Better late than never: the Jesuits’ welcome, if tardy, application of the natural law

“. . . the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to ‘reparations,’ reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for ‘40 acres and a mule’ to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.” Murray Rothbard (1969)[1]

A century-and-a-half after the Civil War, the Society of Jesus has acknowledged the justice of specific reparations owed to the five thousand or so living descendants of the Black people the Jesuits once owned, an enterprise they had engaged in for more than a century. With a “down payment” of $15 million, the Jesuits have pledged to raise $100 million in private donations (not taxpayer funds).[2] What follows is an edited excerpt from “Lock(e), Stock and Jesuit,” Chapter 29 of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. 

* * *

The Jesuits of Georgetown and Baltimore were not absentee slaveholders. They got their hands dirty, so to speak, overseeing around 300 slaves (some estimates put it at 500) on six plantations at any one time.[3]Having interviewed scholars involved in the “Jesuit Plantation Project” of Georgetown University’s American Studies Depart­ment, Kathryn Brand writes:

Compared to other plantation owners in the area, when it came to slavery, “The Jesuits were no better or worse,” according to [University Dean Hubert] Cloke. Many of the slaves had been gifts from wealthy Catholic families to sustain the Church. The abolition of slavery was not an issue in the area until the early nineteenth century, when Georgetown’s Jesuits became deeply divided over the issue of slavery. “But they were not conflicted in the way you would want,” Cloke said. “They were conflicted over what to do about the threat of abolitionists.” [4]

By the 1680s (after the supply of indentured servants dried up), the Society of Jesus in Maryland “relied upon a fully developed slave system,” and American Catholics generally regarded “abolitionism” as a cussword of Protestant heretics. Father Maxwell wrote:

Already in 1836 the propaganda of Christian anti-slavery movement had achieved considerable force in North American and Europe, and at this date the lay editor of a Catholic journal considers that the Christian abolitionists should be regarded as a sect since they differ from all other Christians in believing that slave-holding is a sin against God. [5]

The older generation of Jesuits had long made their peace with the surrounding non-Catholic society’s acceptance of slavery. Prefect-Apostolic (i.e., Bishop) John Carroll (1735-1815), for example, was kind to his slave (he also had a free servant) and generous to him in his will, but was no abolitionist. Emanci­pation would come gradually, and only at the initiative of slaveowners, if he had his way.

A year after Carroll died, John Hughes (1797-1864), the future first Archbishop of New York, arrived in the United States with his father, settling first in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Desperately in need of work, John superintended a garden for the Reverend John DuBois, future founder of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, about fifty miles from Baltimore, in exchange for room, board, and an opportunity to enroll in St. Mary’s College, which he at last was qualified to do in 1820. (A friend of Father DuBois, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, who had established Catholic communities in Emmitsburg, was young John’s “booster.”)

Hughes’ biographer tells us that his “force of laborers consisted chiefly of two negroes, Timothy and Peter, well-known characters, who are still remembered by old students of the Mountain [i.e., Catoctin Mountains],” but omits to indicate the legal status of these chaps. [6]

In Hughes’ own hand we find an odd moral distinction between the one sold into slavery and his or her offspring born into it. Having entertained the scenario of slavers purchasing human beings from enemies who almost certainly would have butchered them, Hughes raises what he calls the “terrific part of the question”:

. . . not only the individuals brought to the American continent or islands are themselves to be slaves, but their posterity, in like manner, for all time to come. This is the only terrific feature about American slavery. And yet it is not alien from the condition of mankind in general. Original sin has entailed upon the human race its consequences for time and eternity. And yet the men who are living now had no part in the commission of original sin. [7]

The view of slavery expressed here is, of course, that of the contemporaneous Instruction of the Holy Office, promulgated under the authority of Pio Nono, the Roman Pontiff who initiated “Dagger John’s” rise through the American hierarchy.

The younger generation of Jesuits, though cordially anti-abolitionist, wanted to divest themselves of their holdings in this unseemly business as soon as possible, at least for economic reasons. Never did they entertain the notion that persons who ought never to have been considered property should simply be manumitted, let alone compensated. No, they thought, rather prosaically, that the money could be invested better, and elsewhere. In Catholic education up north, for instance.

Although by the mid-1830s, the plantations were beginning to turn higher profits, this did not placate the younger Jesuits, because the estates were still not seen as sufficient to support the mission. These new Jesuits had no moral quandaries selling their slaves downriver; they felt their investments should be moved to urban centers such as New York or Philadel­phia. So, in 1838, at a time when the plantations were at their most profitable, the Jesuits decided to sell their slaves to Louisiana’s ex-governor, Henry Johnson, whose son was a Georgetown student. [8]

Now, they weren’t a cold, heartless bunch. Not at all.

Before the sale, the mission drafted “Conditions for Sale,” a set of guidelines to protect their former slaves. They determined that the slaves could only be sold to a plantation, rather than families, “so that the purchasers may not separate them indiscri­minately and sell them.” In what reads like a bill of rights, the slaves were promised to be kept with their families, and those with family on other plantations were to be sold to those plantations. Those who were too old or sick to be sold were to be provided for “as justice and charity demands.” Finally, the slaves were guaranteed the right to practice religion. The document also made a demand of the Maryland Jesuits, likely an addition from the new school of Jesuits. The sale’s profit was not to pay off debts or purchases, but “must be invested as Capital which fructifies,” specifically educational centers in New York and Philadelphia. [9]

Well, guess where those funds wound up:

[Georgetown Plantation Project Professor Edward] Curran believes that some of the older Jesuits listed their slaves on the inventory, but warned them of the sale so that they could hide in the woods when the officials came to transport them. Curran explained, “The 1840 census shows a surprisingly large number of younger slaves still on certain plantations, which supports the tradition that some slaves hid themselves then returned to the plantations once the provincial had left.”

