From Aug. 31 to Sept. 3, 2023, descendants of ancestors enslaved by the Jesuit order at plantations in Maryland during the 1700s and 1800s gathered together in Southern Maryland to connect with long separated family members and to retrace the lives of their forebears, visiting the sites where they once lived in bondage.
Many of the descendants had ancestors who were among the 272 enslaved men, women and children who were part of an infamous sale by the Maryland Society of Jesus in 1838 to plantation owners in Louisiana. Most of the enslaved people in that bill of sale were forced to leave their family members in Maryland and were transported by boat to Louisiana where they had to toil in grueling conditions harvesting sugarcane and cotton. Proceeds of that sale helped the Jesuits ensure the financial survival of their debt-ridden Georgetown College in Washington, D.C.
As Georgetown University in recent years has come to a reckoning with its historic connection to slavery, it has worked with descendants of the 1838 sale, the GU272, to establish the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation to support efforts focusing on racial healing and educational advancements.
Supported by a grant from the Georgetown University’s Reconciliation Fund, about 60 participants in the Reclamation Project’s Southern Maryland GU272 – Jesuit Enslaved Descendant Gathering arrived on a bus, followed by several more people in cars, for their first stop on Aug. 31 at St. Ignatius Church in Chapel Point, located at the site of the Jesuits’ Saint Thomas Manor. The descendants came from across the country, including from Louisiana, New York, Ohio and Michigan.
Greeting them was Jesuit Father Thomas Clifford, the pastor of St. Ignatius Parish, which was founded in 1641 and is considered the oldest continuously active parish in what is now the United States. The priest asked the descendants how many of them may have had ancestors who were enslaved there at St. Thomas Manor, and several raised their hands.
As they stood around the priest on a walkway leading to the church, a historical marker there offered a stark reminder of the inhumanity of the Jesuits’ 1838 sale. On the marker were the words:
“A working farm provided a refuge for religion at the cost of enslaved laborers… By 1700, Saint Thomas Manor, like many farms in the colony, relied on enslaved Africans as farm workers. In 1838, 272 slaves were sold across Jesuit plantations in Maryland, including families here at Saint Thomas Manor.”
And that historic marker included a reproduction of the 1838 bill of sale listing the names and ages of the enslaved people from St. Thomas Manor sold by the Jesuits to the Louisiana plantation owners. The names, carefully recorded in a neatly written script included the names of “George, 65; Daniel, 80; Bernard, 35; William, 18; Tom, 16; Jim, 12; Francis, 8; Amy, 2 sons & daughter; Betsy, 2 daughters; Matilda, 3 daughters; Kitty, 1 son & daughter; Margaret, 1 daughter”… and the list continued.
‘An emotional experience’
Moments before the descendants arrived at St. Ignatius Church on the bus and in cars, Crystal Queen walked the church and cemetery grounds overlooking the Port Tobacco River and paused beside that historic marker.
The 34-year-old works in the office of the city manager of Bowie, Maryland, and attends Kent Baptist Church in Landover. Her father was a member of St. Jerome Catholic Church in Hyattsville
She noted she is still researching her ancestry and her connection to the GU272, but has found that her third great-grandfather on her mother’s side of the family, George Ware, was enslaved at Port Tobacco, and another ancestor on her father’s side of the family – Stephen Queen – “I believe he’s my fifth great-grandfather” – may be buried on the grounds of the cemetery of Sacred Heart Church in Bowie, where ground penetrating radar has recently found what may be the unmarked graves of hundreds of enslaved people who worked at the Jesuits’ White Marsh plantation.
“It’s hard to find the words, really. I got into this history during the pandemic. I had no idea I was connected to any of this,” Queen said, adding, “Getting into this history and learning my family’s connection to it was an emotional experience.”
Standing beside the historical marker, Queen noted, “Seeing them listed this way, and knowing they were considered property, adults and kids, generations enslaved and considered no more than a piece of property, it’s sad and at times it can be angering.”
Reflecting on the chance to meet other descendants, she said, “This weekend I’ve been looking forward to a lot… I’m excited to connect with everybody who is also connected to this. Meeting family, that’s what this weekend is all about, our history and coming together.”
Passing on the story
Also arriving early at the Chapel Point church was Abigail Jefferson, a descendant from Rhode Island who is researching her ancestry, including forebears named Butler, Harris, Newman, Hawkins, Queen and Johnson with family connections to the enslaved people who worked at the Jesuits’ plantations in Maryland.
