Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838

Thomas Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781136544996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

From the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, Father Thomas J. Murphy writes a compelling chronology and in depth analysis of Jesuit slaveholding in the state of Maryland.

CHAPTER ONE

Property and Religious Liberty: The Emergence of Jesuit Slaveholding

AS OVERSEER OF ST. INIGOE’S PLANTATION BETWEEN 1806 AND 1820, BROTHER Joseph Mobberly, S.J. often visited the nearby hamlet of Centreville, Maryland on business. Centreville was a Methodist stronghold, and the Roman Catholic Mobberly often found himself drawn into theological debate during his visits there. One prominent figure, whom Mobberly did not name in his diary but recorded as simultaneously holding the roles of magistrate, storekeeper and minister, “pretended to be a man of very extensive reading.” He frequently challenged Mobberly’s beliefs.

One day, sometime between 1815 and 1817, the storekeeper and Mobberly quarreled about whether Saint Augustine of Hippo had been a Calvinist. The storekeeper insisted that Augustine was indeed a Calvinist, probably attempting to communicate that this patristic father of the Church had at least been an intellectual forbear of John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. Mobberly relied strictly on the chronological facts for his rebuttal: “that is impossible, because Saint Augustine lived several centuries before Calvin was born.” Mobberly recorded that each proponent repeated his position several times, neither yielding at all. Finally, the frustrated Jesuit turned his back and strode out of the store, chiding himself “for having indulged so long in conversation with a Methodistic Ninnyhammer.”¹

The doctrinal affinity of Augustine and Calvin is a matter for theologians to resolve. It is possible for a historian, however, to discern more subtle supporting evidence for Mobberly’s claim. Jesuits had embraced enough of Augustine’s social philosophy to be justified in claiming him as one of their own. Augustine’s specific views on slavery influenced the Jesuit’s everyday treatment of their slaves, as Chapter Three of this study will discuss more fully. However, Augustine’s broader philosophy of the relationship between the church and secular society was of even greater importance in disposing Jesuits toward slaveholding in the first place. His portrayal of history as the faithful’s struggle to attain the righteous “city of God” while living within the sinful “city of man” rang true for Jesuits as they tried to build the Roman Catholic Church in the unfriendly climate of predominantly Protestant Maryland. In the pursuit of their difficult task, Jesuits discerned that the possession of slaves was another means by which they could protect their Church from its enemies.

Throughout the colonial period, the Jesuits dealt with a hostile culture by establishing little “cities of God”—their own plantations—throughout Maryland’s “city of man.” Within these private enclaves, the exercise of the Catholic religion could proceed in relative harmony. This land had to be developed, however, for sufficient income was necessary in order to keep the plantations in Catholic hands. Jesuits could themselves not farm fulltime without neglecting their priestly duties. Therefore, servants were an important support to the Jesuit plantation apostolate from the earliest years. Eventually, the possession of slaves came to serve a wider goal, the Jesuits’ assertion of their own right and the right of Catholic laymen in the colony to be accorded the full rights of English subjects.

This situation endured until the American Revolution, making it unlikely that the Jesuits would seriously consider the abandonment of their slaveholding before that time. Their struggle throughout the colonial period for religious liberty and property rights is well-known, but the utility of slaveholding in their struggle has not received adequate attention. There is a need to reexamine Jesuit colonial political philosophy in the light of its implication for the possession of slaves. So far reconstructions of the Jesuit propositions about Catholic rights to worship and property ownership have ignored the implications of these propositions for this issue.²

The evolution of their political philosophy took place within a context of sectarian struggle, which the Jesuits interpreted mystically, as the manifestation of a deeper conflict between good and evil. They regarded the good forces of the Catholic Church as arrayed against worldly Protestant heretics. In an effort to imbibe the mystery of this struggle, Jesuits turned to Augustine, particularly to The City of God, his book responding to the sack of Rome in the year 410 C.E.

To Augustine, the misfortune of Rome was another act in the constant drama of sin’s mysterious power to thwart the progress of the reign of God. “I must speak also of the earthly city—of that city which lusts to dominate the world. … From this earthly city issue the enemies against whom the City of God must be defended.”³ He went on to speak of the spiritual challenges that faced Christians as they struggled to maintain their fidelity to God and community with one another amid the pressures of daily life. The danger was that until the second coming of Jesus Christ, the Christian would be forced to live simultaneously under the influence of both cities. The believer’s challenge was to avoid overshadowing by the human dimension. Translated to the Maryland situation, this theological formula guaranteed that political imperatives would rank with spiritual, theological and intellectual influences in encouraging Jesuits to persist in slaveholding throughout the colonial era.

Study of the connection between the struggle for political liberty of Catholic colonists and their slaveholding is important, for it can augment study of a possible connection between the emergence of political liberty for all white male freeholders of the Chesapeake and the evolution of a slaveholding system. Lower class Protestant colonists did not have to deal with the burden of religious minority in pressing their case for liberty, but the upper class Catholics of Maryland, including the Jesuits, did.

