Johns Hopkins, the founder of the famous university and hospital that bear his name, was born near Millersville, Maryland, in Anne Arundel county, on May 19, 1795. His mother Hannah Hopkins (1774-1846), née Janney, descended from a prominent family of Virginia Quakers. His father, Samuel Hopkins (1759-1814), was also a Quaker as well as the owner of a tobacco plantation and dwelling known as White Hall (sometimes written as White’s Hall or Whites Hall). The manor house still stands, although the tobacco fields have long been replaced by housing developments and a golf course.

Questions about Johns Hopkins, his family, and their relationship to slavery have recently been raised by Johns Hopkins University, most directly by the revelation that Johns Hopkins himself may have owned enslaved people who worked at his properties in Baltimore in the mid-1800s. These questions have in turn caused many to doubt long-held beliefs about Johns Hopkins' character and his support for anti-slavery causes. 

Historians have acknowledged for a very long time that Johns Hopkins' ancestors owned slaves. But when? How many? What happened to those people? Was Johns Hopkins raised in a household that exploited the labor of enslaved people? And more generally, what was life like at White Hall when Johns lived there?

Existing Narrative

Family lore would have us believe that Johns Hopkins' was raised in a household that included enslaved laborers well into the 1800s. Then, in 1807, as the story goes, Johns' father Samuel Hopkins, driven by a deep sense of Quaker piety and obedience, decided to free his enslaved workforce. This narrative derives primarily from the short biography Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, written by Helen Hopkins Thom and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1929.[1] Thom was Johns Hopkins' grandniece, granddaughter of Johns' elder brother, and great granddaughter of Samuel Hopkins.

According to Thom, at the age of twelve the young Johns Hopkins was ripped from school and forced to return to White Hall to toil in the fields of his family’s now slaveless plantation. A few years later, weary of farm life and longing to make his own way as a businessman in the big city, Johns Hopkins moved to Baltimore where he was first employed by his uncle Gerard T. Hopkins, Samuel’s younger brother. From there, Johns Hopkins advanced quickly from merchant to banker, then to financier, and finally to philanthropist, leaving most of his fortune to found a hospital, a university, and an orphanage for African American children.[2]

This basic narrative has influenced much of what has been written about Johns Hopkins, and circulated by Johns Hopkins University, about its founder. John C. French repeated the story in A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins, which was published in 1946.[3] And in 1974, in an article for the Hopkins Magazine, Kathryn A. Jacob wrote: “’Johnsie's’ first twelve years were carefree. Tobacco was a profitable crop and his father became a man of means. All the plantation work was done by the family's numerous slaves. But in 1807, the pleasant routine of the family changed dramatically. In that year, following the direction of the Society of Friends which had begun to preach that human slavery was inconsistent with their faith, Samuel Hopkins freed his slaves.”[4]

The problem is that much of this story is wrong. 

My Take

Fortunately, we now have enough evidence to begin to assemble a more accurate picture of the early life of Johns Hopkins - a rough portrait of the philanthropist as a boy and a young man in Anne Arundel county.

First, Johns was raised in a family that did not own enslaved people after 1800. Surrounded though they were by slave-owning plantations, Johns Hopkins' immediate family eschewed slavery during his formative years in Anne Arundel county. Samuel and Hannah Hopkins, Johns' parents, may have employed enslaved workers, as they did free and indentured Black laborers, but by the beginning of the 19th century they did not own slaves. What makes me believe this?

When Johns was born in 1795, the process of liberating his grandfather’s enslaved people was winding down, concluding the gradual liberation process that began in 1778 when Johns Hopkins the Elder filed his deed of manumission. The last enslaved people from that contract – Harry, Daniel, and Jemmy – were scheduled to be released in 1801 but were probably freed before 1800. Another man, John, the only enslaved person that Samuel Hopkins inherited directly from his grandfather and perhaps the one and only slave that Johns Hopkins' parents ever formally owned, would have been freed in 1796. (Four other enslaved individuals who were not part of the manumission contract of 1778 but who were named in Johns the Elder’s Last Will and Testament passed to Samuel’s brothers Evan and Gerard and thus did not remain at White Hall.)

In addition, from 1800 through 1820 no enslaved people are recorded on the federal censuses living at White Hall. The census records also provide evidence that the people enslaved at White Hall who were identified by name in Johns the Elder's manumission deed, will, and estate inventory, proceeded to live independently in free Black households scattered around Anne Arundel county (see picture below and also this post).

The other primary documents I have found and examined support the same conclusion. For example:

• An estate auction sale notice in the Maryland Gazette for Elizabeth Hopkins after her death in 1804 did not list any slaves. 

• The estate inventory for Philip Hopkins, Samuel's closest brother, who died in 1814 and who inherited an enslaved boy named Frank from Johns the Elder, did not include any slaves. 

• Samuel Hopkins’ estate inventory of 1814 did not include any slaves. 

