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Criminal
The Sale
00:46:41
In 1791, three men filed lawsuits in the General Court of Maryland. They were all suing the same person: the Jesuit priest who enslaved them.
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- [00:01]
Phoebe Judge
Support for Criminal comes from Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out with your own business or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website and get your product, service or content out there for the right audience to find. You can do it all in one place, all on your terms. Visit squarespace.com for a free trial. When you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a web website or domain. Support for Criminal comes from Shutterfly. Create personalized gifts that really mean something this year with Shutterfly's custom photo gifs. Everyone here at Criminal is doing them this year. People are making coffee mugs, collaborating with siblings to make family photo calendars, uploading funny photos to sweatshirts to make inside jokes. I'm starting a new tradition of making snow globe Christmas ornaments with a photo of my dog. That one's from me to me. Get 40% off your Shutterfly order with code CRIMINAL40 and make something that means something. This year. Get free shipping on qualified orders. See their site for more details.
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Letitia Clark
You come to the New Yorker Radio.
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Rachel Swarns
Hour for conversations that go deeper with.
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Letitia Clark
People you really want to hear from.
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Rachel Swarns
Whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or.
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Letitia Clark
Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney, or the godfather.
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Rachel Swarns
Of Artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the.
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Phoebe Judge
New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. On November 22, 1633, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set sail from England. Both were headed across the Atlantic to Maryland. On board the Ark was a Jesuit Catholic priest, Father Andrew White. Father White had been sent to Maryland to start a Catholic colony. The first thing he did when he arrived was lead a Mass. This was the start of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Over the next few years, the Jesuits colonized thousands of acres across Maryland. They set up tobacco plantations and bought enslaved people from West Africa to work in them.
- [02:24]
William Thomas
So priests who relied on slave labor and slave sales established the nation's first Catholic archdiocese. They helped to build the nation's first Catholic cathedral. Priests who operated a plantation and sold people established the nation's first Catholic seminary.
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Phoebe Judge
Rachel Sworens is an author and a contributing writer for the New York Times.
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William Thomas
Unlike some white people at the time, who viewed enslaved people as brutes, as animals, these priests didn't. They saw them as human beings and human beings with souls, and they felt that they themselves had an obligation to nurture and tend to those souls at the very same time that they felt comfortable buying and selling their bodies. They were expected to participate in church life. They were expected to be Catholics. The expectations, though, varied in time and place. Sometimes they were enforced, and the penalties could be horrifying. There's an instance where, because an enslaved couple flouted the moral code of the church, engaging in infidelity, where as punishment, the priests decided to sell their children.
- [04:04]
Phoebe Judge
In the 1670s, a teenager named Ann Joyce came to Maryland. She'd been born in the Caribbean, but ended up in England, working as an indentured servant.
- [04:15]
William Thomas
And, you know, we all know a little bit about indentured servants, mostly Europeans who arrive with a contract, a term of years to work, and then they go on their way to live independent lives. And Ann Joyce was a black woman, but that was her hope, too.
- [04:40]
Phoebe Judge
Ann Joyce worked for one of Maryland's richest Catholic families, the colony's deputy governor. And when the terms of her contract were up, she went to him with her papers.
- [04:51]
William Thomas
But instead of accepting that and leaving her free to go, he determines that she will not be free to go.
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Phoebe Judge
He burned the contract that proved that she'd come to the colony as an indentured servant and not an enslaved person.
- [05:10]
William Thomas
She is sent off to the control of someone else, another white man, who forces her into a basement where she spends a period of time. And when she emerges from that basement, she is an enslaved woman with no recourse to a contract or to anything.
- [05:36]
Phoebe Judge
Ann Joyce was enslaved for the rest of her life. She went on to have a number of children. She told every one of them her story over the next hundred years. Anne Joyce's descendants were all born into slavery. They were separated and sent to plantations all over the state. Two of them were brothers, Patrick and Charles Mahoney.
- [05:59]
William Thomas
They know the story just as well as all of the members of their family know the story.
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Phoebe Judge
And in the late 1700s, they decided to do something about it.
- [06:10]
William Thomas
And so in 1791, Patrick and Charles Mahoney take the Jesuits to court to try to win their freedom.
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Phoebe Judge
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.
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Rachel Swarns
There were freedom suits in the colonial period in Maryland. One in 1770, so before the American Revolution.
