had conducted an inspection of the Jesuits’ slaveholdings and had recommended a gradual disposal of them.81 He would return for a second inspection in 1830. By then, a sale had become more likely for several reasons. The concern amongst Jesuits about the moral behavior of their slaves had grown. Also, there was an optimism about the growth of Catholicism in the United States while at the same time the Jesuits were facing pressure from the abolitionists as well as from nativists. Furthermore, they had to face the American economic realities of the 1830s.82 When Kenney returned to America as a visitor in the fall of 1830, he had been sent by superior general Jan Roothaan in Rome to again investigate the question whether the order should sell the estates or keep them.83 Kenney found the missions to be in a better state than expected, though not producing revenue that could help financing Georgetown College.
77 Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 87. 78 It took until the Second Vatican Council in 1965 for the common Catholic teaching concerning slavery to be officially corrected. Maxwell gave several reasons why it took so long for the Catholic church to correct their position. One important factor was the principle of continuity of doctrine. The infallibility of the Catholic church was not easy to contradict. Another major factor was censorship. Opinions of the Enlightenment were “condemned en bloc,” which placed anti-slavery writings on the Index of Prohibited Books and significantly slowed down the distribution of these ideas within the church. Maxwell showed how texts written by critical thinkers within the Catholic Church as well as outside of the Catholic Church “for one reason or another” ended on the Index. (Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 13) 79 Jon Gjerde and S. Deborah. Kang, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Chapter 6. 80 Kang, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, Chapter 6. 81 Thomas Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838 (New York: Routledge, 2018), 187. 82 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 187. 83 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 40. 19
Before he could make a recommendation whether to sell the estates, however, Dzierozynski informed Roothaan that the farms were producing, and the mission debts were practically gone.84 Dzierozynski would continue to oppose any attempts to sell. Roothaan subsequently ordered to keep the plantations and improve them.85 In 1830, however, two priests entered the stage that would decidedly influence the course of the debate: Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry. Both had been amongst a group of six American Jesuits who had been sent to Rome in 1820 to receive their training. The hope had been, amongst others, to bring them closer to the Roman Catholicism as European visitors such as Kenney had already in earlier days complained about the republican values of American Jesuits: “The Society has this obstacle to overcome in these parts— namely, that Americans have such an ardent passion for liberty and for their country that it approaches madness, and they have of their nature an intense hatred of manifesting themselves or others to superiors.”86 However, confronted with the repressive politics that followed the Congress of Vienna in many parts of Europe, their republican values were only reinforced. Mulledy in particular displayed a “stridently American identity,” according to Kuzniewski.87 Not only were they distinctly American, they also represented a “new breed of American Jesuits” that was not particularly loyal to the Maryland tradition which was rural and based on land- and slaveholding.88 Both came from northwestern Virginia where slaveholding was not as deeply implanted as it was in Maryland. Both were furthermore convinced that the double role as planters and priests that was performed by Jesuits in Maryland was responsible for their economic problems as well as the problem of corrupt slaves.89 In 1830, Thomas Mulledy, by then president of Georgetown College, wrote a letter to the Jesuit Superior General Roothaan in which he raised questions regarding the Jesuits' slaveholding in Maryland. In his letter to Roothaan, Mulledy expressed a desire to fit in American society and respond to the political climate of strengthening abolitionism by proposing delayed manumission.
84 Dzierozynski to Roothaan, January 28, 1831, MD 4-I-5, Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, quoted in Curran, Shaping Catholicism. 85 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 41. 86 Kenney to Brzozowski, December 2, 1819 Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, MD, 2.II, quoted in Anthony J. Kuzniewski, “Our American Champions’: The First Generation of American Jesuit Leaders after the Restoration of the Society,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesus 46, no. 1 (2014), 6. 87 Kuzniewski, “Our American Champions,” 17. 88 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 44. 89 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 41. 20
Some of his concerns were of religious nature. He wondered whether the plantations were the “spiritual ruin” of the Jesuits running them, since that made them owners of slaves which was “against the vow of holy poverty.” He furthermore voiced the opinion that “it is almost impossible to make [the slaves] good Christians or faithful servants” and made them responsible for “the eternal ruin of [the] Priests who supervise them.” 90 He also made an economic argument. He argued that the farms were not profitable since “the greatest part [of the income from them] is consumed by the black slaves – or badly spent by the Fathers who are their handlers.” He therefore proposed to sell the slaves and rather “invest the money in banks.”91 He furthermore made a political argument. He argued that since it was such a “popular and edifying thing to free” slaves or sell them for a certain time until they were freed, in order to prepare them for freedom, the Jesuits should do the same. Mulledy referred here to “term slavery” or delayed manumission, which were agreements under which slaveholders pledged themselves to free their slaves after a certain number of years.92 He talked about the “general […] American mania for emancipation” and indeed, by 1830, the abolitionist movement had gained traction. In 1830, most African Americans in the Washington D.C. area were free people.93 He made it very clear that he was concerned for the reputation of the order by asking: “Would the Society thus not gain great esteem in these lands?”94 Over the following years, Mulledy kept urging Roothaan that the Jesuits could not be priests and planters at the same time and by 1833 he warned him that they could “not have both flourishing colleges and flourishing missions.”95 It did not take long for the European influences to respond. Fidèle de Grivel took a completely different side on this matter. In January 1831, he sent a letter to Father Roothaan, urging him not to sell the mission’s slaves. In his letter, Grivel gave a detailed assessment of the Maryland province and of St. Thomas Manor in particular. This letter is illuminating for two main reasons. It gives a detailed description of the daily lives of slaves on a Jesuit planation – or rather, what a Jesuit priest at the time believed to be slave life on a Jesuit plantation.
90 “Questions Regarding Slavery: Rev. Thomas Mulledy, SJ to the Jesuit Superior General, January 7, 1830,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 15, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/408. 91 “Questions Regarding Slavery: Rev. Thomas Mulledy, SJ to the Jesuit Superior General, January 7, 1830.” 92 Ira Berlin, A Guide to the History of Slavery in Maryland (Annapolis, MD: Maryland State Archives, 2008). 93 “A Brief History Of African Americans In Washington, DC,” accessed May 8, 2020, https://www.culturaltourismdc.org/portal/a-brief-history-of-african-americans-in-washington-dc. 94 “Questions Regarding Slavery: Rev. Thomas Mulledy, SJ to the Jesuit Superior General, January 7, 1830.” 95 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 41. 21
He described how “[the slaves] lack nothing, according to their condition.”96 He went on to say that in comparison to the “poor Breton peasants”, “[as] for food and clothing, they are Lords in comparison. Father Neale gives them 2 ½ pounds of beef per week, and salted herring; bread (wheat and rye, and oatmeal), potatoes, and polenta in abundance. […] Each house has a garden; and if they want to, they can raise poultry, harvest vegetables, fish, catch partridges and other animals in traps and eat them or sell them.”97
He described how the slaves were “all strong and rarely sick.”98 Descriptions such as this were probably what led scholars such as Walker Gollar to argue that the Jesuits’ slaves “probably were treated with more respect than were most other Maryland slaves.”99 This description stands in stark contrast with Craig Wilder’s assessment who wrote that “the treatment of enslaved people on the Jesuit farms was alarming” and that the “supervisors were providing insufficient rations to slaves, overworking servants, and inflicting excessive violence on enslaves men and women.”100 Wilder drew his information from Kenney’s report of the plantations. Grivel made an explicit case to Roothaan to sell neither the mission’s slaves nor the land. With this he directly responded to voices such as Kenney and Mulledy, who were proposing these measures. He argued that the “embarrassment of an administration as extensive as that of our 15 or 20,000 acres of land” is “strongly exaggerated,” just as the assumption of the “little revenue we drew from our farms.”101 By describing the stable, married life of the slaves he furthermore directly addressed the moral decay that Kenney as well as Mulledy brought forward as one of their main arguments in favor of selling the slaves. He argued that Kenney’s plan to “sell [everything] and put our money in the banks” was not the right way to go.102 He admitted that there were some good points to make against slavery, such as “the liberty given to each man by nature” which he claimed was “ironically expressed in the famous act of independence of the United States in 1776.”103 While he “approved of these
96 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 13, 2020, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/292. 97 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 98 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 99 C. Walker Gollar, “Jesuit Education and Slavery in Kentucky, 1832–1868,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 108, no. 3 (2010): 213-249, https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2010.0050, 224. 100 Craig Wilder, “War and Priests - Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution,” in Slaverys Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 239. 101 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 102 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 103 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 22 sentiments, as consistent with the established government,” he did not think that they should be applied in this case “until we can abolish the laws sanctioning slavery without harming the fortune of the proprietors.”104 Grivel referred to the “Society of the Friends of the Negroes” which, according to him, consisted to a large part of Methodists. He talks about a “conspiracy” in which the Methodist preachers had “raised the Negroes to the east of the Chesapeake Bay” but which had “imploded before the government discovered it.” He expressed the concern that the Methodist’s desires for prompt emancipation was probably shared “too strongly” by many Jesuits.105 Apart from emphasizing that Mulledy’s and Kenney’s reports and warnings were starkly exaggerated, Grivel made several arguments why selling the slaves, or the land with the slaves, would not be expedient. His first argument was that selling the slaves would make cultivation of the land impossible due to a shortage of “free men and non-owners” which in turn was because of “the ease with which Whites here can become owners.”106 Here, his outsider’s perspective on the economic system of the United States becomes apparent, paired with a certain skepticism thereof. He also feared that the company would have to sell the slaves below their value and that the company would not be able to handle this amount of money responsibly. He further feared the loss of influence in business that would be attached to loosing such a large amount of land.107 His arguably most interesting argument in this context, however, is the one about reputation. While Mulledy expressed his concern about the reputation of the Jesuits in the United States if they kept their slaves and did not follow the general trend of emancipation, Grivel’s concerns were exactly the opposite. He feared that by selling the slaves, and potentially the lands as well, the company would “generally be blamed by friends,” by which he most likely meant Jesuits in the United States and abroad.108 He was worried about reputation, just as Mulledy was. They just differed in whose opinions mattered to them. It could not be ignored, however, that the Abolitionist movement gained more and more traction. In December 1833, for example, the newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society announced that it would “aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in
