The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church by Rachel L. Swarns

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church Reviews

• 
  Sunny Valvaneda

  This was an amazing book but also very difficult to read. As someone who grew up in Catholic schools, I was completely unaware of the slave history that the Church held. That they would use the Bible to justify their disgusting behavior is even more despicable. It does help me to better understand their silence during the Holocaust. Those that they deem less than are not worthy of saving or protecting. I did appreciate that over the years a few priests did speak up against slavery but sadly even the Vatican had no issue with slavery and did not support those priests. And I had always heard how wonderful the Jesuits are and how great their schools are. Well, know I know why their schools are so excellent. The amount of free labor they were able to use to fund the schools by selling slaves to pay off debts helped them to fund some of the best colleges and universities possible. All while destroying many innocent lives. And it’s incredibly sad how many of these families were separated for hundreds of years and only found each other because of a single article that was written about this tragedy. And while the university is working towards reparations and has formally apologized on behalf of the priests who destroyed their ancestors lives, nothing can ever truly atone for the horror and sadness these families have endured. A beautifully written story about a very ugly part of America’s history.
• 
  Colleen Browne

  Initially, as I began reading this book, I must admit that I was a bit annoyed. I felt as if this was another one of those anti-Catholic screeds ignoring the role of other religions while attacking the Catholic Church for its role in slavery. Soon, and as my reading advanced, I realized that I had misjudged Swarns and that what she has written is an essential part of the Catholic Church in America and its role in the lives of the people it enslaved, made promises to, and then broke their promises for their own financial enrichment- to save and enlarge Georgetown University and to open and expand other Catholic universities in the U.S.
  
  Swarns is an excellent writer, drawing the reader in with both the deep research that went into this book and plight of the people whose story is told. Even though there are attempts to continue to ignore or hide episodes in our country about which we are not proud, telling this history, and all of the other histories of its kind is essential to the country. As a historian, it has become obvious to me that in order to create the kind of society that most of us truly desire, we must come to terms with our history- even when it embarrasses or shames us. To overcome those things and truly embrace our country and one another, it has to be done. Sorry for the preaching.
  
  The story does have a somewhat, if bittersweet, ending. Descendants of the 272 enslaved people bought and then sold by the Jesuits in 1838, have reached out to one another and are able to dig more deeply into their family history. Moreover, the Jesuits have participated and offered reparations to the survivors even though there are those who believe that they should do more.
  
  Anyone interested in the history of this country needs to read this book and others about African Americans and the massacres that they have historically suffered. We owe this to them. Of course, we also owe the same focus to other groups we as a country have treated badly- Native Americans, Asians, etc.
• 
  Donna

  This book follows what is known of the enslaved Mahoney family whose roots began in colonial Maryland. Their story continues to the present day, as descendants from the family’s dispersed branches discover their common ancestry. The book also describes the relationship of the institutional Catholic Church with slaveholding in America.
  
  The Mahoney family story begins with Ann Joice, a teenager who arrived in the colonies in around 1676. She had been born in the tropics but had been living in England when she signed on as an indentured servant and eventually worked in the home of a wealthy Maryland Catholic, Colonel Henry Darnell. The story of how Darnell stripped Ann of her freedom is heartbreaking, but this matriarch of the Mahoney family decided to tell her story to her children and grandchildren and that story became her legacy as it was passed down through the generations.
  
  At around the same time, Jesuits also settled in Maryland with the promise of land and freedom from the restrictions that they faced in England. Bequests from wealthy Catholic landholders to the Jesuit priests allowed them to amass large plantations and enslaved workers, so much so that in the mid 1700s, the Jesuits were the largest slaveholders in Maryland. The Jesuits felt responsible for the spiritual growth and development of the enslaved people they bought and sold as property, seemingly untroubled by the obvious contradictions. But by the early 1800s, the Jesuits were in financial crisis, especially in their mission to establish schools such as the college at Georgetown. This led eventually to the decision to sell all of the enslaved people they owned and forcibly relocate them. Many were sold south to work on cotton and sugar cane plantations.
  
