Introduction

The most puzzling and enigmatic member of the Hopkins family, in my view, is Samuel Hopkins, Jr., the younger brother of Johns Hopkins and one of the original partners in Hopkins Brothers grocery firm. Samuel, who I'll call Sam in this essay, was the only one of Johns' ten siblings to abandon Quakerism, marry outside the religion, and leave the Society of Friends. He also held enslaved people. In exploring Sam's story, Ed Papenfuse and I have uncovered a significant paper trail of slave ownership beginning in 1834 and lasting until at least 1860, including documentation that permits us to confirm with high confidence that Sam was the owner of the enslaved male living with him and Johns Hopkins in 1840. This aspect of the Hopkins family narrative, which enlarges and complicates our understanding of Johns Hopkins' life as well, was completely unknown. Until now.

Brother and Businessman

Sam Hopkins was born on November 20, 1803. He had the unfortunate distinction of being the middle child of his family, the sixth of eleven children born to Samuel and Hannah Hopkins at their Anne Arundel County plantation known as White's Hall. In the mid-1820s, Sam left the family farm, along with another brother Mahlon, to help Johns establish Hopkins Brothers grocery firm in Baltimore "at the old stand of Hopkins and Moore." By 1830, two more brothers had joined the company - Philip and Gerard - and business was booming. Only Joseph, the eldest of the six Hopkins boys, remained at White's Hall to manage the family's tobacco business.

Records indicate that Sam's involvement with Hopkins Brothers was interrupted during the 1830s when he left the firm to pursue other business interests. He dabbled in coal and lumber but with little success, and a partnership with T.R. Matthews went bankrupt during the depression that followed the Panic of '37. Big brother Johns bailed him out, and Sam, perhaps reluctantly, re-entered the grocery business around 1840 when his name begins to surface again on company documents and court judgments. He was a principle partner of the Hopkins Brothers firm when it was dissolved in 1847 and sold to Henry D. Harvey, among others. After this point, Sam's professional life appears to have been unremarkable. In 1860, at the age of 57, he was described on the federal census as a "retired merchant." 

Marriage to Lavinia Jolliffe

In 1834, ten years after he helped Johns launch Hopkins Brothers, Sam wed Lavinia Jolliffe, the daughter of an established and wealthy family based in and around Winchester, Virginia. Only 19 when she married 31-year-old Sam, Lavinia was described in one account as a "beautiful woman" and a close friend of Elizabeth Schofield, who had married Sam's brother Joseph just one year before. Perhaps the couple met at Joseph and Elizabeth's wedding at Hopewell Meeting near Winchester; Lavinia attended the ceremony even though she was not at the time a Quaker. Or maybe they met while Sam was in Virginia during one of Hopkins Brothers' frequent commercial visits to the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent parts of the state. The Jolliffe family had trading accounts with several mercantile firms, including Hopkins Brothers and T.W. & G. Hopkins, the company operated by Sam's cousins Thomas, William and Gerard T. Hopkins, Jr. (Later, another cousin, Margaret Hopkins, married Lavinia's brother Meredith Helm Jolliffe.)

Lavinia's parents were not members of the Society of Friends but her father John Jolliffe was raised a Quaker. In 1804, however, he was read out of meeting for exhibiting a "Libertine Spirit," i.e., "fighting and being at a Horse Rase [sic]." Once rejected by his birthright religion, John never returned. He married Fanny Helm, the daughter of Colonel Meredith Helm, a local military hero who served in Daniel Morgan's Riflemen during the American Revolution. Colonel Helm's farm near Winchester, called Belleville, was maintained by slaves. When the Colonel died, he left 21 enslaved people to be distributed among his heirs, the bulk going to his daughter Frances and eventually, through marriage and the law of coverture, to her husband John Jolliffe.

The Dowry Slaves - Sydney and George

Sam's connection to the Jolliffes would send his life down a different path from the rest of his devout Quaker family, most significantly with respect to slavery. During their marriage, Sam and Lavinia owned at least six enslaved people. Five of the six were acquired from Lavinia’s family in Virginia: Sydney, George, Nancy, Selina, and Margaret. We have no information regarding the identity of the sixth enslaved individual who was recorded in Lavinia’s household in the 1860 census, but it is safe to assume that that individual also came to Baltimore from Virginia or at least had some link to enslaved people formerly owned by the Jolliffe family. 

