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Episode: The Sale

Author: Vox Media Podcast Network
Duration: 00:46:41

Episode Shownotes

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. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_07
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00:00:08 Speaker_07
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00:00:34 Speaker_01
When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash criminal to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. On November 22nd, 1633, two ships, the Ark and the Dove, set sail from England.

00:00:44 Speaker_01
Both were headed across the Atlantic to Maryland. On board the Ark was a Jesuit Catholic priest, Father Andrew White.

00:00:54 Speaker_01
Father White had been sent to Maryland to start a Catholic colony.

00:00:59 Speaker_07
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.

00:01:16 Speaker_07
They set up tobacco plantations and bought enslaved people from West Africa to work in them. So priests who relied on slave labor and slave sales established the nation's first Catholic archdiocese.

00:01:29 Speaker_07
They helped to build the nation's first Catholic cathedral.

00:01:41 Speaker_06
Priests who operated a plantation and sold people established the nation's first Catholic seminary. Rachel Swarns is an author and a contributing writer for the New York Times. Unlike some white people at the time who viewed enslaved people as brutes, as animals, These priests didn't.

00:01:57 Speaker_06
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.

00:02:10 Speaker_06
at the very same time that they felt comfortable buying and selling their bodies.

00:02:20 Speaker_06
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.

00:02:41 Speaker_06
There's an instance where, because an enslaved couple flouted the moral code of the church, engaging in infidelity, where, as punishment, the priest decided to sell their children. In the 1670s, a teenager named Anne Joyce came to Maryland.

00:03:03 Speaker_06
She'd been born in the Caribbean, but ended up in England working as an indentured servant.

00:03:21 Speaker_07
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.

00:03:31 Speaker_06
Ann Joyce was a black woman, but that was her hope too. 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. But instead of accepting that and leaving her free to go, he determines that she will not be free to go.

00:03:57 Speaker_07
He burned the contract that proved that she'd come to the colony as an indentured servant and not an enslaved person.

00:04:07 Speaker_06
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.

00:04:26 Speaker_06
When she emerges from that basement, she is an enslaved woman with no recourse to a contract or to anything. 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, Ann 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.

00:04:52 Speaker_07
They know the story just as well as all of the members of their family know the story. And in the late 1700s, they decided to do something about it.

00:05:07 Speaker_07
And so in 1791, Patrick and Charles Mahoney take the Jesuits to court to try to win their freedom. I'm Phoebe Judge.

00:05:15 Speaker_06
This is Criminal.

00:05:27 Speaker_06
There were freedom suits in the colonial period in Maryland. One in 1770, so before the American Revolution.

00:05:37 Speaker_07
William Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska.

00:05:47 Speaker_00
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.

00:05:57 Speaker_07
The success rate was actually quite high.

00:06:02 Speaker_07
More than 50% of all of the freedom suits in Washington, D.C. and Maryland were successful.

00:06:19 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:31 Speaker_00
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.

00:06:54 Speaker_00
raising a fundamental question for Americans, was slavery compatible with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence? 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.

00:07:27 Speaker_07
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. This is Letitia Clark.

00:07:40 Speaker_02
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?

00:08:01 Speaker_02
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? The plantation where Edward, Charles, and Patrick were enslaved was called White Marsh. The Queens were the biggest family there.

00:08:20 Speaker_02
Their ancestor had also come to Maryland as an indentured servant. The Queen freedom suit and the Mahoney freedom suit are, in my view, two of the most important freedom suits in American history.

00:08:33 Speaker_07
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. It's extraordinarily risky.

00:08:45 Speaker_00
Enslaved people are literally suing in open court a defendant slaveholder personally.

00:09:03 Speaker_00
This is an 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.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
One woman in Maryland, a relative of the Mahoney's, 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. Edward Queen's case was the first to go to trial in May of 1794.