  The story of the Mahoneys, the 1838 sale, and the troubled history of Georgetown first came to national attention when the author, Rachel L. Swarns, wrote an article that appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2016. This book is an outgrowth of that article, as has been the identification of nearly 600 Mahoney descendants, the creation of a Georgetown Memory Project and the GU272 Descendants Association, as well as other formal and substantial responses from the University. It’s a remarkable story.
• 
  Siria

  The 272 recounts the story of the Mahoneys, an extended family of enslaved and later free Black Americans whose forced labour and eventual sale south to Louisiana were used to fund the construction and expansion of Georgetown University. Rachel Swarns' account of how the Jesuit Order abused generations of people, and justified that abuse to themselves through a kind of pious, racialising paternalism, is an engrossing if often queasy and infuriating read. It's the rare book where you feel like the author didn't need to call out church hypocrisy as much as she did, just because it's so evident on the page.
  
  There were a couple of places where I thought that Swarns' analysis could have dived deeper—either through following the lives of the post-Reconstruction descendants of the Mahoneys, or through contextualising the religious history of these events more—and a couple of points where there are minor historical errors. (Admittedly I'm far more familiar with European forms of Catholicism, but e.g. unless the reforms of Vatican II were anticipated in 19th-century America, Mass was celebrated in Latin, not in the vernacular.)
  
  However, these are reservations which ultimately do not detract from the power and importance of this work, and anyway no one book could be expected to encompass every aspect of this history: of the 272 enslaved people sold by the Jesuits, there are at least 6,000 known living descendants today. Highly recommended.
  
  4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.
• 
  Dawn Michelle

  I will never, ever, understand, in my whole life, understand how people thought it was okay to enslave a people, simply because their melanin was darker than theirs. The more I learn, the angrier I get [and the more I want to learn - education is what will help us to NOT make the same mistakes and to help correct those that were made]. Which is why this is a must read book, especially right now, with the atmosphere of trying to erase history. HOW can we even think that taking something out of a book erases it or takes away the fact that free people were enslaved, lied to, had promises broken, families separated and destroyed all because their skin color was different than their oppressors? Slavery and the atrocities committed against a race of people can NEVER be erased and books like this and the brave authors that seek and write the truth will continue make sure history is taught and shown and when institutions such as Georgetown, once the truth has been revealed, think that an apology for such atrocities will be enough, will continue to help fight for more, though will anything ever be enough for the pain and suffering inflicted on a race of people who did nothing but exist? I think not. I think white america could apologize for the rest of our lives and it will never, ever, be enough.
  
  Thank you to Rachel L. Swarns and her bravery and tenacity and for the depth of this book - thank you for sharing all you have learned and all you have done to help move this project forward; I am so inspired by you. Thank you to Karen Murry - Narrator for bringing this story to life and for making it even more real by the vocal telling of this story. It really brought the story to life for me and I am so glad I waited for the audiobook. Thank you also to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group/Random House for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  David

  This is a book about a worthy topic but I’m sad to say that the writing was uncompelling, so I often read other books when I had the choice.
  
  Some people in the USA, it is alleged, say that they are largely not to blame for the outrages and cruelty of slavery because their family immigrated many years after slavery was abolished. I have never heard anyone say this myself, since I don’t get out much, but I have no problem believing that somebody, probably many people, said it, and continue to say it today. Let’s assume it is true that people said it, even say it frequently. This book (and the New York Times article that preceded it) is evidence that it is possible to arrive in the US after the abolition of slavery and still benefit from it. If you learned anything at Georgetown, you, however indirectly, benefitted from slavery because, without the proceeds of the sale of slaves, Georgetown University as we know it today would not exist. This book is about Georgetown but I don’t believe there is anything particularly unique about this university. Many things in the USA – buildings, organizations, institutions; religious and secular – share this quality. If you use them today, you benefit.
  
  The Times article which preceded this book made a splash for good reason, but I simply don’t believe that the authors had enough information to expand this into a compelling book. The reason for this is, of course, that the enslaved victims, in keeping with the opinion of slave owners that slaves were less than human, neither made a record of their lives nor allowed them to do so themselves, holding people not only in slavery but also in ignorance, meaning, enslaved people were usually not allowed to learn to read and write. If an enslaved person managed, somehow, to teach themselves, and recorded the outrages that occurred routinely, it would have, if discovered, been treated as an act of outrageous defiance and punished very severely. It’s not a mystery why first-person accounts of enslavement are few and far between.
  
