During the 18th and 19th history. And is the washington d. C. Area. He looks at georgetown been fitted from the slave economy in 90 minute memorial lecture is given annually to honor and part of the conference on washington d. C. History. I would like to bebin by thanking the Historical Society of washington, d. C. For the opportunity to deliver this years brown lecture. Proffer professor brown was champion of the history of washington, d. C. Its a thrill to be honor her work and life in this form. It was moving to hear youre recollection of your grandmother and im i cant tell you how happy it makes to hear from you that she would appreciate the work were doing at georgetown. Thats the best introduction i have ever gotten the entire time of my life. I appreciate that. I would hope to do her proud. I would like to thank the National Archives for hosting us. For all of you for being here in person or perhaps watching the remotely through the magic of youtube or cspan. I appreciate your interest in history. Sometimes these days it seems like teaching and learning about history is an uphill battle. Were focused on the present we look forward the future, so few pause to reflect on the past and how it shapes who we are today. To see so many people who are here to learn about lift and think about its impact on our world is heartening. College campus especially the venerable once like georgetown, you can see how venble it is. It present very well manicured landscapes of historical memory. The Old Buildings stand as monuments to the past, even as intier ya is updated. Coffee shops. The buildings are named after founders. In truth few know who they were until those founders become imfa mouse. Start to show signs of blight. I teach history as Georgetown University. I teach and right about slavery and right about emancipation largely in the deep south. Last year i had a privilege of serving as a member on slavery and reconciliation. The group was formed in september of 2015 at behest of universitys president. Who asked us to reflect on how georgetown acknowledge and recognize jorn towns history relationship with the institution of slavery. The immediate cause of the formation of the working what promised the president to form in body was the reopening of a newly renovated hall. A hall named at reverend thomas, society of jesus. Georgetown yoofrt in 1830s. Here is the problem, the scandal with which is now wellknown, i hope its wellknown, he orchestrated mass sale of 300 men, women and children who were other thanned by the maryland jesuit in 1838 and used the sale to rescue the college from debt. Its safe to say and shocking to understand that georgetown really owes its existence to the sale of those slaves in 1838. The proceeds of that sale saved the college. The president rightly grasp that the moment was ripe for the Georgetown Community to have a difficult conversation about this history. He did that for many reasons. He understood the moment for many reasons. One of them was the things royal or College Campus last year. The student protests against injustice. That was being perpetrated on people of color. But also he knew the history of georgetown and was aware ef its roots in the institutions of slavery. I will ad that the new scholarships book have put issue of slavery in american colleges and universities back into our mental landscape. So were our work builds on the shoulder of scholars and activists and that whole community has helped us to do our work. I want to emphasize that georgetowns history of slavery was never a secret. A small ground of scholars, alumni student have known about this history for a long time. Theres excellent scholarship on the subject. And i want to applaud the effort of my predecessor who colleague of mine, professor kurn when is retired. He wrote history georgetown published in 1989. He wrote about this 1838 sale and sequences for the collecting. A long time before the working group started its work. In the 1990s Study Program became to in creating a pioneering website called jesuit plantation project that publish some documents, they did well before we did. Student journalist matthew wrote about georgetown slave holding past in newspapers and period kals. And yet, for all of this, when the working group began its work last year we were surprise to discovery how little we and most people knew about this subject. And how shocking georgetowns link to safery. People did not know the history. So i feel like that is a failure of scholars like myself who have written about this stuff, but have not done enough to get it out to the public, to really have this history penetrate peoples consciousness at the university and beyond it. This history in a real way was lost to us, buried unnooet the universitys landscape of memory. It seems to me the first step is reconcilian is truth. So excavating this history and publicizing it has become one of our key tasks. Its what ive really been devoted to as a member of the working group. Now to accomplish that, weve been digging in archives at georgetown where the archives of the maryland province now reside, and archives in other places as well, including right here at the National Archives which just has extraordinary material on the history of american slavery. So weve been digging around to find original documents that can shed light on this history. And were trying to make them available on our website call the slavery archive, today i would like to walk you through a handful of these documents to give you a sense of the depth and extent of georgetowns roots in american slavery. And to introduce you to some of the central questions and challenges raised by this material. So we are a gathering of people who are interested in history. So i hope you dont mind if i dwell on the past. Its really what we do. So to begin with this to begin with this history, im going to go back farther in