Johns Hopkins & Slavery

Read about our latest research and findings at OSF Preprints: https://osf.io/zra5f/ 

Posted March 22, 2021. The following colleagues assisted with this essay: Stan Becker (Professor Emeritus, JHU Bloomberg School of Public Health), Sam B. Hopkins, (retired attorney, JHSPH alumnus, and great great great grandnephew of Johns Hopkins), and Edward C. Papenfuse (retired archivist for the Maryland State Archives and JHU alumnus).

On December 9, 2020, Johns Hopkins University announced to the world that it had proof its founder and namesake was a slaveholder. National media picked up the news, a slick video was released, and an apologetic message from the university's President was emailed to the campus community. Within hours social media was buzzing. Some people asked, “How could this be true?” Others wondered “How could this not be true?”

Let's take a close look at what the extant evidence can and cannot tell us about Johns Hopkins and slaveholding. Did the founder of Johns Hopkins University own slaves?  This essay will examine the three primary claims made on December 9th, 2020, by Johns Hopkins University: (1) that census data from 1840 and 1850 show that Johns Hopkins was a slaveholder, (2) that Johns Hopkins was not an abolitionist as originally thought, and (3) that Johns Hopkins' father Samuel Hopkins was a slaveholder beyond what had previously been known.

I. INTERPRETATION OF CENSUS DATA & OTHER EVIDENCE

A census is a record of population and residential information. The pre-Civil War censuses, including the slave schedules, were not intended to collect definitive evidence of slave ownership.[1] In fact, widely used distributors of historical census records caution users against drawing such conclusions. See, for example, Ancestry.com: “The slave schedules almost never conclusively connect a specific enslaved individual with a particular slave owner. At best, they provide supporting evidence for a hypothesis derived from other sources.” 

Furthermore, during the mid-1800s in Baltimore, many enslaved people lived with and worked for people who were not their owners.[2]  In his exhaustive study of slave records in antebellum Baltimore, focusing specifically on the years 1830 to 1860, Ralph Clayton notes that: “The researcher must take great care not to assume that an individual owned a slave simply because he or she was enumerated in a household with slaves in the census records and slave schedules. Although the majority of such individual householders were probably slave owners the possibility exists that they were employers (hiring the slave for a period of time).”[3]  

During this period, an enslaved individual could be owned by one person, live with another person, and work for a third person. The Frederick Douglass story illustrates this point quite well. In 1830, Douglass lived with the family of Hugh Auld in Baltimore. But Auld did not own Douglass; he was owned by Auld’s brother and sister-in-law in Talbot county on the Eastern Shore. And after Douglass came to live with Hugh Auld, he was “hired out” to a Fell’s Point shipbuilder who paid him wages. Thus, although Douglass had not been manumitted, he was nonetheless working for pay while living in the household of an individual who did not own him. And he was enumerated in that person's household in the 1830 census as a slave.[4]

For these reasons, it is considered best practice among demographers and genealogists to couple census data with other supporting evidence when making claims about slave ownership, identity, and status. Without corroborating materials, such as first-person testimony from someone like Douglass, the 1840 and 1850 census documents alone cannot be used to conclude that Johns Hopkins owned enslaved people. Currently, the only evidence that supports the claim that Johns Hopkins owned as opposed to employed or merely housed the enslaved men in his home concerns his servant James Jones (see below). Beyond this example, there is no evidence to date to substantiate the 1840 and 1850 censuses, and there is no evidence before 1840 or after 1850 that Johns Hopkins owned, employed, or housed any enslaved people. 

Of course, the possibility exists that such evidence will be discovered. However, if evidence is discovered, it will become important to understand why Johns Hopkins may have owned, hired, or housed enslaved people and also how members of the Quaker faith employed all of these strategies – purchase, employment, and shelter – to resist slavery and help the enslaved.

A. 1840 Free Inhabitant Census for Baltimore City

In 1840, the census for the city of Baltimore listed four free whites in Johns Hopkins’ household, two free Blacks, and one enslaved male. Any of the four free whites, even the two free Blacks, could have owned or employed the enslaved man. Thus, we cannot conclude based on the 1840 census whether the man listed as a slave was owned or hired, nor about who in the household may have owned or employed him. In fact, outside of a few examples from the 1860 slave schedule, it is impossible to tell whether an enumerated slave is the property or the employee of the head of the household (or of other free people, white or Black, who live in the same home).[5]  

B. 1850 Slave Schedule Census for Baltimore County

The 1850 slave schedule for Baltimore County (Clifton estate) listed four enslaved men as well as Johns Hopkins’ name in the first column titled “names of slave owners.” Unfortunately, this column title is a misnomer. The record merely shows that Johns Hopkins owned the property at which the slaves worked but not necessarily the enslaved men themselves. This critical point is made very clear in the instructions to census enumerators in 1850: “The enslaved people of each owner are to be numbered separately…and a separate description of each is to be given. The person in whose family, or on whose plantation, the slave is found to be employed, is to be considered the owner – the principal object being to get the number of enslaved people, and not that of masters or owners.” 