104 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 105 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 106 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 107 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 108 “Slavery at St. Thomas Manor: Fr. Grivel to Fr. Roothaan, 1831.” 23 the guilt of slavery.”109 In the declaration, William Lloyd Garrison only referred to “the churches” in general, without specifying which churches or denominations he meant. It is likely, however, that the Jesuits felt like the declaration addressed them. It was mostly Protestant denominations, especially the Quakers, that pushed for abolition. Catholics, on the other hand, were often perceived to be stifling progress and to perpetuate authoritarian structures. The American Anti-Slavery Society would attracts more and more members meanwhile, comprising 100,000 by 1838.110 Amidst this climate, Kenney advised Roothaan again to “gradually liberate the mission from such servants and substitute free labor in their place” taking into account the “state of public feeling on the subject of slavery.”111 The need to distance themselves from the growing controversy surrounding slavery was enforced by the increase in nativist rhetoric at the time of which the Jesuits were frequent targets.112 Fenwick described, for instance, how the Jesuits had been accused of committing massacres in France, Italy, Spain and Ireland. He also reported how the “anti-Masonic party in New England had linked the Jesuits to an alleged conspiracy against the Constitution.”113 The nuances of and possible strategies behind this nativism and anti-Catholicism will be explored in more depth in the following chapter. While the options of freeing the slaves, selling them, and selling the estates were discussed quite openly, there was another option that was explored in secret. McSherry, who had become the first provincial supervisor of the new Maryland province in 1833, entered into secret negotiations with the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society (ACS) about sending freed slaves to Liberia. The colonization movement enjoyed wide support amongst white Marylanders and in 1832, the legislature provided 20.000$ annuity to the Maryland branch of the ACS for ten years as a response to Nat Turner’s rebellion in neighboring Virginia.114 In addition, laws were passed under which freed slaves who refused transportation would face either ejection from the state or a revision to bondage.115 However,
109 Declaration of the Anti-Slavery Convention, Assembled at Philadelphia, December 4, 1833 (Philadelphia City A.S. Society, 1833), 46. 110 “Abolition Movement - Early Antislavery Efforts, Early Efforts of Blacks, Revolutionary Era Abolitionism, Northern Abolitionism,” accessed June 17, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20100112204130/http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/5913/Abolition- Movement.html. 111 Fr. Peter Kenney, S.J., “Minutes of Extraordinary Consultation at Georgetown College, Washington, D.C.,” MPA, Box 126, Folder 2, quoted in Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 188. 112 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 188. 113 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 189. 114 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 193. 115 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 193. 24 fear of nativism led the Jesuits to conduct their dialogue with the ACS anonymously. They appointed an intermediary, Will Eckead, to represent them in discussions.116 In a letter to Father William McSherry, Ekead described the state of the new colony in Liberia to be suitable for the relocation of the Jesuit slaves. He assured McSherry that a “Catholic expedition” could expect a warm welcome there. Many members of the board had assured him that “Catholic blacks were empathetically the best part of the Coloured population” and would make “the best settlers.” He also expressed the hope that Georgetown College selling its slaves might “prove a good lead to many Catholic slaveholders, who viewed the evils of a slave population precisely as ourselves, but could not consistently send them away from their churches.”117 McSherry did not pursue this option any further, however. The Maryland branch was quarreling with the ACS at the time, leading to a split between the two organizations, and McSherry did not want to be caught in the middle. 118 By 1835, Mulledy’s concerns had grown even more and he reported to Roothaan “that these farms were a curse on the Society in this region. The negroes behave abominably on many of them & the priests allow them to destroy soul and body. They are neither farmers nor priests, nor religious—but some bad combination of all.”119 Mulledy as well as McSherry became increasingly uncomfortable about their status as slaveowners. While Mulledy had previously argued in favor of deferred emancipation, this became increasingly difficult due to new legislation in Maryland.120 Following Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, fear had spread amongst slave holders in Maryland. They were not only scared of slave insurrections, however, but of tumults caused by the more than 17,000 free black people in Maryland. This panic led to a series of repressive laws which limited the rights of the slaves, as well as the free black people in Maryland.121 These developments made the option of emancipation less feasible and a mass sale more attractive, since financial pressures were still rising.122
116 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 193. 117 “The Liberia Option,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed May 28, 2020, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/41. 118 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 194. 119 March 8, 1835, MD 5-III-6, Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, quoted in Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 42 120 Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters; the Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press, 1975), quoted in Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 43. Ira Berlin observed that “nowhere was the sense of crisis greater than in Maryland.” (210) 121 Baltimore Heritage, “1831-1884: Abolition and Emancipation,” Baltimore's Civil Rights Heritage, accessed June 23, 2020, https://baltimoreheritage.github.io/civil-rights-heritage/1831-1884/. 122 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 43. 25
The opportunity opened up to sell the slaves from the remaining four slave-holding Jesuit farms in the Maryland Province, White Marsh, St. Thomas, Newton, and St. Inigoes. Ironically, White Marsh had been the primary point of contention during the dispute with Maréchal. While the older generation of republican Jesuits in Maryland had plainly refused to give up the farm, its slaves were now to be sold to settle the dispute once and for all with Maréchal’s successor. As Dubuisson explained later in his memorandum, one of the potential buyers was a Catholic, who was the “son of one of the governors.”123 The other one, although a Protestant, was a “rich individual, a distinguished man, very well-known” who would “ensure the free practice of [the slaves’] religion.”124 In 1835, the Maryland Province held its first congregation.125 Mulledy, McSherry, James Ryder, and George Fenwick argued to sell the slaves and some of the lands and focus the resources on establishing colleges and missions in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. Their focus on urban centers was strongly opposed by Alosyius Young who was the provincial’s assistant and came from and old Maryland family.126 He was convinced that the people around Mulledy and McSherry were biased against the rural tradition. A compromise was made that suggested to sell the slaves but to keep some plantations and operate them with free labor.127 McSherry consented to the sale, as did Mulledy, Gabaria, Ryder, Fenwick, and Vespres. Dzierozynski vehemently opposed the sale, as did Grivel, Dubuisson, and Young. In general, this was a rather young group of Jesuits to vote on the matter, as Vespres pointed out to Dubuisson. Vespres, although he consented to the sale, would have wished for some older, more experienced priests to be present for the decision as well.128 Fidèle de Grivel, who had opposed the sale, observed to Roothaan in 1835 that “the Protestants have, up to now, appreciated us only because of our large estates; if we sell them, they will consider us no better than Methodist preachers who crisscross the country to accumulate money.”129
123 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 124 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 125 The Maryland Mission had become Maryland Province in 1833, the first province which the Society of Jesus established in the United States. (Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 113.) 126 Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 43. 127 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 196. 128 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 129 De Grivel, Memoire Sur La Congregation, 1835, MD 5-I-21, Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus, quoted in Curran, Shaping Catholicism, 45. 26
Dubuisson had concerns as well. In 1836, he wrote a memorandum in which he discussed whether it was “expedient to sell these 300 slaves.”130 Being an opponent of the sale himself, he presented the arguments in favor of the sale to follow up with the counterarguments against it. Since he presents both sides in his memorandum, this document is especially valuable for further mapping out the discussion surrounding the sale. His main argument in favor of the sale was that the missionaries would greatly benefit from it. He argued that running the farms and supervising the slaves disturbed their “tranquility of spirit” and turned them into “masters, […] farmers, […] and businessmen,” rather than “humble missionaries.”131 He also feared that the “dangerous temptation” to work on the farms might make teaching at Georgetown College less attractive to the Jesuits. He was especially worried about those young Jesuits who were not “brought up and formed in Europe” but in the United States. He argued that “if our Fathers in America can gradually assume the ways of the Society [of Jesus] in Europe, a very considerable spiritual benefit will result.”132 Later on, however, he made the counterargument that it would be “wrong to attribute the spiritual evils […] primarily to our current missionary system.”133 In his opinion, the problem lay somewhere else entirely. He listed three sources of “spiritual evils”, the first being the “spirit of independence of the American nation, so quickly and heartily espoused by the numerous Irish who come to us.”134 The second source of spiritual evil for him was the “state of the country and the population” which for Dubuisson led to a heightened interest amongst Jesuits in industry, business, and politics. Furthermore, it caused the need to “accommodate [themselves] to circumstances and prejudices” by adapting their way of life. One result of this was to not wear “only religious clothing” for instance, which “form such a good wall against the invasions of the worldly spirit.”135 Here, Dubuisson’s position as an ideological outsider in the United States becomes obvious. He laments the loss of an old world which he left behind. In his new home, he was confronted with a shift towards worldliness, away from the Rome-centered Catholicism he was used to.
