Maryland was the first American colony to welcome Catholic immigrants. In 1634, the Ark and the Dove, carrying Catholic settlers and priests, arrived in the nascent Chesapeake colony. Maryland’s most prestigious early family, the Calverts, were themselves Catholic. In 1649, the Maryland Toleration Act, drafted by Lord Baltimore, decisively promoted religious liberty. “No person or persons…shall from henceforth be any waies troubled, molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof,” read the act.
Yet Maryland’s role as a haven for Catholics seeking safety for religious persecution was short lived. English Puritans in the so-called “Plundering Time” of 1645 violently and destructively overran the Catholic colony of Maryland, as historian Kevin Starr describes in Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America. Following that episode, the growth of the Catholic population of early colonial Maryland largely stalled, never reaching more than ten percent. A Protestant-dominated Maryland General Assembly in 1704 even forbade celebration of Catholic sacraments and limited civic participation for Catholic residents.
I recalled this little-known anecdote of American anti-Catholicism when reading NYU journalism professor Rachel L. Swarns’ new book The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, which recounts the story of Maryland-based Jesuit priests who in 1838 sold 272 enslaved persons to preserve what became Georgetown University. The book jacket claims it demonstrates “how slavery fueled the growth of the American Catholic Church.” Pulitzer-prize winning author Steven Hahn in a blurb on the back cover calls the book “a devastating indictment, not only of Georgetown but also of the entire Catholic Church.”
The 272 is not just a harrowing tale of mistreatment of blacks by antebellum, plantation-owning Jesuit priests. It is an argument, namely, that American Catholicism today owes its very existence to the sale of these enslaved people. This is precisely what Swarns seeks to prove in her final, fourteenth chapter. The Jesuits, she notes, earned $130,000, or about $4.5 million in today’s dollars, from the sale of their slaves. “The money enabled Georgetown to survive and thrive and helped stabilize the Maryland province’s precarious finances,” she writes.
Yet, argues Swarms, that was just the beginning. She notes that income from the Maryland Jesuit province helped finance St. Louis University in Missouri, Washington Seminary (now Gonzaga College High School) in D.C., and Georgetown Preparatory School, now located in North Bethesda, Maryland. The Jesuits of Maryland also sent $30,000 to Holy Cross, the first Catholic college in New England, to cover construction costs, books, and travel expenses of faculty traveling from Boston to Washington. They established Loyola College in Baltimore and the Scholasticate seminary in Boston. They supplied Jesuit professors to Fordham, St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia, Boston College, and Santa Clara, California. Other Jesuits, also reliant on slave labor, ran colleges in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio, including Xavier in Cincinnati.
It’s an embarrassing and damning history, no doubt. But it’s also incomplete, and not a little exaggerated. Consider first the history of Maryland, which, admittedly, was the original beating heart of Catholicism in early America, Baltimore serving as its first diocese when it was established in 1789. Yet by 1808, there were also dioceses in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Bardstown, Kentucky, largely driven by Irish and German immigration. By the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, there were more Catholics in the diocese of Boston alone than all eleven seceding states, plus Maryland, one of the few slave states that remained in the Union.
In other words, before 272 slaves were sold to save the Jesuits of Maryland, the Jesuits’ influence in American Catholicism was already eclipsed. The same can be said for American Catholic education: St. Louis University was founded twenty years before the sale. Many other schools Swarms doesn’t mention — presumably because she could identify no tie to the Jesuits of Maryland — were established in the same period as the sale: Villanova, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and Notre Dame in Indiana, Clark University in Iowa, and Niagara University in New York. The same can be said for seminaries: the first was St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland, founded in 1791. Other early seminaries were formed in Charleston (1822), St. Louis (1818), Cincinnati (1829), Boston (1829), Philadelphia (1832), and New York (1832).
Moreover, the growth of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century America was greatest among German immigrants. And these Germans were staunchly in the abolitionist camp, even in slave states. As historian James M. McPherson recounts in his Pulitzer-winning masterpiece Battle Cry of Freedom, throughout both the antebellum and Civil War period, ethnic-German Catholic immigrants represented a powerful political block from which the nascent Republican Party (and subsequently the US Military) could expect reliable anti-slavery support. Indeed they did: German-Americans were the largest ethnic group in the Union Army, contributing almost half a million soldiers — thousands of whom died — to the cause. The senior-most Catholic in the Union Army — William S. Rosecrans — was a fervent abolitionist.
All of this severely undermines Swarms’ argument, which seems entirely ignorant of these details. Yes, one might reasonably argue that some institutions in nineteenth-century American Catholicism benefited from the reprehensible sale of 272 black Americans (most of them Catholic) to slavers in the Deep South. But that is a far cry from The 272’s tenuous thesis.