00:09:44 Speaker_00
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. One of the key witnesses was the son of a midwife. She delivered Mary Queen's daughter.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:17 Speaker_07
Another key witness was a white man who'd grown up near the plantation where Mary Queen was enslaved.

00:10:22 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:37 Speaker_07
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.

00:10:52 Speaker_07
He won his freedom.

00:10:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:16 Speaker_07
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 still very hard. It's very difficult.

00:11:31 Speaker_07
So, I mean, you are trying to.

00:11:34 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:56 Speaker_02
And, you know, there was no guarantee that some other court trial was gonna come where the Jesuits were gonna 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. The Jesuits were losing money fighting freedom suits.

00:12:11 Speaker_02
And now they were waiting for Charles and Patrick Mahoney's trial to start. It created waves of uncertainty among the Catholic slaveholders because the Mahoney's were scattered among various enslavers.

00:12:28 Speaker_07
And there are letters from those enslavers, you know, talking about, oh, good Lord, you know, what's going to happen with this case?

00:12:38 Speaker_06
Will it affect the people that I enslave as well? 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.

00:12:50 Speaker_06
The Jesuits essentially pay him to stop representing enslaved petitioners suing them.

00:13:04 Speaker_07
And so he switches to the defense, you know, to the slaveholders, the Jesuits, and in Mahoney's case, is representing the Jesuits.

00:13:12 Speaker_00
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 Ann Joyce had really been an indentured servant.

00:13:36 Speaker_07
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.

00:13:45 Speaker_07
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.

00:13:56 Speaker_07
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.

00:14:12 Speaker_07
But the brothers were never caught. And in 1799, a second jury heard their case.

00:14:26 Speaker_07
In the second trial, Charles Mahoney is declared by a jury, again, of all white men, that he is a free man. The Maryland court declared that his ancestor, Anne Joyce, should have been free, and so should her descendants.

00:14:42 Speaker_00
Charles' enslaver, a priest named John Ashton, was ordered to pay his legal fees and provide thousands of pounds of tobacco in damages.

00:14:53 Speaker_07
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.

00:15:12 Speaker_07
They said, quote, slavery is incompatible with every principle of religion and morality.

00:15:26 Speaker_07
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 Mahonies.

00:15:37 Speaker_07
But then, John Ashton freed them anyway. After 12 years in court, one historian thinks that Charles and Patrick just paid him.

00:15:54 Speaker_07
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. We'll be right back.

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00:17:25 Speaker_07
In 1791, on a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigos, a man named Harry Mahoney had his first child. St. Inigos was in southern Maryland, near the banks of the Potomac River.

00:17:33 Speaker_07
Priests who visited wrote about how beautiful it was.

00:17:44 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:01 Speaker_03
So, you know, enslaved people are property, human property. And the Jesuits do with their property what people do.

00:18:13 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:27 Speaker_03
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. The Jesuits were selling enslaved people to plantations in the South.

00:18:44 Speaker_07
And the work conditions were quite different from the Chesapeake. And so in Maryland and Virginia, people knew about this. Enslaved people knew.

00:19:00 Speaker_07
The priests knew, too, that Black people were terrified of being sold down south because the conditions were so, so much worse.

00:19:15 Speaker_07
Rachel Swarns writes that Harry Mahoney tried to protect his family by becoming the foreman of the plantation.

00:19:23 Speaker_06
So here's this guy who comes from this family of resistors who becomes essentially the right-hand man. of the enslaver. There was another thing Harry Mahoney did. One of his daughters told her children about it decades later.

00:19:40 Speaker_06
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.

00:20:02 Speaker_06
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 Mahonies considered.

00:20:23 Speaker_06
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. One day, Harry noticed a British ship sailing towards St. Inigo's.

00:20:42 Speaker_06
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 priest that he'd saved the money.

00:21:00 Speaker_06
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.

00:21:19 Speaker_06
Harry Mahoney, his wife, and their eight children were seemingly safe. But the Jesuit plantations kept losing money.

