In 1676, a Black teenager named Ann Joice arrived on the shores of Maryland with hopes of a new life.
She had traveled to the recently founded colony from England, destined for indentured servitude, and worked as a maid for the ruling Calvert family, who for three generations had presided over Maryland as a religious haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in England.
Contracts of indenture then could lead to relative autonomy at their completion, but Joice had arrived at a perilous time in the fledgling colony’s history, as the formal legalization of slavery had already spread quickly along the Atlantic coast.
Eventually, her contract – the only evidence of the agreement – was set aflame by a plantation owner and military officer named Henry Darnall. She was imprisoned in a kitchen cellar for about six months and then emerged as an enslaved woman, forced to work in Darnall’s kitchens.
So begins the lineage of the Mahoney family – the enslaved descendants of Ann Joice – whose story is at the center of a vital new work of journalism examining the Catholic church’s foundation in America and its reliance on enslaved labor and the sale of enslaved people for institutional survival.
Authored by the NYU journalism professor and New York Times contributor Rachel L Swarns, the 272 is a meticulously researched work of narrative history and investigative journalism. The book traces the lineage of the Mahoney family, over centuries, from Joice’s arrival in Maryland to the enslavement of her descendants on plantations owned and operated by Jesuit priests, who became among the largest enslavers in the state. It examines in devastating detail the brutality experienced by those the Jesuits enslaved: a priest who sold a child born out of wedlock as punishment for the parents, a group of people exchanged for a horse and some cash, two of Joice’s descendants hanged and mutilated after being found guilty of killing a plantation overseer.
Swarns documents the family’s subsequent forced separation as part of the sale of 272 people to plantations in Louisiana in order to fund the expansion of the newly founded Georgetown College. And finally, she describes their emancipation, in Maryland and Louisiana.
The book grew from Swarns’s reporting for the New York Times in 2016, which first drew national attention to campus discussions as Georgetown reckoned with the university’s then little known connections to slavery, and in particular the Jesuits’ sale of 272 human beings to ensure its survival. Situated in Washington, Georgetown is America’s oldest Catholic university and one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the US.
The book had begun as a two-year project, Swarns said in an interview, but soon ballooned into a reporting task of gargantuan proportions, taking seven years to complete. From the outset she had made the choice to focus on a single family’s journey but that process in itself led to “lots of dead ends, lots of rabbit holes”.
“Early on I knew that when you write about slavery there is some segment of the population that is going to say: ‘No thank you, not interested, nothing to do with me,’” she says. “So how do you make people willing to come to the narrative? I thought: ‘Two hundred seventy-two people are sold, but I want to focus on one family.’”
The reporting relied on records and source material from at least 17 archives dotted around the US and abroad.
The Mahoney family’s story, although surviving in patches of oral history handed down to the present day, had been shattered into tiny fragments. Its shards were buried in rural courtrooms of the river parishes in Louisiana, sprawling state archives in Maryland, journals of Jesuit priests, sale ledgers, execution reports, and ship manifests.
The details of Ann Joice’s imprisonment and enslavement, for example, were recovered in appeals court records from 1802 after a number of her descendants challenged the legality of their forced labor, and cited the story of her burned indenture contract as proof: the horrors of abuse recounted over generations, itself a marker of the family’s resistance.
Swarns too relied on recent descendants, to buttress the narrative to the present day. Many came to light after the publication of the original article, as part of a non-profit venture, the Georgetown Memory Project.
A practicing Catholic herself, Swarns had known little of the church’s connection to slavery in the US before a newsroom tip sparked her interest in Georgetown. The harrowing story of the 1838 sale of 272 people to two plantation owners in Louisiana is told over an extended chapter. It documents how families were callously split apart, despite orders from leaders in Rome. The transaction made the Jesuits and Georgetown about $115,000 in profit ($3.78m in today’s terms).
Promises made to the Mahoney family that they would never be sold were discarded. That pledge had been offered after the family’s patriarch Harry Mahoney had opted to help protect planters’ interests during the British invasion of Maryland in 1812.
Instead, his daughters Anny and Biniana and their children were detained and sold, then separated again in Louisiana, while his wife and another daughter, Louisa, fled after a sympathetic priest named Father Joseph Carbery told those on the Jesuit plantation of St Inigoes to run shortly before they were rounded up.
In swathes of narrative, Swarns is forced into conjecture and rhetorical questions as there are no primary records that present this history from the perspective of enslaved people.
Describing Anny after the separation from her family, she writes: “Her emotions can only be imagined, though they are the definition of unimaginable.”
The author would discuss such moments with her own son, who came into adolescence as the project took shape: “Just imagine, Carbery comes to you, and you’ve got five minutes to run. Who do you take? Who don’t you take? Do you run? Do you not?” she would ask.
“Just that moment alone I have spent so much time thinking about,” Swarns says. “It is hard history. As a parent, as a Black woman, as a descendant of enslaved people myself. That just stops you cold.”
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Carbery’s opposition to the sale stood in stark contrast to many in the ambitious generation of priests who sought aggressive expansion of Georgetown and the church itself. Swarns focuses on the career trajectory of two men, Thomas Mulledy and William McSherry, who would both serve as presidents of the university, and played key roles in forcing the sale through. (Halls at the university named after both were renamed in 2015.)
But the internal debate within the church is intentionally examined in detail.
“When you’re writing about slavery, there are always people who say, you know: ‘Stop right there, don’t bring your 21st-century moral ideas to this institution. It was lawful, so questions of right or wrong are not relevant here,’” she says. “I think it was really important to point out, certainly with the Catholic church, that was not the case. There are voices all along the way of priests raising questions, raising concerns, protesting sometimes.”
Swarns’s own Catholic faith has remained steadfast, given new context and meaning by her research. Generations of Mahoney descendants, too, have stayed in the church and have joined other descendants in pushing Georgetown towards meaningful reconciliation. Still, she has not shared or spoken about her work in her own congregation.
“I am just not sure about what the reception would be,” she says, candidly, recalling a story from years ago when she offered to share some of her findings with a church during Black History Month but was overlooked. “I think it left me with a feeling that this isn’t necessarily welcome, even now, in some places in the Catholic church.”
The book, too, is published at a significant juncture in American politics, when the historiography of race and racism in the country has been censored in many states, and weaponized in the Republican presidential primary. It was not something the author had envisaged at the beginning of the reporting, which started about three years before the New York Times published the 1619 Project, a landmark study that has subsequently ignited a far-right backlash.
In late June of this year, the conservative supermajority on the supreme court effectively struck down race-conscious college admissions, a seismic blow for racial equity across the US. The decision was particularly pertinent at Georgetown, which has, since 2017, offered preferential admissions to descendants of those enslaved by Maryland’s Jesuits as part of a program of reparatory justice. The institution, like many others, is still grappling with how the ruling will affect broader admissions policy going forward. (Dozens of other US universities have also identified links to slavery as movements for reparatory justice sweep across campuses.)
“When I got started on this, even just writing that first article, it felt urgent to me,” Swarns says. “But it is even more urgent now. Because history has become a battleground … The documentation of how slavery fueled the growth of so many of our institutions and provided the foundation of so much of the American economy and American life, all of that is under assault.”
