Tea at Trianon: Jesuit Plantation’s 18th-Century Slave Quarters

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, November 6, 2020

Jesuit Plantation’s 18th-Century Slave Quarters

From Smithsonian:

A team from the Maryland Department Transportation State Highway Administration and St. Mary’s College used metal detectors to identify the remains of cabins, broken clay tobacco pipes, ceramic cups and other traces of lives lived on the plantation. The artifacts were buried in farm fields in Leonardtown’s Newtowne Neck State Park, which is home to an 18th-century brick manor once occupied by Jesuit missionaries. Per a statement, local Reverend Dante Eubanks is one of the many modern descendants of African American individuals enslaved at Newtown Manor.

“To be able to stand in the exact place where my ancestors lived and endured is a powerful experience,” he says. “We need to remember these stories, they are important to our history and healing.”

In 1838, Jesuit priests in the Washington, D.C. area sold more than 272 enslaved people—including those living at the Newtown estate—for the equivalent of about $3.3 million in today’s dollars. Part of the money went toward paying the debts of Georgetown University, then known as Georgetown College. Some enslaved individuals pleaded for rosaries so that they could pray as they were rounded up and loaded onto ships bound for plantations in Louisiana, according to Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times.

Five years ago, administrators at the D.C. university announced plans to rename residence halls that honored former Georgetown presidents Thomas Mulledy, who authorized the 1838 sale, and William McSherry, who acted as Mulledy’s lawyer during the sale. The news arrived one day after student activists staged a sit-in, as Toby Hung and Ashwin Puri reported for the Hoya at the time, and followed recommendations made by a working group established to study how Georgetown could acknowledge its history and make amends for the past. (Read more.)