Then again, Swarms perhaps needed to make such a hyperbolic claim to reinforce her other ideological objective: to push various institutions such as Georgetown University to pay reparations to black Americans for these historical wrongs. In her epilogue, she notes that the Jesuits in 2021 agreed to raise $100 million to benefit the descendants of the 272, as well as promote other racial reconciliation issues (descendant leaders had asked for $1 billion). Yet, Swarms notes, fundraising for these initiatives has thus far fallen far short of expectations.
Presumably Swarms specious claims that the Catholic Church in America was built upon coerced black labor are intended to provoke a broader movement that would see many other Catholic institutions agree to pony up large sums of money in the name of racial reparations. Such an objective not only fails on historical grounds, but moral and practical ones. If anything, the sins of the American Church constitute what Catholic moral theology labels “remote material cooperation,” meaning cooperation in the sinful act of another by material support which is not intimately connected to the evil in question. In this case, a few Catholic academic institutions accepted some funds that had been acquired via the sale of persons.
The Catechism teaches: “The Seventh Commandment forbids acts or enterprises that …. lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity.” Yet these other Catholic institutions did not lend material support to the sale of persons — they benefited (either directly or indirectly) from them. And that is far murkier territory upon which to make definitive moral judgments for institutions in contemporary America, especially considering financial ambiguities regarding various money’s ties to slavery, as well as almost two centuries of historical distance.
Nor, moreover, has the Catholic Church ever taught that individuals must make restitution if the money they legally (and ostensibly ethically) acquire from another was itself tainted by unethical decisions. And for good reason: how many businesses or organizations engage in some manner of immoral or unethical behavior which its employees have no control over, nor any formal or material cooperation with? Swarms’ own employer The New York Times is vehemently pro-abortion, and aggressively (and unethically) contributed to pro-Iraq War propaganda that resulted in the deaths of thousands and the destabilization of an entire region. Are Swarms’ paychecks any less tainted by such immorality and evil than Georgetown’s current budget?
More practically, how would anyone go about determining what to pay, and who to pay, for these sins of the past? Holy Cross accepted what would now be approximately $1 million from the Maryland Jesuits — to whom, exactly, would they pay back that money? Does any of the charitable work Holy Cross has done over the last 150 years offset the amount owed?
When one considers what reparations advocates are demanding, the absurd impracticality of it all is more apparent. Georgetown University is supposed to raise a billion dollars? Swarms herself says the Jesuits profited less than $5 million — in today’s money — from the sale of slaves. What manner of compound interest is this? And, even more telling, reparations advocates are never willing to clarify when enough is enough, namely, when those benefiting from this financial restitution will agree that they have been fully compensated for past wrongs.
That fact alone should raise alarm bells even for those willing to carefully consider demands for reparative justice. The racial reparations business is exactly that, a business, from which many people are now cynically profiting. Some individuals, I will willingly grant, may be deserving of the recompense they receive — but many others are little better than grifters, manipulating the consciences and/or pocketbooks of those fearful of being tarred as racists. Certainly journalist Nikole Hannah Jones, responsible for the largely spurious 1619 Project, falls in the latter category, having secured many accolades (and a small fortune) for her faux history.
The most influential historical writing today is not done by historians such as Starr or McPherson, but ideologically-driven journalists such as Swarms and Jones. That also explains why the agenda of the latter’s efforts is so thinly veiled: it is not really history, but politics. But that also presents Catholics with good reason to be suspicious. Yes, the Church in America has committed crimes for which she should repent, and, when there is clear, impartial data, make restitution. The 272, for all its distressing storytelling of Jesuit avarice, fails to make that case.
The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church
By Rachel L. Swarns
Penguin/Random House, 2023
Hardcover, 352 Pages
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Swarms is not a dispassionate historian. She clearly has an agenda to damage Christ and His Church. Perhaps an expose of her personal life is warranted to uncover the motivation for her agenda.
If you look at the history of colonial America virtually everyone was involved with slavery in some fashion. If slavery built the Catholic Church it also built the colonies, both North and South.
If colonists weren’t themselves slave owners, they benefitted from the slave trade through industries tied to the West Indian plantations.
Sadly what Georgetown did was perfectly legal. Their actions are more directly apparent but if I recall Brown University and many other institutions have earlier ties to the slave trade. Respectable people didn’t want to soil their hands as slave traders but a great many owned shares in slave ships or manufactured goods for slaves.
The sad truth about Georgetown is not that they were unique but that they behaved like everyone else in their surrounding culture.
Very accurate. It should be known that in the 17th and 18th centuries, trade went on among all European countries, their colonies in the Americas and Africa. It was an arrangement that economically benefitted all parties with the exception of the African peoples who were enslaved and treated like chattel. But even in Africa, there had to have been locals who were paid to participate in the slave trade. So, protestant countries like Holland, England, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries directly or indirectly participated in and benefitted from the slave trade. It was part of the economic system of the time. You didn’t have to run a cotton plantation in Virginia to be part of an economy that benefitted from slavery as everyone benefitted in one way or another. So, let’s stop the anti-Catholic virtue-signalling by some dim-witted academic who “teaches” the faux science of sociology.