  Sometimes, in this book, the author is fortunate enough to encounter and reproduce a rare example of the testimony of the anguish that slavery caused among the enslaved. Here’s one:

  A year earlier, while [a police constable] had been patrolling in the city, he had been called to the slave pen on Duke Street [in Alexandria, Virginia]. Someone had heard children screaming. A young enslaved woman in her twenties, who had been granted the freedom to live with autonomy until she had recently been sold, had decided that she could not bear for her children to return to a life of slavery. She had already strangled her two youngest children in the pen and was attempting to murder her two older children, beating their faces and heads with bricks “by which they were horribly mangled.” (Kindle location 2050)

  More frequently, however, there is no information, dramatic or otherwise, at which time the author must fill in the blanks with unfounded, if very reasonable, speculation. This results in the frequent appearance of phrases like “We do not know whether…”, “No one knows whether…”, “And there is no description of…”, “It is unclear whether …”, and so on.
  
  It is completely reasonable for the author to be outraged – what happened was outrageous then, and still is now. But I don’t think the author’s case is well served by attempts to tug the heartstrings like

  Louise and Anna would soon learn from their elders that a Black child’s value was not measured by her infectious laugh or her curiosity but her utility. (location 965)

  or

  But for Anna, who was imprisoned on board the Katherine Jackson, the twisting tributary must have seemed like a river of tears. (location 2114)

  I once read – I think it was also in the New York Times – that African-Americans docents leading white Americans through historically preserved Southern plantations sometimes had to endure knuckleheaded outrage because they (the docents) did not give sufficient space to the alleged existence of slaves who felt childlike satisfaction at the treatment they received from their benevolent masters. With opinions like this walking around apparently unmolested and unchallenged, it’s easy to understand why the author is outraged at the treatment of enslaved people, both described in this book and more generally, and wants to write about it. However, I think that this book, as written, won’t convince anybody who doesn’t agree already.
  
  I received a free electronic advance copy of this book from
  the publisher via
  NetGalley.
• 
  Megan

  A part of me wants to give this more stars, because the subject matter is important and the writing is good. I think, however, the book never really expands beyond its summary. The jacket copy tells us that Jesuits ran plantations and owned slaves, and it was the running of those plantations that got the Catholic church going in the US and the sale of those slaves that bankrolled Georgetown University and the seeding of other Jesuit schools across the nation. And the book is just…details about that. It just wasn’t a difficult concept to understand, so reading names and dates and prices and speculating on people’s feelings just felt to me like over-explaining. I found the end, where Swarns discusses Georgetown and Jesuit efforts towards reconciliation the most interesting and relevant.
• 
  Susan

  DNF
• 
  Lindsay

  Such an important read. Difficult history to process, but the stories of these precious families, needs to be shared.
  
  “As a community and as individuals, we cannot do our best work if we refuse to take ownership of such a critical part of our history. We must acknowledge it."
• 
  Bridget Johnson (Jameson)

  Anyone with a Georgetown interest or connection should read this.
• 
  Kristjan

  Let’s get this out of the way first … slavery of any kind is evil; however, the underlying theme of this books is that the Catholic Church, specifically here in the American colonies, was somehow more duplicitous in their participation in this evil institution than any others of the majority … and that assertion was not demonstrated within this book … only implied.
  
  The 272 are the slaves that were sold in 1838 by Georgetown University, a Jesuit learning institution that had poorly administered its finances to the point of near bankruptcy. That sale enabled to University to survive and eventually thrive to become the elite American college it is today. It is the contention of the author that this success is the foundation of the American Catholic Church today … a statement that is only marginally supported by the following story of the Mahoney family with respect to GU272.
  
  In fact, the work as a whole frequency engages in the fallacy of composition by using the Jesuit order in Maryland as a representative of the entire Catholic Church … despite the order actually being suppressed and reorganized outside of the Church for part of that history. In reality, what we see if that the Catholic Church in Maryland (representing a minority of the total state population) largely conforms to the beliefs and mores of the majority Protestants in the state, largely under the silent toleration of the Vatican (the authors go nearly two centuries to find Church support for slavery which had by this time started to significantly erode). This is not intended to let the Church, the Jesuit order or Georgetown University off the hook … only that such poorly constructed arguments make any discussion and reconciliation more difficult.
  
  There is a lot to be angry about here. In fact, this book is designed to play on emotions; therefore it is important to be on the lookout for presumed inferences that enable the misinterpretation of the context in order to elicit the emotional response desired. Unfortunately, the book also engages in apparent exaggeration of the facts for the same purpose (which serves to undermines the academic validated of the whole piece). One such example from Chapter 2 where the author state “By the early 1700s, enslaved Black people accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of Maryland’s workforce.” In fact, estimates of the slave population in Md for 1710 is only about 24% of the entire population … by 1755, nearly 40% of the state population were black; however, an estimated one-third of that number were actually free-blacks. Such exaggeration is hardly necessary to capture the evil that is chattel slavery and only serves to undermine trust in the later assertions by the authors.
  