- [06:40]
Phoebe Judge
William Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska. In the 20 or so years before Charles and Patrick Mahoney sued for their freedom, other enslaved people across Maryland had gone to court to do the same thing, filing lawsuits to prove that they were descended from indentured servants and should Never have been enslaved.
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Rachel Swarns
The success rate was actually quite high. More than 50% of all of the freedom suits in Washington, D.C. and Maryland were successful. They were successful in a way that we've forgotten. And we really need to look at these suits because they tell us a story that we need to hear about enslaved people who were acting in the law, acting in politics. Slavery was never stable in the law. It was being challenged throughout the 17th and 18th century in England. And these cases kept coming up, and enslaved people in Maryland knew about these cases. And in the aftermath of the Revolution, they bring these cases forward, raising a fundamental question for was slavery compatible with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence?
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Phoebe Judge
Charles and Patrick Mahoney were not alone when they filed their freedom suit. In the same week, another enslaved man from the same plantation filed one too. His name was Edward Queen.
- [08:24]
Letitia Clark
So Edward Queen, not much is known about him. Because even though we know a lot more about Edward Queen than almost anybody, it's not like there were writings of Edward Queen and statements of Edward Queen or anything like that.
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Phoebe Judge
This is Letitia Clark.
- [08:45]
Letitia Clark
So as I found out, Edward Queen is a direct ancestor of mine. My mother's maiden name is Queen, so I always knew I was a queen, although I never knew about Edward Queen. He must have been an amazing person of courage, right? Because how are you an enslaved person? And now you're going to sue your enslaver? I mean, the person who could really hurt you and do some damage, you know, you're going to sue that person.
- [09:17]
Phoebe Judge
The plantation where Edward, Charles, and Patrick were enslaved was called White Marsh. The queens were the biggest family there. Their ancestor had also come to Maryland as an indentured servant.
- [09:29]
Rachel Swarns
The Queen freedom suit and the Mahoney Freedom suit are, in my view, two of the most important freedom suits in American history.
- [09:37]
Phoebe Judge
If Edward, Charles, and Patrick won their suits, they could make it easier for everyone else in their families all across Maryland to sue, too.
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Rachel Swarns
It's extraordinarily risky. Enslaved people are literally suing in open court. A defendant slaveholder, personally. They are. This is a individual suit, It's a civil suit, and it's in the public arena of the court. And so it came with considerable risk, not least of which was that even before a suit was filed, some slaveholders, if they caught wind of such an action, would summarily sell the person out of the state or out of the colony. One woman in Maryland, a relative of the Mahoneys, was planning to sue for freedom. But before she could file the papers, she was sold to Havana, Cuba. So the Consequences of these actions were potentially immense.
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Phoebe Judge
Edward Queen's case was the first to go to trial in May of 1794.
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Letitia Clark
So the basis of his lawsuit is that he was descended from a free woman, and that free woman's name was Mary Queen. That's his grandmother.
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Phoebe Judge
One of the key witnesses was the son of a midwife. She delivered Mary Queen's daughter.
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Letitia Clark
She had known at the time that Mary Queen should have been free, but she was being held illegally in slavery by James Carroll, who was the one who hired her to deliver the baby.
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Phoebe Judge
Another key witness was a white man who'd grown up near the plantation where Mary Queen was enslaved. He said he remembered his mother talking about how Mary and her enslaver were always, quote, quarreling about her freedom. Edward's trial lasted a few days.
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Letitia Clark
They came to the decision that, indeed, Mary Queen had come to this country as a free person and that, indeed, Edward Queen was a descendant, and so for that reason, he should be a free person. And so he won his freedom. He won his freedom.
- [12:00]
Phoebe Judge
Edward Queen was free, but his mother, siblings, and cousins were not. Their freedom suits were pending in the lower court, but since Edward had won in the general court, his family assumed their cases would go through, too. So Edward and some of his family left the plantation.
- [12:18]
Letitia Clark
I mean, I was thinking, even in the last week or so, like, how would it be for me if I went free? But yet my sister was still enslaved, and my aunts and, you know, like, you can't be at peace that way. You know, it's. It's still very hard. It's very difficult. So, I mean, you are trying to do the best you can now with your newfound freedom, right, and buy property, I'm sure. Work hard, buy property, keep your family together, the parts of your family that were released along with you, to keep that part together. And, you know, there was no guarantee that some other court trial was going to come where the Jesuits were going to say, no, you know, this is overturned. So I don't think they ever felt totally at peace with the fact that they were free.