130 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 131 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 132 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 133 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 134 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 135 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 27
As a third source of spiritual evils he mentioned “certain Fathers from Europe (from England and Ireland)” who negatively influenced especially young priests by setting the example of disobedience. He condemned them harshly by saying that they “should have been removed from the body” and that they, “through their influence, already transmitted an evil spirit.”136 He also voiced the opinion that was shared by many at the time that the Jesuits should focus on their educational efforts. On the other hand, he argued later, the farms gave the opportunity to employ elderly priests, those who came from abroad and did not speak the language well, and those who were not educated enough to teach. His second major argument was that of morals. The big number of “very bad slaves” and the resulting need to “sometimes punish defiant slaves with the whip” posed too big of a “moral burden” on the Jesuit priests running the farm.137 On the other hand, he emphasized the “great repugnance among the blacks of Maryland towards being sold and transported to the South” and called it cruel to rip them from their homes and churches. He proposed to at least keep a certain number of them, such as the old or the married. This line of argument tied directly into the Catholic teachings on the “morality of slavery.” The master had a moral obligation to care for the physical and spiritual well-being of his slaves. On the other hand, the slave could also pose a “moral burden” if he behaved “badly.” This idea of mutual reliance on each other showed the corporatism on which this moral framework was built. In this organic community, all parts supposedly influenced each other and each other’s spiritual well-being. He first dismissed the often-expressed fear that people would disapprove of a sale by pointing out that after selling the slaves from the Bohemia farm, “people say the sale has had no negative effect on public opinion.” The Jesuits had sold their slaves on the Bohemia farm in 1831. Kenney had been shocked by the “immoral behavior” of the slaves there and had given the order to sell them. Later on Dubuisson remarked, however, that “the negative effect of such a measure on the public opinion for a simple layman is in no way comparable to that which could result for Priests, for a religious order, for Jesuits.”138 He then elaborated on why a sale was a better option than giving the slaves their liberty. Setting them free would “do them a greater disservice with respect to things temporal as well as spiritual” since “free negroes do not know where to go.” He also pointed to the
136 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 137 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 138 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 28 many states who were unwilling to take in freed slaves and where “scenes of disorder [had] occurred [the previous] year” with “popular riots on the part of whites against these unhappy free blacks.” Dubuisson argued that the Jesuits would have to sell their slaves at some point anyways and that now, they at least knew that they would be sold to masters that would allow them to practice their religion freely. 139 He also pointed out, however, that if the Jesuits were to sell the slaves instead of freeing them, the “Philanthropists would not miss the chance to throw a stone at [them]” and maybe accuse them of having a “secret agreement with these plantation owners from Louisiana to share the profits of the blacks’ labor, which would be considerably more productive there than in Maryland.”140,141 Here again, the political pressure becomes obvious, under which the Jesuits found themselves at the time. Dubuisson also gave a hint as to why he thought the colonization option had not been pursued further. He pointed out that the “colony of Liberia is far from offering the resources we hoped for.” 142 The last point that he made in favor of the sale was the monetary benefit, pointing out the debt of Georgetown College in particular. He also remarked, however, that such a large sum of money could always just “vanish”, for instance through “bankruptcies of banks or individuals” or “political turbulences which menace the United States.” Here, the distrust becomes apparent that many European Jesuits at the time had in the banks. He finally gave an account of who voted in favor of the sale and who did not, declaring that he “voted against the proposition as it is, declaring that I would have voted in favor if they would have wanted to modify it.” He did not specify what the agreement would have had to look like to gain his approval.143
139 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 140 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 141 Philanthropy grew in influence in the United States during the 19th century. It was, amongst other causes, closely linked with abolitionism. One example for this were the Tappan brothers, two of the most important philanthropists at the beginning of the 19th century. Amongst other endeavors, Arthur and Lewis Tappan organized and funded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Like many other philanthropists at the time, they were Protestants, in this case Calvinists. Philanthropy was closely linked with Protestant abolitionism, which in turn oftentimes came hand in hand with anti-Catholic sentiment. This will be explored in more depth in the following chapter. For more information on Protestant philanthropy and their abolitionist efforts, and about the Tappan brothers in particular, see: “Changing Society Through Civil Action: Abolition,” Changing Society Through Civil Action: Abolition (Washington D.C.: Philanthropy Roundtable), accessed June 20, 2020, https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/docs/default-source/default-document- library/whatcomesnext_abolition.pdf?sfvrsn=61afa740_0. 142 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 143 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 29
A different position had been taken by James Ryder in 1835 when he had given a speech in Richmond, Virginia. Ryder was a professor of philosophy and theology at Georgetown at the time and would later become president of the college. He was also amongst the six young Jesuits who had left the United States in 1820 to receive their training in Rome. In his oration from 1835, he argued vehemently against abolition. He made a paternalistic argument, arguing that in slavery, "the slave has a home –he is clothed, maintained, and protected by his master." He emphasized the importance of social order since "God is a God of order" and called upon Catholics to maintain this order instead of letting "rebellion and murder" take over.144 He painted a dark picture of chaos that were to break out due to the “wicked interference of some would be philanthropists, who are jeopardizing the peace of our flourishing country, in order to carry out their visionary schemes of emancipation.”145 Ryder tried to invoke fear of emancipation in his audience by evoking images of horror and chaos. He made direct reference to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion from 1831 which took place in Southampton County, Virginia, when he talked about a “man […], prowling about the humble habitations of our unsuspecting slaves, and, in the name of God, seducing them into rebellion and murder; and by intoxicating their minds with the poison of religious fanaticism, make them renew the scenes of Southampton.” In Ryder speech, the wish to please his southern audience becomes apparent. Moreover, he emphasized the role of the Catholic Church to bring social stability and act as a bulwark against unrest and chaos. While the congregation in 1835 had voted in favor of the slave sale, it still needed approval from Roothaan. He gave his approval in a letter to McSherry in December 1836, after McSherry had been pushing for a timely sale of the missions’ slaves. He confirmed that the slaves “can be sold and should be sold, whenever the opportunity should present itself”146 and left the business up to McSherry, on several conditions. Murphy argued that these conditions mirrored Roothaan’s desire to “preserve the traditional Catholic moral theology of slaveholding, which stipulated that the interests of the slaves be placed ahead of the needs and desires of their masters.”147 He asked to make sure that the slaves could practice their Catholic religion freely and that families should not be separated. Roothaan’s conditions for the sale
144 “Proslavery Oration by Rev. James Ryder, SJ, August 30, 1835,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 20, 2020, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/88. 145 “Proslavery Oration by Rev. James Ryder, SJ, August 30, 1835.” 146 “Fr. Roothaan, S.J. Lays out the Conditions for the Sale of Slaves, 27 December 1836,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 22, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/94. 147 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 198.. 30 were fixated and expanded by Francis Vespre in Rome who laid out 20 conditions for the slave sale. One striking thing here is the insistence that the “cash yield of this sale of slaves should never be re-invested in banks of any sort.”148 Here, the suspicions in Rome became apparent regarding the changing economic conditions in the United States and their distrust regarding banks. This had already been uttered by other European Jesuits such as Dubuisson who had worried that the money might just “vanish” when deposited in banks. McSherry had been urging Roothaan to sell the slaves sooner rather than later. In 1837, however, the economic panic changed things. He wrote a letter to Roothaan in May 1837, therefore, to ask him to wait. He argued that “the necessity of the sale cannot be so urgent at the present time, when the whole county is embarrassed beyond description in the currency.”149 Due to the economic crisis, he estimated that they “could not at the present time obtain one tenth part of what we could have obtained last year for them.”150 In his letter, once again the difficult financial situation of the missions became apparent, when Mulledy reported that neither St. Inigoes nor White Marsh had paid any of its taxes the previous year. He also pointed out that he was “not much versed in temporal affairs” and had “no one to consult in whose judgement I can have confidence.”151 Here again the problem showed of some Jesuits having to be priests, teachers, and businessmen all at once. Before McSherry could conclude the sale, he fell gravely ill in 1837. Mulledy succeeded him and finally concluded the sale. On June 19, 1838, he signed a final contract for the sale of the Jesuit slaves. In a letter from November 1838, Mulledy thanked God that he had “succeeded in getting on board ship all the negroes” and had thereby completed the sale.152 Throughout the time leading up to the sale, it became apparent that “both McSherry and Mulledy wanted to win recognition of Catholics as true Americans,” as Murphy argued.153
148 “Twenty Conditions of Sale, 1836,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 2, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/407. 149 “‘The Sale Cannot Be so Urgent’: Fr. McSherry to Fr. Roothaan on Inflation, the Slave Sale, and Taxes, May 13, 1837,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 22, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/275. 150 “‘The Sale Cannot Be so Urgent’: Fr. McSherry to Fr. Roothaan on Inflation, the Slave Sale, and Taxes, May 13, 1837.” 151 “‘The Sale Cannot Be so Urgent’: Fr. McSherry to Fr. Roothaan on Inflation, the Slave Sale, and Taxes, May 13, 1837.” 152 “‘Thank God I Have Succeeded’: Fr. Mulledy Completes the Sale of 272 Slaves to Louisiana, November 11, 1838,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed June 9, 2020, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/288. 153 Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding, 201. 31
While navigating the question of slavery between a Catholic and an American identity would continue into the following decades, it had reached its first climax in 1838.