This group of enslaved people held by Sam and Lavinia - the five for whom we have names - may be roughly divided into two groups. The first two - Sydney and George, who were acquired immediately following Sam and Lavinia's wedding - can be described as the dowry slaves. Gifting enslaved people to newlyweds was a common practice in the South, especially among wealthy enslavers like the Jolliffes (see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers' They Were Her Property for a detailed description of this practice). 

For many enslaved people, being given to a new owner could be a frightening and traumatic experience, fraught with uncertainty and the possibility of being separated from loved ones. In this case, of course, we don't know how Sydney and George felt about their new masters nor about moving from rural Virginia to urban Maryland, but we also cannot naively assume that they were unhappy about it. Frederick Douglass was overjoyed when he learned that he would move from Maryland's rural Eastern Shore to Baltimore at the age of eight. Henry Louis Gates writes: 

"When Frederick Douglass arrived in Baltimore in 1827, he was a slave who had known only the brutality of plantation life in antebellum Maryland. What he found was a free city paradoxically surrounded by slavery, where emancipated African Americans had formed a vibrant community that had increased in size by over 3,000 percent in the previous decades. By the middle of the century, over 25,000 free blacks lived in the city, making up 15 percent of the population. Indeed, while slavery grew in the rest of the South, it actually declined in Baltimore, dropping from nearly 5,000 in 1810 to around 3,000 in 1850. In other words, in the days leading up to the Civil War, only a tenth of the African Americans in Baltimore were actually enslaved. Moreover, urban slaves enjoyed a level of autonomy unheard of on the plantation. Douglass writes in his autobiography that "a city slave is almost a freeman" who had the opportunity to learn a trade and earn a living."

Sadly, in this case, unlike the example of Frederick Douglass, we do not have Sydney and George's voices nor do we know what happened to them after they left Sam's household.

On August 2nd, 1834, Sam registered Sydney, about 12 years old, with a justice of the peace in Baltimore. At the time, it was illegal to bring slaves into Maryland unless the owner held lands in a neighboring state, registered the enslaved person with a justice of the peace, and agreed not to sell him/her/them. The law was partly designed to prevent the further expansion of slavery in Maryland and of the coastwise slave trade largely based in the port city of Baltimore.

A year later, on October 15th, 1835, Sam registered a male slave named George, about 13 years old, the same age as Sydney (I wonder if George and Sydney were related, perhaps even twins?). In both cases, Sam declared to the justice of the peace that Sydney and George were "acquired by marriage," were "slaves for life," and were not removed from Virginia "for the purpose of sale" in Maryland. 

Sam Hopkins may have adhered to the laws of Maryland that governed the transportation of enslaved people when he brought his dowry slaves to Maryland, but the Baltimore Monthly Meeting was not pleased and implored him to release George and Sydney. He refused. Thus, in 1839, Sam was disowned from the Friends both for “selling distilled spiritous liquors” and for having "in his Family two colored persons who are slaves.” The minute continued: “Having been visited, and not manifesting a disposition to make satisfaction for his deviations, we therefore disown [Samuel Hopkins] from membership with us."

According to the 1840 census, when Sam resided with Johns in a Franklin Street house, one enslaved male, age 10 to 24, was recorded living in the same household. Shortly after this, Sam was assessed Baltimore city taxes on a single slave, George, valued at $375, at a residence separate from Johns on the south side of Lombard Street between Hanover and Sharp Streets. (Johns was assessed taxes in the same ledger but no enslaved people were recorded in his possession.) The enslaved person enumerated in the 1840 census was thus clearly George and owned by Sam and Lavinia. (See also https://osf.io/zra5f/.) 

Where was Sydney in 1840? If Sam honored his declaration before the justice of the peace in 1834, he could not have sold her. This leaves a few options. Either she died, she returned to Virginia, or she was manumitted by Sam and Lavinia in Maryland. Sydney would have turned 18 around 1840, the age at which Quakers were commanded to free enslaved females from bondage (men were to be freed at 21). This may explain why she did not appear in the census in Sam's home in 1840 nor in the tax record that was generated just a year after the census, but George did. Unfortunately, the records that might have confirmed whether Sydney was manumitted in Baltimore have been destroyed. (An additional possibility - that Sydney fled the Hopkins home - seems unlikely unless Sam decided not to place a runaway ad.)

