Mother Mary Elizabeth Clarisse Lang 1794-1882 Baltimore, Maryland

Mother Mary Lange, the foundress of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, was born Elizabeth Lange in the around 1794, in Santiago de Cuba, where she lived in a primarily French speaking community. She received an excellent education; & in the early 1800s, Elizabeth left Cuba & settled in the United States. By 1813, she was in Baltimore, Maryland, where a large community of French speaking Catholics from Haiti was established.  It did not take Lange long to recognize, that the children of her fellow immigrants needed an education.  There was no free public education for African American children in Maryland until 1868. She responded to that need by opening a school in her home in the Fells Point area of Baltimore for the children. She & her friend, Marie Magdaleine Balas (later Sister Frances, OSP) operated the school for over 10 years.

Reverend James Hector Joubert, SS, who was encouraged by James Whitfield, Archbishop of Baltimore, presented Elizabeth Lange with the idea to found a religious congregation for the education of African American girls.  Father Joubert would provide direction, solicit financial assistance, & encourage other "women of color" to become members of this, the 1st congregation of African American  women religious in the history of the Catholic Church.  Elizabeth joyfully accepted Father Joubert's idea.  At the time black men & women could not aspire to religious life.  On July 2, 1829 Elizabeth & 3 other women professed their vows & became the Oblate Sisters of Providence.

Elizabeth, foundress & first superior general of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, took the religious name of Mary. She was superior general from 1829 to 1832, & from 1835 to 1841.  This congregation would educate & evangelize African Americans. And they would always be open to meeting the needs of the times. Thus the Oblate Sisters educated youth & provided a home for orphans. Slaves who had been purchased & then freed were educated & at times admitted into the congregation. They nursed the terminally ill during the cholera epidemic of 1832, sheltered the elderly, & even served as domestics at Saint Mary's Seminary.

Mother Mary's early life prepared her for the turbulence that followed the death of Father Joubert in 1843. There was a sense of abandonment at the dwindling number of pupils & defections of her closest companions & co-workers. Mother Lange never lost faith.  To her black brothers & sisters she gave herself & her material possessions; until she was empty of all but Jesus, whom she shared generously with all by witnessing to His teaching. God called her home, February 3, 1882 at Saint Frances Convent in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Oblate Sisters of Providence is the first successful Roman Catholic sisterhood in the world established by women of African descent.  It was the work of a French-born Sulpician priest & four women, who were part of the Caribbean refugee colony which began arriving in Baltimore, Maryland in the late eighteenth century. Father James Hector Nicholas Joubert, SS, a Sulpician priest discovered it was difficult for the Haitian refugee children to master their religious studies because they were unable to read. He heard of two devout religious Caribbean women who were already conducting a school for black children in their home in Baltimore.  In 1828 those two women, Elizabeth Lange (later Mother Mary Lange ) & Maria Balas accepted his proposal to start a sisterhood with the primary mission of teaching & caring for African American children. After adding 2 more women, Rosine Boegue & American-born Theresa Duchemin, they began studying to become sisters & opened a Catholic school for girls in their convent at 5 St. Mary's Ct. in Baltimore. Thus began St. Frances Academy. It is the oldest continuously operating school for black Catholic children in the United States & is still educating children in Baltimore.

African American nuns teach African American girls at Saint Francis Academy in Baltimore

The four novices in this pioneer society were forced to vacate their first house & moved to a rented house at 610 George St. Baltimore.  Here in their chapel the four women took their vows, & the first women religious order of women of African descent was officially founded on July 2, 1829.  In December of that year the four sisters & the school moved to a rowhouse at 48 Richmond Street.  This location would be the motherhouse for the order for the next 31 years. In the next few years the order & school quickly outgrew the rowhouse & purchased some adjoining properties.  A bigger school & new chapel were built in 1836.  The new chapel is especially significant because it was not only for the use of the convent of the Oblate Sisters of Providence but was also used by Baltimore's black Catholics.  This would be the first time American black Catholics had their own separate chapel for worship, baptisms, marriages, confirmations & funerals. 

The order continued to prosper & grow through the early 1840s.  However, the death of Father Joubert in 1843 left the Oblates without the person who had helped & supported them from their inception.  Since their primary mission was the education of men for the religious life, the Sulpicians decided not to minister to the Oblates any longer.  At the same time paid enrollment in the school began to wane; & by 1846, there were only 8 students in the school who paid tuition.  The order asked permission from the Bishop to beg on the streets in order to help support the convent.

Since the Sulpicians no longer ministered to the sisters on a regular basis, the Oblates began to walk the short distance to St. Alphonsus for the sacraments.  St. Alphonsus was a church conducted under the direction of the Redemptorist order & generally served the Baltimore's growing German community.  Through their association with the Redemptorists the sisters met Father Thaddeus Anwander, CSsR. who became their ecclesiastical director in 1847.  Under Fr. Anwander the order again began to grow & prosper.  A separate school was opened on the property & the first time the Oblates began to teach boys.  The sisters opened other Catholic schools for African American girls in the city as well as teaching adult women in evening classes & opened a home for widows.   In 1860, the sisters were notified that the Redemptorists were giving up their directorship of the community.