  Prologue
  Chapter 1: Arrivals
  Chapter 2: A Church’s Captives
  Chapter 3: Freedom Fever
  Chapter 4: A New Generation
  Chapter 5: The Promise
  Chapter 6: A College on the Rise
  Chapter 7: Love and Peril
  Chapter 8: Saving Georgetown
  Chapter 9: The Sale
  Chapter 10: A Family Divided
  Chapter 11: Exile
  Chapter 12: New Roots
  Chapter 13: Freedom
  Chapter 14: The Profits
  Epilogue
  
  I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
  
  #The272 #NetGalley
• 
  Jyotsna

  Read this as one of the jury members of the Booktube Prize 2024 Octafinals.
  
  My Ranking - 2nd out of 6 books (Top 2)
  
  Rating - 5 stars
  NPS - 10 (Promoter)
  
  The priests in Maryland, who relied on the proceeds derived from slave labor and slavery, built the nation's first Catholic college, the first archdiocese, and the first Catholic cathedral and helped establish two of the earliest Catholic monasteries. Even the clergymen who established the first Catholic seminary operated a plantation and relied on enslaved laborers.
  
  Yet enslaved Black men, women, and children remain invisible in the origin story traditionally told about the emergence of Catholicism in the United States.
  
  This is a powerful and well researched book on enslaved African Americans who contributed to the making of the Catholic faith in the US. The prose will make you blood boil and make you realise that religion led by a man, at the end of the day, is just a device to get monetary benefits to the institution.
  
  The book is a well written piece of historical and social non-fiction, I recommend it if you are looking for books on slavery.
• 
  Sandie

  Most of us think of the American Catholic Church as an institution with roots in Spain and 19th century European immigration, but Catholicism, while largely proscribed in the other English colonies had established roots in French Louisiana and British Maryland where slaveholding flourished and was central to the economic life of the region. The colony of Maryland was founded by English Catholics. Charles Carroll, who signed the Declaration of Independence, was one of a notable group of wealthy Catholic slave-holding landowners. The Jesuit religious order settled in Maryland to minister to Catholics in Maryland and Pennsylvania. The Jesuits owned plantations run by slave labor and looked upon their slaves as people with souls to be saved and encouraged them to become Catholics. They and the Church in Rome expected that slave marriages and family units would be honored, even if the priests' estimation of the capabilities of their Black people ranged from profoundly racist to loving and respectful paternalism.
  
  My fellow Catholic, Rachel L. Swarns has written an extraordinary and heartbreaking book about the Jesuits' slaves who were at the center of a tragic and damning episode in early American Catholic history.
  
  Following the American Revolution, when Catholics were finally free to establish their own schools, Archbishop John Carroll, former Jesuit and cousin of Charles Carroll, built Georgetown College to educate young men from both Catholic and Protestant families. The College was the center of the Jesuits' grand plan to establish the Church in the new nation, The Jesuits' Maryland plantations were expected to finance the schools.. When the costs of building and expanding the school vastly outstripped incomes from the plantations, some prominent priests blamed the costs of slave labor rather their own bad management for insufficient income and concocted a scheme to fund the school by the sale of the Jesuit's slaves. Blinded by ambition for himself and the American Church, Georgetown College president, the Rev. Francis Melledy ignored opposition within the Jesuit Community and orchestrated the mass sale of the Jesuit's slaves. Mellendy was also undeterred by the devastating consequences that would befall the 272 Black people. Rome's strictures that the slave families be kept together and be provided with chapels and priests that would allow them to practice their Catholic faith were blatantly ignored. Instead, the families were ripped apart, and most of the slaves were sent deep into the South to harsher lives on sugar and cotton plantations with rarely a priest in sight. In short, to save Georgetown College and ultimately provide seed money for the American Catholic Church, the Maryland Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people, ignoring the duty they owed to those mostly Catholic, men, woman, and children in their care.
  