Many people lived at Clifton during the summer of 1850. Besides Johns Hopkins, his sister, and his niece, at least 25 other people lived and worked at the estate as listed on the census. This group included the estate manager William Waddel, two gardeners, a carpenter, four laborers, and possibly a gatekeeper. In addition, there were almost certainly construction companies and artisans working on the property at the same time, including the architects John Rudolph Niernsee and James Crawford Neilson. The four men enumerated on the slave schedule could have been employed, or even owned, by any of these people or businesses. 

Why then did the enumerator list Johns Hopkins' name on the slave schedule? One simple reason, explained above, is that the census instructions for 1850 required the enumerator to include the name of "the person in whose family, or on whose plantation, the slave is found to be employed." Because Johns Hopkins owned the entire Clifton compound, including all of the estate's dwellings, the census enumerator, Mr. Ellridge Hall, was obligated to record Johns Hopkins' name on the slave schedule even if he did not own or directly employ the enslaved men (if indeed they were enslaved and not free Blacks who had been misenumerated). And again, it did not matter to the enumerator if the men were owned or employed; the census in 1850 made no distinction. 

Finally, there is a curious and critical anomaly with the census returns for Clifton in 1850 - the enumeration dates of the free inhabitant census and slave schedule are different (see photos below). The slave schedule was completed on Wednesday, August 14th whereas the free inhabitant form was completed three days later on Saturday, August 17th. This inconsistency suggests that Johns Hopkins was not present on the day the slave schedule was completed at Clifton. As a result, the enumerator may have assumed that the four Black men he encountered were slaves owned by Johns Hopkins, or the enumerator may have received incorrect information from someone else at Clifton on August 14th. It is important to note that enumerators were not required to interview the head of the household but rather any free white person over the age of 20 who was present at the time of the enumeration. Who else could have spoken with Mr. Hall on August 14th? There were at least eight white men over 20 working at Clifton during the summer of 1850 besides Johns Hopkins. Perhaps it was the estate manager Mr. Waddel, or a gardener, or one of the laborers, or even a construction supervisor. Whatever the case may be, the difference in the enumeration dates in August 1850 raises further questions about attributing ownership of the slaves to Johns Hopkins. (For more information about Clifton, see this essay.)

C. Other Evidence that Johns Hopkins May Have Owned or Employed Enslaved People 

Johns Hopkins University has presented evidence of Johns Hopkins' possible involvement in acquiring slaves for debts owed his businesses during the 1830s. From the Biographical Archive page: "In 1831, as part of the Hopkins Brothers business endeavors, Johns and Mahlon sought the possession of an enslaved person from the Keech family in satisfaction of a debt. In a later encounter, as detailed in a letter from the Hopkins Brothers to William B. Stone in 1838, they state that their firm would accept an enslaved person as collateral for a debt." But we do not know how these disputes were resolved, whether the firm of Hopkins Brothers ever took possession of enslaved people, and, if they did, what happened to them. Further investigation should be undertaken to understand these examples and how they relate to Johns Hopkins' conduct more generally.

Next, we have the case of James Jones. According to his 1873 obituary in the Baltimore Sun (see below), Johns Hopkins purchased an enslaved man, James Jones, whom he subsequently freed and employed as a servant in his household. We are not told when these events occurred or how long Jones may have been enslaved, but the article states that Jones was purchased in Virginia, brought to Baltimore, and liberated. Jones remained "faithfully in [Johns Hopkins'] service ever since." If true, this story would be consistent with the practice common among members of the Quaker faith of purchasing in order to free enslaved people, as we discuss below. Not only did Jones continue to work for Johns Hopkins, but upon Hopkins' death, Jones was given a house and $5,000, a very large sum in 1873. Could James be the enslaved man enumerated in Johns Hopkins' Baltimore city household in 1840? Or could he be one of the men from the 1850 slave schedule for Hopkins' Clifton estate?  It's possible.