The order then came under the directorship of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).  Under the directorship of the Jesuits the OSPs for the first time began missions outside of Baltimore.  They opened a mission in Philadelphia in 1863, & one in New Orleans in 1867.  The order remained under the directorship of the Jesuits until 1871, when priests from the Josephite Fathers & Brothers became their directors. This was a natural alliance since the mission of the Josephites is to minister to the African American population.  Eventually the order founded schools in 18 states. Some missions only lasted a few years, while others endured & changed with the needs of the community. By the 1950's there were over 300 Oblate Sisters of Providence teaching & caring for African American children, as they do to this day.

Spectacular Renaissance gardens + a little Baltimore scandal - Château de Villandry

The Château de Villandry, Indre-et-Loire, France.

The Château de Villandry, Indre-et-Loire, France, was constructed in the 1500s, reportedly on the spot where King Philip II of France (1165-1223) once met Richard I of England (1157-1199) to discuss peace.   Its Renaissance gardens include a water garden, ornamental flower gardens, & vegetable gardens.

During the French Revolution, the property was confiscated, & in the early 19th century, Emperor Napoleon acquired it for his brother Jérôme Bonaparte, who had married Betsy Patterson in Baltimore, in 1803. Across the Atlantic, Napoléon, who was already planning his coronation as well as anticipating marriages for all his siblings with the major royal houses of continental Europe, was none too pleased to learn of his 19-year-old brother’s marriage.

Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte by Francesco Emanuele Scotto, circa 1806

Napoleon ordered his brother back to France demanding that the marriage be annulled.  Jérôme ignored Napoleon's initial demand, that he return to France without his wife. Furious, Napoléon ordered that Betsy be forbidden from landing anywhere in continental Europe but encouraged his brother to continue on without her. Napoléon offered her an annual pension of 60,000 francs a year, if she would only agree to leave & relinquish the Bonaparte name. Betsy refused.

1804 Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

Promising to sort things out & have her received in proper state, Jérôme went off to reason with Napoléon, assuring poor pregnant Betsy, who was left behind in neutral Portugal, that he would do everything he could to sort the situation out. He never returned.  She bore him a son in 1805, & returned to America.  Jerome got a new wife without benefit of a legal divorce & the Château de Villandry.

The Château de Villandry, Indre-et-Loire, France.

The Château de Villandry, Indre-et-Loire, France.

Baltimore City Slave Trade

Baltimore City Slave Trade

The Baltimore Sun  20 June 1999, 

by Scott Shane

E. Sachse's view of Baltimore City looking west from Calvert Street on Market Street c 1850.

ON JULY 24, 1863, three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, Union officers freed the inmates of a slave trader's jail on Pratt Street near the Baltimore harbor. They found a grisly scene.

"In this place I found 26 men, 1 boy, 29 women and 3 infants," Col. William Birney of the U.S. Colored Troops wrote to his commanding officer. "Sixteen of the men were shackled and one had his legs chained together by ingeniously contrived locks connected by chains suspended to his waist." 

The slaves were confined in sweltering cells or in the bricked-in yard of "Cam- liu's slave-pen," where "no tree or shrub grows" and "the mid-day sun pours down its scorching rays," Birney wrote. Among those imprisoned was a 4-month-old born in the jail and a 24-month-old who had spent all but the first month of his life behind bars.

The liberation of the slave jails marked the end of a brutal Baltimore institution whose story remains unknown except to a handful of local historians.

For a half-century before the Civil War, more than a dozen slave traders operated from harborside storefronts along Pratt and adjacent streets. Some advertised regularly in The Sun and other papers, declaring "5,000 Negroes Wanted" or "Negroes! Negroes! Negroes!" In an 1845 city directory, "Slave Dealers" are listed between "Silversmiths" and "Soap."

Out-of-town dealers would routinely stop for a week at Barnum's or another downtown hotel and place newspaper advertisements declaring their desire to buy slaves.

A routine spectacle was the dreary procession of black men, women and children in chains along Pratt Street to Fells Point, where ships waited to carry them south to New Orleans for auction. Weeping family members would follow their loved ones along the route; they knew their parting might be forever, as there would be no way to know where slaves shipped south would end up.

The grim drama in Baltimore was part of a major industry. Though the United States banned the import of slaves in 1808, the domestic slave trade thrived, as the need for labor shrank in the Chesapeake area and boomed in the Deep South, where the cotton gin had revolutionized agriculture. Between 1790 and 1859, according to one scholar's estimate, more than 1 million slaves were "sold south," most of them from Virginia and Maryland.

The broken families and severed relationships resulting from this commerce were a human catastrophe that can be compared in scale, if not in violence or death toll, to the original tragedy of the Middle Passage. Scholars estimate that perhaps 11 million captured Africans survived the journey to the Americas, but most went to Brazil and the Caribbean; only about 650,000 came to the colonies that would become the United States.

