The Sale

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0:36Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. On November 22, 1633, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set sail from England. Both were headed across the Atlantic to Maryland. On board the Ark was a Jesuit Catholic priest, Father Andrew White. Father White had been sent to Maryland to start a Catholic colony.

1:26The first thing he did when he arrived was lead a Mass. This was the start of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Over the next few years, the Jesuits colonized thousands of acres across Maryland. They set up tobacco plantations and bought enslaved people from West Africa to work in them. So priests who relied on slave labor and slave sales established the nation's first Catholic archdiocese. They helped to build the nation's first Catholic cathedral. Priests who operated a plantation and sold people established the nation's first Catholic seminary. Rachel Swarns is an author and a contributing writer for the New York Times.

2:15Unlike some white people at the time who viewed enslaved people as brutes, as animals, these priests didn't. They saw them as human beings and human beings with souls, and they felt that they themselves had an obligation to nurture and tend to those souls at the very same time that they felt comfortable buying and selling their bodies. They were expected to participate in church life. They were expected to be Catholics. The expectations, though, varied in time and place. Sometimes they were enforced, and the penalties could be horrifying. There's an instance where, because an enslaved couple flouted the moral code of the church, engaging in infidelity, where, as punishment, the priests decided to sell their children.

3:26In the 1670s, a teenager named Anne Joyce came to Maryland. She'd been born in the Caribbean, but ended up in England, working as an indentured servant. And, you know, we all know a little bit about indentured servants, mostly Europeans who arrive with a contract, a term of years to work. And then they go on their way to live independent lives. And Ann Joyce was a Black woman, but that was her hope too. Ann Joyce worked for one of Maryland's richest Catholic families, the colony's deputy governor. And when the terms of her contract wore up, she went to him with her papers. But instead of accepting that and leaving her free to go, he determines that she will not be free to go.

4:25He burned the contract that proved that she'd come to the colony as an indentured servant and not an enslaved person. She is sent off to the control of someone else, another white man who forces her into a basement where she spends a period of time. And when she emerges from that basement, she is an enslaved woman with no recourse to a contract or to anything. Anne Joyce was enslaved for the rest of her life. She went on to have a number of children. She told every one of them her story. Over the next hundred years, Anne Joyce's descendants were all born into slavery. They were separated and sent to plantations all over the state.

5:17Two of them were brothers Patrick and Charles Mahoney. They know the story just as well as all of the members of their family know the story. And in the late 1700s, they decided to do something about it. And so in 1791, Patrick and Charles Mahoney take the Jesuits to court to try to win their freedom. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

5:52There were freedom suits in the colonial period in Maryland. one in 1770, so before the American Revolution. William Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. In the 20 or so years before Charles and Patrick Mahoney sued for their freedom, other enslaved people across Maryland had gone to court to do the same thing, filing lawsuits to prove that they were descended from indentured servants and should never have been enslaved. The success rate was actually quite high. More than 50 % of all of the freedom suits in Washington, D.C. and Maryland were successful. They were successful in a way that we've forgotten, and we really need to look at these suits because they tell us a story that we need to hear about enslaved people who were acting in the law, acting in politics.

6:56Slavery was never stable in the law. It was being challenged throughout the 17th and 18th century in England, and these cases kept coming up. And enslaved people in Maryland knew about these cases, and in the aftermath of the revolution, they bring these cases forward, raising a fundamental question for Americans. was slavery compatible with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Charles and Patrick Mahoney were not alone when they filed their freedom suit. In the same week, another enslaved man from the same plantation filed one too. His name was Edward Queen. So Edward Queen, not much is known about him because even though we know a lot more about Edward Queen than almost anybody, it's not like there were writings of Edward Queen and statements of Edward Queen or anything like that.

8:04This is Letitia Clark. So as I found out, Edward Queen is a direct ancestor of mine. My mother's maiden name is Queen, so I always knew I was a queen, although I never knew about Edward Queen, he must have been an amazing person of courage, right? Because how are you an enslaved person, and now you're going to sue your enslaver? I mean, the person who could really hurt you and do some damage, you know, you're going to sue that person? The plantation where Edward, Charles, and Patrick were enslaved was called White Marsh. The Queens were the biggest family there. Their ancestor had also come to Maryland, as an indentured servant.

