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From Recompense to Revolution:
Mahoney v. Ashton and the Transfiguration
of Maryland Culture, 1791-1802
ERIC ROBERT PAPENFUSE
On 18 October 1791, Charles Mahoney petitioned the Maryland General
Court for his freedom. At the time, statutes permitted slaves to contest the
legality of their bondage. Many appealed to the slate courts, and occasional-
ly their requests were upheld.' Mahoney claimed that because he was
descended from 'a free woman named Ann Joke*, the Reverend John Ashton,
a Catholic priest and former Jesuit, was not lawfully his master. Chief Justice
Samuel Chase summoned Ashton to Appear before the...General Court at
Annapolis immediately'. Until the case was decided, Mahoney was to be
treated 'well* and allowed to attend 'court from time to time in support of his
petition for freedom'.1
Nearly 1,500 miles away in the French colony of Saint Domingue, other
slaves were rebelling against their masters. Unlike Mahoney, these blacks did
not believe that progress could be obtained within the existing social order.
Word of their August uprising spread quickly to the United States. One
Baltimore newspaper reported:
They set fire to all the houses, and butchered all the white people they
found in them....These ravagers are too numerous to be attacked; as they
have obliged all the house-slaves, even against their will, to join them,
and massacred such as attempted to make their escape. After having rav-
aged all the level populous country, they made their way through many
exterior settlements, and there the unfortunate few soon fell victims to
their rage.1
Such accounts horrified Southerners who feared that their own world might
become 'a new St. Domingo - a mournful scene of massacre, pillage, and
conflagration'.4 By the end of the 1790s, many had come to conclude that if
the anarchical flames of liberty were to be avoided, challenges to the institu-
tion of slavery could no longer be tolerated.1
As the case of Mahoney v. Ashton demonstrates, foreign examples greatly
influenced American conceptualizations of freedom during the final decade of
Eric Robert Pupeniiise is a graduate student in the Department of History. Yale University.
Slavery and Abolition. Vol. 15. No. 3. December 1994, pp. 38-62
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS. LONDON
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