Bound for the Promised Land: Lore3o Roots and Enslavement Dr. Annie E. Stevens Webster University 2023
IntroducEon For the first five decades of its existence in the antebellum South, the Sisters of Lore9o at the Foot of the Cross, as an early American religious congrega>on, par>cipated in the system of enslavement of human beings of African descent. Some early Sisters brought enslaved persons with them as patrimony, which they were required by canon law to transfer to the religious community. Among them was the first “Dear Mother” or Superior, Ann Rhodes, whose “Negro man slave named Tom” was sold in August 1812 to Reverend Charles Nerinckx, the money being used to purchase land and build the first log cabin complex for the new religious community.1 Ann and her sibling Mary Rhodes, who served as Superior aNer Ann’s death, had both inherited enslaved persons in the 1797 will of their father, Abraham Rhodes, of Saint Mary’s County, Maryland: “to Mary one boy called George and one girl called Anna and to Ann one boy called Tom and one girl called Sarah.”2 Like their forebears in Maryland, Catholic immigrants to Kentucky brought enslaved persons with them as family “servants” – a term frequently used in the nineteenth century that masks the reality of enslavement “for life” unless emancipated, either by individual enslavers or by the