00:21:33 Speaker_06
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.

00:21:54 Speaker_07
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. Other priests disagreed.

00:22:09 Speaker_07
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.

00:22:23 Speaker_06
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.

00:22:43 Speaker_07
Both owned plantations in Louisiana, where they grew sugar cane and cotton. Milady made a deal to sell almost 300 men, women, and children for a total of $115,000. The priest who ran St.

00:22:59 Speaker_07
Inigos, where Harry Mahoney and his family were enslaved, opposed the sale. He even traveled to Georgetown to try to talk Mulledy out of it.

00:23:05 Speaker_06
And when he returned to St. Inigo's, 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.

00:23:28 Speaker_07
The promise that he had counted on for so many years was broken. But it wasn't clear when they would be sold.

00:23:40 Speaker_07
And then they wait.

00:23:44 Speaker_06
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.

00:24:01 Speaker_07
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 Mulledy himself set out for St. Inigos to oversee more of the sale.

00:24:28 Speaker_06
And the priest who runs the plantation, who is opposed to the sale, gets wind that they are coming, and he urges members of the Mahoney family to run. 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. Anna, the sister who has two young children, doesn't make it.

00:24:51 Speaker_06
Anna was in her 20s. She had a son around eight or nine years old and a daughter who was about six. 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.

00:25:16 Speaker_06
We know that they were taken by a sea craft from St.

00:25:21 Speaker_07
Inigo's to Alexandria. We know that they were marched from where they were held to the wharf, to the ship, to the Catherine Jackson. Anna and her children were the 73rd, 74th, and 75th names on the ship's manifest.

00:25:41 Speaker_06
Their heights were measured and recorded before the journey. Her son was 4'4", her daughter was 3'11".

00:25:56 Speaker_07
The Jesuits sold a total of 272 men, women, and children in the sale of 1838. They were paid roughly $422 per person.

00:26:06 Speaker_06
And we know a little bit about what other enslaved people described about the journey from

00:26:26 Speaker_07
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.

00:26:33 Speaker_06
and then about arriving in New Orleans, a place so different from what people had known that it's often described as another country. 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.

00:26:56 Speaker_07
They'd been able to track down a few, but they believed there could be thousands. And so we ran a companion piece asking readers, are you connected to this story?

00:27:12 Speaker_07
We published a link to the passenger list They asked if anyone recognized any of the names. We'll be right back.

00:27:32 Speaker_06
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. 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.

00:27:52 Speaker_06
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.

00:28:07 Speaker_07
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 in 2016. They decided to talk on the phone.

00:28:23 Speaker_06
When she started 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.

00:28:37 Speaker_07
I said, all I know is Mississippi, Louisiana, and folks moved up to Illinois, and I'm from Chicago. 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.

00:29:02 Speaker_04
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 right now. They were both related to Harry Mahoney.

00:29:14 Speaker_07
His daughter, Anna Mahoney, had grown up in Maryland, enslaved at a Jesuit plantation called St. Inigo's. And in 1838, she'd been sold to the South.

00:29:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:29:50 Speaker_04
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. Jeremy is the executive assistant to Georgetown's Dean of Medical Education.

00:30:14 Speaker_04
In September of 2016, he'd watch the president of Georgetown announce plans to acknowledge its history and apologize.

00:30:27 Speaker_04
The university would build a memorial to the people Jesuits enslaved, rename some buildings on campus, and create an institute to study slavery.

00:30:32 Speaker_07
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.

00:30:46 Speaker_04
And now you're telling me that what I witnessed in September, that apology, that apology also were from my ancestors. 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.

00:31:09 Speaker_04
And so I took my son and I met Melissa and her mother in the food court. And we sat there and we talked. What did you talk about? We talked about this history. We talked about how we have now reunited.

00:31:28 Speaker_07
This family that had been split for what, as we calculated from back in 2016, 178 years. Melissa knew all about Anna and Louisa's stories.