Finally, there is the testimony of Isaac Queen. In 1884, the Baltimore Sun reported that “when Johns Hopkins has become a wealthy businessman Isaac [Queen] was called to perform duties at Clifton and other places owned by Mr. Hopkins.” Queen was a free Black laborer at the White Hall plantation during Johns Hopkins’ youth. This account raises the possibility that the laborers at the Clifton estate in 1850 had been “called up” from Anne Arundel county. Again, it was common in Baltimore to employ free and enslaved Blacks from the plantations of rural Maryland. Such arrangements were sometimes used to shelter Blacks, free and enslaved, from slavecatchers and "blackbirders" who prowled the city looking for people to kidnap and sell south. Could Isaac Queen, who was not a slave, be one of the men from the 1850 slave schedule for Hopkins' Clifton estate?  It's possible.

II. JOHNS HOPKINS & ABOLITIONISM

No statements by Johns Hopkins on the subject of slavery have been found. However, the absence of statements is not sufficient to prove that he was not an abolitionist nor that he did not oppose slavery. Lacking direct evidence, we must turn to indirect evidence and secondary sources to infer Johns Hopkins’ likely attitudes. 

A. Johns Hopkins' Support for Anti-Slavery Causes & the African American Community

Johns Hopkins was not a radical anti-slavery abolitionist in the style of someone like William Lloyd Garrison. Of this we can be sure. But did he oppose slavery at all? And if so, what did he think was the best way to bring about slavery’s demise? 

There is evidence that Johns Hopkins supported efforts to assist the African American community before, during, and after the Civil War. For example, in 1856, Johns Hopkins served alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a trustee of the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, D.C.[6] The school, which was founded in 1851 by educator and abolitionist Myrtilla Miner, was revolutionary for its time and became the target of significant hostility from those in the local community who did not believe that Black girls deserved to be educated. Other members of the Board of Trustees included Henry Ward Beecher and Samuel M. Janney, an important anti-slavery Quaker activist who was Johns Hopkins' first cousin.

During the Civil War, Johns Hopkins sided with Lincoln and the unionist cause, and he gave money to support members of the Black community in Baltimore affected by the war. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, these efforts led Johns Hopkins to donate to an orphanage for colored girls that "received liberal contributions from Quakers in the North; also from the Government, and the late Johns Hopkins, who was also one of the connection [i.e. Quakers], subscribed $500 to the work."[7] The article goes on to say that "It is believed that his interest thus excited led to his endowment of the present Home for Orphan Colored Girls. When that institution was founded the girls from the lesser orphan asylum were transferred to it, while the property owned by the original orphan asylum organization was utilized as a Shelter for Aged Colored People, a most unique and beneficent charity." 

Of course, Johns Hopkins' greatest charitable act was his gift of $8 million dollars to found a university, hospital, and orphanage for African American children. The hospital, in particular, was to be accessible to everyone “without regard to sex, age or color." For this transformational bequest, Johns Hopkins was celebrated by the black community in Baltimore before his death (see right side of photo below). In April of 1873, white and Black members of the Douglass Institute gathered to honor Johns Hopkins’ charity to African Americans. Remarkably, the article notes that Johns Hopkins intended to found a “free hospital, orphan asylum and college, all of which are to be open to colored people upon equal terms with white citizens.”[8]

And then we have the generous gifts that Johns Hopkins left his three Black employees upon his death in 1873: $5,000 to James Jones, $1,000 to Chloe Johnson, and $2,000 to Charles Tolbert. James Jones was also given “the house in which he now resides, on French street, in the city of Baltimore.” These monetary gifts, which totaled $8,000 in 1873, would be the equivalent of more than $250,000 today, not including the value of the house that was given to Jones.

B. Johns Hopkins’ Upbringing & Quaker Faith

No influence is more important to understanding how Johns Hopkins may have felt about slavery than Quakerism. The Society of Friends was a major thread in the fabric of Johns Hopkins’ long life, involving an extensive kinship network of practicing Quakers, many of whom were active in anti-slavery and other progressive causes. This network included many of Johns Hopkins' close business associates, his uncle Gerard T. Hopkins, his uncle Jesse Tyson, and his cousin Samuel M. Janney. It also included members of the prominent Thomas family, who were related to Johns Hopkins through his grandmother Elizabeth Thomas Hopkins. 

Former Maryland State Archivist Edward C. Papenfuse has published an impressively researched essay about Quakers in Baltimore that provides critical insights into Johns Hopkins’ religious life and beliefs. In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins attended the Orthodox Courtland Street Meeting of Friends. This Meeting had split from the Baltimore Meeting in 1828, but like all Quaker groups it continued to oppose slavery. Johns Hopkins' mother, Hannah Hopkins, served as a minister in the Meeting. According to Papenfuse, "The most powerful influence on the Courtland Street Meeting and in all likelihood Johns Hopkins was ... Joseph John Gurney. Gurney was received with open arms by the Orthodox meeting where he wrote and published in Baltimore a reasoned attack on the majority of Baltimore Quakers who were Hicksite...[as well as] a letter to Henry Clay in which he made it clear that Friends should favor immediate emancipation."

