By Bernard A. Cook
A Map of Maryland Jesuit Stations of the 17th-19th Centuries.
After Pope Clement XIV had suppressed the Jesuit order in 1773, Fr. John Carroll returned to Maryland from the Jesuit seminary in Liège, where he had been teaching. Under his leadership, the 23 Jesuits in Maryland and Pennsylvania formed the Select Body of Clergy that continued the Jesuit mission until 1804. (1) Members of the Select Body of Clergy continued to run five large estates and a smaller farm in Maryland (2): St. Inigoe’s Manor and Newtown Manor in St. Mary’s County; St. Thomas Manor in Charles County; White Marsh Manor in Prince George’s County; Bohemia in Cecil County; and St. Joseph on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake in Talbot County. In 1804, the Jesuits of Maryland were reconstituted as part of the Russian Province of Jesuits, which through the intervention of the Russian Czarina Catherine the Great had never been suppressed. Pope Pius VII finally restored the Society of Jesus throughout the Church in 1814.
The Jesuits were involved in the colony of Maryland from its inception. Fr. Andrew White, S.J., who was invited by Lord Baltimore to join his Maryland project, sailed on the Ark, a 400 ton merchant ship, in 1633 with two other Jesuits, Fr. John Altham Gravenor and Fr. Thomas Gervase. The Ark carried approximately 140 colonists to Maryland. The Jesuits financed the voyage of 26 men who accompanied them on this initial voyage to Maryland. (3) These individuals, in order to pay for their voyage, were obliged to work after their arrival for three or four years for the Jesuits as indentured servants. During the next five years, the Jesuits brought another 48 men to Maryland as indentured servants. (4)
Fr. White was particularly concerned to bring Christianity to the indigenous people he encountered. The Yaocomico and the Anacostans saw relations with the English as an advantage in their conflicts with other native Americans. To further his effort, White created a dictionary and translated the Catholic catechism into the languages of the native Americans in the area. White converted Chitomachon, the chief of the Piscataway. However, Chitomachon might well have seen this as politically advantageous.
Metagnomen, the local chief of the Yaocomico, granted land to White, but Lord Baltimore refused to recognize this acquisition. He insisted that he alone could grant claims to land. (5) To receive land a person had to finance the voyage of indentured servants to populate Baltimore’s colony. Those who brought indentured servants in 1633 would receive 10 acres of town land for every five men brought over. After 1633, “Adventurer Gentlemen” would receive title to five acres of town land and 2000 acres of farmland for every 10 individuals whose transportation they provided. Adhering to those conditions, the Jesuits acquired their first two estates, St. Inigoe’s Manor and St. Thomas's Manor. (6)
St. Inigoe, located on the left bank of the Potomac near the initial settlement at St. Mary’s was the oldest of the Jesuit plantations. The Lords Baltimore granted the Jesuits the 2000 acres there in 1637. St. Thomas Manor, further up the river, consisted of 700 acres to the east of Port Tobacco creek and 923 acres on the west side of the creek. St. Thomas Manor, which at one point consisted of 4,500 acres, became the largest of the plantations. (7) Eventually five plantations and smaller properties amounted to approximately 13,000 acres, and were worked by approximately 323 enslaved people in 1790. (8)
Catherine O’Donnell notes, significantly, that Lord Baltimore valued the Jesuits but placed limitations upon them. They sailed to Maryland as individual Englishmen. As such they could own property as individuals, and, in that way, fund their missionary enterprise. However, the Society of Jesus according to Baltimore’s order could not own property. Assigning land to individual Jesuits enabled Baltimore to subvert the Statutes of Mortmain, which forbade corporate ownership of land. It also allowed Baltimore to avoid anti-Catholic attacks. O’Donnell asserts, “Jesuits’ landholding and need to support themselves had momentous consequences: it drew them as willing participants into the plantation system.” (9) The Jesuits of Maryland, as a consequence, eventually relied upon enslaved labor to support themselves and their mission. (10)
The Jesuit properties were initially farmed by tenant farmers and indentured servants. Indentured servants were required to labor for a fixed number of years to pay for the cost of their passage to Maryland. (11) Mathias de Sousa, a free person of mixed race, arrived with the colonists on the Ark in 1634. (12) It has been asserted that he joined the Ark when it stopped at Barbados for supplies after having been blown off course by a terrific storm. De Sousa, who was the first Black to reside in the colony of Maryland, worked for the Jesuits as an indentured servant. After de Sousa fulfilled his obligation of servitude, he sailed up and down the Potomac bringing goods back and forth between settlements. He was not only the first free Black to reside in the colony, he eventually became a member of the colonial Assembly. (13)
