272 Slaves Sold to Finance Georgetown University
By
John C Abercrombie
It has been stated that value of slaves in America was more valuable than all the industrial and transportation capital of the United States in the first half of the 19th century. This was a great cause of the wealth of the slaveowners who took advantage of land stolen from the original owners, the Native Americans who had lived here for centuries.
Slaves were collateral and could be used to mortgage land and other goods. Slaves were often threatened with having family members sold away, splitting parents from even infants because of minor infractions as determined by the slave owner. Banks would finance land purchases using slaves as collateral. They could then make 40% on the labor of the slave and pay the bank 8%. Slaves and the products they produced were responsible for well over 50% of the entire GNP of the United States.
Other industries made loads of money indirectly. New England ship builders made ships to bring people to this country. Shoes and clothing were made in the North and shipped to be used by the enslaved people. It is necessary to keep in mind that these people were free in their native country and enslaved once they got to America.
Many institutions owned slaves and Georgetown University was no exception. June 1838 the University benefited from the sale of 272 slaves, some as young as 2 months old to finance the ailing institution. This resulted in families being split for economic reasons with no consideration of human relationships.
It is interesting that the date was June 19th as many years later, it was on what is now recognized as Juneteenth. The date when the last slaves were freed in Texas 18 months after they had officially freed at the end of the Civil War. To see information on Juneteenth, click here.
Georgetown owned these human beings and they had been used to build the institution’s physical buildings, tend farms and perform hard labor under rigid control. Georgetown was a prominent Jesuit priests. They were looked on not as humans but as collateral and sold to secure the future of this great Catholic institution that hold such a place of honor to this day.
While it would seem as if there would be some mention of this in history, it remained largely unknown. Unknown because that portion of history is so like anything that reflects on the horrors of slavery preempted from our history.
With time, Georgetown professors, students and alumni are taking a look at this portion and tracking the people sold to finance the institution. What remains is what is owed to the descendants. To this day the search continues. Many have been located; however, it is difficult to determine exactly how many were exploited by the University in this financial transaction.
Georgetown and the Society of Jesus’ Maryland Province have issued an apology for their role in this action to more than 100 descendants who had been traced at the time of the apology.
“Today the Society of Jesus, who helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned,” said Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, during a morning Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope. “We pray with you today because we have greatly sinned and because we are profoundly sorry.” This message was delivered to more than 100 descendants of the original enslaved people who had been sol to finance the institution.
Georgetown is not the only institution that has prospered on the backs of enslaved people. The sale however is the largest one acknowledged to date.
As part of an ongoing consideration to this atrocity Georgetown is seeking to rectify their prior actions and, in a speech delivered to descendants of the identified descendants delivered this message:
“Today the Society of Jesus, who helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned,” said Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, during a morning Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope. “We pray with you today because we have greatly sinned and because we are profoundly sorry.”
The university created the liturgy in partnership with members of the descendant community, the Archdiocese of Washington and the Society of Jesus in the United States.
The week also provided opportunities for members of the descendant community to connect with one another and with Jesuits through a private vigil on Monday night, a descendant-only dinner on Tuesday evening and tours of the Maryland plantation where their ancestors were enslaved.
Georgetown has renamed one of its buildings Isaac Hawkins Hall named after the first enslaved on the list of the account of the sale. That building is now known as Freedom Hall.
Another building has been renamed Anne Marie Becraft Hall in honor of a free Black woman who established a school in the town of Georgetown for Girls of color. She later joined the Oblate Sisters of Providence, recognized as the oldest active Roman Catholic sisterhood in the Americas established by women of African descent.
In recognizing the role Georgetown in the use of slaves as money, they are recognizing some of the depths of what slavery actually represented. They recognize that despite their principals, they recognized the “theft” of labor, the destruction of families and the long term devastation that this inflicted on an entire race of people. Slavery was much more than the theft of labor; it was the deprivation of liberty for which this country professes so loudly.
A problem can is not solved without first recognizing it, discussing it and taking steps to rectify the long term damage that continues to this day.
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For Black History Month 2020, we posted daily. These posts focus on the reality of Black life in America after the Civil War culminating in the landmark Brown v Board of Education that changed so many of the earlier practices. To see the posts, click here
For Black History Month 2021, we focused on Black Medical Achievements, Inventors and Scientists.To see those posts, click here.
We also posted a 5 part mini-series on the 100th anniversary of one of the most horrific massacres in the history of America. Hundreds of Blacks were slaughtered and 10,000 left homeless in this largely unknown event. To see the posts, click here.
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Georgetown University was an active participant in the slave trade selling upwards of 272 slaves from their Maryland run plantation to the deep south in an effort to support the then struggling university in 1838 according to The New York Times. Georgetown is not the first or only university to own slaves. In fact, Harvard, Columbia, Brown, University of Virginia did as well. Now students, professors and alumni want to know what happened to those men and women and what the university will do moving forward. Melvin Robert and Joya Mia Italiano look into Georgetown University’s response on the Lip News.
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Facing Georgetown’s History:
A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation A microcosm of the history of American slavery in a collection of the most important primary and secondary readings on slavery at Georgetown University and among the Maryland Jesuits Georgetown University’s early history, closely tied to that of the Society of Jesus in Maryland, is a microcosm of the history of American slavery: the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the tobacco economy of the Chesapeake in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the contradictions of liberty and slavery at the founding of the United States; the rise of the domestic slave trade to the cotton and sugar kingdoms of the Deep South in the nineteenth century; the political conflict over slavery and its overthrow amid civil war; and slavery’s persistent legacies of racism and inequality. It is also emblematic of the complex entanglement of American higher education and religious institutions with slavery.
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Georgetown University confronts its history with slavery
One-hundred-seventy-eight years ago, Georgetown University was free to everyone who was able to attend; it was also massively in debt. To pay that debt, the university sold 272 slaves — the very people that helped build the school itself. Today, the university’s leaders, students and alumni are grappling with how to confront that history. Michelle Miller reports.
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From the 2016 Washington Ideas Forum. The presidents of Harvard University and Georgetown University discuss their institutions’ historic ties to slavery in a conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Participants in this discussion are: Drew Gilpin Faust, President, Harvard University. John DeGioia, President, Georgetown University. Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Correspondent, The Atlantic Recorded Thursday, September 29, 2016, at the Washington Ideas Forum. For the eighth year, the Forum was hosted by The Atlantic in partnership with the Aspen Institute. Leaders in policy, business, technology, science, history, arts and culture engaged with top journalists on the most consequential issues of our time.
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Keynote || Radcliffe Institute WELCOME Lizabeth Cohen, Dean, Radcliffe Institute, and Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Harvard University OPENING REMARKS (12:07) Drew Gilpin Faust, President and Lincoln Professor of History, Harvard University KEYNOTE (15:51) Ta-Nehisi Coates, Journalist; National Correspondent, the Atlantic: Author, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) and The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) Conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Drew Gilpin Faust (34:37)
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We see that slavery was MUCH more than depriving people of their liberty and theft of their services, it was the cruel and long lasting emotional devastation of selling away loved ones, taking indecent liberties, cruel and inhumane treatment and so much more. History has attempted to take the sting out of it which is impossible. This has made people reluctant to see the past and this has had a long term harm by remaining “hidden” and allowed to fester. History must be faced in order to heal and move forward!