8:51The Queen freedom suit and the Mahoney freedom suit are, in my view, two of the most important freedom suits in American history. If Edward, Charles, and Patrick won their suits, they could make it easier for everyone else in their families, all across Maryland, to sue too. It's extraordinarily risky. Enslaved people are literally suing in open court a defendant slaveholder personally. This is an individual suit. It's a civil suit, and it's in the public arena of the court. And so it came with considerable risk, not least of which was that even before a suit was filed, some slaveholders, if they caught wind of such an action would summarily sell the person out of the state or out of the colony.

9:49One woman in Maryland, a relative of the Mahonis, was planning to sue for freedom, but before she could file the papers, she was sold to Havana, Cuba. So the consequences of these actions were potentially immense. Edward Queen's case was the first to go to trial in May of 1794. So the basis of his lawsuit is that he was descended from a free woman, and that free woman's name was Mary Queen. That's his grandmother. One of the key witnesses was the son of a midwife. She delivered Mary Queen's daughter. She had known at the time that Mary Queen should have been free, but she was being held illegally in slavery by James Carroll, who was the one who hired her to deliver the baby.

10:42Another key witness was a white man who'd grown up near the plantation where Mary Queen was enslaved. He said he remembered his mother talking about how Mary and her enslaver were always, quote, quarreling about her freedom. Edward's trial lasted a few days. They came to the decision that, indeed, Mary Queen had come to this country as a free person and that, indeed, Edward Queen was a descendant, and so for that reason, he should be a free person. And so he won his freedom. He won his freedom. Edward Queen was free, but his mother, siblings, and cousins were not. Their freedom suits were pending in the lower court.

11:30But since Edward had won in the general court, his family assumed their cases would go through too. So Edward and some of his family left the plantation. I mean, I was thinking even in the last week or so, like, how would it be for me if I went free, but yet my sister was still enslaved and my aunts and, you know, like, you can't be at peace that way. You know, it's still very hard. It's very difficult. fault. So, I mean, you are trying to do the best you can now with your newfound freedom right and buy property, I'm sure, work hard, buy property, keep your family together, the parts of your family that were released along with you to keep that part together.

12:17And, you know, there was no guarantee that some other court trial was going to come where the Jesuits were going to say, no, So, you know, this is overturned. So I don't think they ever felt totally at peace with the fact that they were free. The Jesuits were losing money fighting freedom suits. And now they were waiting for Charles and Patrick Mahoney's trial to start. It created waves of uncertainty among the Catholic slaveholders because the Mahonies were scattered among various enslavers. And there are letters from those enslavers, you know, talking about, oh, good Lord, you know, what's going to happen with this case?

13:04Will it affect the people that I enslave as well? Three months after Edward Queen won his case, the Jesuits approached one of his lawyers with an offer. They wanted him to drop his cases. The Jesuits essentially pay him to stop representing enslaved petitioners suing them. And so he switches to the slaveholders, the Jesuits, and in Mahoney's case is representing the Jesuits. Charles and Patrick Mahoney's case finally got a trial date in 1797, six years after they filed their suit. The Mahoney's trial took so many years in part because the Maryland court had sent a commission to London to investigate whether Anne Joyce had really been an indentured servant.

14:01It took them three years to sail to England, compile a report, and come back. But an all-white jury found the commission's report inconclusive. The case would have to go to a retrial, which could take years. Charles and Patrick didn't want to wait at White Marsh. So in December of 1797, they escaped the plantation. Less than a month later, their enslaver posted an ad in the Maryland Gazette. He said Charles and Patrick Mahoney, quote, pretend they are set free, and he offered a$16 reward. But the brothers were never caught. And in 1799, a second jury heard their case. In the second trial, Charles Mahoney is declared by a jury, again of all white men, that he is a free man.

14:59The Maryland court declared that his ancestor, Anne Joyce, should have been free, and so should her descendants. Charles' enslaver, a priest named John Ashton, was ordered to pay his legal fees and provide thousands of pounds of tobacco and damages. It was the largest award given to any enslaved person in the Maryland court. It would be enough for Charles to buy a small property. But the Reverend John Ashton appealed the verdict right away. The Mahoney's lawyers fought the appeal with an argument against slavery itself. They said, quote, Slavery is incompatible with every principle of religion and morality.