Quaker opposition to slavery did not mean that members could not hire or house bondspeople, provided that the employment aided the enslaved person. Such aid took many forms – helping the enslaved person raise funds to purchase their freedom, providing training in certain trades, or rehabilitating those who were sick or injured. Johns Hopkins may have been disowned by the Baltimore Meeting for selling liquor, but we have found no evidence to date that he was ever disciplined for slave holding by either the Baltimore Meeting or the Orthodox Courtland Street Meeting.

Quakers were required to keep and care for young, disabled, or elderly enslaved people who could not prosper on their own. They also purchased enslaved people for the express purpose of helping and freeing them. Warner Mifflin (1745 – 1798), the eighteenth-century Quaker abolitionist, used both purchase-to-free arrangements and apprentice indentureships to protect and emancipate enslaved people.[9] A major goal of these efforts was to rescue people from “Slavery’s Trail of Tears” in which redundant slaves in the Upper South, notably Maryland and Virginia, were sold to cotton plantations in the Deep South. 

We find instances of this purchase-to-free practice among members of Johns Hopkins' family. Samuel M. Janney (pictured below), an anti-slavery activist from Virginia and a cousin of Johns Hopkins, purchased enslaved people to help them and their families.[10] Quakers did not always have the means to purchase slaves to free them, but those who did were encouraged to help when they could. As we will see below, Samuel M. Janney wasn’t the only relative of Johns Hopkins who negotiated purchase-to-free deals to help enslaved people. We even have evidence that Johns Hopkins himself purchased slaves to free them, as the story of James Jones demonstrates.

Like most forms of contentious politics, the movement to end slavery in the nineteenth century had moderate and radical wings. Abolitionists were radical in their day. They believed in the immediate and unconditional end to slavery, even endorsing at times violence against slaveowners and others to advance their cause. Other opponents of slavery, emancipationists, were not radical. They embraced a moderate and gradual approach to ending slavery that relied on moral suasion, litigation, and acts of charity. Johns Hopkins was most likely in this camp. He is best described as a progressive emancipationist and a lifelong Quaker who assisted the anti-slavery movement the best way he knew how - with his fortune, his faith, and his standing in the Baltimore community. 

III. SAMUEL HOPKINS & SLAVERY 

The Hopkins Retrospective project has also raised questions about Johns Hopkins’ father, suggesting that he too may have owned enslaved people well into the nineteenth century in contradiction to what was previously understood to be the case. I have written extensively about this assertion elsewhere on this blog. My conclusion: Samuel Hopkins, and his wife Hannah Hopkins, did not own slaves after 1796. And Johns Hopkins' Grandmother Elizabeth Hopkins did not own slaves after 1800, nor were there enslaved people living on the Hopkins family plantation after 1800. 

Therefore, the reason no one has been able to find evidence that Samuel Hopkins emancipated his enslaved workforce in 1807 is that the family held no enslaved people in 1807. Samuel Hopkins had released all of his family’s slaveholdings a decade earlier, during the 1790s, perhaps before Johns Hopkins was even born. This finding is in line with what we know about patterns of manumission among Quaker families during this period, which mostly occurred before the turn of the nineteenth century and in response to directives issued by the Society of Friends starting in the 1770s. In 1778, Johns Hopkins' grandfather, Johns Hopkins the Elder, manumitted almost all of the family's enslaved workers (the few who remained were probably elderly). Nine were liberated immediately, and 33 others became term slaves who would be freed after reaching a certain age (21 for women, 25 for men). All would be released before the census was completed for the family farm in Anne Arundel county in 1800.

In particular, when Samuel Hopkins was 25 years old in 1784, he inherited from his father a "term slave" named John. According to his father's deed of manumission, John was to be freed around 1796. After 1796 we can find no evidence that Samuel or Hannah Hopkins owned enslaved people. They may have employed enslaved workers, as they did free and indentured Black laborers (for example the children of Johns the Elder's former slave Phillis Johnson), but by about the time Johns Hopkins was born in 1795, they did not own slaves, with one very important exception we now turn to.

