Maryland and Virginia - 1791-1798
I have placed this chapter here in the record deliberately.
Every chapter in this record has been written in a specific order for a specific reason, and I have tried to be honest in the framing notes about what the reasons are. This chapter comes here - after the Enlightenment, after the Revolution in France, after the dispersal and the suppression and the ordinary maintenance of the chain through centuries of European crisis - because what happened in America in 1776 is the event toward which everything in the preceding chapters was, in one sense, moving.
The founders of the American republic were not enemies of the chain. Most of them did not know the chain existed. They were, in their own way, trying to answer the same question the chain exists to preserve: how do free people order themselves under something larger than themselves? They answered it in the language available to them, which was the language of the Enlightenment, which was the language that had already concluded that the old ordering was convention and not nature, useful fiction and not discovered truth.
The answer they gave has lasted one hundred and eighty-five years as I write this in Alton, Illinois in 1961. It is a remarkable answer. It is also, I believe, an incomplete one - not because the founders were wrong about liberty, but because liberty without the ordering that makes it intelligible becomes, over time, something it was not intended to be.
I have been watching this for twenty years from my kitchen window in Alton. I have been watching it longer than that from inside the record.
The chain crossed the Atlantic in 1791. It came with a man named Thomas Bennet, of a Maryland Catholic family that had been Catholic since the colonial period and had kept its faith through a century and a half of legal disability and quiet persistence. He was thirty-eight years old. He did not know exactly what he was receiving when a Jesuit priest in London handed him a package of documents and told him to take them home.
He took them home. That is enough.
— T.M., 1961
Thomas Bennet had gone to London in the spring of 1791 on ordinary business - the family's tobacco interests, a dispute about a shipping contract, the kind of commercial travel that Maryland planters made periodically to maintain the relationships that kept everything running. He was a careful man, moderately prosperous, educated in the way of Maryland Catholics who had sent their sons to Jesuit schools in Europe for three generations because the colonial laws had not allowed Catholic schools at home.
He had a letter of introduction to a Jesuit priest named Father Edmund Talbot, who was known to the Bennet family through a network of connections that predated the American republic and would outlast it. The introduction was social - a courtesy call, a family connection honored in the way of people who maintained such connections carefully because they understood that networks of trust were more durable than any institutional structure.
Father Talbot received him at a house in Bloomsbury that served as an informal gathering point for the Society's dispersed members - the suppression of 1773 had scattered the Jesuits, and the English province existed in a condition of unofficial semi-continuation, its members operating as secular priests while maintaining the bonds of a community that had not, despite the papal brief, fully accepted that it was dissolved.
They spoke for two hours about ordinary things - the family, the tobacco trade, the new American republic whose constitution Father Talbot had followed with close attention. He asked about Bishop Carroll, whom Bennet knew slightly through the Catholic community in Maryland. He asked about the prospects for Catholic education in the new country, about the legal situation, about how American Catholics understood their position in a republic that had no established church and therefore, theoretically, no legal disability for any religious community.
Bennet answered these questions honestly and with the specific perspective of a man who had lived his entire life as a member of a minority faith in a society that had not, historically, welcomed that faith. He said that the Constitution was a remarkable document and that the religious liberty it promised was real and that he did not yet know what it would produce.
Father Talbot listened to this with the attention of a man who has been waiting to take the measure of someone before making a decision, and who has now taken it.
He brought out the package at the end of the second hour.
It was wrapped in oilcloth, tied with cord, approximately the size of a large book. He set it on the table between them and looked at Bennet with the directness of a man who had decided to dispense with indirection.
He said that the package contained documents that had been in the Society's custody - informally, through individual members rather than the institution - since the suppression. He said that the suppression had made it impossible to continue keeping them in Europe with any confidence of continuity, and that the new republic's religious liberty made America the most stable environment currently available for certain kinds of custody.
He said that he had been told, by someone whose judgment he trusted, that the Bennet family had the qualities the custody required. He named those qualities: patience, discretion, the ability to hold something carefully without needing to understand it fully, and the kind of faith that was not performed for an audience because there had never been an audience for it.
Bennet looked at the package. He asked what the documents were.
Father Talbot told him what he could tell him in an afternoon, which was not everything but was enough. He told him about the notation system, which he would need to learn. He told him about the chain of custody, which went back further than the Society and would continue after it. He told him that the materials described something that the American republic had chosen not to recover, and that they needed to be kept until the recovery was possible, which might not happen in Bennet's lifetime or his children's lifetime or their children's lifetime.
Bennet was quiet for a moment. Then he asked the question that people always asked: why me.
Father Talbot said: because you are going home to a country that has made a serious attempt at ordering itself without the thing these documents describe, and which will discover, eventually, what it has left out. When that discovery happens - and it will happen, though none of us will live to see it - the record needs to be there. It needs to be in the country where the discovery will matter most.
Bennet took the package home on the ship in September of 1791. He carried it in his cabin rather than the hold, wrapped in a second layer of oilcloth against the Atlantic weather. He spent the crossing reading what Father Talbot had given him to read - a set of introductory notes in the notation system, a partial index of what the package contained, a list of contacts in Maryland and Philadelphia who knew, to varying degrees, that the custody existed.
He arrived in Baltimore in November. He carried the package to the family house in Charles County, Maryland, and placed it in the library alongside the books that had survived the colonial period and the revolution and the founding of the republic. He spent the winter learning the notation system, which took him longer than it had taken Renard or Wulfric because he had no teacher and had to work from the introductory notes alone.
He got it eventually. He was a careful man.
He kept the materials for thirty-one years, until his death in 1822. In that time he added to the record once - a document he had acquired through his own research, a colonial-era transcription of a medieval text that bore the notation system and which he had found in the estate of a Catholic family that had died out, whose library was being dispersed. He recognized the notation, acquired the document through legitimate purchase, and incorporated it into the custody.
He left the materials to his son with a letter that I have read in full and which is one of the most honest documents in the record. He writes:
I do not know if what I have kept matters in the way Father Talbot believed it would matter. I have kept it for thirty-one years without knowing this, which is a different kind of faith than the kind I practice on Sundays and which I have come to think is related to it in ways I cannot fully articulate. I am leaving it to you not because I am certain it is important but because I gave my word that I would pass it on, and the giving of your word is itself a form of order, perhaps the most basic one, and I have tried to keep to it.
Pass it on when the time comes. You will know when.
His son kept it. His son's daughter kept it. The chain moved west with the country, the way everything moved west - through Ohio, through Indiana, through Illinois. It arrived in Alton sometime in the 1880s, through a sequence of custodians I have traced imperfectly, in the hands of a family that kept it without full understanding for another generation before it came to me.*
I did not know, when I received it in 1945, that I was receiving the American branch of the chain. I did not know there were other branches. I did not know what the full record looked like.
I know now. I am writing it down in Alton, Illinois, one hundred and seventy years after Thomas Bennet brought the package home from London, in the country that made a serious attempt at ordering itself without the ordering the record describes.
Father Talbot was right that the discovery would come. I believe I am watching its early stages from my kitchen window.
The chain is here. It has been here for a long time. It was here before Joshua was born.
— T.M., 1961