The Estate Slaves - Nancy, Selina and Margaret 

The second group of enslaved people held by Sam and Lavinia we can call the estate slaves. They were bequeathed to the couple as part of the settlement of the estate of Lavinia's father, who died intestate in 1838, triggering a protracted process of sorting out his assets. In 1846, after a lengthy series of legal interventions and court judgments, Sam and Lavinia acquired three enslaved females from the estate: Nancy, Selina, and Margaret. 

The process of distributing John Jolliffe's human property to his widow and heirs was managed by the chancery court of Frederick County, Virginia. Chanceries were special equity courts designed, more or less, to resolve disputes over matters such as inheritance. In estate cases, an administrator, or team of administrators, would be appointed by the court to assemble all the necessary facts and figures and eventually make a pronouncement as to the division of assets. The Jolliffe v. Jolliffe case was particularly complicated. It involved considerable real and personal property (including 25 enslaved people), a surviving widow, significant debts and advancements, almost a decade of expenses charged to the estate, and at least nine direct heirs.

We do not know why or how Nancy, Selina and Margaret were selected to be given to Sam and Lavinia. It is interesting to note that after eight years of legal wrangling, the court administrator, David W. Barton, chose to divide the Jolliffe slaves equally among the designated heirs based on their assessed "value." After John's widow received her dower share of one-third of the total, each of his nine children, including Lavinia, was awarded exactly $597.79 of enslaved chattel property. (If the total value of the enslaved people assigned to a given heir exceeded $597.79, that heir had to pay the difference to another sibling. If the value was less, that heir received a cash payment to bring his or her total to exactly $597.79.)

In Sam and Lavinia's case, the chancery court deducted a $95.76 advancement (for Sydney and George?) from the share of John Jolliffe's human property, reducing their allotment to $502.03. Nancy, Margaret, and Selina amounted to $525.01, and thus Sam and Lavinia were ordered to pay $22.98 to another heir whose "portion" of human property amounted to less than the equal share of $597.79. 

Assessing Nancy - "Of Little to No Value"

How were the values (or prices) of the Jolliffe slaves determined? In most cases, we don't know exactly. They are simply asserted in the final court documents that spelled out the ultimate ruling of the chancery court. In one case, however, we do: Nancy. "At the request of Mr. Samuel Hopkins of the City of Baltimore," the certificate of appraisal reads, "... we the subscribers have examined a certain negro woman called 'Nancy' about eighty years of age, who is now in the possession of the aforesaid Samuel Hopkins, [and] are of the opinion that any services she can hereafter render to whomsoever she may fall possessed can be of little or no value whatever." The appraisers, which included Hopkins Brothers' partner and Quaker Henry D. Harvey, set Nancy's worth at one cent.

Why did Sam order Nancy's "value" to be assessed? Slave appraisals were a regular feature of the gruesome trade in human beings that took place in the United States before 1865 (see Daina Ramey Berry's Their Price for a Pound of Flesh). They treated human beings as commodities that could be bought and sold like any other piece of furniture, livestock, or agricultural product. In this case, I suspect that Sam and Lavinia wanted to reduce Nancy's "price" in order to maximize their share of the division of slaves and possibly to avoid paying taxes on her in Baltimore. In 1842, as part of the overall valuation of John Jolliffe's estate, Nancy was assessed at $50. (Note also that superannuated slaves like Nancy were very rarely sold, and the laws of Virginia and Maryland prohibited her from being manumitted in Winchester and then moved to Baltimore.)

It is interesting to speculate about Sam and Lavinia's acquisition of Nancy, who was already living in Baltimore when the chancery court closed the case on John Jolliffe's estate in 1846. Did they choose to care for her? Were they asked to? Did they hope to provide Nancy a measure of comfort in her final years? Was she related to Margaret and Selina? Nancy was among the enslaved people that came into John Jolliffe's possession when he married Frances Helm in 1807, so it is quite possible that Nancy cared for Lavinia when she was a child. 

