Book Review: The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

July 1, 2024

The 272 opens on a phone call. Melissa Kemp called Jeremy Alexander just before Thanksgiving in 2016 “because she believed that they had a common ancestor, an enslaved woman who had been born in Maryland and sold to Louisiana.” Melissa is the direct descendant of Louisa Mahoney Mason and she believed Jeremy to be the great-great-great-grandson of Anna Mahoney Jones, Louisa’s sister. She wondered if he had seen the story published in The New York Times earlier that year about the 272 men, women, and children “sold by the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University” (xiii). Louisa and Anna were two sisters torn apart by that mass sale. They were probably his ancestors. “Are you sitting down?” Jeremy asked in reply. He was speaking with her from his office phone at Georgetown University, where he worked!

Rachel L. Swarns is the journalist who wrote that initial story in The New York Times—“272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?”—and the many more that followed. But The 272 is so much more than just a book-length iteration of intrepid reporting, as worthy as that would have been. Swarns effectively retells the whole of U.S. Catholic history from the vantage point of the enslaved and their descendants. The book traces “[t]he arc of the Mahoney family’s experience—from their seventeenth-century enslavement, first by Catholic gentry and then, decades later, by Catholic priests, to their twenty-first-century negotiations with both the Church and Georgetown over reparations.” The Mahoney family story is the story “of a country, and an institution, built on forced labor and its halting efforts to grapple with what some have described as our nation’s original sin” (xvii). Swarns brings that story to life with all its fraught choices and devastating costs.

U.S. Catholic Historian, Summer 2024.

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