I watched a YouTube video produced by a Rhode Island historical society. It documented the deep ties to slavery in Rhode Island & other parts of New England. Newport, RI was a center & an important part of the slave trade. Virtually every industry in colonial RI was tied to that in some way & not a few of those industries employed slaves as laborers.
If you visit Jamaica, ackee & salt fish is one of the best loved Jamaican dishes. Dried codfish was one of the provisions New England ships provided West Indian slave holding plantations. It was a cheap, non-perishable source of protein but nowadays it’s much scarcer & pretty pricy.
Yup, if someone has an axe to grind with Catholics, Jews, Southerners, Muslims, or whomever, they can always find examples to make their case because virtually everyone & every culture played a part in slavery at some point in time. I always wonder why the Eastern slave trade is generally never mentioned even though it was older & larger than the Atlantic trade & in some nations wasn’t formally abolished until well into the 20th Century. If one has a gripe with Ethiopians or Saudis, I guess they could write a book selectively calling them out too.
The May 2010 issue of The New Criterion has an article titled “Why Bait the Browns?”, by Sylvia Brown. The article begins:
On the true legacy of the Brown family to the university in Providence named for them.
For the past six years, first Brown University, and then the whole State of Rhode Island, has been engaged in a substantial investigation of the transatlantic slave trade. Just as today’s world is saturated with goods produced directly or indirectly through human exploitation, eighteenth-century Rhode Island was permeated with the products of the Triangle Trade. With few natural resources and almost no hinterland, the colony realized early that maritime commerce was its only prospect and embarked on trade with gusto—not only with the West Indies, Britain, and the colonies of the American coast, but also with privateers, smugglers, and slavers. Rhode Island merchants, principally those based in Newport and later in Bristol, undertook at least one thousand slave voyages. Yet just one family has been made the poster child for Rhode Island slavery: the Browns of Providence. Alas, all the ink and all the words have…
Yes, thank you for sharing that.
I hear antisemitic folks focusing on Jews involved in the slave trade in Newport, RI and elsewhere. And they certainly were. But the point as you cited was that everyone in colonial RI was involved in some fashion as well. Jews and others of lower status were involved in ways higher status people chose not to be but everyone benefited financially with the exception of the poor slaves.
Deacon Peitler:
By way of clarification/addition, it is important to keep fully in mind that during the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery continued to be practiced throughout the world, yet your focus is on the Atlantic Slave Trade, which can be misleading in many respects since you refer to it as the slave trade. More importantly, the slavery of Africans by fellow Africans was a practice that had been going on for thousands of years, and so it is not simply a matter of “locals who were paid to participate in the slave trade.” African tribes that were largely successful in enslaving fellow Africans from other tribes also benefitted from the practice. They expanded their benefits by trading with people from other countries.
It is also crucially important to keep in mind that there would have been no Atlantic Slave Trade involving the selling of African slaves into the Americas had it not been for African tribal leaders happily selling some of their slaves to people from Europe. Contrary to the myth largely perpetrated by Alex Haley in “Roots,” there were no major excursions into Africa by Europeans defying African leaders and forcibly rounding up thousands of Africans.
To get a really insightful perspective on all of this, please read the following article:
“America would be a better place if we taught the truth about slavery” by the super researcher I mentioned in other comments, Dr. Kathleen Brush. Her article can be accessed at:
https://12ft.io/proxyref=&q=https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/america_would_be_a_better_place_if_we_taught_the_truth_about_slavery.html
Also, superb insights and facts about slavery can be obtained by watching Dr. Thomas Sowell’s YouTube collection of short videos at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7s6piXiFK-Q5PoPxMQ2maPPIwcBX7ssF
Thank you for further explication of the slave trade and how Africans themselves participated and benefitted from the enslavement of fellow Africans. I was not intending to limit their involvement. I only wished to demonstrate that focusing in on the Jesuits at Georgetown and extrapolating to all of Catholicism was outrageously deceptive. Everyone in Western civilization either directly or indirectly, wittingly or unwittingly benefited from slavery. So-called academics should stop the lying and falsification of history.
Thanks for the additional comments, Deacon. Don’t forget that all peoples in the East, North, and South also benefited from the worldwide phenomena of trading slaves and making use of slave labor.
Be sure to read the article I previously cited, and also watch at least some of the Sowell YouTube videos that help expose some of the lies you lament as well as many others that seek to falsely portray Western Civilization in general as the great slavery monster when in point of fact, it is the one that eventually led to eradicating much of slavery throughout the world. And the Catholic Church played a not insignificant role in helping to bring about this most welcome cultural development throughout the world.