32
In Fear of a Papal Conspiracy - Protestant Anti-Catholicism and Abolitionism in Maryland
The sale of the Jesuit slaves in 1838 was significantly influenced by the political circumstances of the time. Especially Mulledy and McSherry were aware of and concerned about the anti-Catholic sentiments, combined with a growing abolitionist movement. Jesuits at Georgetown were reacting to an increasingly hostile environment towards Catholics in the United States. It is therefore illuminating to take a closer look at Protestant anti-Catholic sentiments in Maryland, especially in combination with abolitionism. Rather than merely affirming that these sentiments existed, however, this chapter explores Protestant anti-Catholicism as a historical strategy. This vocabulary is based on Joseph Miller’s approach which he developed in The Problem of Slavery as History. He applied his methodological framework to the concept of slavery and slaving as a strategy. I expand the approach to also look at other categories, such as “anti-Catholicism” as a historical strategy. Joseph C. Miller made a powerful argument to interpret historical dilemmas through the lens of motivated human action instead of thinking about them in static terms and institutions. 154 The professor of history at the University of Virginia wrote his book The Problem of Slavery as History, a title which reminds of David Brion Davis’ classic, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture from 1966, on purpose.155 Miller recognized Davis as “perhaps the defining thinker in the modern field” who showed in The Problem of Slavery how slaving had continued throughout Western history, from Greek antiquity to its abolition in the nineteenth century.156 It had the paradox at its center, why humanists over the course of over two thousand years had not decisively repelled slavery until the abolitionists in the eighteenth century.157 Davis produced the framework “within which scholars still discuss slavery productively,” according to Miller.158 Miller built on Davis’ work and seeked to expand it. Arguing the “utter irrelevance” of the “defining qualities of slavery ‘as an institution’ that we read about,” he developed a framework of analysis which historicizes slaving.159 He argued that slavery should not be seen
154 Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, 18. 155 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 156 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 3. 157 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 11. 158 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 3. 159 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 3. 33 as an institution, “slaving” should rather be seen as “historical strategies, rooted in times, places, cultural heritages, and momentary opportunism.”160 Looking at slavery as an institution which transcends time and space has “frozen the dynamics of slavery”, according to Miller, and occurrences of slaving and slavery are not seen as historical processes anymore.161 Miller encouraged to historicize, or think historically. By this he meant to favor “existential ambiguities” over abstracting and generalizing, a tendency that he saw influenced by Sociology.162 Emphasizing that political, economic, and mental structures of the past can only be abstractions for the historians, they should instead look at “how and why people actually behaved.”163 Therefore, historians should focus on contextualizing human action. Miller argued persuasively that while “coherence is much easier to model sociologically than motivations are to infer historically,” it is worth it. Justin Liles recognized this book as a “fundamental […] critique of an entire sub-discipline of history” which offered a “theoretically sophisticated approach to slaving throughout history.”164 This chapter will interpret Protestant anti-Catholicism applying Miller’s approach to contextualizing human actions as strategic reactions to changing circumstances. Wallace argued that Protestant anti-Catholicism was born out of a desire to define a national Protestant identity, partly as a reaction to large-scale Irish Catholic immigration.165 While Protestants further north oftentimes connected this anti-Catholicism with slavery, using both as antipoles to their republican values, this was not necessarily the case in the border state Maryland. As the analysis of the journal Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine shows, their approach to abolitionism was much more cautious and conservative than that of their northern counterparts. In primarily wanting to preserve social order and avoid chaos, the authors of the magazine voiced interests which overlapped with what continental Jesuits at Georgetown such as Dubuisson and Dzierozynski tried to achieve while contemplating the slave sale. Overall, the analysis of the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine shows that if McSherry and Mulledy wanted to emphasize their “Americanness” and work towards acceptance by Protestants, they had to make sure that they did not give the impression to be controlled by Rome in ways that would interfere with American civil matters.
160 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, ix. 161 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 1. 162 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 5. 163 Miller, The Problem of Slavery, 8. 164 Justin L. Liles, “A Review of ‘The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach,’” Taylor & Francis, May 9, 2013, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03612759.2013.787886?journalCode=vhis20). 165 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 67. 34
Exploring Protestant anti-Catholicism in Maryland as a strategy to react to change does not mean to imply that it was merely a strategic tool, unfounded in genuine emotions and sometimes even justified concerns. The same goes for analyzing Protestant statements on slavery and abolition in this chapter. This chapter focuses on the analysis of a Baltimore Journal, the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine. It is important to keep in mind that the editor of a journal does not speak as a private person. Economic interests should be kept in mind in this context as well, since “particularly after 1820, […] publishers […] slowly began to re-discover the economic potential of anti-popery,” as Farrelly pointed out.166 Protestant journals are a useful lens through which to analyze the Protestant discourse at the time.167 The press played a big role in the Protestants’ promotion of anti-Catholicism and abolitionism. Beginning in the 1820s, several journals by northern Evangelicals published increasingly virulent articles which attacked Catholicism and the papacy.168 This even led to a public rebuke from the bishops who convened at the Second Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1833.169 The journals continued, however, to portray Catholicism and slavery alike as subversive of American institutions and values.170 I use a Protestant journal for a closer analysis of the Protestant discourse in Maryland at the time before and during the slave sale. The Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine was founded by the well-known Presbyterian pastor Robert J. Breckinridge. He was a central figure and stark supporter of the Old School faction during the Old School – New School Controversy. The monthly publication ran from 1835 to 1841 until it was discontinued after local Catholics sued for libel and slander.171 For my analysis, I look at the publications from 1835 and 1837, the years leading up to the slave sale. While there are some changes in the tone of the publication from 1835 to 1837, the main themes and topics stayed constant throughout. They reflect the general suspicion towards Catholics at the time. This suspicion went so far as to describe a Catholic conspiracy to undermine American republicanism and exert influence from abroad. They also illuminate the stance on slavery maintained by the Maryland Presbyterians which differed from the more radical Protestant abolitionists in the North.