Historians debate whether the shift from indentured servants to enslaved labor occurred because of a decline in the supply of indentured servants or an expectation that slavery would provide a consistent supply of labor and be more profitable. The first slaves from Africa were brought to St. Mary’s city in 1642, only eight years after the arrival of Fr. White and the colonists in 1634. In the 1660s, only 3 percent of the population in the colony consisted of enslaved people. By 1710 the percentage was 24. (14)
Catholics and the Jesuits endured a period of persecution in the 1640s, during the Puritan Revolution. Anti-Catholics from Virginia seized White and seven other Jesuits in 1645. Three Jesuits perished, and White and the others were sent back to England on account of their “evil” preaching. Thomas Copley, S.J., who was also expelled, was allowed through the intercession of Baltimore to return in 1648, so the Jesuit mission in Maryland continued. However, the character of the colony changed and with it the mission of the Jesuits. The native American population dramatically decreased and the number of settlers increased significantly. Catherine O’Donnell writes, “The Jesuit mission was also growing and changing. No longer focused on the indigenous peoples who had inspired their labors, Jesuits in the colony were ‘priest planters,’ conducting missions to Catholic settlers throughout the colony.” (15)
When the Jesuits in Maryland began to hold slaves is not clear. An annual report from 1638 mentions four “servants” purchased in Virginia. Whether they were enslaved persons or indentured servants is not clear. Enslaved people as well as indentured servants were referred to as “servants.” Fr. Copley sued a Capt. Ingle over a boy sold in Virginia for £20, the usual price for an enslaved boy in the late 1630s. (16) Two individuals, who worked on the Jesuit estate at St. Inigoe in 1664, were called “servants.” It is uncertain whether they were enslaved or indentured. A former enslaved woman told the Jesuit Joseph Zwinge in the early twentieth century that she was a descendant of a slave given by Lord Baltimore to the Jesuits at St. Inigoe around the same time. (17) In 1717, with growing Protestant hostility, William Hunter, S.J., made a list of all of the property owned by the Jesuits at the Newtown Manor. If necessary, he intended to transfer the Jesuit property to a Catholic layman, Thomas Jameson. Hunter’s inventory contains the first list of enslaved people held by the Jesuits. He enumerated, “Negro servants 15. 4 men, Will, Jack, Kill, Peter. 4 women, Mary, Teresa, Clare, Pegg. 4 boys, Jack, Clemm, Tomm, James. 3 girles [sic], Betty, Kate, Susan.” (18) By 1765, the total number of enslaved people held by the Jesuits was 192. (19)
Under the Stuart monarchs in England, Charles II and James II, Catholicism was tolerated in Maryland. However, after the English Glorious Revolution in 1688, Catholics again experienced repression. In 1704, the Maryland General Assembly outlawed the ownership of land by religious orders. The Jesuits then transferred the Jesuit holdings, including land and any enslaved people, to individual Jesuits as they had been required to do initially by Lord Baltimore. Those individual Jesuits held and administered the estates and the enslaved on behalf of the order and bequeathed the property in land and slaves to other Jesuits, or after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, to individual members of the Select Body of Clergy, or the Corporation of the Roman Catholic Clergymen, chartered by the Maryland legislature in 1792. (20)
By 1790, the Jesuits utilizing these tactics had under their control 323 enslaved men, women, and children. (21) Slavery was slavery. However, the Jesuits recognized their religious responsibility for the enslaved. This obligation and a paternalistic attitude were expressed in a sermon by Fr. George Hunter, S.J., in 1749. Hunter said, “Charity to negroes is due from all, particularly their masters. As they are members of Jesus Christ, redeemed by his precious blood, they are to be dealt with in a charitable, Christian, paternal manner, which is at the same time a great means to bring them to their duty to God and therefore to gain their souls…” (22) Fr. John Lewis, the last superior of the Maryland Jesuits before their suppression in 1773, referred to the enslaved as “Brothers in Jesus Christ,” and warned, “he who takes no care of his domesticks [sic] is worse than an infidel and has denied his faith.” (23)
O’Donnell provides a rather stark assessment of the Jesuits as slaveholders. She writes,
the “Jesuits’ attention to enslaved people’s sacramental life coexisted with physical coercion, expropriation of labor, and, of course, the overarching injustice of enslavement itself.” (24) John Bossy refers to an “ineradicable mixture of social paternalism and racism with which the Jesuits regarded” the slaves they held. (25)