- [13:13]
Phoebe Judge
The Jesuits were losing money fighting freedom suits, and now they were waiting for Charles and Patrick Mahoney's trial to start.
- [13:22]
William Thomas
It created waves of uncertainty among the Catholic slaveholders because the Mahoneys were scattered among various enslavers. And there are letters from those enslavers, you know, talking about, oh, good Lord, you know, what's going to happen with this case? Will it affect the people that I enslave as well?
- [13:48]
Phoebe Judge
Three months after Edward Queen won His case. The Jesuits approached one of his lawyers with an offer. They wanted him to drop his cases.
- [13:56]
Rachel Swarns
The Jesuits essentially pay him to stop representing enslaved petitioners suing them. And so he switches to the defense, you know, to the slaveholders, the Jesuits. And in Mahoney's case is representing the Jesuits.
- [14:20]
Phoebe Judge
Charles and Patrick Mahoney's case finally got a trial date in 1797, six years after they filed their suit. The Mahoney's trial took so many years, in part because the Maryland court had sent a commission to London to investigate whether Anne Joyce had really been an indentured servant. It took them three years to sail to England, compile a report, and come back. But an all white jury found the commission's report inconclusive. The case would have to go to a retrial, which could take years. Charles and Patrick didn't want to wait at White Marsh. So In December of 1797, they escaped the plantation. Less than a month later, their enslaver posted an ad in the Maryland Gazette. He said, charles and Patrick Mahoney, quote, pretend they are set free. And he offered a $16 reward. But the brothers were never caught. And in 1799, a second jury heard their case.
- [15:25]
Rachel Swarns
In the second trial, Charles Mahoney is declared by a jury again of all white men that he is a free man.
- [15:37]
Phoebe Judge
The Maryland court declared that his ancestor, Anne Joyce, should have been free and so should her descendants. Charles enslaver, a priest named John Ashton, was ordered to pay his legal fees and provide thousands of pounds of tobacco and damages. It was the largest award given to any enslaved person in the Maryland court. It would be enough for Charles to buy a small property. But the Reverend John Ashton appealed the verdict right away. The Mahoney's lawyers fought the appeal with an argument against slavery itself. They said slavery is incompatible with every principle of religion and morality. It is unnatural and contrary to the maxims of political law, more especially in this country, where we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal and that liberty is an inalienable right. It didn't work. The Jesuits won the appeal against the Mahoneys, but then John Ashton freed them anyway. After 12 years in court, one historian thinks that Charles and Patrick just paid him.
- [16:53]
William Thomas
Charles and Patrick are freed. But the resolution of the case and the loss of the case means that most of their relatives remain enslaved and with very little prospect of freedom.
- [17:14]
Phoebe Judge
We'll be right back. Thanks to Squarespace for their support. Building a website can seem intimidating if you've never done it before. But you don't need to worry when you use Squarespace. Squarespace is the all in one website platform to help you stand out and succeed online, no matter your level of experience. Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website for your project or business so you can get your product, service or content out there for the right audience to find. They have plenty of tools to help you tailor it to fit your personality and vision. And if you aren't quite sure what you want, Squarespace has the tools to help you figure it out, like their website builder called Blueprint AI. It just asks you a few questions about your brand or business, and it uses that information to create a blueprint for your online presence. Plus, your websites will look great no matter what device people use to access them a phone, computer or tablet. Visit squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for Criminal comes from Etsy Choosing the right gift for someone can be a lot of fun. I recently received a very good gift, a print of an old agricultural booklet from the 1956 National Farming Forum. It's a black and white image of different varieties of potatoes, each one labeled Etsy can help you find a totally original gift for everyone in your life with handmade, handpicked gifts from independent sellers. For example, you can order a customized T shirt covered in photographs of someone's pet, or you can get someone a jean jacket with their name sewn across the back, or a necklace engraved with their handwriting. Shop Etsy this holiday season to celebrate all of your favorite people for original gifts that say I get you. Etsy has it. In 1791, on a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigos, a man named Harry Mahoney had his first child. Saint Inigos was in southern Maryland, near the banks of the Potomac River. Priests who visited wrote about how beautiful it was. The plantation was covered with pine trees, cedars, and dogwoods. It grew wheat and tobacco. Harry Mahoney would likely have heard about his relatives Charles and Patrick's freedom suit and that they lost. By then, tobacco plantations weren't making as much money for the Jesuits. Everyone was thinking about cotton.
