As the Western world has reckoned with its past histories of slavery, scholars and publics alike have become acutely aware that the institution was embedded in nearly every corner of society’s foundations. Government, Church, schools, medicine all gained strength from race-based bondage. But until recently studies of slavery were not brought into histories of universities, with little attention given to institutional slaveholding. ‘Let us go free’ – the title a reference to an enslaved man’s 1833 letter to a Jesuit Father – examines the Jesuits and their universities. It joins Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and ivy (2013), David Blight’s Yale and slavery (2024) and a growing list of other books, commissioned investigations, commemorations and initiatives that have unveiled the varied ways in which top universities depended on unfree people.

Gollar’s account focuses on the people themselves – ‘the human face of slavery’ – and less on the economics or theology of enslavement that other works have emphasised (p. 3). He draws on letters, diaries and wills culled from more than twenty archives. The second half of the book relies especially on slave narratives, oral histories and interviews of formerly enslaved people. What emerges is a careful account of institutional developments and enslaved people’s experiences, spread across twenty-five chapters.

Part i retraces familiar history: Catholic activity in Central and South America, before concentrating on North America, especially Maryland. Gollar shows that ‘Jesuit complicity with slavery reached back to the very beginning of the American Catholic experience’ (p. xv). While some Jesuits challenged slavery on moral or theological grounds, most followed the norms of wider society.

Part ii considers the early development of Georgetown, which opened in 1791 as the nation’s first Catholic college. Jesuits, like other slaveholders, benefited not only from the labour of enslaved people but also through the proceeds of selling and renting people to cover construction costs, debts and tuition payments. The most significant development in Georgetown’s first decades was its agreement to sell 272 enslaved men and women in 1838 for $115,000 ($3.3 million/£2.6 million today). The sale coincided with the realignment of the agricultural industry from tobacco on the Eastern seaboard/Upper South to cotton in the Deep South. The mass sale, however, was not without resistance. Several white priests objected to selling Catholics or rupturing master-slave Catholic relationships, leading to a six-day debate at the Maryland Jesuit Provincial Congregation. There were conditions attached: family ties must be honoured (slave families could not be separated), and those sold must be allowed to continue practising their Catholic faith, including having access to a priest. Yet, as Gollar shows, these stipulations were only partially fulfilled, and many slaves would subsequently change owners multiple times. There is a distressing irony here: desiring to cleanse themselves of slavery, Georgetown Jesuits participated in the slave economy, continuing to enable the practice.

Part iii surveys the expansion of Catholic colleges and universities to the West: in Missouri (especially St Louis), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama and Ohio. Jesuit associations with slavery on the Catholic frontier were complex. As Gollar writes, ‘Louisiana Jesuits clearly benefited from the unjust system of slavery but also appeared to genuinely care about the spiritual life of enslaved people and may have supported, even encouraged, a slave revolt’ (p. 224). Meanwhile, in other settings such as Spring Hill, Alabama, Gollar highlights attitudes of slaveholders’ sons who were students at Jesuit universities, drawing a connection between slaveholding and a penchant for success without work. Interestingly, scientific racism, which Wilder and other historians have shown as prevailing at some of the north’s prestigious institutions, does not appear to play a major role at the universities Gollar studies. Overall, Gollar comments, many antebellum Catholics believed in gradual emancipation – repelled by the practice of slavery but convinced that immediate emancipation was not prudent.

Part iv charts the continuing relationship between Jesuits and African Americans from the Civil War to the present. As Black Catholics pursued economic independence, some continued to feel a strong connection to the Jesuits and sought to walk the hard path to forgiveness. Sifting through interviews of formerly enslaved people and their descendants, Gollar observes that some maintained their convictions about God’s justice and the Christian call to love. As one woman commented, ‘God going to righten each wrong some day’ (p. 283). We learn too about the trailblazing work of Victor and Constance Daniel, who led the Cardinal Gibbons Institute in Maryland and introduced ‘emancipatory education’ that provided vocational training. This section also considers how twentieth-century Catholic historians have grappled with the Jesuit legacy of owning enslaved people. Joseph Zwinge’s 1908–12 accounts confessed it ‘strange to us that the Fathers should ever have had slaves, and stranger still that they sold them’ but nevertheless rationalised the 1838 sale (p. 277). A masters’ thesis from 1974 marked a turning point, no longer seeking to justify Jesuit actions but criticising their ‘moral schizophrenia’ (p. 294).

The conclusion to the book assesses where we stand today with reconciliation and healing. In 2017, Georgetown officially apologised and along with the Jesuits offered $27 million (£21 million) in reparations to the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation. Academic research has provided a form of redress, even while other modes of redress and reparations remain unclear to many. Gollar closes with a personal turn, connecting the ‘privilege of higher education’ he has experienced to his family’s slaveholding past (p. 312). He offers a word of regret for his family’s dependence on enslaved labour and of gratitude to enslaved people for giving their lives for his family’s benefit.

More than an institutional account, ‘Let us go free’ offers an example of ‘connected history’, seeking to combine organisational history, often told from the perspective of white leaders, with the viewpoints and experiences of all people within the Jesuit ambit. This is equally a story about Black Catholics – why African-descended people, despite being enslaved by powerful white Catholics, chose to remain in the Church. Gollar exposes the paradox of church culpability in enslavement and Black commitment to Catholicism. For example, we meet Mary Austin Jones, who founded orphanages and schools as she led the Sisters of the Holy Family and established the first international mission by Black Catholics. Readers encounter a Tennessee enslaved Catholic man, Basil, and his family who petitioned his religiously unobservant master for access to a priest. Enslaved workers may have belonged to white people legally, but they made the Catholic faith their own. A further question to explore is how Black Catholics contributed to, reformed and indeed transformed American Catholicism to make it more truly ‘catholic’.

Much of the book’s content, especially the first two parts, has been known to scholars. Moreover, it is not until after 100 pages that readers will encounter universities, the subtitle’s subject. These matters notwithstanding, ‘Let us go free’ shines a light on universities outside the North-East (the Ivies), where much research has focused. One of this book’s strengths is its attention to global and comparative dimensions – for example, Latin American Jesuits liquidating enslaved labour on the Saint Pierre plantation, Martinique. In what might be seen as a parallel history to Gollar’s book, Rachel Swarns’s recent The 272 portrays Georgetown University’s participation in the slave system as integrally tied to the history of the Catholic Church in America. While Swarns focuses on Georgetown, Gollar’s study is wider. More of this is needed. How have Jesuit institutions in other parts of the world engaged with their histories of slavery? What have practices of truth-telling, lament and reconciliation looked like there? North American institutions might gain renewed insight, courage and wholeness from such investigations – which would be a fitting fulfilment of Gollar’s aims to connect historical research with social healing.