Yet the story of the domestic slave trade has been swallowed in America's long amnesia about slavery in general.

"A dream of mine would be to have a little Baltimore tour -- not showing where Frederick Douglass worked in Fells Point or where Thurgood Marshall lived, but where the slave traders were, where the slaves were whipped," says Ralph Clayton, a librarian at the central Pratt library and a historian who has authored most of the few works on the city's slave trade. "But I've run into many people of both races who say, 'Why are you digging this up? Leave it alone.'"

Agnes Kane Callum, dean of Maryland's African-American genealogists, remembers seeing a still-standing slave jail as a girl in the 1930s. Her father would take the family on Sunday drives and point out a hulking brick building with barred windows at Pratt and Howard streets.

"He called it a slave pen," recalls Callum, 74, a North Baltimore grandmother who has researched slavery for 30 years. "He'd say, 'That was where my grandmother was held.'" The slave dealer sold Callum's great-grandmother, who had been snatched as a girl from a beach in the Cape Verde Islands off West Africa, to a plantation in St. Mary's County.

Camliu's and all the other physical evidence of Baltimore's once-thriving slave trade has been erased by demolition and redevelopment. But its history can be pieced together from surviving documents.

The slave jails served several purposes. Slave owners leaving for a trip could check their slaves into a jail to ensure they would not flee. Travelers stopping in Baltimore could lock up their slaves overnight while they slept at a nearby inn. Unwanted slaves or those considered unreliable because of runaway attempts could be sold and housed at the jail until a ship was ready to take them south, usually to New Orleans.

The slave ships anchored off Fells Point, which the traders' generally preferred because of fear of interference from the large number of free blacks working at the Inner Harbor, says Clayton. He has researched the story of an Amistad-style rebellion by slaves on one ship, the Decatur, southbound from Baltimore. The Sun carried ads for the ships' regular runs from Baltimore to New Orleans.

By the Civil War, while slaves outnumbered free blacks in Maryland, in Baltimore there were 10 free people of color for every slave. Yet the slave trade posed a constant threat to free African-Americans, who were in danger of being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

In fact, the warden of the Baltimore County jail ran regular newspaper notices listing black men and women he had arrested on suspicion of being runaways but who claimed to be free. Each notice would include a detailed description and the admonition, "The owner of the above described negro man is requested to come forward, prove property, pay charges and take him away, otherwise he will be discharged according to law."

In The Sun in 1838, Hope H. Slatter, a Georgia-born trader who succeeded Woolfolk as Baltimore's leading trafficker in human beings, announced under the heading "Cash for Negroes" the opening of a private jail at Pratt and Howard, "not surpassed by any establishment of the kind in the United States." Slatter offered to house and feed slaves there for 25 cents a day, declaring: "I hold myself bound to make good all jail breaking or escapes from my establishment."

To keep the supply flowing, Slatter added: "Cash and the highest prices will at all times be given for likely slaves of both sexes. ... Persons having such property to dispose of, would do well to see me before they sell, as I am always purchasing for the New Orleans market."

Facing complaints about the grim procession of chained human beings along Pratt Street, Slatter found a solution of sorts: He hired newfangled, horse-drawn "omnibuses" to move the slaves to the Fells Point docks. He would follow on horseback.

"The trader's heart was callous to the wailings of the anguished mother for her child. He heeded not the sobs of the young wife for her husband," wrote one abolitionist eyewitness whose account was discovered by Clayton.

"I saw a mother whose very frame was convulsed with anguish for her first born, a girl of 18, who had been sold to this dealer and was among the number then shipped. I saw a young man who kept pace with the carriages, that he might catch one more glimpse of a dear friend, before she was torn forever from his sight. As she saw him, she burst into a flood of tears, sorrowing most of all that they should see each other's faces no more," the abolitionist wrote.

Rogers' mother was particularly distraught, the flier said, because she had lost another daughter in the same manner four years earlier, "of whom she has never since heard." Rogers' stepfather, a free man, had offered to bind himself to service to work off the $850 necessary to buy her freedom. But the slave trader was unwilling to wait, so the preacher, identified as S. Guiteau, was trying to raise the necessary sum.

"Let mothers and daughters imagine the case their own," Guiteau wrote, "and they cannot but act with promptness."

Why have such spellbinding stories so rarely been told? Callum, the Baltimore genealogist, attributes it to the reluctance of both races to reopen the wound left by slavery.

"White people naturally don't want anyone to know their ancestors owned slaves," Callum says. But black people, too, have kept silent, she says. Callum's maternal grandfather was born into slavery, but when the subject arose, the old man would declare, "No man owned me!"

"His voice was so full of emotion, a hush would fall over the room," Callum recalls, sitting in her North Baltimore rowhouse surrounded by the tools of the genealogical trade.

"Some black people still feel that way today, six generations later," she says. "But we cannot let people forget our holocaust, the black holocaust of slavery."