Following in Warner Mifflin’s footsteps and presaging Samuel M. Janney's abolitionism, in 1802 Samuel Hopkins purchased the freedom of a man named John Joyce from Charles Carroll for $200. As described by William G. Thomas in A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, the purpose of this humanitarian act was to emancipate John Joyce so that he could, in turn, purchase and reunite with his own family.[11] The deed of manumission reads:

I hereby manumit and Declare to be henceforth

free a mulatto Man commonly Called old

Shoemaker John now calling himself John Joyce

formerly my Slave in Consideration of the Sum of

two hundred Dollars paid to William Watson

my Clerk by Mr. Samuel Hopkins for the freedom

of the said John Joyce   Given under my hand and

Seal this seventh day of December in the year of our

Lord eighteen hundred and two

Signed & Sealed…Ch Carroll of Carrollton  

This extraordinary document (see image of this deed below) provides powerful evidence that Johns Hopkins’ parents, who were devout Quakers, would not have countenanced slaveholding in their home in Anne Arundel county. The census records from 1800 and 1810, which list no enslaved people in the household of Samuel Hopkins, nor in the households of close relatives nearby, also support this commitment (see image of 1800 census below).

CONCLUSION

Our interpretation of the evidence regarding Johns Hopkins and slaveholding differs substantially from the university’s interpretation as presented on December 9, 2020. We believe that the 1840 and 1850 census records are not sufficient to prove Johns Hopkins owned as opposed to employed or housed enslaved people; that as a lifelong Quaker Johns Hopkins was likely an emancipationist who was deeply opposed to slavery; and that his family, especially his father Samuel Hopkins, had a less – not more - extensive relationship to slaveholding than has been previously understood.

Slavery from the standpoint of those enmeshed in it is a complex history of the brutal exercise of power over the lives of human beings. Opposing, undermining, and ultimately working to end human bondage in Maryland, slavery's "middle ground," is also a complex issue.[12] William Lloyd Garrison chose to flee Baltimore and attack slavery from afar. Many, including Frederick Douglass, also found themselves forced to escape from tyranny to fight slavery more effectively, with some, such as Harriet Tubman, making dangerous incursions into southern states to help enslaved people escape to freedom. Countless others stayed behind to shelter and transport enslaved people north of Maryland in what is referred to as the "Underground Railroad.” Some even took up arms to defeat the slave catchers.

There were others, many of them of the Quaker faith like Warner Mifflin, Samuel M. Janney, and Samuel Hopkins, who quietly and by their deeds and actions resisted and attempted to disassemble the institution of slavery by working within the framework of laws that supported it. Could Johns Hopkins, a man who prospered within the context of the Maryland slave-based economy and who was also a Quaker emancipationist, be such a “quiet agitator” against the evils of slavery? We think so.

Notes:

[1] See https://www.afrigeneas.com/library/slave_schedule2.html.

[2] Christopher Phillips, Freedom’s Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860, University of Illinois Press, 1997. See also T. Stephen Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland, University Press of Kentucky, 1997, and also Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, JHU Press, 2009.

[3] Ralph Clayton, Slavery, Slaveholding, and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore, Heritage Books, 1993, p. 59.

[4] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass and Other Works, Canterbury Classics, 2014, p. 195-209.

[5] See Ralph Clayton, Slavery, Slaveholding, and the Free Black Population of Antebellum Baltimore, Heritage Books, 1993.

[6] G. Smith Wormley, "Myrtilla Miner," The Journal of Negro History, 5.4 (1920): 448-457.

[7] The Baltimore Sun, "Tyson Family Maryland," 1905-01-22: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/30884860/tyson-family-maryland/?xid=637. 

[8] The Baltimore Sun, "The Johns Hopkins Charity," 1873-04-09. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/73709048/colored-citizens-of-baltimore-celebrate/?xid=865 

[9] See Gary B. Nash, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

[10] Patricia Hickin, "Gentle Agitator: Samuel M. Janney and the Antislavery Movement in Virginia 1842-1851," The Journal of Southern History, May, 1971, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 1971), pp.

159-190. “With twelve other men [Samuel M. Janney] bought a female slave and four children in order to provide for their freedom and to reunite them with the husband and father of the family. A few years later he bought a little colored girl and her crippled mother for almost four hundred dollars in neighboring Fauquier county.”

[11] William G. Thomas, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, Yale University Press, 2020.

[12] Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century, Yale University Press, 1987, p. 211.

Updates:

[1] March 31, 2021: revised section I.B. to include new information regarding the people living or working at Clifton during the summer of 1850. The information was gathered from the census, an 1852 article in the Baltimore Sun about improvements at the Clifton estate, and the paper written in 2010 by Lauren Emily Schiszik, "Invisible in the ―Elysian Fields: An Argument for the Inclusion of Archaeological Resources in Clifton Park‘s Master Plan," for the degree of Master of Historic Preservation from the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park, available at https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/11069/1/L.Schiszik%20final%20paper%20for%20.