00:31:43 Speaker_07
The sisters had ended up naming their daughters after each other. Both of them lived to see slavery abolished. After Anna was freed, she and her family ended up in New Orleans. Louisa stayed at the St. Inigo's plantation. They never saw each other again.

00:32:01 Speaker_07
Louisa kept working for the Jesuits as their employee, and so did her descendants.

00:32:04 Speaker_04
Melissa has family who worked for the Jesuits in Maryland as recently as 1974.

00:32:17 Speaker_07
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.

00:32:26 Speaker_04
I believe that him being named Arnold is absolutely significant. However, it was lost through history, through the time.

00:32:38 Speaker_04
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.

00:32:59 Speaker_07
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.

00:33:16 Speaker_07
And I think maybe my grandfather, Albert Alexander, was trying to explain the history of the Mahoney's, and it just got lost in translation. What do you think your father would have made of all of this?

00:33:33 Speaker_07
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.

00:33:46 Speaker_04
And I, you know, and I asked, 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 lived through.

00:34:04 Speaker_04
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.

00:34:23 Speaker_04
My son got a hit early on, which was with somebody in Louisiana, and that was sort of mysterious, and he never pursued it. It seemed like a mistake.

00:34:32 Speaker_04
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.

00:34:50 Speaker_04
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. Her cousin introduced himself as Guilford Queen.

00:35:13 Speaker_04
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.

00:35:26 Speaker_07
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. It was sad and exciting at the same time, right, because it made it

00:35:39 Speaker_07
Like this, it really happened. You are really a descendant of a slave.

00:35:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:54 Speaker_07
And it was pretty much overwhelming, to tell you the truth. It was a lot. It was a lot to take in. Letitia also already knew about the sale of 1838.

00:36:07 Speaker_02
She had read Rachel Swarn's article in the New York Times about Georgetown's history. Her daughter had been a student there.

00:36:17 Speaker_07
And Letitia was a professor of clinical radiology, also at Georgetown.

00:36:20 Speaker_02
She'd worked for the university for close to 40 years. 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. The Georgetown professor was the one who figured out that Letitia was a direct descendant of Edward Queen.

00:36:43 Speaker_07
Edward was freed more than 30 years before the sale of 1838, but there were other queens who were never allowed to leave White Marsh, and they were sold.

00:36:54 Speaker_02
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.

00:37:05 Speaker_02
And we were sitting just amongst each other. We were all descendants of the same thing. And that's when it hit me that, you know, It was sort of a, it was a teary time, right?

00:37:24 Speaker_07
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.

00:37:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:37:54 Speaker_07
You know how there's like sort of a survivor's guilt when somebody goes through something traumatic?

00:38:01 Speaker_07
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.

00:38:11 Speaker_02
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

00:38:23 Speaker_02
70 more years of it than they had to endure. In April of 2017, Georgetown University and the Jesuits held a ceremony where they formally apologized to descendants of the sale.

00:38:41 Speaker_02
The president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada in the United States, Father Timothy Keseki, stood up and said, quote,

00:38:57 Speaker_02
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.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
And to have Father Kisecki to go up and say it was their fault and to ask for our forgiveness was a very powerful to me.

00:39:25 Speaker_02
I never thought I would hear a white person say to me that they are sorry for having enslaved my ancestors. A year later, Jeremy and Melissa went to Louisiana.

00:39:42 Speaker_02
They planned to visit a place called Iberville Parish, where Anna Mahoney, her sister Bibiana, and her brother Robert had been enslaved.

00:39:53 Speaker_07
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.

00:40:11 Speaker_07
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.

00:40:24 Speaker_04
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.

00:40:58 Speaker_07
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. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.

00:41:15 Speaker_07
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

00:41:30 Speaker_07
Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

00:41:47 Speaker_07
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 Lauren Spohr, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

00:41:53 Speaker_07
We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show, and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

00:42:06 Speaker_04
Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.