Jefferson, a native of Washington, D.C., whose family attended the Shrine of the Sacred Heart there, now works as a chaplain at a medical center in Providence, Rhode Island and practices the Yoruba Ifa West African spiritual tradition. She earlier worked as a teaching artist and as a professor at a college.
“For so long, I wasn’t able to trace my ancestral heritage unfortunately due to the slave trade, and so many records were lost and not well kept. Now being able to have a connection to my ancestors and my family from the past is invaluable,” Jefferson said.
She added that it was also important for her “to be able to leave a legacy to my offspring, to share the story with them so the story can be passed on to others, and to honor their (our ancestors’) past and their suffering.”
A widespread evil
Before the descendants’ bus arrived, Father Clifford in an interview noted that at the time of the Jesuits’ 1838 sale, about 100 enslaved people lived at St. Thomas Manor, and about 80 to 90 of them were listed on the bill of sale to be transported to the Louisiana plantations, but some were old and infirm and remained in Maryland. He said that in Maryland’s 1840 census, 17 enslaved people were listed as living at St. Thomas Manor. The 1850 and 1860 census each listed two enslaved people as remaining at that Maryland plantation.
Later when he addressed the descendants as they gathered inside St. Ignatius Church, the priest said that when the Jesuits established working farms on plantations to support their mission in the new Maryland colony which was established in 1634, they first relied on indentured servants, but later with the scarcity of that workforce, the religious order came to rely on enslaved workers as was the common practice in the colony.
“They (the Jesuits) turned to slavery as a means of providing labor,” he said, noting that in addition to tobacco, wheat was a major crop grown at St. Thomas Manor, which had two grain mills.
Maryland, known as the birthplace of religious freedom and toleration in what became the United States, like the other colonies didn’t extend those ideals of freedom to enslaved people. In 1664, Maryland adopted its first law on slavery, which then legalized lifelong servitude for the enslaved.
Father Clifford noted that the 1850 census for Charles County, Maryland, where Chapel Point is located, listed 9,653 enslaved people, 472 free people of color and 5,796 white people among its 16,517 residents.
The priest said that when he first began teaching high school history in the 1976 bicentennial year, he taught about the reality of the Jesuits’ involvement in slavery and its pervasiveness at that time.
“Thomas Jefferson, the incredible philosopher of freedom and rights, didn’t live it in his life,” Father Clifford said of the founding father and author of the Declaration of Independence who enslaved 400 people at his Monticello estate in Virginia.
The priest noted that an 1866 fire at St. Thomas Manor gutted St. Ignatius Church and the manor house and destroyed its earlier records, and the cemetery later established alongside the church includes an African American section, where descendants may be buried. Father Clifford said ground penetrating radar will be done farther down the hillside from the church, and that may offer clues to the location of the gravesites of the enslaved people who worked at St. Thomas Manor. He thinks that the site of the living quarters for the enslaved may be located on state park land east of the parish grounds.
When St. Ignatius Church was rebuilt and reopened in 1867 after the fire, its design reflected the entrenched racial separation then prevalent in society and in the church, even after emancipation had brought freedom to the country’s enslaved people. Father Clifford noted that in those days, white people sat in the first 10 pews of St. Ignatius Church, Native Americans could sit in the last four pews, and the African American Catholics attending Mass there had to sit in the balcony.
‘It means everything to me’
After Father Clifford’s presentation at St. Ignatius Church, the descendants walked through the St. Thomas Manor grounds where centuries earlier, people enslaved by the Jesuits had once lived and worked.
Lisa Stafford from Fredericksburg, Virginia, who is Baptist and owns a real estate firm, stood on the cemetery grounds speaking with other descendants, joined by her husband Bobby Stafford, a financial analyst with the Navy, and their daughter Milan.
Noting that her ancestor Isaac Queen was enslaved at the Jesuit’s White Marsh plantation in the Bowie area, Lisa Stafford praised the strength of her forebears and their legacy. “They were so resilient. We were always taught to be proud people. We were born free.”
She said her father died as a young man, and supported “Black power and rights.”
Stafford said meeting other descendants at the gathering and learning about their ancestors “means everything to me. My father died young. I didn’t know about his family. I had no identity.” Later, she added, “It’s like meeting my father again.”
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