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Cornelius “Neely” Hawkins

Born at White Marsh, the Jesuits’ Maryland plantation, around 1825. Sold in 1838 at 13 — with his parents, his grandfather, and his seven brothers and sisters — aboard the last ship. He lived the rest of his life in Louisiana. In 2016, a photograph of his gravestone told the world this history.

Born at White Marsh

White Marsh, Prince George’s County, Maryland

Cornelius Hawkins was born enslaved at White Marsh around 1825, the eldest son of Patrick Hawkins and Letty Blacklock. His family had worked the Jesuits’ Maryland fields for generations — the same plantation where Peter Queen was born. He would have been 4 years old when the Jesuits sent Peter Queen, then 12, away to Missouri.

Cornelius’s grandfather was Isaac Hawkins. In 1838, Isaac was about 65 years old, and his name was written first on the list of 314 people the Jesuits agreed to sell. But Isaac never went south. The Jesuits ultimately kept him at White Marsh, and Cornelius never saw him again. Nearly two centuries later, Georgetown University removed the name of Thomas Mulledy — the Jesuit and Georgetown president who sold him — from a campus building and replaced it with Isaac’s name.

The first name on the sale list was Cornelius’s grandfather, but he stayed behind. Cornelius never saw him again.

1838 census of people to be sold, with Isaac Hawkins at the top of the White Marsh column and Cornelius listed below his father Patrick — The Jesuits’ census of the people they intended to sell, 1838. At the top of the White Marsh column: “Isaac, about 65.” Ten lines down, among Patrick’s children: “Cornelius, his son, 13.” At the foot of the last column: “272 in all.”

Isaac Hawkins Hall on the Georgetown University campus — Isaac Hawkins Hall at Georgetown University. The building carried Thomas Mulledy’s name until the university renamed it for Isaac Hawkins, the first person listed on the 1838 sale agreement — and Cornelius’s grandfather.

Shipped Away

November 13 – December 6, 1838 · aboard the Katharine Jackson

In November 1838, Cornelius boarded the Katharine Jackson at Alexandria with his whole family: his father Patrick, 35; his mother Letty, 30; and eight children — Cornelius at 13, Francis at 12, 10-year-old Susan, 8-year-old Gabriel, 5-year-old Peter, 3-year-old Jackson, 1-year-old Elizabeth, and an infant, Martha, born that year.

The manifest recorded Cornelius’s height as 4’7”.

Unlike many families in the sale, the Hawkinses were not divided at the dock. Nine of them were sold together to Jesse Batey and sent up the river to his plantation at Maringouin, in Iberville Parish. Bibiana Mahoney and her children were aboard the same ship, bound for the same place.

Bill of sale to Jesse Batey, 1838, listing the Hawkins family — The bill of sale to Jesse Batey, November 10, 1838. Eleven lines from the top: “Patrick Hawkins 35, Letty 30, Martha (her infant) 1, Cornelius 13, Francis 12, Susan 10, Gabriel 8, Peter 5, Jackson 3, Elizabeth 1.”

Maringouin

1838–1859 · Iberville Parish, Louisiana

The Hawkinses were put to work in the cane fields of Iberville Parish. Cornelius grew up there, and the community the Maryland families built in Maringouin outlasted slavery itself. Their Descendants live there still.

His brother Francis — Frank — married Biby Ann Butler, the daughter of Bibiana Mahoney, joining two families who had been sent together from Maryland. His youngest brother Jackson, just 3 years old when he was sold, has numerous living Descendants in Louisiana and beyond.

The Name in the Ledgers

1851–1859 · Iberville Parish

After the Jesuits sold Cornelius in 1838, he was repeatedly sold — often with the land. He appears in an 1851 inventory and the 1853 sale documents of Batey’s Maringouin plantation. By 1855, he appears in the Barrow family’s inventory of the same land. In 1859, he was sold to a man named Woolfolk.

The ledgers never learned his life. They did learn his name.

For more than a century, Cornelius Hawkins lay at rest in a Louisiana cemetery under a stone almost no one outside Maringouin had ever seen. Today, it has been seen around the world.

In 2016, The New York Times published an investigation into Georgetown’s 1838 sale. This was the story that uncovered the Jesuits’ slaveholding past for much of the world. One of the most prominently placed and most striking images in the article was a photograph of Cornelius Hawkins’s weather-worn gravestone, leaning onto another, in a Maringouin cemetery.

“A college buddy of mine called me and said, ‘Joe, have you seen the front page of The New York Times? There’s a story about your hometown.’ So I went and got myself a copy, and there it was. I can take three steps from Cornelius Hawkins’ headstone, and I’m standing in front of my oldest brother. All my life I had walked through this cemetery and never knew.”

— Joseph Stewart, Descendant of Isaac Hawkins and Cornelius Hawkins

A Network of Kin

A family undivided

The 314 people sold in 1838 were not strangers to one another — Hawkinses married Queens, Butlers married Mahoneys, Plowdens married Hills. Cornelius’s own family shows how tightly the web was woven: his grandfather Isaac gave his name to a building at Georgetown; his brother married into Bibiana Mahoney’s family; his youngest brother’s great-great-granddaughter leads the Foundation that exists because of this history.

Could you also be a Descendant?

Monique Trusclair Maddox tells the story of the day she learned her family had been enslaved by the Jesuits.

Monique Trusclair Maddox

As a Descendant of Nace Butler, Bibiana Mahoney, and Isaac Hawkins, Monique grew up in the Louisiana town of Maringouin, an epicenter for Descendants of Jesuit slaveholding. Her great-great-grandfather Jackson Hawkins — Cornelius’s youngest brother — was 3 years old aboard the Katharine Jackson. Today she is President and CEO of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation.