Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Deeply researched and revelatory ... A fascinating meditation on the meaning of slavery and of people converted to property and commodities ... But it is also the moving human story of some of the people who endured and survived this ordeal, and who have long awaited rediscovery ... When Swarns writes about descendants of the 272, her story is equally compelling, although her narrative sweeps somewhat hurriedly to the Civil War ... Chronology and family structures can get a little muddled in Swarns’s otherwise beautifully written account ... Here and there a historical misstep occurs, though these should not affect the book’s impact in academia and beyond.
Powerful and moving ... The basic facts of this story are not new ... Swarns relays the hard facts of these atrocities and weaves together extensive research, data, letters and oral histories to bring forth an intimate family story ... Swarns centers the experiences of enslaved people owned by the Jesuits for nearly two centuries who remained largely unnamed and unknown until now. This is no ordinary accomplishment ... Swarns is a gifted writer and storyteller. But The 272 succeeds not only in its telling of a tragic story. By drawing on existing studies as well as her own archival research exploring letters, deeds, ship manifests and reports, she also shows how the Jesuits increasingly managed their plantations as capitalist ventures ... Swarns does not limit her research to written documents. Through painstaking investigative work, she found, met and interviewed the descendants of the Mahoneys who still remember their family’s harrowing past.
She has amplified her early reporting into a vivid and compelling narrative that lays bare the complexity of these tragic events and traces, where possible, the fate of the slaves themselves ... Neither an argument for wholesale reparations nor a polemic directed at the Catholic Church. While Ms. Swarns’s heart understandably lies with the enslaved and their tragic fate, she has delivered a fair-minded account that illuminates the pragmatic motives of the Jesuits and recovers from near-oblivion the lives of the enslaved people at the center of the story.