15:43It is unnatural and contrary to the maxims of political law, more especially in this country where we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that liberty is an inalienable right. It didn't work. The Jesuits won the appeal against the Mahonies. But then, John Ashton freed them anyway. After 12 years in court, one historian thinks that Charles and Patrick just paid him. Charles and Patrick are freed but the resolution of the case and the loss of the case means that most of their relatives remain enslaved and with very little prospect of freedom

16:35We'll be right back

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18:26Just a blank page with a blinking cursor, asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. In 1791, on a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigos, a man named Harry Mahoney had his first child. St. Inigos was in southern Maryland, near the banks of the Potomac River. Priests who visited wrote about how beautiful it was. The plantation was covered with pine trees, cedars, and dogwoods. It grew wheat and tobacco. Harry Mahoney would likely have heard about his relatives Charles and Patrick's freedom suit and that they lost. By then, tobacco plantations weren't making as much money for the Jesuits.

19:20Everyone was thinking about cotton. So, you know, enslaved people are property, human property. and the Jesuits do with their property what people do. When there are hard times, they sell. So Harry Mahoney is living at St. Inigos at a time when there is great fear and great uncertainty among the enslaved. He and his family watch as the Jesuits sell people from the plantation where they live. And so he has to find a way to keep his family safe. The Jesuits were selling enslaved people to plantations in the South. And the work conditions were quite different from the Chesapeake. And so in Maryland and Virginia, people knew about this.

20:20Enslaved people knew. The priests knew, too, that Black people were terrified of being sold down South because the conditions were so, so much worse. Rachel Swarns writes that Harry Mahoney tried to protect his family by becoming the foreman of the plantation. So here's this guy who comes from this family of resistors, who becomes essentially the right-hand man of the enslaver. There was another thing Harry Mahoney did. One of his daughters told her children about it decades later. During the War of 1812, the British are threatening the plantations, and they are actually coming up And there's a period of time where this is terrifying to many of the white people.

21:19But, you know, for black people, it was actually also exhilarating because the British were promising freedom to people who abandoned the plantations and joined their forces. And, you know, this must have been something that Harry and the Mahonies considered. Certainly everyone knew, you know, people ran and all around them were running to the British. Harry, perhaps because he had young children, decides to stay. One day, Harry noticed a British ship sailing towards St. Inigo's. He knew the priests stored money in a house on the plantation, and once he saw the soldiers, he went to get it. Then he took his family into the woods to hide.

22:09The British soldiers ransacked the plantation. They took every valuable thing they could find. When they left, Harry Mahoney came out of the woods and showed the priests that he'd saved the money. As a result, he is rewarded by the Jesuits for his courage and his loyalty. And with that, he garners a promise from them, a pledge, that neither he nor his family will ever be sold. Harry Mahoney, his wife, and their eight children were seemingly safe. But the Jesuit plantations kept losing money. Some of the priests thought they could recover by selling hundreds of enslaved people at once. One of the biggest advocates of this idea was the president of Georgetown, which the Jesuits had founded.

23:05His name was Thomas Mullady. The Jesuit leaders at the time said there was no way to keep Georgetown afloat, keep the Jesuits afloat, and to expand without some cash. And the way to get it was to sell off the enslaved. Other priests disagreed. They felt the Jesuits had a moral duty to the people they enslaved and thought they treated slaves better than southern plantation owners did. But Thomas Mullady wouldn't give up on the idea of a sale. And by 1838, he got permission from Rome to do it. There are two primary buyers, a former governor of Louisiana who is a member of Congress at the time, and a wealthy doctor who was originally from South Carolina.

24:01Both owned plantations in Louisiana, where they grew sugarcane and cotton. Mullady made a deal to sell almost 300 men, women, and children for a total of$115 ,000. The priest, who ran St. Inigos, where Harry Mahoney and his family were enslaved, oppose the sale. He even traveled to Georgetown to try to talk Milady out of it. And when he returned to St. Inigo's, to the plantation, to the manor house there, Harry Mahoney is there serving his meal and sees something in the priest's face, and he knows then that they have been sold. The promise that he had counted on for so many years was broken. But it wasn't clear when they would be sold.