166 Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism, 151. 167 This was also the approach employed by Wallace in Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism. 168 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 44. 169 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 44. 170 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism,1. 171 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 100. 35
The 1830s marked a period of rising anti-Catholicism in the United States, especially in the north. During that time, northern Evangelicals started a campaign against Catholicism and slavery alike. Wallace’s study of antebellum anti-Catholicism suggested that it was primarily a political expression of an American Protestantism identity. Catholicism served as an antipole against which Protestants could define their American identity and values at a time when the nation was still newly defining itself.172 Slavery served as a second antipole, embodying the opposite of what American values were supposed to be in the eyes of northern Protestants. In that sense, anti-Catholicism, as well as abolitionism, can be interpreted as a strategy to define an American Protestant identity.173 Miller emphasized the significance of strategic actions adapting to changing circumstances. One of these changing circumstances that Protestants in Maryland were reacting to with rising anti-Catholicism was immigration. Large scale immigration from Ireland and Germany had started in the 1820s and continued to grow during the 1830s. By the 1840s, huge numbers of increasingly poor and desperate Irish immigrants were arriving in cities such as Boston, Baltimore, and New York. They brought with them a Catholicism that was less liberal than its Americanized counterpart. Farrelly pointed out that these Irish immigrants “unwittingly revived and fed long-standing Protestant fears about the connections between Catholicism and poverty, ignorance, dependence, and corruption.”174 This hostility towards Irish immigration concerned Mulledy and McSherry personally as well, since both were of Irish decent. Overall, northern journals described Catholicism as a threat to American liberties, and a European conservative conspiracy to take over the United States from abroad. It connected this rhetoric with anti-slavery rhetoric, portraying both as equally dangerous to the country. Among the most influential of these publications were A Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States from 1834 and A Plea for the West from 1835.175,176 The former was a series of letters which was published in the New York Observer and was written by Samuel Morse under the synonym “Brutus.”177 It was reprinted by several other
172 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 67. 173 Farrelly pointed out that there had been Anti-Catholicism in the United States before the 1830s. But this was the first time that it was of a distinctly “American” nature, and not a British form of anti-Catholicism being expressed in America. Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism, 128. 174 Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism, 143. 175 Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States the Numbers of Brutus, Originally Published in the New York Observer (New York: Leavitt, Lord, 1835). 176 Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West, 1835. 177 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 52. 36 publications. Morse presented Catholicism as a political attempt to take over America from Europe, with the conspiracy originating in the Austrian government. He stated that "Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here."178 Morse stated that "Austria has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply."179 This “fountain” was most likely the Leopold Association, an Austrian organization which funded Jesuit missions from abroad. Wallace argued that the publication had a lasting effect since it “connected Catholicism, immigration, and European conservatism as imminent threats to American democracy.”180 The equally influential text A Plea for the West was published by Lyman Beecher and followed along the same lines. It warned against Catholicism and the threat of immigrants, who had been “educated under the despotic governments of Catholic Europe.”181 He expressed the fear that the immigrants are under the control of European influence, that they were “entirely accessible to the control of the potentates of Europe as if they were an army of soldiers, enlisted, and officered, spreading over the land.”182 This fear of control by Rome and Vienna was a common theme in many publications at the time. When it came to anti-Catholicism, the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine expressed it as virulently as its counterparts further north, that were described by Wallace. It presented Catholicism as a secretive religion with political ambitions to overthrow republicanism in America. This alleged conspiracy was thought to be controlled from abroad. The fear was further incited by vivid horror stories about priests, nunneries, and convents. The article “Questions stated, Religious and Political Romanism” indicated that the increasing suspicion of Catholics had started two years previously, in 1833, and that “this country has never witnessed any impression so extensive and so profound produced in so short a space of time, as that which, within two years, has been made upon the public mind respecting the dangers of Romanism to the nation.”183 The article argued further that the Catholics had benefitted from several “exterior events and circumstances” such as “foreign agitations, and movements, - extraordinary developments, - the operation of the social elements of our great cities, - the progress of
178 Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, 14. 179 Morse, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, 15. 180 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 52. 181 Lyman Beecher, Plea for the West, 1835, 54. 182 Beecher, Plea for the West, 1835, 54. 183 Robert Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 234. 37 higher education in schools and colleges, - the contact of religious sects.” All those factors had “developed the whole Papal subject, with amazing rapidity and effect.”184 One recurring theme in the magazine was that of secrecy. The idea was that Catholics kept many secrets, trying to cover up their true intentions. The journal published a lot of Catholic bulls and decrees, giving the impression of “unveiling the truth” about the doings of the Catholics. Especially by providing an English translation, they made them more accessible to the public. There was a great focus on the order’s secrecy and its disposition to intrigue. The article “The Jesuits – The order absolutely monarchical”, for example” stated that the Jesuits’ “plots, intrigues and assassinations occupy no small part of their history.”185 It described how the Jesuits were expelled virtually all over the world and how they were restored in 1814 by the “infallible” Pope Pious VII.186 During the 1830s, horror stories from Catholic nunneries, monasteries, and other institutions were in vogue. Most famous and successful was probably Maria Monk with her Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk which was published in 1836.187 But even before that, journals such as the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine and other Protestant journals published stories and anecdotes which stirred up fear and resentment towards Catholics. One example for this is the story of the “Baltimore Priest” which was published in 1837. The author stated that the “the iniquitous practices of Roman Priests in Papal countries; their wickedness, excessive licentiousness, their robbing the poor, their ruling them with a rod of iron” were common knowledge.188 They further reasoned that they saw it as their duty to uncover that these things happened in America as well, not just in remote countries. They argued that they had to report on these incidents since “the people must know who these are that enter with soft words, in sheep’s clothing” although the “Roman Catholic Community will call it slander.”189 The incident was an example of a Catholic priest robbing the poor. It told the story of a girl who was supposedly haunted by the ghost of her mother. To have the ghost “prayed away” she paid a Catholic priest a large sum of money. He did not help her, however, and ultimately, she converted to a Methodist Church.
184 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 234. 185 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 21. 186 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 21. 187 Maria Monk et al., Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: Or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent (London: Camden, 1836). 188 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 15. 189 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 15. 38
Another recurring theme in the journal was that of a Catholic conspiracy. One aspect of this was the fear that Catholicism in the United States would undermine republicanism, combined with the conviction that Catholicism was inherently incompatible with republicanism. Another aspect of the conspiracy theory was the idea that high levels of administration were “infiltrated” by Catholics. If Catholics were suspect, Jesuits were even more so. In the article “The Jesuits – The order absolutely monarchical”, the author described how the Jesuits destroyed the church from within. He claimed that “with them the church has no unity, […] with their hands against all the other orders, and they against them.”190 The article gave a brief history of the Jesuit order and described how the “order is absolutely monarchical – under a general at Rome who governs as he pleases.”191 It talked about the rules that Jesuits had to obey within the order, especially the “secret rules”, or the “secret constitution.”192 The article stated that “without any moral principle, with vigorous efforts, trained and disciplined men, the end always sanctifying the means, no barrier hindering, no law which they could not evade, nothing so dangerous but they were bound by oath, to attempt if ordered by the general.”193 The article called for vigilance towards the Catholic order and asked whether they were “not exerting their influence in opposition to the republican spirit of our government.” It becomes apparent how much the rising fear and suspicion towards Catholics was linked with the rising levels of Catholic immigration. Central to this was the fear of these Catholic immigrants still being loyal to European priests: “Then see the mass of foreign Catholics coming into this country, under the priest and ready to move at his nod, to do whatever he shall command, and yet no danger!”194 While many horror stories and conspiracy theories were flat out untrue, Farrelly pointed out that many Irish immigrants were indeed “replicating […] some of the habits of clerical deference that they had adopted in Ireland.”195 This did by no means mean, of course, that they were a part of a larger European plot to take over America. But it made it easier to convey that impression to the American public. The article “Questions stated, Religious and Political Romanism” claimed that Romanism was an unfree religion that did not only make a religious claim, but a political one as well. The Catholic Church was neither willing nor capable of reform. The author voiced the
190 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 17. 191 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 17. 192 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 18. 193 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 20. 194 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 22. 195 Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism, 143. 39 concern that “every distinctive feature of our social system, encourages attempts against us; and every movement in the elements of the decaying and renovating systems of the old world, has a tendency to throw off upon us the worst portions of their population.”196 The author suggested that Catholics, and especially Jesuits, were unwanted in other countries and therefore came to the United States. He further talked about the mass immigration of Irish and German Catholics with numbers “nothing short of one hundred thousand every year” coming to the United States.197 He lamented that with the naturalization laws, they could become citizens within three years and with that obtain the right to vote. These votes were then in turn controlled by “foreign priests.”198 Followers of the “most depraved and monstrous” Catholic belief were not devoted to the United States but to “foreign princes” and the Pope.199 The closing article for the year 1835, “Address of the Protestant Association of Baltimore”, talked again about the dangers of Catholicism and its connection with European restorative forces. The Romish priesthood we have reason to believe is aided by the secret support of the despotic government of Europe, who look upon this country as the nursery of those liberal political principles which have shaken their thrones to their foundation, and who have no hope of destroying our civil institutions, but by assisting the Roman Church in the design of substituting popery for Protestantism.200
The hierarchy of Catholics with many superiors in Europe called into question their allegiance to the United States and made Protestants fear the influence of European conservatives in the country. One further particular concern were the Catholic schools and colleges. The fear was that Catholics, Jesuits in particular, were using the schools to turn Protestant children into Catholics. The article “The Jesuits – The order absolutely monarchical” addressed the Jesuits’ educational institutions and their wealth. It asked “how numerous […] their colleges [would] become” and “what they [were] doing in their schools and colleges.” It referred to a letter by H. A. Riley, a former pupil at Georgetown College.201 Furthermore, the author lamented: “How great their wealth, and their power!” Both aspects concerned the Jesuits at Georgetown. It expressed the suspicion they received for their educational activities as well as for being