With the sale [in 1838], the Jesuits of Maryland made $115,000 [about $2,780,000 today] and ended their history as a large slaveholding institution. The money from the sale was, as stipulated, invested in Xavier High School in New York and St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia. Some of the funds also went to finance Fordham University, completed in 1842 . . . . “Much of the funding for these schools came from the ignoble sales,” [Dean] Cloke said. [10].

Talk about ”the subsidy of history”! Xavier, my high school and Fordham, the alma mater of several of my uncles, were seeded with profits from the sale of human beings, who should have been simply manumitted.

* * *

According to libertarian natural law philosophy, whose great exponent was Murray Rothbard, reparations are morally owed to a victim of aggression not only from the aggressor, but also from anyone who inherited the fruit of that aggression. There may be difficulties in identifying not only the slaves’ descendants, but also the slaveowners’ heirs. There is, however, no statute of limitations.

As Father Maxwell’s herculean scholarship shows, the use of slave and convict labor for imperial ventures, regularly and duly rationalized by learned theologians, was a standard feature of Catholic Europe, and by no means an accidental one. Some theologians, to their credit, protested the especially dehumani­zing features of the peculiar institution in the name of the slave’s personhood, but never the institution itself until the late 19th century. Manuals of instruction for seminarians offered justifica­tions of the institution as in accord with nature up to the time of Second Vatican Council. [11]

I’ll leave it to Catholic apologists to explain why it took so long for natural law’s antislavery implications to sink in.

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic

Notes

[1] Murray Rothbard, “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” The Libertarian Forum, June 15, 1969, 4. See also Walter Block, “On Reparations to Blacks for Slavery,” The Human Rights Review, July-September 2002, 53-73.

[2] Rachel L. Swarns, “Catholic Order Pledges $100 Million to Atone for Slave Labor and Sales,” New York Times, March 15, 2021.

[3] Life and Labor under Slavery: the Jesuit Plantation Project

[4] Kathryn Brand, “The Jesuits’ Slaves,” The Georgetown Voice [“Georgetown’s Blog of Record”], February 8, 2007.

[5] John F. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church: A History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery (London: Barry Rose Publishers, 1975), 110. The lay editor he refers to was B. J. Webb of Catholic Advocate, in a piece published April 2, 1836. I’ve posted a facsimile of the full text of Maxwell’s book on my old site. I’ve not been able to find out who owns the rights to Slavery and the Catholic Church, which should be brought out in a new edition. Do any readers agree and have some ideas about this?

[6] John Rose Green Hassard, Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes, D.D., First Archbishop of New York. With Extracts from His Correspondence. D. Appleton and Company, 1866, p. 24. There is an interesting case of a Maryland slave named Peter, whom we cannot with certainty identify as one half of young John Hughes’s labor force, but whose situation reveals something of the educated Catholic mentality regarding slavery. Historian Thomas Murphy, himself a Jesuit, writes:

On May 5, 1801, when the [Corporation of] RCC [Roman Catholic Clergy] convened at Newtown [MD], there was concern about the plans of a Father Brasuis to free a slave named Peter. The corporation informed Brasuis that such a step would harm “that sublimation, which ought to be preserved among the other slaves.” Therefore, they advised that Peter be required to purchase his own freedom by providing security equal to the amount for which he might otherwise have been sold. The clergy felt that if Peter managed to fulfill these conditions, he would thereby demonstrate that he had earned freedom . . . rather than received it as a right. . .

. . . the priests showed a conviction that if Peter could manage to purchase his liberty, he would thereby witness to the remaining slaves that freedom had its patient price. Hopefully, his example then would guard against slave revolts and the temptation to believe that freedom could be claimed on demand. Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838. New York, Routledge, 2001, 75.

[7] Hassard, 426. Emphasis added. This is from an unsigned article in his diocesan journal in 1862. Father Maxwell commented on this passage: “Emancipation was held to be desirable because of the existence of recognized abuses in the slave-system, not because of any intrinsic injustice in the system itself; but such emancipation should be gradual. Abolitionism without compensation of the slave-masters was condemned as an unjust denial of property-rights.” Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 114. Emphasis added.

[8] Brand, “The Jesuit Slaves.” It was not uncommon to see a Georgetown University student in those days accompanied by his slave.

[9] Brand notes the irony of the situation: “. . . all Jesuits recognized certain basic rights for the slaves. A report from the time demanded adequate fixed rations, half of Saturday to themselves, and the promotion of morality and the administration of the sacraments. However, the report also states that for other slaves, ‘chastisement should not be inflicted in the house, where the priests live.’ That is, it was acceptable for priests to whip the slaves, as long they did not do so in their own quarters. Similarly, the document stated that pregnant women should not be whipped.”

[10] Brand, “The Jesuit Slaves.”

[11] The chronologically last example that Father Maxwell cites is M. Zalba, Theologiae Moralis Compendium, published in 1958, a few months before Pope John XXIII announced his intention to call a general council. Maxwell, 88, n. 173. I own a copy.