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Slavery at Georgetown College 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
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