Sam Hopkins was recorded in the 1850 federal census with two enslaved females in his home. The woman recorded as 80 was surely Nancy; the 14-year-old girl could be Selina or Margaret, whose ages are not known. By 1860, Lavinia Hopkins was enumerated with one male, age 20, in her possession, but no enslaved women are enumerated in her household. Nancy had probably died, and like Sydney, we do not know if Selina or Margaret returned to Virginia or were manumitted. Sale and/or other outcomes are unlikely for the same reasons stated above. 

Who was the 20-year-old enslaved person living with Sam and Lavinia on the eve of the Civil War? Unlike in 1850, in 1860 enumerators were required to note when an enslaved person was employed rather than owned. No such notation accompanied Lavinia's record, indicating that she was in fact the owner of the young enslaved man. That she was named as the "owner," rather than Sam, suggests that this unidentified person was associated with the Jolliffe family. Unfortunately, as of this writing, we know nothing more about him other than what appears in the census. 

“A Valuable Member of the Community”

How did Johns Hopkins feel about his brother’s entanglements with slavery and rejection of Quakerism? A letter that Johns wrote to his mother Hannah in 1840, just a few months after Sam was read out of meeting in December 1839, provides a clue. “Sam'l has improved very much,” Johns tells Hannah, “and will I trust make a valuable member of the Community.”

Improved how? From what? Was Sam ill, or was Johns referring to his brother’s breach of the Quaker testimony against slavery and other transgressions? The latter is, I think, the most likely interpretation of Johns’ statement. The minute that disowned Sam in 1839 employed similar language: “Affectionately desiring his restoration to Society.” 

Hannah was surely mortified by some of Sam’s life choices. Marrying outside the Society was one thing; Lavinia had Quaker roots and was closely associated with other members of the Hopkins family as well as with the Quaker communities in Northern Virginia. But to hold slaves in defiance of one of the core tenets of Quakerism must have caused her a great deal of concern, and no small sense of shame. 

It is important to keep in mind that disownment only barred Friends from taking part in business activities but not from attending meetings for worship. “Disorderly” Quakers were encouraged to atone for their errors and rejoin the Society as full members, as the minute against Sam indicates. Hannah, and Johns it seems, held out hope that Sam would correct course. Instead, he joined an Episcopal church in Baltimore and apparently made no effort to raise his children as Friends.

Johns had no real ability to force Sam and Lavinia to give up slavery, of course, but he may have persuaded them to manumit the slaves at the Quaker-recommended ages of 18 for women and 21 for men. In the early 1830s, two enslaved women came to White's Hall (we don't know how or why) and were manumitted by Joseph J. Hopkins soon thereafter. Joseph thus complied with the testimony against slaveholding and was never disciplined by the Society. 

Johns tolerated George living in the same house (along with two free Blacks) during the summer of 1840, but the tax and related records we have collected confirm that Johns and Sam lived together for only a short time around the year 1840 (and both as tenants in a home on Franklin Street). This was a period of great precarity for Sam and his young family. His independent business ventures had failed, the economy was still reeling in the aftermath of the Panic of ‘37, and Lavinia was pregnant with their third child. By 1841, Sam and Lavinia occupied a separate house with their growing family, enslaved servant George, and two Black employees. 

Nevertheless, it is clear that Johns’ harbored strong feelings of responsibility for Sam that were both filial and fraternal. He never abandoned his younger brother, nor does it appear that other members of the large Hopkins clan shunned Sam. They may have even applauded his efforts to "help" the enslaved people he brought to Baltimore and possibly manumitted there, if that is indeed what occurred. We simply don't know. (Note: there is one instance, online in the Maryland State Archive's Legacy of Slavery database, in which Sam Hopkins served as a witness for a free Black man named John Johnson who applied for a certificate of freedom in Baltimore in 1842.)

But while Johns actively helped many Quaker friends and family members – including several cousins and nephews - advance their professional prospects by offering them positions with the B&O Railroad, Merchants Bank or other institutions, he never seems to have assisted Sam in this way. Nor have we found evidence that Sam and Lavinia were involved to any significant degree in charitable pursuits or civic organizations in Baltimore, unlike so many of their Quaker relatives.

Conclusion

Was Sam the proverbial black sheep of the Hopkins flock? Or was he seen as a rebel who dared to defy the strict constraints of his Quaker upbringing? Did he resent his brother's wealth, power, and good deeds? Perhaps. In Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, Helen Hopkins Thom describes how Johns forced Sam to rejoin Hopkins Brothers by settling his debts and ending his independent partnership with T.R. Matthews, all without consulting Sam on the matter. According to Thom, Sam was "not pleased" with Johns' "high-handed" intervention, even though it may have saved him from financial ruin.

