The sky darkened as the moon obscured the sun. Enslaved people looked up on that sweltering September afternoon in 1838 and saw a blazing red ring of light surrounding the moon like a shimmering halo.
Some prayed that such heavenly spectacles meant their liberation was near. Others viewed them as omens, signs of agony to come. On the St. Inigoes plantation in southern Maryland, the Mahoney sisters needed no celestial sign to know of the darkness that lay ahead.
The sisters, Louisa Mahoney and Anny Mahoney Jones, had been sold, along with scores of other Black people enslaved by the nation’s most powerful Jesuit priests. The leaders of the Catholic order were convinced that the sale was the only way to save Georgetown College, the nation’s first Catholic institution of higher learning, from being crushed by its debts. Even opposition from many of their own priests did not deter them from the steps they were about to take.
The Jesuits had made a list of the people they planned to sell: 272 enslaved men, women and children who labored on their Maryland plantations.
The prospective buyers were prominent men from Louisiana: Henry Johnson, a congressman and defender of slavery who’d once served as governor, and Jesse Batey, a doctor who had established himself as a planter.
When the two men had disembarked from the stagecoach that carried them from Washington to the countryside of southern Maryland just a few months earlier, they had found Rev. Thomas Mulledy, the former president of Georgetown who now ran the Jesuit province, waiting to give them a tour of the plantations and the scores of people he’d put up for sale.
At St. Inigoes, one of the Jesuit plantations in St. Mary’s County, the enslaved numbered more than 80 people. There were toddlers and young mothers, young men in the prime of their lives, middle-aged couples, and elderly men and women.
Harry Mahoney, Louisa and Anny’s father and the patriarch of the extended Mahoney clan, was described as the oldest enslaved person on the plantation. He had worked faithfully for the Jesuits for decades, hidden the church’s wealth during the War of 1812, and secured a pledge that his family would never be sold. Would the Jesuits keep that pledge?
His daughter Nelly seemed safe. She was working in Alexandria, Va., helping the Jesuit priest who was tending the flock at St. Mary’s Church. But what about his wife, Anna? What about the rest of his children? One of his sons, Gabriel, a blacksmith, was married to a woman on another plantation. Would he be safe?