Brother Joseph Mobberly, S.J., who administered the Jesuit property at St. Inigoe and the enslaved people there from 1806 to 1820, defended the institution of slavery, but was ambivalent about its consequences. Mobberly wrote, “slavery is not only lawful, reasonable and good, but that it is also necessary.” (26) However, he argued that the responsibilities of masters for the spiritual and material welfare of their slaves was such that owners would be better off materially and certainly, in view of eternal salvation, much better off spiritually without slaves. (27) Mobberly wrote that masters were morally obliged to answer for the enslaved people they held by “providing them with beds and comfortable houses,…providing them with necessary food and rainment,…permitting them to marry,…prepar(ing) them properly for the sacraments…” Owners were to be held responsible before God for “…using cruel methods in correcting them,…neglecting them in sickness and old age,…selling them under grievous circumstances and separating man and wife.” (28) In 1815, he wrote to Fr. Giovanni Grassi, S.J., Superior of the Jesuit Maryland Mission and the president of Georgetown College from 1812 to 1817, “It is better to sell for a term, or to set your people free…Because we have their souls to answer for.” (29)
Though Mobberly expressed concern for the spiritual welfare of the enslaved under his control at St. Inigoe, he had a low opinion of the enslaved. He claimed, “The better a Negro is treated, the worse he becomes.” (30) When Fr. Peter Kenney, S.J., an Irish Jesuit, sent as a special Visitor, or overseer, to the American mission. visited St. Inigoe in 1820, he questioned the enslaved about their conditions. He listened and was appalled. He intervened and the Jesuits removed Mobberly from his post within a month. (31)
During the early years after the American Revolution, a number of freedom suits were brought by enslaved people in Maryland against slaveholders, arguing that female relatives had been indentured servants - free women. (32) Some of the suits were eventually successful. By April 1796, twenty enslaved people had won their freedom in suits against Fr. John Ashton, S.J., who assisted Fr. John Lewis, S.J., the administrator of White Marsh Plantation. (33) The enslaved people, who won their freedom, were members of the Queen family, descendants of Mary Queen, a free woman of color, who had come to Maryland from England as an indentured servant around 1713. (34) In addition to members of the Queen family, a number of other free Black families, members of Holy Trinity parish, such as the Butlers, Shorters, and Thomases, had gained their freedom through these suits.
In 1797, Charles Mahoney filed a freedom suit against Fr. Ashton. Richard Ridgely, Mahoney’s lawyer, argued, “slavery is incompatible with every principle of religion and morality. It 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.’” (35) If this moral and legal argument did not impress the Jesuits, the freedom suits were a factor that led the Jesuits to reconsider their involvement in the institution of slavery.
Fr. Francis Neale, S.J., the founding pastor of Holy Trinity parish, had been the administrator of St. Thomas manor at Port Tobacco in Charles County, Maryland. In 1809, when he became president of Georgetown College, Neale had Priscilla Queen brought to Georgetown, probably from Port Tobacco. She took advantage of her transfer to the District of Columbia to lodge a freedom suit asserting that she was a descendant of Mary Queen, a free woman of color. (36) Although she lost that suit, the Jesuits were concerned about the possibility that their property in slaves was being threatened by freedom suits. The account book of St. Thomas Manor in August 1794, recorded £4 17s 6p paid to Philip Barton Key, the uncle of Francis Key, “To…retain or stop the mouth of lawyer Key from speaking in favor of the Negroes who have sued for their freedom.” (37)
Georgetown College was founded in 1789 by the Maryland Jesuits reorganized as the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen. The College did not own many enslaved persons, never “more than five people in any given year from 1792 to 1862,” when slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia. (38) However, the college was dependent upon enslaved laborers, whose services it rented. Enslaved people cooked for the Jesuits and students. They cleaned the school and did the laundry of the faculty and students. The college also utilized enslaved laborers to construct buildings including Old North. It hired enslaved masons from a builder, Daniel Bussard, to construct an infirmary and smokehouse, and it hired enslaved bricklayers and carpenters from George B. Magruder, James Harvey, George Athee and others for a variety of construction projects at the expanding campus. As many as 20 enslaved people worked at the college in 1815 and 1816. (39) It is probable that the original church at Holy Trinity, now the Chapel of St. Ignatius, as well as the present church, dedicated in 1851, were constructed utilizing the labor of enslaved workers.
