systemic racism and opposed civil rights for African-Americans, only officially and definitively renouncing slavery and "racial" discrimination with a resolution in 1995. William Knibb was an active campaigner against slavery in Jamaica, who suffered persecution, including the burning of his chapel at Falmouth, at the hands of agents of the colonial powers. Catholics Catholic bishops in America were always ambivalent about slavery. Two slaveholding states, Maryland and Louisiana, had large contingents of Catholic residents; however both states had also the largest numbers of former slaves who were freed. Archbishop of Baltimore, Maryland, John Carroll had two black servants — one free and the other a slave. The Society of Jesus in Maryland owned slaves, who worked on their farms. The Jesuits began selling off their slaves in 1837, and without these funds Georgetown University would not exist today; it "owes its existence" to this transaction. As Catholics only started to become a significant part of the US population in the 1840s with the arrival of poor Irish and southern Italian immigrants, who congregated in urban (non-farming) environments, the overwhelming majority of slaveowners in the US were white Protestants, the elite. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued the Bull In supremo apostolatus condemning the slave trade. Bishop John England of Charleston wrote several letters to President Martin Van Buren's Secretary of State explaining that the Pope, in In supremo, did not condemn slavery but only the slave trade, the buying and selling of slaves, not the owning of them; no Pope had ever condemned "domestic slavery" as it had existed in the United States. As a result of this interpretation, no American bishop spoke out in favor of abolition. Daniel O'Connell, the lawyer fighting for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in America. Garrison recruited him to the cause of American abolitionism. O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mathew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition. O'Connell also spoke in the United States for abolition. The Bishop of New York denounced O'Connell's petition as a forgery, and if genuine, an unwarranted foreign interference. The Bishop of Charleston declared that, while Catholic tradition opposed slave trading, it had nothing against slavery. One outspoken critic of slavery, Archbishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote: Between 1821 and 1836 when