- [20:02]
William Thomas
So you know, enslaved people are property, human property. And the Jesuits do with their property what what people do when there are hard times. They sell. So Harry Mahoney is living at St. Inigos at a time when there is great fear and great uncertainty among the enslaved. He and his family watch as the Jesuits sell people from the plantation where they live. And so he has to find a way to keep his family safe.
- [20:41]
Phoebe Judge
The Jesuits were selling enslaved people to plantations in the South.
- [20:46]
William Thomas
And the work conditions were quite different from the Chesapeake. And so in Maryland and Virginia, people knew about this. Enslaved people knew. The priests knew too, that black people were terrified of being sold down south because the conditions were so much worse.
- [21:14]
Phoebe Judge
Rachel Swarns writes that Harry Mahoney tried to protect his family by becoming the foreman of the plantation.
- [21:21]
William Thomas
So here's this guy who comes from this family of resisters who becomes essentially the right hand man of the enslaver.
- [21:33]
Phoebe Judge
There was another thing Harry Mahoney did. One of his daughters told her children about it.
- [21:38]
William Thomas
Decades later, during the War of 1812, the British are threatening the plantations. And, you know, they are actually coming up on shore. And there's a period of time where this is terrifying to many of the white people. But, you know, for black people, it was actually also exhilarating because the British were promising freedom to people who abandoned the plantations and joined their forces. And, you know, this must have been something that Harry and the Mahoneys considered. Certainly everyone knew, you know, people ran and all around them were running to the British. Harry, perhaps because he had young children, decides to stay.
- [22:33]
Phoebe Judge
One day, Harry noticed a British ship sailing towards St. Inigo. He knew the priest stored money in a house on the plantation, and once he saw the soldiers, he went to get it. Then he took his family into the woods to hide. The British soldiers ransacked the plantation. They took every valuable thing they could find. When they left, Harry Mahoney came out of the woods and showed the priests that he'd saved the money.
- [23:02]
William Thomas
As a result, he is rewarded by the Jesuits for his courage and his loyalty. And with that, he garners a promise from them, a pledge that neither he nor his family will ever be sold.
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Phoebe Judge
Harry Mahoney, his wife and their eight children were seemingly safe. But the Jesuit plantations kept losing money. Some of the priests thought they could recover by selling hundreds of enslaved people at once. One of the biggest advocates of this idea was the president of Georgetown, which the Jesuits had founded. His name was Thomas Mullady.
- [23:47]
William Thomas
The Jesuit leaders at the time said there was no way to keep Georgetown afloat, keep the Jesuits afloat, and to expand without some cash. And the way to get it was to sell off the enslaved.
- [24:05]
Phoebe Judge
Other priests disagreed. They felt the Jesuits had a moral duty to the people they enslaved and thought they treated slaves better than southern plantation owners did. But Thomas Mullady wouldn't give up on the idea of a sale. And by 1838, he got permission from Rome to do it.
- [24:24]
William Thomas
There are two primary buyers. A former governor of Louisiana who is a member of Congress at the time, and a wealthy doctor who is originally from South Carolina.
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Phoebe Judge
Both owned plantations in Louisiana, where they grew sugarcane and cotton. Mullady made a deal to sell almost 300 men, women and children for a total of $115,000. The priest who ran St. Inigos, where Harry Mahoney and his family were enslaved, opposed the sale. He even traveled to Georgetown to try to talk Milady out of it.
- [25:07]
William Thomas
And when he returned to St. Inigos, to the plantation, to the manor house there, Harry Mahoney is there serving his meal and sees something in the priest's face. And he knows then that they have been sold. The promise that he had counted on for so many years was broken.
- [25:38]
Phoebe Judge
But it wasn't clear when they would be sold.
- [25:42]
William Thomas
And then they wait. They know that everyone, nearly everyone, will be sold, and they are just waiting for the slave traders to come. It must have been agonizing.
- [26:00]
Phoebe Judge
Harry's oldest son, Robert, was the first the slaveholders took. In June of 1838. He was 45. He was sent to New Orleans on a slave ship called the Uncas. Then in October, Reverend Milady himself set out for St. Antigos to oversee more of the sale.
- [26:20]
William Thomas
And the priest who runs the plantation who has opposed the sale, gets wind that they are coming, and he urges members of the Mahoney family to run.
- [26:34]
Phoebe Judge
One of Harry's daughters, named Louisa, got away in time. She and her mother ran into the woods to hide. But not everyone heard the priest's warning.
- [26:45]
William Thomas
Anna, the sister, who has two young children, doesn't make it.
- [26:51]
Phoebe Judge
Anna was in her 20s. She had a son around 8 or 9 years old and a daughter who was about 6. Another one of Harry's older daughters, Bibiana, also didn't make it. She had children, too. Harry was too old to be taken away that day, but he watched as his daughters and grandchildren were.
- [27:12]
William Thomas
We know that they were taken by a sea craft from St. Inigos to Alexandria. We know that they were marched from where they were held to the wharf to the ship to the Catherine Jackson.
- [27:35]
Phoebe Judge
Anna and her children were the 73rd, 74th and 75th names on the ship's manifest. Their heights were measured and recorded before the journey. Her son was 4 foot 4. Her daughter was 3 foot 11. The Jesuits sold a total of 272 men, women and children in the sale of 1838. They were paid roughly $422 per person.
- [28:03]
William Thomas
And we know a little bit about what other enslaved people described about the journey from Alexandria to New Orleans, about being crammed onto the ships, about having time on the deck, about just the sea as far as you could see, about the terror, about the fear, about people dying sometimes on the journey, and then about arriving in New Orleans, a place so different from what people had known that it's often described as another country.
- [28:46]
Phoebe Judge
When Rachel Swarns first started reporting the story of the sale for the New York Times, she spoke to genealogists who were trying to find descendants of the people who'd been sold. They'd been able to track down a few, but they believed there could be thousands.
- [29:02]
William Thomas
And so we ran a companion piece asking readers, are you connected to this story? We published a link to the passenger list.
- [29:16]
Phoebe Judge
They asked if anyone recognized any of the names. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comes from GiveWell if you're looking to make a charitable donation, GiveWell has poured over independent studies and charity data to help donors direct their funds to evidence backed organizations that are saving and improving lives. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities and GiveWell doesn't take a cut. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org pick podcast and enter Criminal at checkout. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from criminal to get your donation matched again, that's givewell.org to donate or find out more. Support for Criminal comes from Mint Mobile. Smartphones are unbelievably expensive, but you don't have to also pay a fortune for your monthly service. When you switch to Mint Mobile you can get a three month plan for $15 a month and it's very easy to switch. You do it all online using your existing phone and phone number. We set up a friend with the Mint Mobile plan and he said he has high speed 5G data and unlimited talk and text. He said it's exactly like his old service, just much cheaper to get this new customer offer and your new three month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month. Go to mint mobile.com Phoebe that's mintmobile.com Phoebe you can cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at mintmobile.com Phoebe $45 upfront payment required equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. CMIT Mobile for details. Jeremy Alexander didn't know much about his family tree growing up. But after he had a son, he wanted to try to learn more.
- [31:50]
Jeremy Alexander
And in 2014, it had become in vogue for people to do DNA testing to learn more about their ancestry. And so I started with my parents.
- [32:04]
Phoebe Judge
In 2016, Jeremy got an email from a woman named Melissa Kemp. She was from Boston. And she said, according to Ancestry.com they might have relatives in common.
- [32:15]
Jeremy Alexander
And I wrote back, sure, let's talk. Whenever you're ready to talk, I'm willing to talk. And we set up the time. It was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2016.
- [32:25]
Phoebe Judge
They decided to talk on the phone.
- [32:28]
Jeremy Alexander
When she started and telling her story about the fact that the family is from Maryland. And all I thought to myself was I don't know anything about the history of my family being in Maryland. I said, all I know is Mississippi, Louisiana, and folks moved up to Illinois and I'm from Chicago. And it was a bit of a surprise. And she's going through this whole story about then a person named Louisa and Anna who were sisters and that she comes from a branch from Louisa's side of the family and that it looks like that I descend down from Anna. I'm just trying to figure all this out because I don't know these names. I haven't been able to go back to these names at this time.
