What made a servant? A different representation of slavery at Georgetown
This short entry on financial matters from February 1805 — seemingly just a bunch of digits preceded by a dollar sign — unveils an inmportant attribute of slavery at Georgetown. This paper comes from the procurator ledgers of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus and shows two payments that were sent to Georgetown for the hire of servants. [1]
What made a servant? In general, a servant performed certain duties for a person, the employer, at their estate; those usually included matters of manual labor and domestic service. Servants worked under a contract and were paid a wage, unlike slaves who were working for life and were forced to perform labor. In the context of the Atlantic Slave trade, does this distinction exclude the possibility of a servant being a slave, or vice versa? This is what these six lines prompt us to wonder.
This paper clearly indicates that the hire of servants at Georgetown was financed by the Jesuits. Georgetown did not own many slaves, rather, it rented laborers — the servants. Maryland Jesuits, who were notorious Catholic slave owners, were the driving force behind the financial foundation of Georgetown. They would lease servants — slaves, essentially — to the college, benefiting from proceeds of their salaries. The hiring system was well-suited for the economy that had emerged in Maryland: hiring provided for temporary labor demands, as the type of labor needed in the region had changed from that needed for managing a plantation.
The servants worked at the kitchens, dormitories, the classrooms, the infirmary… Construction projects were developed using the labor of the servants, and the school was expanding rapidly. Did you know that the expansion of Old North dormitories at Georgetown’s campus in Washington was built with 20,000 bricks handled by three servants? The servants — Sam Davies, Mr. Harvey, and Mr. Bovey — whom the college Jesuits rented for $50.25, were actually enslaved carpenters. [2]
The payment for hiring these servants is in the same category in the cheque as payments for horse food, building tools, materials, etc. Does it mean that even on the financial level, the labor of a servant was still equated to that of a slave, e.g. a commodity? The names of the servants are also left unmentioned, which leaves room to contemplate on the nature of the value of servant labor in Georgetown.
As can be understood from financial ledgers, renting servants out to the college was also a barter transaction: students and their families would pay off their tuition fees by providing the slaves they owned to the college. An account of Margaret Fenwick, a prominent Maryland slave owner, depicts the hire of a man named Michael in 1821 for $60. This and other hires have offset her bills, including expenses for her son George at the university. [3]
These prove that Georgetown saw people as capital. Although the Jesuits tried to lift the moral implications of having forced labor as a foundation of their Catholic institution by attributing value to servitude instead of obedience, the bottom line stayed the same: the servants were mostly slaves owned by prominent Maryland slaveowners.
Georgetown Jesuits were not primarily traders, rather, they carefully wrote the enslaved people’s names as servants, stealing their labor, and, consequently, perpetuating slavery through a different representation, in order to support the operation of their insitution.
by Dayana Amandossova
GU'24
1. Maryland Province Archives , “Hiring "servants" at the College, February 1805,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed December 7, 2021, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/422.
2. Georgetown University Archives , “Enslaved carpenters at Old North, 1815-1817,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed December 7, 2021, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/254.
3. Georgetown University Archives , “Hire of Michael from Margaret Fenwick, 1821,” Georgetown Slavery Archive, accessed December 7, 2021, http://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/items/show/299.