Slavery's Capitalism by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

National Institutions and Natural Boundaries

CHAPTER 11

War and Priests

Catholic Colleges and Slavery in the Age of Revolution

CRAIG STEVEN WILDER

I have been a faithful servant to the Society [of Jesus] going on 38 years, & my wife Molly has been born & raised in the Society, she is now about 53 years of age[.] Now we have not a place to lay our heads in our old age after all our service. We live at present in [a] rotten logg house so old & decayed that at every blast of wind we are afraid of our lives and such as it is it belongs to one of the neighbours—all the rest of the slaves are pretty well fixed and Father [Peter] Verhaegen wants me and my wife to live on the loft of one of the outhouses where there is no fire place nor any way to warm us during the winter, and your Reverence know it is cold enough here—I have not a doubt but cold will kill both me and my wife here—To prevent the evil, I am will[ing] to Buy myself & wife free if you accept of 100 dollars[,] 50 dollars I can pay down in cash, the rest as soon as I possibly can.

—Thomas Brown, enslaved, St. Louis University, 1833

In August 1797, shortly after the end of his final term in office, President George Washington rode horseback to the Catholic college in Georgetown, a settlement that the state of Maryland had ceded six years earlier to the federal district. In 1789 John Carroll had founded the college. Carroll was the nation’s first Catholic bishop and a former Jesuit—Pope Clement XIV had suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773, a proscription that lasted forty-one years. Georgetown president Louis Guillaume Valentin DuBourg and a small faculty of French and Creole Sulpicians (Order of St. Sulpice) and ex-Jesuits from the United States, the West Indies, Ireland, and continental Europe greeted the general. Washington spoke to the faculty and a larger body of students from the porch of Old North, the second academic hall on campus. Enslaved people completed the scene. Slaves belonging to the faculty and officers and slaves owned by or leased from local craftsmen and merchants labored at Georgetown during its first four decades. The Catholic clergy owned several Maryland slave plantations that funded their missions, including the college and St. Mary’s Seminary (founded in 1791) in Baltimore. In fact, the college had an account with the local tobacco merchant Brooke Beall—who owned Yarrow Mamout—before it had a single student. The vice president governed the campus servants, and the records offer glimpses into the routineness of that business: In 1793 the merchant Thomas Corcoran received “Cash [for] 1 p[ai]r shoes for Negroe Nat.” Two years later the officers paid “Cash for Negro[es] Jos[eph] & Watt for 3 days work.” In December 1798 they agreed to board “4 Negro Children @ $20. Each” with Margaret Medley in town.1

If George Washington’s visit to Georgetown confirmed the incorporation of Catholics

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