Excellent. You bring to the fore the sad realities which allowed African slavery to exist. Slavery was and is a grotesque phenomenon across cultures, no culture has been exempt including African enslaving Africans and to compound the evil selling their “catch” to Europeans and Americans.
Rude are the reality sandwiches history serves up.
Deacon Peitler:
By way of clarification/addition, it is important to keep fully in mind that during the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery continued to be practiced throughout the world, yet your focus is on the Atlantic Slave Trade, which can be misleading in many respects since you refer to it as the slave trade. More importantly, the slavery of Africans by fellow Africans was a practice that had been going on for thousands of years, and so it is not simply a matter of “locals who were paid to participate in the slave trade.” African tribes that were largely successful in enslaving fellow Africans from other tribes also benefitted from the practice. They expanded their benefits by trading with people from other countries.
It is also crucially important to keep in mind that there would have been no Atlantic Slave Trade involving the selling of African slaves into the Americas had it not been for African tribal leaders happily selling some of their slaves to people from Europe. Contrary to the myth largely perpetrated by Alex Haley in “Roots,” there were no major excursions into Africa by Europeans defying African leaders and forcibly rounding up thousands of Africans.
To get a really insightful perspective on all of this, please read the following article:
“America would be a better place if we taught the truth about slavery” by the super researcher I mentioned in other comments, Dr. Kathleen Brush. Her article can be accessed at:
https://12ft.io/proxyref=&q=https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/america_would_be_a_better_place_if_we_taught_the_truth_about_slavery.html
Also, superb insights and facts about slavery can be obtained by watching Dr. Thomas Sowell’s YouTube collection of short videos at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7s6piXiFK-Q5PoPxMQ2maPPIwcBX7ssF
Wow, Deacon. You are Catholic? Christian? I don’t think so. Why are you so afraid that some of the Catholic people could be so wrong? As you are so wrong on almost evitou espouse. Certainly you are not Franciscan in thought or Pope Francis like in life. Regards, Patrick
It is amply evident after a decade of papal fantasy that Jorge Marion Bergoglio is not adept at applying Christian realism to the sad realities of human existence. He has no resemblance to Franciscan theological insight or to the Seraphic Father Saint Francis himself.
No birdbath master is required for the authentically Catholic.
I thought ad hominens were screened from this site.
And, yes, I am a deacon, a husband, a father, a grandfather, a retired psychologist, an amateur artist, a missionary, a Catholic, etc etc. I’ve been many things in my life. But one thing I’ve always aspired to avoid being was a fool.
We read: “Pulitzer-prize winning author Steven Hahn in a blurb on the back cover calls the book ‘a devastating indictment, not only of Georgetown but also of the entire Catholic Church.’”
The devil and the angels, both, are in the details:
In 1435 Pope Eugene IV condemned slavery in the Canary Islands. In the 16th century Bartolome de las Casas protested the economienda system in Spanish held regions (a system of Spanish protection in exchange for tribute which later degenerated into near slavery). St. Peter Claver began caring for slaves in the Columbia slave markets, beginning in 1610. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI opposed slavery, and during the Civil War Pope Pius IX was apparently willing to recognize the Confederacy, but only if slavery were abolished.
Of the four million slaves emancipated in 1863, about 100,000 were Catholic—were they accomplices to enslavement by “the entire Catholic Church?” And, as for reparations, what now is to be extracted from Africa whose interior tribes fed the Western slave trade by collecting victims for the waiting slave ships?
A wretched blotch on history all around, but “the entire Catholic Church?”
It appears that the papal bull of Pope Paul III Sublimis Deus was largely ignored.
It is nonetheless distressing to read that Catholic priests owned slaves and that the Church tolerated that.
It’s likely Steve, that your ancestors benefitted from the slave trade. They might not have owned slaves but the economies of Europe and the Americas (and even Afrixa itself) benefitted even in small ways from the slave trade. If it wasn’t part of larger economies, it would never have lasted.
Thank you. It is also likely that in the future our generation will be called racist because most of the products we buy from corporations are made by slave or nearly slave labor in other countries like China (just one example). We are benefitting, even when we try to be careful about purchases. Our ‘historians’ have opened a pandora’s box by being selective and accusative. Unless something changes in academia, it’s logical that our descendents will also have guilt by association – as ‘researched’ by future political historians.
You’ve certainly hit the nail on the head in what you’ve observed. Thanks!
This is the type of race-baiting nonsense that infects the spurious 1619 Project. It’s pure, unfiltered political propaganda thinly disguised as history. The degridation of the study of history into just another avenue for political radicals to propagandize the next generation and transform them into radical left-wing activists is one of the most disgusting abuses of the academy I’ve ever seen.
This story is being told – over and over and over. The very idea of reparations – almost 185 years after the fact – is absurd and all involved know it.
Questions – how much money would be paid and to whom would it be paid? Who would determine who would be paid and what would be the criteria by which those decisions would be made? The questions go on and one and they are virtually unanswerable, and those making these demands are quite aware of that fact.
Their goal is quite plain – guilt. In the right hands guilt can go a long way. It strikes me that the people involved are well aware of and skilled in the use of guilt.
As Mrs. Cracker so astutely points out, what Georgetown did at the time was perfectly legal. It was, of course, inexcusable, as in indefensible and it has left a dark stain on the reputation of the university (and the order?) which will remain forever, but this was 185 years ago.
I personally have difficulty describing this in one word – I am torn between cath-con or con-cath.
I haven’t read Swarms book and I don’t plan on it. The very title shows it is biased and ignorant. Equating the Jesuits with the Catholic Church is nothing more than perpetuating Elizabethan anti-Catholic propaganda. Yawn. Further, it’s clearly the work of someone who embraces the lies of CRT. Gaping yawn. There are more important things to read, things that will help me get to Heaven, the only thing that matters.
Nobody ever talks about the slave trade in Muslim lands. Nor do the British get any credit for fighting the largely Muslim-controlled slave trade in Africa. Nor do we hear about Europeans captured and enslaved by the rulers of North Africa, prompting a US Marine expedition “to the shores of Tripoli.” Why ever is that do you suppose?
Given the prevalence of slavery in the world from ancient to modern times, anyone who had ancestors in Europe or the Middle East had an ancestor who was a slave somewhere, sometime. It’s not necessary to have had roots in sub-Saharan Africa. But how many American students learn that?
Many are unaware of this because it isn’t taught. If it is, it’s presented as being nowhere near as bad as when the Europeans did it. I had a long, drawn out disagreement with Deacon Steven Greydanus about this. Apparently, he’s not alone in the Catholic community when it comes to saying whatever the world did with slavery, it was the slavery of the West that alone was the worst and most evil. This is coupled today with the emphasis on not forgiving, not putting the past behind us, and not seeking reconciliation but reparations. The same approach applies to almost anything the West was involved with. And it’s not just activists in comboxes. In universities and public schools, this is the basic narrative. Obviously in the media and popular culture this is the assumption that productions run with.
Why? I can’t say for sure, but my oldest son has a theory. He believes that for over 250 years, the rich and powerful believed that a free market combined with a democracy espousing such ideals as civil rights, freedom and equality was the magic formula for unprecedented wealth and power. Now they no longer believe it. And it’s in their best interest to get as many people on the street to agree.
“Swarms’ own employer The New York Times is vehemently pro-abortion. How does this statement apply to the topic of morbid black slavery?
Christian religions, Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, Methodist, began to defend the institution, invoking a Christian hierarchy in which slaves were bound to obey their masters.
Our founding fathers had many African American slaves… Washington, Jefferson, Adams, etc.
Slavery may be history however, still alive. Dr. Marting King Jr. in his I have a dream speach said “There may be a time when my little children will not be judged based on their skin color, but by the content of their character”. Then he followed with “Free at last free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last”. Unfortunatly today , neither is true.
Moreover, politics prolifically promulgates racial prefudice. White Supremacy, White Nationalists, neo-Nazis, 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, American Renaissance, American Third Position Party and on.
When will we honor our constitution? The Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
May God help us to help those who cannot see.
“May God help us to help those who cannot see.”
Maybe certain people should heed the words of Christ, those verses about removing the beam from one’s own eyes first. Those who are blinded by sin and pride are in no position to “help” anyone see. Please put your own house in order before presuming to lecture readers about race or any other topic here.
“Only the facts, ma’am.” Joe Friday sought the TRUTH. Crist also said “let him who is without sin cast the first stone”. Heed!
But does that apply to Trump? Just asking based on several years of your comments…
Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but Trump has dug his own lying hole!
My house is in fine shape. Maybe we might move beyond skin color and focus on the killers of mass murders of our adults and babies by criminals, many with an AR15 military style rifle. The predecessor of this mass destructor was my Navy M16 issue. So I know of this gun. These innocent school children are “color blind”. There have been a mindblowing 23 school shootings in 2023. The most deaths by date and location…
May 24, 2022 Uvalde, Texas 22 dead
May 14, 2022 Buffalo, New York 10 BLACKS murdered
August 3, 2019 El Paso, Texas 23 dead
February 14, 2018 Parkland, Florida 17 dead
June 12, 2016 Orlando, Florida 50 dead
2012 Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, that left 28 people dead and 2 injured. Can we enact any change? We’ve tried and failed.
The Second Amendment written 226 years ago needs updating. In 1797 the Brown Bess single shot lock and load muskets were the rifle used in the Revolutionary War, there were no AR15s. The gun lobbyists say if the AR15 is removed from the public, all of their guns will be confiscated. WRONG!
There need to be more organized grass roots “masses”
Our faiths seem not to get visibility involved. Cardinal Cupich – “The Second Amendment did not come down from Sinai,”
Our GOP congress needs stop being driven by NRA lobbies.
May God intercede to stop this slaughter.
Remember, the brilliance of our modern progressive approach to history has been to take the first civilization that moved to abolish slavery on moral grounds, and condemn it alone for having what was universally common through most of human history. In fact, it’s still around, we simply use euphemisms like ‘human trafficking.’ Also, it was less racism, and more political and ideological conflict, that raked up the high body count in the last century. Our race obsession is beginning to blind us to reality, and to the grave threats emerging today.
BTW, Dr. King’s famous ‘not be judged based on their skin color’ has come into heavy rewriting in the last couple years. Some go so far as to say if you don’t judge based on skin color – properly done to the correct skin colors for the correct reasons – it is that which now makes you a racist. Again, obsession is never good and typically ends up corrupting even the virtues of what became one became obsessed about.
What?
The rabid left cant seem to decide if they want to erase the past by removing statues, or profit from it by forcing others to pay them reparations. If you want to be seen as a victim, we can ALL go digging into the past to find some offense we can demand payment for.At some point, ALL of us will find something from history which could make us “entitled”. Too bad there isnt a real life money tree to fund it. For example, many hold up the example of the Japanese who the US confined during WWII, and say their families are entitled to pay back. Never mentioned at all are the GERMAN families in the US who selectively suffered the same fate, often in the same camps. Are they not mentioned because the incarcerations were not quite as numerous? Or does the media not cover it because they are white? I am aware of this situation because my in-laws were caught in this snare; my mother-law was a child at the time this happened and her family spent time in a camp in Texas.
I am very tired of the whine for reparations. The past is the past and it cannot be undone. Nor is it fair to ask those living in the present to pay the tab for the actions of others in the far past. I am tired of seeing statues removed ( Teddy Roosevelt from in front of the NYC Museum of Natural history???) and founding fathers unfairly attacked. It was proposed to remove the name of Paul Revere from a school in California at one point. Ironically, Revere, one of our bravest Revolutionary War heroes, never owned slaves. His name was simply caught up in the anger and general ignorance of the movement, attacked by people too uninformed to even know who he was and what he did.
I grew up poor and white. Because of genealogy research I know my lineage far back for hundreds of years and much better than most. My people for the most part were ministers, soldiers and small time Northern dirt farmers. They didnt own slaves. (And, if I hear the bogus charge of “systemic racism” again, I promise I will vomit.) I dont owe anyone ANYTHING. What I would REALLY like to say to all of these community activist grifters and guilt scammers would almost certainly never be allowed to be printed here. But I figure you can guess what it is.
Subsistence farming – good point
I don’t know if Paul Revere had any direct connections to slavery or might have had through his family, but he surely would have been affected in some way just by living in colonial Boston society.
The Old North Church- “One, if by land, and two, if by sea…” -used to operate a popular colonial-themed tourist spot, “Captain Jackson’s Chocolate Shop.” Capt. Newark Jackson turns out to have been a pew owner & prominent Old North parishoner who trafficked African slaves in exchange for cocoa from Suriname plantations. He & other members of the parish were part of a smuggling ring that bought slaves in Barbados & laundered cocoa. After that discovery the church closed down the chocolate shop.
The spire from which the lanterns were lit was itself funded in part by the proceeds of Honduran slave labor.
Like I said honey, guilt by association does not rate with me. FIRST, Paul Revere was NOT a member of the Old North Church, something I learned in a visit there two years ago.He used the tower for the lantern lights because the spire was one of the highest points in Boston and a signal there could be easily seen. As a teen, he and some friends had expressed an interest in learning to ring the churches bells, and became bell ringers there. An enlarged reproduction of the letter he wrote to them making such request can be seen at the base of the spire. But he did NOT belong to the church. He was a Congregationalist. Even if he DID belong to the church,what is your point? Is he supposed to be guilty of slave trading because another church member who DID deal in slaves made a donation to the church to build a spire?? Really? Not in the real world. I am tired of hearing how much the slaves contributed to American society, as if OTHER Americans were sitting around doing nothing. Which was NEVER true for the vast majority of white Americans, most of whom had a standard of living only slightly better than the slaves themselves. As for the chocolate shop, of which I had NEVER heard, google indicates it is of recent vintage, from about 10 years ago, and thus surely had NOTHING to do with Paul Revere.Their revamping of the chocolate shop’s historic tale was done a year or two ago, well within the time frame of the woke insanity and historic distortion which has recently overtaken the country, and which in the end may destroy it. After all, what would you expect in woke, liberal Massachusetts, where such as Elizabeth Warren represents the state? Who picks the cotton for my t-shirts, grows the bananas I eat for breakfast or weaves the carpet in my home is not my responsibility ( in fact the origins are often foreign) and I cannot control that. Sorry but that kind of “guilt” is stretching into unreality for me. I just dont buy it and refuse to accept its premise. That phony guilt is that far apart from my own personal actions and I wont waste my life researching the origins of every purchase I make.This type of community activist tripe is what has been undermining the origins of the country the last few years. When it started I told friends that the game of casting blame would soon move on to the attempted destruction of the Founding Fathers. Sadly, I was right. They are ignored for the tremendous accomplishment they achieved in freeing America from British rule, and some are now denigrated for having been slave owners, as if it is the ONLY germane fact about their lives. On a recent trip to Mount Vernon, I heard about the “enslaved” members of Washington’s home until I was sick of it. Washington’s “enslaved” cook will never be as important in our history as Washington himself, and that is the TRUTH, whether or not anyone else likes it. Like I said, peddle the guilt to someone more receptive.