- [33:20]
Phoebe Judge
Right now they were both related to Harry Mahoney. His daughter, Anna Mahoney had grown up in Maryland, enslaved at a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigos. And in 1838, she'd been sold to the South.
- [33:36]
Jeremy Alexander
And when she finally really laid it on me about this is what I'm trying to tell you is that you are also a descendant of the enslaved people who were sold back in 1838 by the Jesuit priests who ran Georgetown College, now Georgetown University. I had to stop her right then and there. And I said, I have to tell you something. I said, I am talking to you as I'm in my office at Georgetown University. She couldn't believe it. I said, I've been working here for years now.
- [34:18]
Phoebe Judge
Jeremy is the executive Assistant to Georgetown's dean of medical education. In September of 2016, he'd watched the president of Georgetown announce plans to acknowledge its history and apologize. The university would build a memorial to the people Jesuits enslaved, rename some buildings on campus, and create an institute to study slavery. So he knew about Georgetown's past. He thought he had nothing to do with it. That was two months before his phone call with Melissa.
- [34:54]
Jeremy Alexander
And now you're telling me that what I witnessed in September, that apology, that apology also were from my ancestors.
- [35:07]
Phoebe Judge
Melissa told Jeremy that she was going to be in town visiting family the next week for Thanksgiving. They made plans to meet in person at a mall.
- [35:16]
Jeremy Alexander
And so I took my son and I met Melissa and her mother in the food court. And we sat there and we talked.
- [35:26]
Phoebe Judge
What did you talk about?
- [35:28]
Jeremy Alexander
We talked about this history. We talked about how we have now reunited this family that had been split for what, as we calculated from back in 2016, 178 years.
- [35:49]
Phoebe Judge
Melissa knew all about Anna and Louisa's stories. The sisters had ended up naming their daughters after each other. Both of them lived to see slavery abolished. After Anna was freedom, she and her family ended up in New Orleans. Louisa stayed at the Saint Antigos plantation. They never saw each other again. Louisa kept working for the Jesuits as their employee and so did her descendants. Melissa has family who worked for the Jesuits in Maryland as recently as 1974. Jeremy's father, Arnold Simeon Alexander, died in 2014, years before Jeremy found out about Anna Mahoney and learned about her son, who was also named Arnold.
- [36:37]
Jeremy Alexander
I believe that him being named Arnold is absolutely significant. However, it was lost through history, through the time. He didn't, he didn't know. There wasn't any discussion about this family history. To me, besides the fact that what I remember hearing was that the last name of our family should have been Malone. So I've always wondered, what is this real story? And once I heard Melissa say Mahoney, I said, now I understand. I think it was lost in translation over the years. And I think maybe my grandfather, Albert Alexander, was trying to explain the history of the Mahoneys and it just got lost in translation.
- [37:37]
Phoebe Judge
What do you think your father would have made of all of this?
- [37:40]
Jeremy Alexander
You know, I'm going to tell you. I asked him a question because my dad was born in 1921, if he knew of anyone who is enslaved. And he told me, yes. And I, you know, and I. And I said, well, what did they say? He said they didn't want to talk about it. He said it was such a hard time for them. They didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to remember what they had, what they lived through.
- [38:16]
Phoebe Judge
Letitia Clark and her family also did DNA testing on ancestry. They could only trace their family tree back to the late 1800s. They wanted to see if they could find out more. And soon, a few of them started hearing from people in the south who thought they might be distant relatives.
- [38:36]
Letitia Clark
My son got a hit early on, which was with somebody in Louisiana, and that was sort of mysterious, and he never pursued it.
- [38:44]
Phoebe Judge
It seemed like a mistake. As far as Letitia knew, her family was from Maryland and had been there for close to 150 years. But one of Letitia's cousins heard from someone in Louisiana, too.
- [38:57]
Letitia Clark
It was actually my cousin Guilford who called and tried to connect with whoever was saying they were related to us in Louisiana because it just seemed too mysterious, you know.
- [39:07]
Phoebe Judge
Her cousin introduced himself as Guilford Queen.
- [39:10]
Letitia Clark
They immediately said, your last name is Queen. You're probably involved with the enslaved population of the Jesuits, because by then, they had already been identified as being descendants and part of the 272 that had been sold by the Jesuits to Louisiana. And they recognized the name Queen right away.
- [39:33]
Phoebe Judge
This was how Letitia found out that her ancestors had been enslaved by the Jesuits. After the call, she got in touch with a history professor at Georgetown to learn more.
- [39:44]
Letitia Clark
It was sad and exciting at the same time, right? Because it made it like this. It really happened. You are really a descendant of a slave. I mean, you always knew that you must have been, you know, but now you have names and multiple names of people that you descended from, and it was pretty much overwhelming, to tell you the truth. It was a lot. It was a lot to take in.
- [40:14]
Phoebe Judge
Leticia also already knew about the sale of 1838. She had read Rachel Sworn's article in the New York Times about Georgetown's history. Her daughter had been a student there, and Letitia was a professor of clinical radiology also at Georgetown. She'd worked for the university for close to 40 years.
- [40:35]
Letitia Clark
It's really a little too much, you know, all the connections being at Georgetown, you know. Now, speaking with another Georgetown professor, you know about it.
- [40:44]
Phoebe Judge
The Georgetown professor was the one who figured out that Letitia was a direct descendant of Edward Queen Edward was freed more than 30 years before the sale of 1838. But there are other queens who were never allowed to leave White Marshall, and.
- [40:59]
Letitia Clark
They were sold after we found out that we were involved with the people who had been enslaved by the Jesuits. We did go to that program that was happening on campus about the reconciliation. And so we met a lot of people who were part of the 272, and we were sitting just amongst each other. We were all descended, so the same thing. And that's when it hit me that, you know, it was sort of a. It was a teary time, right, because you're finding people that you otherwise might have known your whole life, but they were transported to Louisiana and probably had a terrible time of it. It's a lot to take in. And in fact, you know, in the beginning, right after we had met with the cousins, I'll call them my cousins, who were sent to Louisiana. For a long time, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't figure out what was wrong, why I couldn't get a good night's sleep. But you know how there's, like, sort of a survivor's guilt when somebody goes through something traumatic? I think I felt a version of that. You know, I think it's a natural feeling, even though you shouldn't have that feeling. I think it's a natural feeling when you meet people whose ancestors endured all the hardships of slavery, right? And then you think, well, we were really saved from that. I mean, not from all of it, but we were saved from 70 more years of it than they had to endure.
- [42:43]
Phoebe Judge
In April of 2017, Georgetown University and the Jesuits held a ceremony where they formally apologized to descendants of the sale. The president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada in the United States, Father Timothy Kasecki, stood up and said, 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.
- [43:14]
Jeremy Alexander
And to have Father Kasecki to go up and say it was their fault and to ask for our forgiveness was very powerful to me. I never thought I would hear a white person say to me that they are sorry for having enslaved my ancestors.
- [43:49]
Phoebe Judge
A year later, Jeremy and Melissa went to Louisiana. They planned to visit a place called Iberville Parish, where Anna Mahoney, her sister Bibiana, and her brother Robert had been enslaved. Jeremy brought his son Jesse, and they met even more descendants from the Mahoney family, who they also found with Ancestry.com. one person drove down from Colorado. One cousin was in the military at a base in South Korea, but flew back with her son. It was the first time since the sale of 1838 that so many members of the Mahoney family were together again. Jesse, Jeremy's son, was 10 years old then. Now he's a junior at Georgetown Preparatory School. On campus, inside a chapel, there's a display that lists people enslaved by the Jesuits. And it just so happened that when Jesse went to school, the ledger that was on view was one that listed Anna Mahoney and her children, Arnold and Louisa, Jesse's ancestors.
- [44:56]
Jeremy Alexander
For that to be there was a very much a spiritual sign for me for Jesse to know, you know, that they are there and they are watching him and guiding him through this time period of his life.
- [45:23]
Phoebe Judge
Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Roberson, Jackie Sagico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison and Megan Kanane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them@thisiscriminal.com we hope you'll join our new membership program Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads and you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co creator Lawrence Bohr too. To learn more, go to ThisIsCriminal.com plus we're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal show and Instagram at Criminal Underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube@YouTube.com criminalpodcast criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows@podcast.vox media.com welcome. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
- [46:35]
Rachel Swarns
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