In addition to hiring enslaved workers, the college administrators bought and sold enslaved people. In 1810, the college sold Liddy to Phillip Bussard for $220, of which $70 was in cash and the rest in whiskey and sugar. In 1808, Fr. Francis Neale purchased from the Jesuit plantation, St. Inigoe, a woman and a man named Len “for the use of the college.” (40) Bishop John Carroll, himself, had proposed the sale of slaves when the Jesuits needed money in 1805. He wrote, “the sale of a few unnecessary Negroes, three or four, and stock would replace the money.” (41)
In 1813, Jesuit trustees met at Georgetown College. They discussed whether they should free the enslaved people held by the order. It was proposed to sell “the whole or greatest part” of the enslaved on their plantations in Maryland for a specific term of years “after which they should be entitled to their freedom.” In June 1814, they agreed to sell all of the enslaved people they held with the provision that they would be granted their freedom after a specific number of years. (42)
Freedom suits were not the only concern. The enslaved people on the Jesuit properties were not reconciled to their status. In July 1814, the British on the way up the Potomac to Washington sacked the Jesuit plantation at St. Inigoe in St. Mary County, and liberated numerous enslaved persons, including some members of the Queen and Mahoney families. In all, more than 700 enslaved people in southern Maryland fled and joined the British. (43) It was evident that servitude was a burden from which the enslaved wished to free themselves.
There was also a dramatic indication of the desire of the enslaved for freedom at St. Inigoe at Easter time in 1817. There was a general disturbance by nearly 300 enslaved and free people, who pelted whites with sticks and bricks before order was restored. A Vermont newspaper reported, “It is customary for the slaves, immediately after the church fast and festival days to have two or three holidays for their recreation. On Easter Monday the 7th of April about 300 negroes bond and free are said to have been collected. After having spent the day in festive amusements peculiar to themselves they became so noisy and riotous, that the civil authority was deemed necessary in order to quell them.” (44) The people, enslaved and free, responded with anger to the effort to terminate their festival. This disturbance was a dramatic indication of the willingness of the enslaved to assert freedom.
In 1814, Fr. Francis Neale personally sold an enslaved man, Isaac, who had run away from Georgetown College and attempted to reach Pennsylvania and freedom. When Bishop John Carroll discovered that Neale continued to sell for life people enslaved by the Jesuits, he wrote to Neale of his surprise and mortification. He declared that the sales “for life” were “in direct contradiction to the humane decision of the Corporation.” Carroll expressed his belief that the sales were invalid. (45) Despite Carroll’s indignation, the Jesuits did not initiate their decision for gradual emancipation. Carroll died on December 3, 1815, two months after his denunciation of the continued sale of slaves for life. In 1820, the Jesuits reversed their decision. They argued that they “on mature reflection considered the measure prejudicial.” (46)
Resources:
1. According to Catherine O’Donnell, “ The Select Body of the Clergy, [was] an institutional successor to the suppressed Jesuit community. The select body was designed to be representative in nature and practical in its duties, meant to carry Jesuit charism and property through to a hoped for restoration.” O’Donnell, Catherine, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States: Faith, Conflict, Adaptation,” Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies, Volume II:2, https://brill.com/view/journals/rpjs/2/2/article-p1_1.xml?language=en
2. Thomas Murphy, S.J., Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York, N.Y.: Routledge: 2001), p. xiii.
3. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes." Woodstock Letters XXXIX, no. 3 (1910), p. 376, https://jesuitonlinelibrary.bc.edu/?a=d&d=wlet19101001-01.2.7&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------, cited by Sharon M. Leon, “Jesuit Estates: Jesuit Holdings in Colonial Maryland,” Jesuit Plantation Project, https://jesuitplantationproject.org/s/jpp/page/estates. There were approximately 76 indentured servants on the Ark. According to O’Donnell (op. cit.), “Jesuits and their indentured servants comprised sixty-two of the roughly three hundred settlers in the first five years of Maryland’s history.”