time to a more distant location than you might expect me to. In the early 1600s, 1610s and 1620s, a jesuit priest named alonzo de sandoval began to minister to newly arrived africans in the port city of cartagena in what is today colombia. Sandoval worked at the Jesuit College there. He was a jesuit 150 years before the founding of georgetown. As he met with sick and dying africans on the docks in cartagena, sandoval began to have some doubts about the morality of the system of slavery that he encountered. He began to ask some pesky questions of his colleagues, jesuits around the atlantic world. Like whether those africans he was meeting with in cartagena had been illegally enslaved. A jesuit priest named luis brandao who was stationed across the ocean wrote a letter addressing his concerns, a truly remarkable letter that tried to ease sandovals conscience. Sandoval included the letter in a massive thome that he published in seville he published in 1627 called on restoring ethiopian salvation. There is a title page from that thome on the left and a part of the manuscript on the right i want to tell you about. And i want to thank one of my graduate students, elsa mendoza for finding this for me. Its good to have students. Dont worry, father brandaur wrote. Wise men of good conscience do not find slavery reprehensible. Thats a quotation from the book, from the letter. Rather, the jesuits buy slaves without feeling any guilt, unquote. It was true, he admitted that no black slave, quote, everybody says he deserves to be enslaved, unquote. But he warned sandoval not to ask them for their opinions. Can you imagine . Quote, they will always say they were stolen or taken illegally, hoping that this will help them get their freedom, unquote. So thats why you shouldnt ask them. Because theyre going to give you an answer you dont like. Father brindau concluded that too many souls were saved through enslavement to worry about the few who might actually have been illegally enslaved. And thats right here on this page, the text of the letter. Now sandoval bought the argument. He made peace with slavery and devoted his life to saving the souls of the 100,000 captive africans transported to cartagena in the first half of the 17th century. Now although it took place a long way from the founding of georgetown, i mention this correspondence between sandoval and brandau because it tells us something important about the intellectual, religious, and social world of atlantic slavery that the maryland jesuits came to inhabit. Slavery and the atlantic slave trade had long been rationalized by christian arguments that prized salvation over earthly freedom. In fact, the Jesuit College in cartagena where sandoval worked went so far as to purchase enslaved africans who served as translators to aid sandovals missionary efforts. Moreover, the attempt to justify slavery required sandoval and his fellow jesuits to dismiss, ignore and ultimately silence captive africans own protests against their enslavement. To listen to them, to take their grievances seriously would have threatened the entire enterprise. The jesuits arrived in maryland in 1634. Not long after sandoval published his treaties in seville. I cant say whether they knew about it or not. They probably didnt. But what we do know is that it took decades for slavery to get firmly implanted in maryland. For a half century, indentured servants and tenant farmers from europe supplied the labor needs for the tobacco economy in maryland and the chesapeake. It was not until the end of the 17th century, the 1680s and 1690s that large numbers of captive africans began to arrive in the colony, and the labor force began to tilt towards slavery. The jesuits, along with other catholics participated in marylands great transition from servitude to slavery and became in some caseses large slave owners in the first half of the 18th century. The record youre looking at now dates back to that era, what the university of maryland historian ira berlin, one of the great historians of american slavery calls the plantation generation of slavery in colonial north america. Now this was a list of slaves who were brought from the jesuits white marsh plantation in Prince Georges County to the st. Joseph mission in Talbot County on the eastern shore. I want to draw your attention to the first name in the list, a woman named nanny. Do you see it . First name. A woman named nanny. She is identified in this record as a 55yearold guinea negro. The names are tantalizing. You want to know so much more about who these people are, but there is just so little information. Her name was nanny, and she was born in africa around 1710. Thats all we know right now. All we really know is what is on that page. Nan any the only enslaved person in the maryland province mentioned in the maryland province archives who ive come across so far who is identified as being africanborn. And this record is perhaps the sole piece of evidence linking the maryland Jesuit Community to their african origins. The other people on this list were all born in maryland and baptized with english names like tom, frank, and lucy. And like most of the slaves named in the maryland province archives, their last names are not recorded. All of this i think are symptoms of what the sociologist Orlando Patterson calls the natal alienation of slavery, the cutting off of people from their ancestry. From the first indications of jesuit slave holding in maryland in the 17 henrys, the jesuit plantation continued to grow across the 18th century. A census in 1765 taken by a jesuit counted nearly 200 slaves on the jesuit plantations. The plantations were primarily located in Southern Maryland in st. Marys county and charles county. But there are also missions and plantations farther north and on the eastern shore. The suppression of the jesuits in the 1770s posed new challenges for the catholic