• Much later, the estate inventory of Joseph J Hopkins, Samuel Hopkins' eldest son who died in 1845, did not list any slaves. This is an indication than none was inherited from his father Samuel Hopkins' estate.[5]

So, we can be fairly certain that Samuel and Hannah Hopkins did not own slaves in 1807, as Helen Hopkins Thom claimed. The "Myth of 1807" is probably pure family legend. It is much more likely, based on the existing evidence, that Samuel and Hannah Hopkins carried out the deed of 1778, fulfilled the dying wishes of Samuel’s father Johns Hopkins the Elder, and honored the commandments of their Quaker faith. 

Second, the Hopkins household at White Hall was deeply religious. All indications point to Samuel and Hannah leading strict lives of devotion and loyalty to the Quaker faith. We know, for example, that Samuel served as an elder of the church and that Hannah Hopkins was an active congregant at the family’s local meeting house. In one of the few letters from Hannah that have survived, she writes to Johns (referring to the death of Johns' brother Mahlon), "May we be strengthened by so awakening a call as the present, to give up to serve the living God with all our hearts, with all our soul and with all our strength." The religious fervor of the Hopkins household must have been a major influence on Johns, but how this atmosphere of religiosity affected him is quite another question. 

Whatever Johns' views on Quaker doctrine may have been, there is no doubt the church was a major thread in the fabric of his formative life. Even after he moved to Baltimore in 1812, Johns was surrounded by a large kinship network of practicing Quakers, mostly of the orthodox persuasion. This network included his uncle Gerard T. Hopkins, with whom Johns first lived and worked, his uncle Evan Hopkins, and his aunt Margaret Hopkins. Margaret was married to Jesse Tyson, the younger brother of the Elisha Tyson (1750-1824), a firebrand Quaker minister and abolitionist as well as a successful businessman.

Our latest research suggests that Johns Hopkins was in good standing with his Quaker congregation at the time of his death and well before that.

Third, the family’s chief source of plantation income – tobacco and other cash crops – was not sustainable. By the end of the 18th century, when Johns was born, tobacco was already in decline throughout the Chesapeake, and farms were gradually transitioning to other cash crops, especially grains like wheat, rye, and barley. Of these, wheat was the most valuable. Wheat could be grown more easily, and it required less labor, but it was still less lucrative than tobacco. The real money was in flour, and at the time Baltimore was the flour capital of the world. (Elisha Tyson, who is mentioned above, owned one of the biggest flour operations in Maryland at the time.) Based on the estate records I have found, it appears that tobacco was always the primary cash crop cultivated at White Hall. But without a large enslaved workforce, the Hopkins family could not compete with larger plantations in Anne Arundel county that used slave labor. Beyond this and regardless of the type of cash crop, all agricultural products were subject to the booms and busts of agricultural commodity markets. In a letter dated May 8, 1826, Hannah tells her brother in Virginia that “The low price offered for tobacco induces Joseph [J. Hopkins, Johns' brother] to keep his, hoping for a better market.” Planters like Samuel Hopkins also had to worry about seasonal weather shifts and environment disasters that could spell doom for a particular crop, fields going fallow from overuse, pest infestations, and the larger ups and downs of the global economy. As a keen observer of economic trends, Johns Hopkins must have surveyed this situation and wondered what future he had in such a place. 

Finally, Johns Hopkins had the advantage of being the second male son of Samuel and Hannah Hopkins. Although primogeniture was abolished in Maryland in 1786, the practice of passing the bulk of one’s landed estate to the eldest son remained very much in vogue in rural parts of the state where it was important to keep land intact to support profitable farming. This practice also presumed that the eldest son would be responsible for running the plantation, caring for family members, and handling legal matters. In the Hopkins family, this person was Joseph J. Hopkins. Johns, the second born, had neither the benefit of inheritance nor the burden of familial expectations to keep him tethered to White Hall. 

It was in this context that Johns Hopkins moved to Baltimore in 1812 to work in his uncle's grocery store. The rest, as they say, is history.[6]

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[1] Helen Hopkins Thom, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, JHU Press, 1929. See also Miles White, "Some Colonial Ancestors of Johns Hopkins," Southern History Association, vol. IV, no. 6, (1900).

[2] Johns Hopkins, Last Will and Testament, March 10, 1873. See also Antero Pietila, The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

[3] John C. French, A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins, JHU Press, 1946, page 13.

[4] Kathryn A. Jacob, Hopkins Magazine, 1974.

[5] Of course, there was Minty and her daughter Louisa, who were owned by Joseph J. Hopkins in 1832. But because I do not yet know much about Minty's origins, I am not mentioning her here.

[6] Edward C. Papenfuse, a former archivist at the Maryland State Archives, publishes a blog called Remembering Baltimore that includes a wealth of information about Johns Hopkins and his legacy. Of special interest here is his article on Johns' life as a Quaker in Baltimore.

Notes on Updates

March 2, 2021: added photo of 1800 census for AA county showing names of free Blacks that match names of several people manumitted by Johns the Elder in 1778 and released before the year 1800.