196 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 236. 197 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 237. 198 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 237. 199 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 237. 200 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 378. 201 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 22. 40 economically successful. This is particularly interesting since the Jesuit plantations were not doing well economically, which was one of the main reasons for selling the slaves in 1838. The authors got even more explicit in voicing their fears in the article “How to overthrow a Republican Government” in which they described how Catholics supposedly were trying to undermine the republican government. Again, Catholicism was portrayed as “only another name in politics for absolute despotism.”202 The author argued that education, Jesuit schools and colleges, were a main pillar of the efforts of overthrowing the government. He stated that “Their colleges are to convert the children of Protestants to those dogmas and superstitions, to those anti-republican and monarchial principles which the spirit of our country not only forbids, but will, if it be permitted to go on, effectually oppose.”203 The article “Address of the Protestant Association of Baltimore” also discussed the dangers of Catholic education again. “These different orders of priests acting under the absolute authority of their superiors residing in Europe, and actuated by a unity of purpose and a common zeal to monopolize the education of our youths, […] are spreading themselves through the length and breadth of this land.”204 It becomes apparent that if Mulledy and McSherry wanted to be accepted in American society, they could not be perceived to be taking orders from Rome and align their decisions too much with the interests of European Catholics. The article “Bishops full vs. Bishops empty” again argued that Catholic colleges and schools always had the goal of religious indoctrination. It also talked about feasting priests who do not comply with their own rules of fasting. The author talked about a feast at Georgetown College with many familiar names mentioned: Mr. Eccleston, Mr. Mulledy, and George Washington.205,206 He called it “humiliating to see any of the institutions of learning in the country prostituted to the superstitious and selfish ends, of the most ignorant and corrupt body of ecclesiastics that can be found in the nation.”207 The author felt that with such high- ranking public figures being present at the banquet and toasting the Jesuits, the country was slowly being taken over by the Jesuits while the “whole conspiracy, is steeped in alcohol and
202 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 250. 203 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 250. 204 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 278. 205 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 467. 206 This might have been George Corbin Washington, the grandnephew of George Washington, who lived in Maryland at the time. “WASHINGTON, George Corbin,” US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, accessed June 23, 2020, https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/23426. 207 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 467. 41 baptised in strong drink!”208 Not only the growing influence was alarming, but also that Jesuits felt increasingly comfortable to display this influence publicly. In the journals from 1837, the general themes regarding the Catholics remained the same. Some slight changes in tone can be observed, however. The tone towards Catholics became increasingly mocking.209 This becomes apparent in the article “Roman Council of Baltimore – Preaching of Bishop England.” It talked about the council during which the sale of the Georgetown slaves was approved. The article explained in which cases the decisions of such a council would become binding for all Catholics, which was when the Pope approved of them. The author called into question this practice by saying: Our present council therefore, though honoured by the presence of such and so many spiritual powers, […] is of no more authority, than an assemblage of old ladies – nor their acts of more value than the waste paper of their own printed discourses – until a miserable old man at Rome, who calls himself Saint Peter, under the name of Gregory, shall examine and decide, whether or not, the divine Spirit, was really present in the assembly.210
This article gives insights about several aspects. It shows a lot about how Protestants, during the Second Great Awakening, presented Protestantism as the state religion and Catholicism as its natural antipole. The author asked: “what has the Pope of Rome to do with the religion of Americans? He is a King – we are republicans; he is a papist […] – we are protestants, […] both civilly and religiously, we are the very antipodes of each other.”211 Again, the fear of foreigners was bluntly expressed when talking about the “alarming fact, that the majority of the papists of the United States are foreigners, and nearly all their priests aliens.”212 The author expressed the conviction that “the Roman communion […] is systematically engaged in a conspiracy to subject the country to the influence of the Pope.”213 Leading up to the slave sale in 1838, Mulledy and McSherry were not only trying to navigate the waters of increasingly virulent anti-Catholicism, but also of abolitionism. The sale concerned plantations which came from a long rural tradition of slave holding. Farrelly pointed out that Maryland Jesuits had not always been in conflict with their
208 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 468. 209 One article consisted exclusively of a joke about the Catholic attempts to missionize the Native Americans. The joke goes as follows: “’How many Gods are there’ said a Popish missionary to an Indian whom he had taught that the consecrated wafer was God, and that there was but one God. ‘None’ said the Indian convert. ‘What! have I been so long laboring with you, and you do not know how many gods there are.’ ‘There was one, but the other day you gave him to me and I eat him.’” (Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 173) 210 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 255. 211 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 255. 212 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 256. 213 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 256. 42 surroundings. Catholicism had not been seen to be necessarily in conflict with republicanism since slaveholding had been a trait they had shared with their Protestant neighbors.214 Slavery had come under attack, however, influenced by northern evangelicals. Jesuit slave holding was not seen as a common trait with their neighbors anymore, but as a threat to republican values, just as Catholicism itself. Scholarship on anti-Catholicism and its connection with abolitionism often focusses on the time from the 1830s onwards leading up the civil war which was marked by rising nativism and anti-Catholicism. Wallace observed that northern evangelical journals often equated Catholics with slaveholders. He furthermore argued that during the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals designed the United States to be a Protestant Christian nation.215 Both slavery and Catholicism were used as antipoles against which a Protestant American identity was formed. The “immoral authoritarianism of the Catholic priest” was compared to the “immoral authoritarianism of the slaveholder” and both were defined as un-American.216 This becomes especially obvious in the vocabulary that was used, with words such as “tyranny” and “despotism”, relating both to the “theological condition of the Catholic Church and the political condition of the South.”217 Northern Protestant journals described both to be tyrannical despots. This was not necessarily the case with the Baltimore Magazine. While it was virulently anti-Catholic, its stance on slavery was more conservative than that of its northern counterparts. It displayed a more cautious approach with a big fear of rebellion and chaos. In many ways, its suggestions were not that far from what some of the Jesuits proposed during the debate surrounding the slave sale. The journal supported colonization, and if that was not possible, gradual manumission. The articles showed a rift between the Presbyterian Church and the Congregational Church which pushed for immediate emancipation. Keeping in mind that the editor of the journal, Breckinridge, was a prominent member of the Old School faction during the Old School – New School Controversy, this does not come as a surprise. On of the points of contention during the controversy was the issue of abolition, with the Old-School faction supporting colonization and gradual emancipation, and the New School favoring immediate emancipation.218
214 Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism.” 215 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 26. 216 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 4. 217 Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1. 218 C. Bruce Staiger, “Abolitionism and the Presbyterian Schism of 1837-1838,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36, no. 3 (1949): p. 391, https://doi.org/10.2307/1893014, 391. 43
In the 1835 edition, there was a long article on the Maryland Colonization Society that the Jesuits were in touch with as well, though anonymously. The article “Colonization and Slavery” was a report on the Maryland Mission in Africa based on documents by the Maryland State Colonization Society. It made a strong case for colonization and expressed the strong desire to see all blacks leave the United States. The principle here involved is exceedingly simple; and if our free coloured population are blindly resolved to abide their destiny among us, […] they would immediately see that their interest, as well as ours, and the slave’s required that every one of these should leave America.219
It also argued, however, that slavery was “sinful and contrary to the spirit of Christ,” “independently of all considerations of African colonization.”220 Many articles showed a dislike of the Congregational denomination and their support of immediate emancipation. Abolitionists in general were portrayed as too aggressive. One example of this was “A travel report from Britain” in which the author described how “the infusion of bitter, furious, and ignorant passion and prejudice, with which the abolition party in both countries, has been poisoning the public conscience – has diffused itself in England, as in America, chiefly among the Congregational churches.”221 Later on in the article, the author stated that “the subject of slavery, little understood in England, is to be made, even more prominent than heretofore; promising nothing so certainly as continual heart burnings, and a final rupture between the churches of the two countries, if not between the countries themselves.”222 In the journals from 1837, the growing role of female abolitionists could be observed as well, even if they were fiercely mocked by the author. The article “Female Abolitionism” showed again that the Presbyterian authors of the magazine were in favor of colonization and gradual emancipation, as proven before, and against more immediate emancipation. They stated that “the second great principle of abolitionism is settled hostility to the whole subject of African colonization; thus depriving that continent of its best hopes, and chief means of being enlightened, civilized and Christianized.”223 The authors also criticized the growing difficulties with gradual emancipation by lamenting the
219 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 4. 220 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1835, 8. 221 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 388. 222 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 389. 223 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 415. 44
insuperable obstacles in the way of all action on the subject of gradual emancipation in the slave states; - and if the opposition succeeded, reducing those states to the necessity of continuing slave states forever – in which there should only be an alternation of bloody revolutions, and a succession of black and white servitude without end.224
This quote shows the fear of rebellion and chaos, with reminds of Jesuits such as Ryder who expressed similar concerns. It also promoted a careful, gradual process of emancipation instead of pushing for immediate emancipation. The author argued that abolitionists asked for too much since they demanded immediate liberation, giving the slaves citizen rights and granting them equal treatment. According to him, abolitionists fought for these things with “insult” and “bitterness.” The author argued that the only result of these actions was to “enrages the slave-holder” and “rivet the chains of slavery.”225 The Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine serves as an illuminating example of the anti-Catholic climate during the time leading up to the slave sale. Protestants used Catholics as an ideological antipode against which they could define a Protestant national identity. Catholics, and Jesuits in particular, were framed as anti-republican forces that were controlled by conservative European forces and whose beliefs were fundamentally incompatible with American values. Regarding the issue of slavery, the authors of the magazine did not equate Catholicism with slavery as strongly as some of their northern counterparts. This is not surprising since their rejection of Catholicism was a lot more extreme than their stance on slavery. Here, they supported a much more conservative approach than many of the northern Protestant journals. Dubuisson pointed out in 1836 that “Philanthropists would not miss the chance to throw a stone at [them]” if the Georgetown Jesuits sold their slaves instead of freeing them.226 While the authors of the Baltimore Magazine definitely did not support slavery in general, their criticism would probably not have been as fierce as that of some other Protestant denominations since their approach to emancipation, manumission and colonization did not differ that much from the options the Jesuits at Georgetown were debating the time. Although, while their criticism of the Jesuits’ slaveholding might not have been as loud – their criticism of apparent control and influence from Rome would have been as vigorous as ever if the Jesuits had followed advice from continental Jesuits in the matter.