leadership in the colony, and new organizational forms emerged to steward the jesuit orders property and slaves, including the corporation of Roman Catholic clergymen. Georgetown college was founded to advance Catholic Education in the new United States in the 1789. And it was established by maryland the maryland catholic planter elite and the jesuit order that was deeply invested in slavery at the local level. And the basic idea was that the jesuit plantations would help to pay for the churches and the schools. So georgetown rests on the foundation of a slave economy. Now the jesuits and their catholic congregants were not the only people in maryland to draw inspiration from the ideals of the American Revolution. And it was really to prove that there was a place for catholics in this new republic that georgetown was founded. It seems that the jesuits own slaves also drew inspiration from the ideals of the American Revolution and thought that the principles of freedom and equality articulated by the revolution should apply to them. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a number of slaves belonging to jesuit owners, including owners closely affiliated with georgetown sued in local courts for their freedom. Three families in particular, the butlers, the mahoneys, and the queens took their owners to court. In some cases were successful. One of these seekers was a man named edward queen who filed this complaint against reverend john ashton with the General Court of the western shore in 1791. I dont know from where youre sitting if you can read the handwriting in this petition, but i assure you this is among the more legible documents that we have encountered. And i should add as well that this document comes from a wonderful website created by university of nebraska Professor William thomas. 00 these various freedom suits in the early republic. This is an example of the kind of collaboration and other peoples scholarship that we have really benefitted from. So if you can read this petition, queen is claiming his freedom on the basis of descent of mary queen who was his grandmother. Much like those africans in cartagena, edward queen claimed to be illegally enslaved. But on this case he was heard and he won his case in the maryland courts in 1794. Queen was a member of what he calls the revolutionary generation of american slaves. And he is also part of the moment of transition in the chesapeake post after the American Revolution when there is a brief window of opportunity for enslaved people to make their way to freedom. This is a moment when the population of free people of color begin to expand tremendously. And ill add that one of the pioneering historians of free people of color in this region was letitia woods brown. But its worth noting that granting queen his freedom on the narrow ground of his freeborn grandmother let me remind you that in the law of slavery, in maryland, most other places in americas, the children of enslaved women were also shlaes. So status followed the mother. Not only did their status follow the mother, not only would the children of slave women be slaved, but they would be on the other hand by their mothers owner. But if your mother is free, you by rights should be free as well. Thats the basis for edward queens claim to freedom. But in granting queen his freedom on this relatively narrow ground of his freeborn grandmother, the courts also implicitly confirmed the enslavement of other enslaved people who not co. Not establish their birthright in court. So you can see here the powers that be in the Slave Society trying to make up rules by which slavery would be governed. That was a Legal Institution that operated by certain rules. Now reverend ashton for his part was an irish born jesuit who was stationed for many years at the jesuit plantation in Prince Georges County. He is listed in the census with 82 slaves next to his name, one of the biggest planters in the region. He also happened to be a founder of the corporation of Roman Catholic clergymen and one of the first directors of Georgetown College. Its really remarkable how many connections to slavery turn up in the early records of the college itself. The First College ledgers which record the students coming into the college and paying for room and board. Their expense. One was named suki. She was hired to the college by her owner, William Diggs for ten pounds a year, from 1792 to 1797. It was the use of hiring and renting slaves. The father recorded daily life at the college noted the presence of 13, quote, colored persons. Thats how he described them in his journal, out of 101 people in all. At the college in 1813. So 13 of the people at the college in 1813 were slaves. Who they were or what they did he failed to mention, but a later entry in his journal records the burial of a man that he calls billy the blacksmith, probably a slave who was buried in the College Graveyard in a ceremony attended by many of the students. Holy Trinity Church next to georgetown record slaves getting baptized and married right next door to the campus. And william gaston, georgetowns first acclaimed student at georgetown, many of our grand lectures and occasions are held in gaston hall. Gaston came from a wealthy slave owning family in North Carolina. He went on to become a distinguished judge on the North CarolinaSupreme Court ruling in one case that a slave had a right to life, and in another that free people of color could be citizens of his state. So those two rulings were remarkably progressive for a North Carolina jurist before the civil war. I think its important to understand that the significance of the use of slave labor at georgetown and its close ties to slavery are not just an economic question, although they certainly are, but theres something deeper going on here. Its about the way these institutions, churches and schools shape the moral order of socie