LJ, I was trying to illustrate how slavery permeated the colonial world and how even the Old North Church had connections to that. Not to peddle guilt or cast aspersions on anyone.
Captain Jackson broke no law by selling slaves. His crime would have been smuggling goods from outside the British Empire.
Slavery is as old as mankind. The bible, Egyptian enslavement of the Hebrews. Slavery among native Americans who captured members of other tribes. Slaves sold by African tribes when they had captives resulting from tribal warfare. Evidence of Aztecs sacrificing captive members of subjected tribes to their gods. And almost certainly slavery as part of human history before the development of writing. MY irritation is the constant drumbeat of the grossly untrue lie that somehow American invented the concept of slavery and that it has colored every accomplishment . The more it is repeated to the uninformed and ignorant, the more deeply entrenched it becomes. If I hear one more person call slavery “America’s ORIGINAL sin” as if we invented the concept, I will scream. Funny they never mention indentured servants, who experienced slavery in all but name for the numbers of years it lasted for them. What about new immigrants who arrived and worked for pennies, otherwise would starve before govt social welfare became a thing? What about the 146 men and women who were killed in working in dangerous sub-standard conditions in the Triangle Shirt waste Fire in 1911?? What about the bigotry inherent in “No Irish need apply” ?Weren’t they taken advantage of? Werent they also victims of mans inhumanity to man? Didnt they also make contributions to our general society? I am tired of hearing ONLY about black slaves. Current views on woke issues MUST be fought as hard as possible EVERYWHERE because they are now permeating every level of American society, from schools to military, and it presents an untrue distorted view of the nation. My word to those peddling this stuff is: Not a balanced history in any way, get over it and move on.
What you are doing is everything wrong with the idea of social guilt. All social guilt is supposed to do is make us aware that, for instance, there is slavery in the world today and some of what we have (such as tech or clothes or other luxuries) might benefit from that. Not that we are guilty, or should hang our heads, or do time, or be smitten for our guilt by osmosis. But the idea that whether Revere was in any way connected to slavey doesn’t matter, he’s still in some way guilty just because, is a problem. Just the idea that the first thing we now say is ‘Sure, he cured cancer, but was he connected to slavey? Heck, doesn’t matter, he benefited from slavery and that’s all that matters’ shows how far we are from a common sense approach to the topic. It’s become pathological now, well beyond anything to do with justice. And this from our generation. That alone is a problem right there.
Comment boxes are a challenging way to communicate. I believe most of us here would be in agreement about the error of presentism and the mistake of making selective moral judgments of historical figures based upon modern societal standards.
It’s a shame we can’t talk about issues face to face because we’re all mostly saying the same thing, just adding additional historical background.
People generally behave according to the culture of their time. For better or worse. Our future descendants will view our failings in a similar way.
True that. I just see where these things are going. It’s hard not to. It was bad enough when we hadn’t yet adopted the modern hyper judgmental, condemning and condescending eradication of past sinners by defining them according to the latest unforgivable sins. That has, of course, become one of the developments upon which all this is based. That slavery (or at least only that practiced by the West), and racism are irredeemable sins that necessitate the elimination of that person because now they are defined by those sins. No nuance or complexity. All racism is the same, and beyond redemption.
Now we’re moving on to the ‘guilt by six degrees of association’ that puts one in mind of the old stories about McCarthyism. You know, I’m a commie. Why? Because I was at a dinner once when someone was there who dated someone who once attended a party with someone who once wrote a letter to a socialist. Now we just scratch out commie and socialist and add ‘slavery’ and ‘racism’. Same principle, different topic. Such a broad and tenuous path to guilt by however vague association is bound to snare those remaining who may actually have opposed racism or slavery. Did Revere oppose slavery or have slaves at all? Irrelevant. He benefited, he had to, white and American. Guilty as charged.
