The Mahoney family’s sacrifice took place one autumn day in 1838: at the dock in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, hundreds of people were forcibly loaded onto the huge slave ship Katherine Jackson bound for New Orleans, in the Deep South. Men and women of all ages were thus removed from their loved ones to be sold as objects, amid the cries of children torn from their mothers’ arms.
Anny Mahoney saw her sister and two children leave for the distant cotton plantations of Louisiana. For years, she and her husband had faithfully served one of Maryland’s richest men, Charles Calvert, and in return they had been promised that their family would never be torn apart. But then the economic situation changed and their fate was sealed.
In the book The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, “New York Times” journalist Rachel L. Swarns also talks about the involvement of the U.S. Catholic Church in that dark age.
Swarns does so by investigating the events of the Mahoney clan and reconstructing the terrible fate of all the two hundred and seventy-two slaves sold to the new masters of Louisiana in 1838 with the aim of financing Georgetown University in Washington with the proceeds. Entire families were uprooted and divided in exchange for $115,000, equivalent to about $4 million in today’s dollars.
The author, an African-American Catholic with other books on slavery to her credit, shows how in 1838 Georgetown University was able to save itself from financial collapse only through the sale of human beings to the landowners of Louisiana, at the time considered the worst exploiters of black slave labor.
Source: La famiglia Mahoney e i 272 schiavi venduti per finanziare nel 1838 una Università cattolica | le pagine dei nostri libri
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