224 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 415. 225 Breckinridge, Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 1837, 417. 226 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.” 45
Strategies of Emancipation
This chapter returns to the core of Miller’s argument, to explore slaving as a historical strategy. The sale of 1838 was a major event in the Jesuits’ involvement in slaving. What the previous chapters have shown, however, is that is was not a singular, insular moment in time. To better understand the underlying dynamics and implications of the sale, we must understand that the slave sale took place at the center of a power web, spanning several continents and decades. If we untangle this web, it can be argued that by selling the slaves, Mulledy and McSherry significantly emancipated themselves from Roman and other European influences, as well as from rural Maryland traditions. They emphasized their “Americanness” by catering to American political and economic demands at the time, rather than to the wishes of the continental Catholic church and their ultramontane colleagues at Georgetown. Interpreting the slave sale as an act of strategically using slaving to emancipate oneself from Rome is ironic on several levels. Most obviously, because keeping other human beings in bondage and making a profit by selling them, stands in stark contrast to the idea of emancipation. Secondly, because at the same time as Mulledy and McSherry were pushing for the sale, figures such as Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais set in motion a completely different form of emancipation from Rome in the form of liberal Catholicism. He focused on individual liberty and would harshly condemn slavery in an essay in 1840. It is illuminating to think about Lamennais, not only in the context of different forms of emancipation from Rome, but also to place ultramontane European Jesuits such as Dubuisson and Dzierozynski and their opinions on the sale in the broader philosophical debate at the time. Just like Dubuisson and Dzierozynski, Lamennais was a child of the revolution. He was born in 1782 in France and his life was a “kaleidoscope of the struggles of the nineteenth century of the Roman Catholic faith against the aftermath of the enlightenment in France.”227 He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern social justice thought in the Roman Catholic Church. His beliefs changed drastically over the course of his life, however. Under the Napoleonic rule in France, Lamennais became a convinced believer in ultramontanism.228 This was a reaction to the Gallican principles that the French government
227 C. B. Hastings, “Hugues-Felicite Robert De Lamennais: A Catholic Pioneer of Religious Liberty,” Journal of Church and State 30, no. 2 (January 1988): pp. 321-339, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/30.2.321, 321. 228 McGreevy described Ultramontanism as “shorthand for a cluster of shifts that included a Vatican-fostered move to the Thomistic philosophy, a more intense experiential piety centered on miracles and Vatican-approved devotions […], and a heightened respect for church authorities ranging from the pope to parish priests.” Catholicism and American Freedom, 12. 46 was following at the time and which was defined by McGreevy as "the notion that national customs might trump Roman regulations."229 Lamennais, who was disillusioned by the governments he had witnessed through the times of revolution, argued that the papacy would provide leadership. In this thinking, he followed the ultramontane thinker Joseph de Maistre with his dictum: “without a Pope, no Church; without a Church, no religion; without a religion, no society.”230 Over time, Lamennais’ politics became more and more liberal, however. He argued that the church should be separate from the state. A central theme in his writings was liberty. He demanded “liberty of conscience, liberty of the press, [and] liberty of education” by 1829.231 He had come to accept the new political order which had followed the revolutions. Oldfield pointed out Lamennais’ “willingness to live within the ‘common law’ framework of a pluralistic society.”232 This stance was strongly condemned by the pope and by reactionaries such as Prince Metternich. Metternich wrote that “the practice of burning heretics and their works has been abandoned: that is a matter for regret in the present instance.”233 Lamennais’ liberal writings ultimately led to a complete break with the Catholic Church in the 1830s. Lamennais asked for individual liberty and is called the founder of liberal Catholicism. The focus lay on the synthesis of liberalism and Catholicism, however. He argued that “when liberals ask for liberty, they also ask for order.”234 He criticized liberals for failing to acknowledge that Catholicism could provide that order in the form of spiritual authority. He made the Gallican system responsible for that which had used the Church in despotic ways and had made it seem “the natural ally of despotism.”235 He wished for a separation of Church and state with a “hypothetical accord between the Church, which would be simply the religious bond uniting souls, and the State, as the political bond uniting wills.”236 As Oldfield pointed out, Lamennais’ shared understanding
229 McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 26. 230 Felicité Robert de Lamennais, De La Réligion Considérée Dans Ses Rapports Avec l’Ordre Politique Et Civil, 1825, 121, quoted in John J. Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 8, no. 2 (1969): 269, https://doi.org/10.2307/1384339, 277. 231 Felicité Robert de Lamennais, Des Progrès De La Revolution Et De La Guerre Contre L'Église (Paris, 1829), vi, quoted in Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 279. 232 Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 279. 233 Hastings, “Hugues-Felicite Robert De Lamennais,” quoting Alexander Roper Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church and the Revolution (New York: Scribner, 1954), 145. 234 Lamennais, Des Progrès De La Revolution Et De La Guerre Contre L'Église, vi, quoted in Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 280. 235 Lamennais, Des Progrès De La Revolution Et De La Guerre Contre L'Église, vi, quoted in Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 280. 236 Jacques Poisson, Le Romantisme Social De Lamennais Essai Sur La métaphysique Des 2 sociétés ; 1833- 1854 (Paris: Vrin, 1931),14, quoted in Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 280.
