Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

In 1838, the Jesuits priests who ran Georgetown University orchestrated a mass sale of people to the Deep South and then used the proceeds of the sale to pay off the debts of the school. The people who the Jesuits owned and sold lived on four plantations across Maryland.  They had lived there for generations, planting not just tobacco for their owners’ profit but deep roots of kinship and culture. Of the initial 272 people—the “GU272”—identified in a census of the enslaved community, nearly half (131 or 47%) were under the age of 18. The large number of children in the GU272 and the extensive record of their presence provides an opportunity to reflect upon the ordeal of enslaved children in the United States during the era of the domestic slave trade. 

Throughout the slave societies of the Americas, the law decreed that the offspring of enslaved women would be the property of their mothers' owners. This rule, known as partus sequitur ventrem, gave slave owners a property right to the children of the women they owned, and it turned the reproduction of enslaved people into capital gains for their enslavers. The law meant that free men could have enslaved children, and it was not uncommon for men to own, and even sell, their own progeny. There was no more radical disavowal of the biological ties of family than slave owners selling off their own children. Over a century, the Maryland Jesuits came to possess many children, reaping the harvests of the law of partus year after year.

Enslaved children appear in birth records preserved in the Jesuit archives. These fragmentary records provide a fleeting glimpse at the patterns of kinship and reproduction among the Maryland Jesuit enslaved community. For example, one document lists 34 children born at the Jesuits’ Newtown plantation in St. Mary’s County from 1804 to 1831, slightly more than one birth per year. The document records the dates of birth, the children’s first names, and the children’s parents’ first names, but includes no surnames. In some cases, the author identified the child’s father as having a different owner from his or her mother. By the law of partus, the children of “Thompson’s Harry,” “Lewellyn’s Henry,” “Jenkin’s Nicholas,” and “Plowden’s Henry” belonged to the Jesuits because the Jesuits owned the children’s mothers: Mary, Betsy, and Biby. The fact that some enslaved women owned by the Jesuits were married to men who were not owned by the Jesuits would complicate the 1838 sale.

One of the great ironies of the history of slavery is that the same records that nominally reduced enslaved people to property are now indispensable to understanding their lives and the world they lived in. The fact that enslaved people, including children, were valuable assets comes across in the surviving tax assessments of the Maryland Jesuits’ property.  The state taxed slaves under the age of 14 at a different rate than those 14 and older, indicating that for tax purposes, slave childhood ended at 14. The tax assessment for Newtown in 1831 lists 47 enslaved people by their first names. Nearly half (23 out of 47) were under 14 years old, and they were assessed at $630 or one-third of the value of the Jesuits’ human property at Newtown. A 10 year-old boy named Sylvester was one of them. 

Some of the same children who appear in the birth and tax records also appear in the Jesuits’ baptismal records. Slaves were people, not livestock. They had souls, and it was the Jesuits’ Christian duty to minister to them. Born to Joe and Esther on February 12, 1819, Sylvester was baptized almost four months later, according to the fragile sacramental register in which a priest recorded the act. Sylvester’s baptismal record tersely noted his status and that of his parents: “4th June 1819 was Baptized Sylvester the Property of New Town born 12th Feby. 1819 of Joe + Easter lawfully married.” Baptized. Property. Lawfully Married. The Jesuits sold Sylvester, Joe, and Esther to Louisiana 19 years later. How could they baptize Sylvester one day and sell him the next? 

The Maryland Jesuits expected that the profits from their plantations would support their religious mission and educational institutions, including Georgetown. But by the early 1800s, a host of financial, sociopolitical, and spiritual challenges led the Jesuits to the fateful decision to sell the people they owned and get out of the business of slavery. The Jesuit provincial general in Rome consented to the sale on the condition that the Marylanders live up to their religious obligations to the enslaved and invest the money prudently. 

Even as they sold off an entire community, the Maryland Jesuits were instructed to keep husbands and wives together because the marriages of enslaved people, like Sylvester’s parents Joe and Esther, were considered lawful and sacred. On the other hand, the Jesuits were not required to keep parents and children together. In fact, the phrase “parents and children” (parentes et filii in the original) is literally crossed out in the original letter sent to the Maryland Jesuits by the provincial general outlining the conditions placed on the sale. Perhaps he intended to insist that parents and children remain together but then thought better of it. 

Enslaved children enjoyed no protection against being sold and trafficked to the Deep South. According to data compiled by the Oceans of Kinfolk database project, three in ten captives transported between U.S. ports in the coastal slave trade were under the age of 15. A Louisiana law—the only one of its kind—prohibited the sale of children under the age of 10 apart from their mothers, but the law was practically unenforceable because slaves could not testify in court against white people, and it did not apply to children who were purchased out-of-state and shipped to Louisiana by their new owners, as was the case with the GU272.  

In November 1838, the Katherine Jackson embarked from Alexandria, Virginia, with a cargo of 130 enslaved passengers on board, members of the GU272 en route from the tobacco fields of Maryland via New Orleans to the cotton and sugar plantations of Louisiana. They are listed in the ship’s manifest by first and last name, sex, age, height, and complexion (either “Black” or “Brown”). The youngest was only two months old: Mary Ellen Butler, accompanied by her mother, Eliza Butler, listed just above her on the yellowed sheet of paper. Also on board were Joe and Esther Greenleaf from Newtown and their children: Sylvester, Emmeline, Mary, Milly, and Lucinda. Lucinda was 10 years old, Black, and 4’2”. She and her family ended up together on Henry Johnson’s Chatham Plantation in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, a 1,000 miles from home.

Adam Rothman teaches history at Georgetown University and is director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies. He is author of Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015) and co-editor of Facing Georgetown's History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (2021).