4. Lists of the passengers on the Ark can be found at The Ark and The Dove A USGenNet Legacy Site, http://www.usgennet.org/usa/md/state/arkdove.html
Zwinge, pp. 374-376.
5. Zwinge, pp. 376-377.
6. Ibid., pp. 375-377.
7. Stephanie A.T. Jacobe, “Where were the Jesuit plantations in Maryland?,” Catholic Standard, Feb. 2, 2021.
Sharon M. Leon, Jesuit Plantation Project, https://jesuitplantationproject.org/s/jpp/page/welcome. Professor Leon’s site provides a wealth of information about the Maryland Jesuits, their estates, and the enslaved people under their control.
8. Elsa Barraza Mendoza, “Catholic Slaveowners and the Development of Georgetown University’s Slave Hiring System, 1792-1862,” Journal of Jesuit Studies, December 15, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-0801P004. Mendoza cited the Federal Census of 1790 and the Liber JC, No. 3, fol. 285, General Court Land Record Books for the Western Shore of Maryland, “Properties,” Box 23, Folder 14, Maryland Province Archives (Henceforth MPA) and “List of properties,” Box 23, Folder 9, MPA.
9. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States.” See also Zwinge, p. 379.
10. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States.”
11. David S. Bogen, “Mathias de Sousa: Maryland’s First Colonist of African Descent,” Maryland Historical Magazine (Spring 2001), pp. 68-71.
12. “Mathias de Sousa,” Maryland Roots, https://mdroots.thinkport.org/library/mathiasdesousa.asp This site asserts, “Some people recognize Mathias as the first free person of African descent living in Maryland..” He was not. Four Blacks were hired out by William Claiborne to work on Kent Island in 1633. However, de Sousa, “an Atlantic creaole,” was the first person of African descent in Calvert’s Colony of Maryland. David S. Bogen, p. 68.
13. Bogen, pp. 73-74.
14. Russell R. Menard, “The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 1:32 (1975), pp. 30, and 41-45. Sharon M. Leon.
15. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States.”
16. £20 in 1638 would be approximately $3979 in 2020. Eric W. Nye, Pounds Sterling to Dollars: Historical Conversion of Currency https://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/currency.htm
17. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes," Woodstock Letters XLI, no. 2 (1912), pp. 203-204.
18. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes," Woodstock Letters XL, no. 2 (1911): 198, and Newtown-Varia, (1668-1962) [100.5 Z3-8], 01/01/1668-12/31/1962 File - Box: 27, Folder: 2; Deed of Gift (Jan. 30, 1717) between William Hunter and Thomas Jameson (100.5 Z5), MPA, cited by Sharon M. Leon.
19. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes," Woodstock Letters XLI, no. 2 (1912), p. 204.
20. Joseph Zwinge, S.J., "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes." Woodstock Letters XXXIX, no. 3 (1910), p. 379.
21. Mendoza citing the Federal Census of 1790 and the Liber JC, No. 3, fol. 285, General Court Land Record Books for the Western Shore of Maryland, “Properties,” Box 23, Folder 14, MPA; “List of properties,” Box 23, Folder 9, MPA.
22. William W. Warner, At Peace with All Their Neighbors: Catholics and Catholicism in the National Capital 1787-1860 (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994), p. 88 and fn. 21.
23. Rev. John Lewis, before 1761, American Catholic Sermon Collection, Georgetown University Special Collection, referenced by Robert Emmett Curran, “‘Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805-1838,” p. 38, in Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation, edited by Adam Rothman and Elsa Barraza Mendoza, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021).
24. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States.”
25. John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 4, quoted by O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States.”
26. Joseph P. Mobberly, SJ, Papers , “"Slavery is According to Reason": The Mobberly Diaries, Part II, August 1823,” Georgetown University Slavery Archive (henceforth GULSC), https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/158 and Diary Part II, Box 1, Folder 7, p. 26-32.
27. Joseph P. Mobberly, SJ, Papers, "Masters must answer," The Mobberly Diaries, Part I, 1820, pp. 141-143,
1820,” GULSC, 2018, https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/152 .