The purpose of all this is pretty clear by now. But it tosses aside endless ages of a Christian understanding about humility, sin, grace, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption and love. This is tied to the overall encouragement of those popular attitudes like hatred, contempt, arrogance, judgementalism, condemnation and a staggering intolerance for anyone who fails to be, well, whatever at the moment. The shock of this is how many Christians – and Christian leaders – have so quickly embraced this development. I’ve often said our generation’s only hope is that Jesus was pulling our legs when He said as we judge others (including old, dead sinners), so shall we be judged.
Much has to be accepted to buy into our modern notion that we, the country, the Church, and pretty much anyone west of the Urals are defined by our sins, our past sins, and the sins of our ancestors. That is not a Christian view, but it is a popular modern, secular and worldly view. Just as DEI proudly states that equality is no longer the prize to be won, preferring equity instead, so we are learning things like forgiveness, or even context, can no longer be lifted up as virtues. For the West at least, presentism is all the rage when it comes to studying our history and heritage. This is accomplished, of course, by not only brutally condemning and defining the past by its worst elements, but also by whitewashing pretty much all of human history anywhere else in the world. As long as we accept these premises, many of which are at odds with even basic understandings of Christian virtue, expect the conclusions we are seeing to be arrived at more and more.
In all honesty, who can bear anymore of this nonsense? Perhaps we all best examine our contemporary enslavement to the spectrum of sin and knock off the neurotic obsession with the past? As anyone knows, beyond the theological and metaphysical reality of slavery we have a world presently promoting the sexual enslavement of children in a variety of ways.
I want to hear no more of this nonsense about something long over and amply rectified.
I wonder what Swarms has to say about the Moslem Barbary pirates of North Africa who enslaved millions of Europeans over the years? Who deserve reparations for that, and who should have to pay?
The President of Georgetown University was from the Healey family and African American on his maternal side.
Thank you so much for sharing that. Fr.Healy had a very interesting story.
I think a professor at Ohio State University estimated that there were between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans captured by North African pirates and sold into slavery. That’s a bunch but between 10 and twelve million Africans are thought to have been trafficked in the Atlantic slave trade.
And not every Barbary pirate was North African. Some Europeans joined up on those slave raids too.
mrscracker: Everything I have read about the Barbary pirates indicates that they were all Muslims. The vast majority were born Muslims, and there were also a small number of converts to Islam from various parts of the world who joined the Barbary pirates as fellow Muslims. They did not act as or represent Europeans, Indians, Asians, etc. As such, I don’t believe your claim that Europeans (one of the primary targets of the Muslim Barbary pirates) also joined in on the Barbary pirates slave raids is accurate, but if you can provide a credible source that supports your contention, I will sincerely take a look at it.
10 to 12 million Africans thought to have been trafficked in the Atlantic save trade is indeed a bunch, but anywhere from 20 million to perhaps as many as 200 million people of many lands and races are thought to have been trafficked in the Arab slave trade, which of course lasted much longer than the Atlantic slave trade. Please note the following regarding the Arab slave Trade primarily between the 14th and 19th centuries:
“Most slaves were black Africans, but some were east and central Asian, Turkish, Persian, and European. What they shared in common was they were non-Muslim. Slaves sold in the Ottoman Empire between the 14th and 19th centuries were 15-40% European. Enslaved for their faith, these are the ‘faith slaves.’ This period coincides with Ottoman conquests in the Balkans in the 14th to 16th centuries when there was mass enslavement of Christians. Similarly, it coincides with the presence of the Crimean Khanate in Eastern Europe. This was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire between 1449 and 1783. This khanate was a slave entrepot that supplied an estimated 2 million white Christian Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian slaves. Another 1-1.25 million Christians, mostly from Italy, Spain, and Portugal were enslaved, sold or ransomed by Ottoman/Barbary pirates in the 18th and 19th centuries. ‘Some people assume that faith slavery, because it was not race based, was less brutal or dehumanizing. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as with black Africans, faith slaves were considered commodities to be bought and sold. If anything, religious intolerance justified extremely cruel and harsh treatment.
The Arab slave trade gained extra vigor in the 19th century when European empires outlawed the trade in slaves. Zanzibar (today part of Tanzania), a 19th century slave entrepot ruled by Omani Arabs worked with African chiefs to fill requests.”
(See pp. 15-16 in “Racism and Anti-Racism in the World: before and after 1945” by Dr. Kathleen Brush.)
Thank you for sharing your comments Doc. Ive read about the Eastern slave trade and yes it’s thought to have been larger than the Atlantic trade and it certainly lasted much longer, right up into the 20th century.
I learned that some Europeans joined in with the Barbary pirates in a history article online and I apologize for not having a link. It might have been from the BBC. I think it was concerning Barbary slaving raids on Britain and Ireland. I’d need to go look for that information.