47 with liberalism was that both accepted modern individual and social liberties as necessary foundations to maintain social order.237 Lamennais adapted to changing circumstances and altered his ultramontane world view to respond to the social and political realities of his time. Dubuisson, and possibly others who were involved in the slave sale, read Lamennais. It is therefore worthwhile to take a closer look at Lamennais’ essay “On Modern Slavery” which he published in 1840. While this was shortly after the slave sale occurred, Lamennais based it on ideas which he had already developed earlier in the 1830s. Central was the idea that religion was the base upon which a free and equal society should be founded. In his essay, Lamennais started out with the concept of the “ancient slave.” Basing his examination on France, Lamennais described how “day by day, slavery became yet more and more a contradiction.”238 Having moved on from ancient slavery, “a new right, founded upon the equality of nature, has become a general belief.”239 He argued, however, that slavery continued to exist, just in a different form. He condemned it harshly: The essence of slavery is, indeed, […] the destruction of human individuality, that is to say, of that natural liberty and sovereignty of the man, which makes of him a moral being responsible for his actions, capable of virtue. Degraded to the level of the mere animal, even below the animal, in losing his individuality, he is deprived of the right of his humanity; consequently, of all right; and, in course, of all duty.240
The language and image Lamennais painted, when he talked about the conditions of modern slavery, remind of what Marx would argue a few years later.241 Lamennais argued that in modern slavery, “between the capitalist and the proletarian, […] the same actual relations subsist as were between the master and the slave of old. The very name remains: we say, the master and the workman; we speak but too exactly.”242 He called to outright revolution against the upper classes which denied freedom to the people. Different from Marx however, and consistent with his earlier writings on spiritual authority, he asked to realize the demands of sovereignty and freedom on a religious and moral basis.243 Lamennais incorporated the Catholic narrative of wage slavery in this account. Jon Gjerde pointed out that this was often pitted against the Protestant narrative of how Catholicism “stifled progress and initiative” in an antebellum America which was rapidly
237 Oldfield, “The Evolution of Lamennais Catholic-Liberal Synthesis,” 281. 238 Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Modern Slavery (London: J. Watson, 1840), 4. 239 Lamennais, Modern Slavery, 8. 240 Lamennais, Modern Slavery, 8. 241 H. Barth, The Idea of Order: Contributions to a Philosophy of Politics, 99. 242 Lamennais, Modern Slavery, 10. 243 Barth, The Idea of Order, 103. 48 changing economically.244 Lamennais differed from this traditional narrative, however, since he emphasized individuality and the “natural liberty and sovereignty of the man” which sounded more resonating of Rousseau than of the traditional Catholic criticism of growing individualism. Lamennais’ life and writings incorporate many aspects of the complex web of circumstances in which the slave sale took place. He had been shaped by the revolutions which also affected European Jesuits such as Dzierozynski and Dubuisson. This might also be one reason why they shared a strong desire for order brought by Rome, which manifested in their ultramontane views. Lamennais, however, moved away from those opinions over time, towards an emphasis on personal liberty and the separation of church and state. What did not change, however, was the idea that the Church should be the moral base for a stable society. One might think that this shift further away from Rome moved him closer, ideologically, to figures such as Mulledy and McSherry, who were also scolded by ultramontanes for their disobedience towards Rome. Dubuisson, for instance, expressed the opinion that “if our Fathers in America can gradually assume the ways of the Society [of Jesus] in Europe, a very considerable spiritual benefit will result.”245 This was only partly the case, however. They did not share Lamennais’ emphasis on individual liberty, at least not to the degree that it would lead them to emancipate their slaves. They did, however, share the idea of a separation of church and state. The separation of church and state had already been invoked during the 1820s by Maryland Jesuits as a strategy during the Maréchal dispute to keep Rome from interfering. In that sense, Mulledy and McSherry acted in a certain tradition of not letting church officials in Rome influence their business in Maryland. This time, however, the dispute did not end with a dismantling of American Catholicism but with a strengthening thereof. The dispute with Maréchal showed the power struggle between Rome and a distinctly republican version of American Catholicism that had been introduced by Carroll, especially with establishing the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland. Figures such as Dzierozynski acted as a bridge between two worlds during that dispute. Dzierozynski had been sent to America specifically as a non-American to broker a compromise between Maréchal and the Maryland Jesuits. Those had acted in the spirit of Carroll’s republican Catholicism and had used their rights as American citizens to defend their position in the Maréchal dispute. Turning to government officials as high as the Secretary of State, they had
244 Kang, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, Chapter 6. 245 “’Is it expedient to sell these 300 slaves?’: The Dubuisson Memorandum, 1836.”
49 emphasized the separation of church and state and argued that Rome could not force them to give up parts of their property to settle the dispute with Maréchal. We can observe how the American aversion to foreign intervention from Rome was used in this strategy to support the claim of the Maryland Jesuits. The fear of “papal intervention,” which was explored in the previous chapter, had played an influential role even before the discussions around the slave sale and was used strategically against Roman influence. Despite the successful efforts by the Maryland Jesuits to object to Rome’s orders during the Maréchal dispute, Dzierozynski was ultimately successful in transferring the administrative powers of the Corporation back to the Society of Jesus with its center in Rome. In other words: The preliminary end of the Maréchal dispute in the 1820s also marked the dismantling of the republican Catholicism in Maryland as it had been established by Carroll which had been based on the administrative power of the Corporation and a strong sense of republican rights and duties of its members. After Carroll’s version of republican Catholicism had been dismantled during the 1820s by continental Jesuits, Mulledy and McSherry represented a new brand of American Catholicism. When Roothaan asked to settle the Maréchal matter once and for all in 1835, times had changed. When the new generation with McSherry, Mulledy, and Eccleston took over, this “ended the Anglo-Roman agency in the American affairs of the Society” and “for the first time, […] Americans had it in their own hands,” according to Hughes.246 They were not part of the old, Maryland tradition of the Corporation and the plantations that Carroll had represented. They emphasized their “Americanness” and focused on shifting the Jesuit’s resources towards the urban centers and towards education. Furthermore, they were highly aware of the climate of rising anti-Catholicism and abolitionism, They prioritized fitting into society over acting according to the wishes of European Jesuits. In the previous chapter, I explored how the maybe most predominant fear of many Protestants in Maryland during the 1830s was the fear of foreign “papal intervention,” much more than a very strong support of abolitionism. Mulledy and McSherry reacted to this political climate, pushing against influences from European as well as from rural Maryland. They made it clear during the discussions surrounding the sale how much American public opinion mattered to them. The sale in 1838 marked a shift towards a brand of American Catholicism which once again had adapted to the political and economic circumstances the Jesuits were facing. Contrary to only a few years earlier during the conflict with Maréchal, the opinion that
246 Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America Colonial and Federal, 1120. 50 ultimately counted most and prevailed was that of American Jesuits such as Mulledy and McSherry, not that of the continental Jesuits representing the “old ways” in the comparatively young province. We can observe, in retrospect, a turn towards complying with the demands of the American political reality at the time, rather than the wishes expressed by the continental Jesuits representing Rome. The sale, therefore, can be interpreted as an act of emancipation on the part of the American Jesuits, embodied by Mulledy and McSherry, where slaving was used as a strategical tool. We should not forget, however, that the sale was initiated by individuals who were reacting to their immediate surroundings and who most likely did not think in terms of “historic shifts.” They were trying to solve a situation which was directly in front of them, with complex political and economic implications. The debate surrounding the sale continued over several years and by the end of it, Mulledy in a letter thanked God that he had succeeded in finally bringing that chapter to a close.247
247 “’Thank God I have succeeded’: Fr. Mulledy completes the sale of 272 slaves to Louisiana, November 11, 1838.” 51
Conclusion
Untangling the web of intentions and influences surrounding the slave, it becomes clear that there was not one defining factor that led the Jesuits in Maryland to sell 272 of their slaves in 1838. This thesis explored different layers of arguments that factored into the decision, ranging from political and religious to economic factors. Following along the arguments made during the dispute, I suggest an interpretation of the sale as an act of American Catholic emancipation from Rome, marking a transition away from an ultramontane, Rome centered variety towards a more American Catholicism which reacted to Protestant anti-Catholicism and a strengthening abolitionist movement at the time. Mulledy and McSherry used slaving as a strategy of emancipation in order to adapt to changing circumstances, with rising anti-Catholicism, nativism, and economic shifts from rural plantations to urban centers. They navigated a web of shifting power dynamics which was more complex than the often-cited antithesis of ultramontane European Jesuits opposing more progressive American Jesuits. Amongst the American Jesuits in Maryland, Mulledy and McSherry were facing those who came from a rural, slaveholding tradition which rooted in the Catholic republicanism that Carroll had established at the end of the eighteenth century one the one side. On the European side, they met ultramontane Jesuits whose worlds had been shaped by revolutions and upheavals in Europe. One important factor in this process of emancipation was the Protestant anti- Catholicism the Jesuits were facing at the time. The analysis of the Protestant journal Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine showed that the main fear invoked was that of foreign “papal intervention.” If Mulledy and McSherry were striving for American acceptance, they had to avoid giving the impression that they were being controlled by their superiors in Rome. Throughout the endeavor of contextualizing and interpreting the sale, it became clear how interwoven the political, religious, and philosophical spheres were. Furthermore, categories such as “ultramontane” and “liberal” were oftentimes fluid and flexible. This was exemplified in this thesis on the example of Lamennais and his essay “Modern Slavery.” He represented a different kind of emancipation from Rome, with his focus on individualism and personal liberty. At the same time, arguments from both sides regarding the sale resonated in his writing. This thesis could be expanded on in further research in several places. One such place would be the role of an emerging liberal Catholicism during the 1830s and 1840s, with figures such as Henri Lacordaire and Charles Forbes René de Montalembert standing next to 52
Lamennais. It would be illuminating to further research how their writings were perceived in the United States in this transatlantic Catholic development. The tensions within the Irish clergy on the topic of slavery and abolition would be another topic to expand on. Mulledy and McSherry were both children of Irish immigrants. How can we place them and their decision to sell the Jesuit slaves in this context, taking into account the positions of influential figures such as the Irish-born John Hughes, the archbishop of New York, or Daniel O’Connell, the well-known Irish abolitionist priest? The goal of exhaustively historicizing any event can ultimately never be reached. We will never definitely know, why a certain individual acted in a certain way and which factors were more influential than others. The attempt to do so can help, however, to contextualize human action in the past to better understand what might have led individuals to make the choices they ultimately made. The Ignatian principle of adapting to circumstances is deeply engrained in Jesuit spirituality. It turns out that, in a sense, McSherry and Mulledy were the most Jesuit of all in that sense, by adapting to the rapidly changing circumstances they were facing.
53
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