American Catholics have long assumed that theirs is an immigrant story, remote from the nation's original sin of slavery. Recent media coverage of a slaveholding past at Georgetown and other Jesuit universities thus came as a something of a shock. But the Jesuits were far from the only Catholic religious order to have depended on slave labor – virtually every Catholic religious order, women's as well as men's, stationed in places where slavery was legal owned at least some slaves. Bishops and even priests – a surprise here simply because most antebellum priests were poor – owned slaves as well. So did Catholic laymen. Until the 1960s, most historians of American Catholicism, nearly all of them Catholics themselves, did not so much deny this uncomfortable reality as underestimate its extent and put a positive spin on it. Catholic slaveholders, they typically maintained, were unusually humane masters, concerned for both the temporal and spiritual well-being of their enslaved people. This was especially true, or so the argument ran, of those lucky enough to be enslaved by Catholic religious.
Although the subject has not yet been adequately explored, Catholic slaveholding has lately received much greater and more critical attention from historians, as David Endres's fine volume attests. But much remains to be done, as Endres explains in a thoughtful closing essay. How many enslaved persons were owned by the various Catholic religious orders? How well were they treated and, of particular importance, how frequently were they sold? We simply do not know. Kelly Schmidt's excellent essay on Jesuit slaveholding in their southern and midwestern missions offers a tentative figure of “more than 189 individuals” who were “owned, rented and borrowed” by the Jesuits in these locales, and points in addition to a long history of Jesuit slaveholding globally. No underestimating here when it comes to the extent of Catholic slaveholding! Like other contributors to the volume, she is briskly dismissive of the notion that Catholic religious were dependably gentle masters: “the Jesuits were no different in how they treated enslaved people than other enslavers” (5). Since all systems of slavery depend ultimately on a willingness to employ violence, this characterization is bound to be closer to the truth than the pious conclusions of earlier historical accounts. But the relevant evidence is exceedingly limited, and Schmidt's judgment may say as much about present-day passions as it does about the past.
Perhaps the most interesting essays in the volume deal not with slaveholding but Catholic attitudes toward slavery. Almost no Catholics appear to have been abolitionists, regarding the abolitionist movement, with considerable cause, as hostile to Catholicism and Catholics themselves. Indeed, few Catholics appear to have suffered moral qualms over slavery. Only three American bishops gave public support to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had the effect on the great majority of Catholics of strengthening their already-strong support for the northern peace movement. Only one bishop is known to have embraced immediate emancipation, which he did only in 1863. Even after the war's conclusion, the assembled American hierarchy expressed regret that an extended period of gradual emancipation had not been possible. The views of the bishops were doubtless grounded at least in part on racism. But their assumptions about the necessarily hierarchical nature of a stable society played a prominent role as well. As for the majority of Catholic laymen, distant from slavery themselves but deeply hostile to persons of African descent, the prospect of emancipation elicited a toxic blend of rage and fear. Racism was surely a principal factor, but so were anxieties in a heavily immigrant population about economic competition from a newly freed black populace.
Were Catholics much different from Protestants when it came to race and slavery? Although none of the authors addresses this question, the answer is very likely no. The Catholic church did not suffer division over the issue as certain Protestant denominations did, and Catholics in general remained on the periphery of national debates over slavery in the antebellum decades. But even immigrant Catholics imbibed the unfiltered racism that infected nearly all Americans long after slavery ended – racism against which few Catholic leaders preached. In this sense especially, the American Catholic past does indeed bear the taint of the nation's original sin. David Endres and his collaborators have made a welcome contribution to the on-going work of re-conceptualizing the American Catholic past.
