Book Review: ‘The 272,’ by Rachel L. Swarns - The New York Times

I'm only one-third through Rachel Swarns new book but I can affirm David Blight's praise.  To have earned such praise by Professor Blight is a signal honor.

The literature facing up to the Church's failures is growing.  In the past year we have Maureen O'Connell's Undoing the Knots - five generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness (Beacon) , and Christopher J.Kellerman, S.J.'s  All Oppression Shall Cease -  A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the  Catholic Church (Orbis).

As a Brooklyn-born Catholic, who grew up in purposely all-white Levittown, NY [see Richard Rothstein's the Color of Law]  (Economic Policy Institute) I recognize the self-satisfied blindness about race discrimination which is our legacy. The two "fresh starts" post Civil War Reconstruction, and Brown v Board and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were staggered starts. But six Supreme Court justices are blind to that.

Rachel Swarns - an NYU journalism professor - is an elegant writer whose account of this newly recognized history of the flawed human institution - the Catholic Church - deserves wide readership.

- GWC

THE 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church | By Rachel L. Swarns | Illustrated | 327 pp. | Random House | $28

Book Review: ‘The 272,’ by Rachel L. Swarns - The New York Times

Review by David Blight (author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” and the forthcoming “Yale and Slavery: A History.”

During the War of 1812, a large extended family of Mahoneys lived and labored as enslaved people on several plantations in southern Maryland. They were descendants of a Black woman named Ann Joice, who had arrived from England in approximately 1676 as an indentured servant. For years she served one of Maryland’s richest men, Charles Calvert, as a domestic in his manor house. In 1684 she was transferred to Calvert’s cousin Henry Darnall, a wealthy Catholic, who promptly burned her indenture papers, rendering her a slave for life.

In the midst of the war, Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry, two young Virginians, were students at the small Georgetown College (now Georgetown University) in Washington, D.C., the country’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, then little more than two decades old. Sons of Irish immigrants who had taken up slaveholding, the pair joined the Society of Jesus, an order of Catholic priests founded in 1540 and known the world over for their devotion to education and the creation of schools and colleges. The Jesuits grasped the path to power and wealth in antebellum Maryland, enslaving hundreds of people and operating several wheat and tobacco plantations in the state.

“The 272,” Rachel L. Swarns’s deeply researched and revelatory new book, is the story of the remarkable Mahoney clan and how their lives, nearly a century and a half after Ann Joice’s, intersected with those of Mulledy, McSherry and the Jesuits in one of American slavery’s most withering tragedies. “The 272” is a fascinating meditation on the meaning of slavery and of people converted to property and commodities — assets of wealth and objects of sale. It’s a book that journeys to slavery’s heart of darkness: to the separation of families, the terror of being sold into the vast unknown and of bodies transformed into profits and investments. But it is also the moving human story of some of the people who endured and survived this ordeal, and who have long awaited rediscovery.

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