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

The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. By Rachel L. Swarns. New York: Random House, 2023. Softcover, 326 pp. $18.00.

Reviewed By Jeff Kluever

In her book, The 272, journalist Rachel L. Swarns demonstrates how deeply intertwined religious institutions were with the American slave trade by examining the sale of 272 enslaved individuals by the Catholic Church in 1838 to generate funds for Georgetown University and other projects, and illustrates how that sale impacted the lives of the men, women, and children sold by the church.

The 272 tells three stories, with the 1838 sale as the connecting hub of the narrative. First, Swarns explores the relationship between the Catholic Church and the slave trade in the United States. The first eight chapters of the book provide a well written overview of the topic, while zooming in on the plantations involved in the 1838 sale. A book length study on slavery and the Catholic Church would be a useful addition to the shelf, but Swarns wisely keeps her narrative focused and out of the deep weeds so that she can direct readers to her second and most important story, the Mahoney’s.

Swarns chooses to use one enslaved family, the Mahoney’s, as the centerpiece of her story because, in her words, “The 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—tells the singularly American 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)

By putting these individuals front and center, the author humanizes what otherwise could have been an academic study of the relationship between the Catholic Church and slavery, making the book more approachable for a wider audience. This choice undoubtedly made the author’s task more challenging, as primary source materials for individuals who were intentionally kept illiterate, or otherwise left no written record are lacking. However, the author does a fine job of compensating for the dearth of sources by taking a more journalistic approach to her text, using secondary sources to flesh out, or other primary sources as stand ins, when her protagonists are silent. Piecing together the lives of people based on estate inventories, census records, and other bits and pieces is no small feat. A truncated family tree would have been a welcome addition, especially as family names like Anna and Louisa are repeated in different generations, but once the story focuses on the 1838 sale, it becomes a bit easier to keep family members straight.

Swarns narrative is deeply researched, as evidenced by her extensive endnotes. There were moments in which footnotes may have aided the reader, as it is far easier to check a source in a footnote than an endnote, but the decision to go with endnotes is understandable; for many readers footnotes are a distraction and could have detracted from the book’s commercial appeal.

Third, in the final chapters, Swarns analyzes the on-going impact of the sale, for the church, for the enslaved, and for their descendants. Throughout the book, Swarns notes the incongruity between “priests [who] prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they held captive, even as they sold their bodies (xvi).” Reading these pages, it is easy to view the church as an evil institution; there is no just argument for owning human beings. And yet the story is never as clean cut as one would like. Melissa, one of the descendants of a family sold by the church explains, “I’ve always been – I guess I would say – proud of my relationship my family had with the Jesuits. So much of my worldview has been shaped by the Catholic Church.” (222) At the same time, descendant Joseph Stewart writes, “The effects of the impact of slavery on our ancestors continue to manifest themselves in the lives of descendants until this day, and will persist far into the future.” (225)

Both things can be true, which leaves the reader grappling with important questions about the legacy of slavery in the United States. By examining one, albeit large, sale of human beings, Swarns helps readers understand how embedded and pervasive slavery was within American society, how slavery disrupted, destroyed, and in some cases, ended the lives of enslaved people, and how that legacy continues to ripple through our culture in the 21^st century.

Jeff Kluever holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Grinnell College and master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Carroll University. He has worked as teacher, high school and college football coach, the Executive Director of a history museum, and Education Supervisor at a Civil War battlefield museum and living history plantation. He served on the board of directors of the Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center and offers Civil War-themed tours of Woodland Cemetery for the City of Des Moines. In addition, Jeff has published a novel titled Waking the Shadows.