  The 272 is a powerful book. Swarn has a fine prose style and employs solid knowledge of antebellum slavery, documents from 19th century archives, and interviews with contemporary Black Catholic families connected to the Maryland Jesuits. She tells their story largely through the family of Ann Joice and Harry Mahoney. Although the slaves left no written records, Swarns can recreate the history of the Mahoney family because their stories were handed down to their descendants along with a strong Catholic faith that withstood the betrayal and bigotry of white Catholics. The Mahoney's descendants knew that Ann's lay Catholic master destroyed her manumission papers and that their priests broke promises never to separate them or sell them away. Both Jesuit records and family stories also remember the priest who knew the Mahoney family best, Father Carberry, who stood by the family, fought against selling any slaves, and made repeated efforts to keep the Mohoneys safely together in Maryland. Reading The 272 devastated me personally, and I am grateful to Rachel Swarns for the book she has written. It is not only an important book about inhumanity, grave sin, and treachery. It is also a story of the courage, survival, and faith of an African American community. The book ends with long overdue reunions of descendants of the Georgetown slaves, their organized confrontation of Georgetown University, and the University's response to the sins committed against their ancestors. We shall see how the great Georgetown University lives up to promises recently made to the survivors of the 272 . In addition to reparations already promised by the university, Georgetown's students voted to annually fund an additional $400,000 as part of reparations.
  
  This is an important book for contemporary Americans, and it is especially important for white American Catholics. The Church we love and, yes, struggle with; the Church that nurtured our immigrant forebearers to survive poverty and anti-Catholic bigotry and violence was built not only with the pennies of our poor and despised Irish, Italian, and Eastern European ancestors but also by the sale of innocent, mostly Catholic, African American families. The 272 will help us understand the legacy of slavery, what is owed to our Black sisters and brothers, and the resilient and remarkable faith of our fellow Black Catholics.
• 
  Hannah Im

  I had no idea until this book that the original US Catholics were also slave owners. I always had associated slave owners with commercial land owners and farmers. This book held one surprise after another, the least of which was its association of the Jesuits and Georgetown University. I’m saddened, angered, and illuminated.
• 
  Marvin

  "The 272 - The Families Who Were Enslaved And Sold to Build The American Catholic Church" by Rachel L. Swarns. Published 2023.
  
  This is the story of the 1838 slave sale and how it shaped American institutions, such as the first Catholic institution of higher learning - Georgetown College, now known as Georgetown University.
  
  Of equal importance and what forms the heart of the story is, what happened to the people who were sold and their descendants?
  
  It took Swarns and her team of archival researchers and historians seven years to dig into 200-year old developments of how Jesuit priests that built the early foundations of the Catholic Church, relied on slave sales and slave labor to fuel the growth.
  
  Tying everything back to current descendants is what makes this story emotionally heartbreaking. Swarns shines a light on the enslaved, giving you 'History 101' as it's never before been taught. It has been a privilege to read this book and learn the unsettling truths.
• 
  Tina Panik

  Swarn’s strong narrative style presents a meticulously researched history that should be required reading for all Americans.
• 
  Kelly

  This is a must read, especially for anyone educated by the Jesuits. It’s extremely well written and well researched.
• 
  Luis Rivera

  3.5 — very interesting book on the sale of 272 slaves by the Jesuits of Georgetown University in order to save themselves from debt and disaster. Though the storyline was interesting as someone fascinated by genealogy and history, the writing just didn’t work for me. It felt very dry and disconnecting, I found myself spacing out while reading. I would still recommend it to others (more to history buffs), but I was personally happy to be done with it.
• 
  Lisa

  Challenging read on that it reads like a text book. I hung in there because ofthe topic.
• 
  Micha Goebig

  Very very interesting
• 
  Allison

  This book should be required reading for Georgetown students and Maryland high school students.
• 
  DJ

  Even with great speculation of the actual details, which admittedly are impossible to know, still an objective telling of the sordid slave trade of our past.
• 
  Dana Marie

  Enlightening. I've read many narratives about American chattel slavery but this shed new light on other aspects. It is well written, honest and powerful.
• 
  Patricia

  After reading this I couldn’t decide if I should scream or just gag. What a horrific indictment of the Jesuits and the American Catholic Church during the civil war. How did they manage to hide this story for close to 150 years? A worth-while read for Catholics everywhere, but particularly for graduates of the colleges belonging to the Jesuits.
• 
  Tanya

  Excellent and gut-wrenching book about the connection between slavery and Catholicism in the US, focused on the specific history of the Jesuits of Georgetown University’s decision to sell 272 enslaved people in 1838 - and the reverberations of that decision into today.