"Without slaves and without assassins": Antebellum Cincinnati, Transnational Jesuits, and the Challenges of Race and Slavery

Abstract:Though established in Ohio, a free state, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati was immersed in slavery through its origins, clergy, religious orders, schools, and lay Catholics. This article explores the archdiocese's ties to slavery through its relationship with the Jesuits who assumed leadership of the diocesan institution of higher education, the Athenaeum, and renamed it St. Xavier College. It examines how the college's administrators sustained the school through direct and financial ties to slavery. Operating in a city beset by controversy—where nativism, debates over slavery and sectionalism, and anti-Catholicism intersected, Jesuits from Europe and the U.S., shaped by international, national, and local influences, responded to the region's growing racial and sectional tensions. Both individually and collectively, they harbored competing allegiances and opinions that were largely withheld from public discourse to prevent discord. St. Xavier College's Jesuits made choices cautiously and strategically to navigate regional and global contexts of their educational ministry.