25:02And then they wait. They know that everyone, nearly everyone, will be sold. And they are just waiting for the slave traders to come. It must have been agonizing.

25:22Harry's oldest son, Robert, was the first the slaveholders took in June of 1838. He was 45. He was sent to New Orleans on a slave ship called the Uncas. Then in October, Reverend Milady himself set out for St. Enigos to oversee more of the sale. And the priest who runs the plantation, who has opposed the sale, gets wind that they are coming. And he urges members of the Mahoney family to run. One of Harry's daughters, named Louisa, got away in time. She and her mother ran into the woods to hide. But not everyone heard the priest's warning. Anna, the sister who has two young children, doesn't make it.

26:12Anna was in her 20s. She had a son around 8 or 9 years old and a daughter who was about 6. Another one of Harry's older daughters, Bibiana, also didn't make it. She had children too. Harry was too old to be taken away that day, but he watched as his daughters and grandchildren were. We know that they were taken by a sea craft from St. Inigos to Alexandria. We know that they were marched from where they were held to the wharf, to the ship, to the Catherine Jackson. Anna and her children were the 73rd, 74th, and 75th names on the ship's manifest. Their heights were measured and recorded before the journey.

27:07Her son was 4 '4", her daughter was 3 '11". The Jesuits sold a total of 272 men, women, and children in the sale of 1838. They were paid roughly$422 per person. And we know a little bit about what other enslaved people described about the journey from Alexandria to New Orleans, about being crammed onto the ships, about having time on the deck, about just the sea as far as you could see, about the terror, about the fear, about people dying sometimes on the journey. and then about arriving in New Orleans, a place so different from what people had known that it's often described as another country.

28:07When Rachel Swarns first started reporting the story of the sale for the New York Times, she spoke to genealogists who were trying to find descendants of the people who'd been sold. They'd been able to track down a few, But they believed there could be thousands. And so we ran a companion piece asking readers, are you connected to this story? We published a link to the passenger list. They asked if anyone recognized any of the names. We'll be right back.

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29:27It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Jeremy Alexander didn't know much about his family tree growing up. But after he had a son, he wanted to try to learn more. And in 2014, it had become in vogue for people to do DNA testing to learn more about their ancestry.

30:06And so I started with my parents. In 2016, Jeremy got an email from a woman named Melissa Kemp. She was from Boston. And she said, according to Ancestry.com, they might have relatives in common. And I wrote back, sure, let's talk. Whenever you're ready to talk, I'm willing to talk. And we set up the time. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2016. They decided to talk on the phone. When she started in telling her story about the fact that the family is from Maryland, And all I thought to myself was, I don't know anything about the history of my family being in Maryland. I said, all I know is Mississippi, Louisiana, and folks moved up to Illinois, and I'm from Chicago.

30:56And it was a bit of a surprise. And she's going through this whole story about then a person named Louisa and Anna who were sisters. And that she comes from a branch from Louisa's side of the family and that it looks like that I descend down from Anna. I'm just trying to figure all this out because I don't know these names. I haven't been able to go back to these names at this time right now. They were both related to Harry Mahoney. His daughter, Anna Mahoney, had grown up in Maryland, enslaved at a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigo's. And in 1838, she'd been sold to the South. and when she finally really laid it on me about this is what I'm trying to tell you is that you are also a descendant of the enslaved people who were sold back in 1838 by the Jesuit priests who ran Georgetown College, now Georgetown University.

32:00I had to stop her right then and there. And I said, I have to tell you something. I said, I am talking to you as I'm in my office at Georgetown University. She couldn't believe it. I said, I've been working here for years now. Jeremy is the executive assistant to Georgetown's Dean of Medical Education. In September of 2016, he'd watched the president of Georgetown announce plans to acknowledge its history and apologize. The university would build a memorial to the people Jesuits enslaved, rename some buildings on campus, and create an institute to study slavery. So he knew about Georgetown's past.