According to one reconstruction, the liberties of white planters in late seventeenth century Virginia were secured through the emergence of an elaborate system of African slave labor. Social and economic tensions increased as the population of Tidewater Virginia grew; many white settlers finished their term of indenture but had little prospect of obtaining land. Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, in which planters on the western edge of the Virginia colony rose up against the largerscale owners to their east, was a symptom of this problem. The eventual replacement of a white indentured laboring force by an enslaved black labor force contributed to conditions which finally allowed poor whites to develop modest prosperity they might not otherwise have obtained, to own small amounts of land, and to share a modicum of the social prestige enjoyed by largescale, slaveholding planters. The result was to secure for all white male freeholders a right of participation in a republican government and a superior social status simply by the fact of their whiteness. These factors, this reconstruction concludes, greatly defused the potential for class conflict in the Chesapeake.⁴

The problem faced by the first Jesuit planters of Maryland, however, was not the pursuit of upward mobility. Most of them were of high English birth, “Popish Gentlemen of good families,” according to a commentary of Peter Atwood, S.J. in 1718.⁵ Indeed, in early seventeenth century England, on the eve of Maryland’s colonization, only the sons of the gentry could afford to travel to the mainland of Europe for the Jesuit novitiate and subsequent clerical education that was banned in England itself. Roman Catholicism largely died out among most lower class Englishmen during the reign of Elizabeth I because they generally lacked the means to provide for a private space for the practice of the faith. Only those poor who managed to cluster near Catholic businessmen in London or around gentry estates in the countryside found havens for devotion. The result was that the first Catholic settlers of Maryland, while a small minority of the colony, were also its elite until at least the late 1640s. The large majority of the first settlers were lower class Protestants.⁶ This situation of Catholic elitism was unique in “the entire history of English North America.”⁷

After decades of threats and occasional repressions, Catholics were effectively eliminated from political participation in Maryland by the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and remained so until the American Revolution of 1776. The exclusion began when Maryland Protestants took advantage of the deposition of the Catholic James I in favor of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary to bar Catholics from government. This event was known locally as the revolt of the Protestant Associators.⁸ As far as Catholics were concerned, it was no longer enough to be a propertyholder in order to vote. The exceptional impediment to Catholic civil rights thus became religious minority status rather than social class. Jesuits remained the intellectual leaders of the Catholic planters of Maryland, however, and led the way in articulating resistance to this imposed settlement. They developed a political philosophy which regarded landholding and slaveholding as avenues to the procurance of civil rights for themselves and their coreligionists. Examination of this philosophy may augment studies of white people of the Chesapeake, in general, found slavery to serve their own purposes. For Catholics, at least, more was at stake in the tradeoff between slavery and freedom than simple political participation and social prestige. They used the fact of their slaveholding to argue the case for their own religious liberty.

Much of their spiritual and intellectual formation prompted Jesuits to conduct slaveholding for what they told themselves were fundamentally altruistic reasons, as part of a paternal responsibility for the spiritual and material welfare of lower class people and people of darker color whom the Jesuits regarded as needing the direction of others. The political motivations for their slaveholding, however, revealed that this rationale of selflessness was not wholly accurate. Jesuits, like their peers, thought of their self-interest when they practiced politics. Moreover, the self-interest they pursued in this matter resulted in a Church which accorded spiritual freedom to slaves even while holding them in material bondage. Jesuits’ theological, political, and social activities thus intermingled generosity and repression in a paradoxical way.

It is not possible to understand the weight the Jesuits attached to land ownership in the Maryland colony unless one comprehends their experience as fugitive, landless priests in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The English government feared that the Jesuits were agents of the papacy and Catholic Spain in a conspiracy to overthrow the Protestant settlement. From 1585, it was high treason for a Jesuit even to be present in England. This policy was reinforced after Jesuits were implicated in the so-called “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up the houses of Parliament in 1605.⁹ While many Jesuits continued to enter the country secretly, they fell dependent on the willingness of sympathetic householders to conceal them.

This dependence on the English gentry lessened Jesuit freedom to choose and conduct their own apostolates. Their occupations became chaplaincy and tutoring behind the doors of manor households rather than open proclamation of the Gospel.¹⁰ This was a frustrating situation for most Jesuits, whose spiritual heritage and personal dispositions inclined them toward a bold public evangelization of the English nation. They were restless at the gentry’s willingness to privatize religious practice in return for the government’s tacit consent to leave upperclass Catholics alone. An open break with the gentry, however, would have cost the Jesuits not only financial support, but also possibly their lives.

On balance, therefore, life in England was disappointing to many Jesuits by the middle third of the seventeenth century. Those who traveled to Maryland from 1634 were responding to this frustration, and to the hope that in the New World they might be able to proceed more freely.¹¹ This hope was not to be fulfilled entirely, but from the start of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Property and Religious Liberty: the Emergence of Jesuit Slaveholding
• Chapter Two Real Poverty and Apparent Wealth on the Jesuit Farms
• Chapter Three Doubt and Debate: Jesuit Questions about Slaveholding
• Chapter Four Preaching versus Practice: Jesuit Theory and Conduct of Slaveholding
• Chapter Five Brother Joseph Mobberly and the Intellectual Antecedents of Jesuit Anti-Abolitionism
• Chapter Six To Serve the Slave or the Immigrant?
• Chapter Seven The End of Maryland Jesuit Slaveholding
• Epilogue A Slaveholding both Anglo-American and Catholic
• Bibliography
• Index