28. Mobberly Memorandum, part 1, Mobberly Papers, Treatise on Slavery, GULSC, https://findingaids.library.georgetown.edu/repositories/15/archival_objects/1443543
29. Joseph Mobberly to Giovanni Grassi, February, 5, 1815, box 58, folder 6, MPA, GULSC,
30. The Mobberly Diaries, 2:1, GULSC: https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/152, p. 141.
31. Corporation Minutes, April 20,1820, MPA, GULSC: Kenney, “Temporalities,” 1820, Maryland Province Archives X-T-1, GULSC referenced by Robert Emmett Curran, “’Splendid Poverty’: Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1805-1838,” p. 39, in Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation.
32. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States,” quoting Thomas Murphy, S.J., Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. xxii.
33. William G. Thomas, III, “The Timing of Queen v. Hepburn: An exploration of African American Networks in the Early Republic,” O Say Can Your See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family, August 2015, https://earlywashingtondc.org/stories/queen_v_hepburn#footn8.
White Marsh plantation in Prince George’s county had been bequeathed to the Jesuits by James Carroll in 1729. White Marsh held more enslaved people than any other Jesuit plantation. From 1783, it served as the meeting site for the Corporation for Roman Catholic Clergymen. James Carroll had purchased the services of Mary Queen, a Black indentured servant. The normal period of service for an indentured servant was seven years. However, when Carroll died Queen was considered part of the estate bequeathed to the Jesuits. Thomas, A Question of Freedom, pp. 20 and 173-179. See also Leon, “White Marsh,” “John Ashton,” and “Mary Queen.”
34. William G. Thomas III, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 167-172.
35. Eric Papenfuse, "From Recompense to Revolution: Mahoney v. Ashton and the Transfiguration of Maryland Culture, 1791-1802," Slavery and Abolition Vol. 15, #3, Dec 1994, p. 44, quoted by Thomas, A Question of Freedom. Charles Mahoney initially won his freedom. However, the case was appealed and re-tried. Amid the fear evoked by the revolt of enslaved people on Saint-Domingue, Mahoney lost his freedom at his third trial in 1802.
36. Thomas, A Question of Freedom. pp. 167-172.
37. Thomas, “The Timing of Queen v. Hepburn,” quoting St.Thomas Manor Account Book 1793-1825 Box 46, Folder 2, Maryland Province Archives, Society of Jesus, Georgetown University Manuscripts, August 20, 1794..
A contract between Mary Queen and Charles Carroll concerning Mary Queen’s indenture could not be produced by Priscilla Queen’s attorney, and the District of Columbia rejected the oral evidence of an old relative as hearsay.
38. Mendoza.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.
41. O’Donnell, “Jesuits in the North American Colonies and the United States,” quoting John Carroll to Francis Neale, November 12, 1805, in Thomas O’Brien Hanley, ed. The John Carroll Papers, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 2:497.
42. Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen of Maryland, June 14, 1814, Minute Book No. 2, folder 2, box 2.4, and May 18, September 14, 1813, folder 1, box 24. , MPA, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University, quoted by Thomas, A Question of Freedom, p. 187.
43. Thomas, p. 187. Also see Zwinge, "The Jesuit Farms in Maryland. Facts and Anecdotes." Woodstock Letters XXXIX, no. 3 (1910), pp. 377-382. See also Sharon M. Leon,s website.
The National Park Service in “Enslaved African-Americans confront difficult choices,” states that, “As British ships began to enter Chesapeake Bay in March 1813, some enslaved African-Americans made their way in small boats to claim their freedom. In April 1814, after Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane became Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the North Atlantic, he issued a proclamation aimed at African-Americans still in bondage. Addressed ‘to all persons wishing to emigrate from the United States,’ Cochrane’s proclamation noted that those escapees would be received by the British, as ‘either entering into His Majesty’s
Sea of Land Forces,’ or ‘as FREE Settlers to the British Possessions in North America or the West Indies.’” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/slave-loyalism.htm.
44. Vermont Intelligencer, Bellows Falls, Vermont, July 7,1817, p. 3, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/34262208/slave-resistance-in-st-marys-county/
45. Carroll to Neale, October 3, 1815, box 57.1, folder 15, MPA quoted by William G. Thomas, A Question of Freedom, pp. 188-189.
46. Mendoza quoting, “Proceedings of the Corporation of Roman Catholic Clergymen, August 22, 1820,” Box 24, Folder 1, MPA, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University.