Without more of a documentary paper trail, it would be unwise to draw further conclusions about Sam's personality, attitudes, or motives. Although they had four children, there are no living descendants of Sam and Lavinia's union (see family tree below) and very few of the couple's papers survived (we have only two letters from his pen). We also do not know what became of the enslaved people who Sam and Lavinia owned, though this is a topic we are currently researching. 

Sam Hopkins died in 1867, just two years after the conclusion of the Civil War and three years after slavery was abolished in Maryland. His death was, by all accounts, a painful one. He suffered for many years from scrofula, a now rare form of tuberculosis that attacks the lymph nodes in the neck and can cause painful lesions around the head and face. After he died (without a will like his father-in-law) and all was said and done, Sam's estate was worth over $100,000 (more than $2 million in today's currency.) With Sam’s passing, Johns became the last survivor of the six Hopkins brothers. 

Lavinia outlived her husband by 17 years. Long enough, sadly, to experience the early deaths of all of her children. Arundel died first, in 1873, during a trip to Paris. He had attended Harvard, then earned a medical degree from the University of Maryland, and became a respected physician. Next to go was John Jolliffe Hopkins, Sam and Lavinia's first child. John lived at White's Hall as a farmer with his wife Betty. He also served in the Union Army. Lavinia was at his side when he died in 1875.

Ella Hopkins Mercer passed away in 1879 at the age of 41, less than a year after her husband James Monroe Mercer succumbed to typhoid fever. James, who Johns Hopkins called "Roe," was the scion of one of Maryland's first families, a direct descendent of Governor John Mercer (1759-1821), and the nephew of Governor Thomas Swann (1809-1883). Ella and James were fond of their Uncle Johns, and Johns, in turn, looked out for their welfare. In a letter to James dated May 23rd, 1873, Johns wrote "I am grieved to hear that Ella keeps so feeble." He then explained that he was giving them £100 from a London bank "which I hope will help you to pay expenses."

The last child of Sam and Lavinia's to die was Mahlon Hopkins in 1879, cause unknown. Over the years Johns also sought to help Mahlon, at one point purchasing him a farm in Montgomery County from fellow Quaker Edward Stabler. Johns disclosed to Stabler that "this property is purchased for my nephew Mahlon Hopkins, my brother Sam's son." According to Johns, Mahlon was "a most exemplary young man of great personal purity and promise, being highly educated."

Postscript - A Trip to Green Mount Cemetery

To understand the relationship between Johns Hopkins and Sam Hopkins, I highly recommend visiting Baltimore’s historic Green Mount Cemetery. Johns is buried on a bluff not far from the main gate, slightly east and north of the spired chapel built by famed architects John Rudolph Niernsee and James Crawford Neilson and completed in 1856. His austere grave ledger, now partly shaded by a large Redwood tree, lies between two of his sisters, Hannah and Eliza, who served successively as his housekeepers. Another sister, Sarah Hopkins, and her husband Richard Mott Janney lie next to Eliza, creating a five-part series of simple, matching memorials. Not far from this group, just north and slightly up the same hill, are the remains of Johns' sister Margaret, her husband Miles White and their son Francis, who married Sarah and Richard's daughter Jane. Johns wished to be remembered alongside these relatives, all Quakers and members of Baltimore’s Orthodox Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Richard and Miles were also leading Baltimore philanthropists.

Sam and Lavinia Hopkins, their four children, their son-in-law James Monroe Mercer, and at least one of their grandchildren, are also buried at Green Mount but at some distance from Sam’s Quaker kinfolk. Their eclectic set of grave markers is distinct from Johns' group. They include crosses, upright stones, and decorative carvings – the kind of funerary ostentation shunned by Friends. The contrast between the final resting places of these two brothers - one world famous and one almost completely forgotten - sheds light, I believe, on their enigmatic relationship and unique life courses. Distant in death, Johns and Sam were also distant in life, perhaps not physically but certainly in terms of their faith. Sam never became the "valuable member of the Community" his brother and mother hoped for.

Sources & Acknowledgements

Sources for this paper, cited after each image, consist mostly of the primary documents I have collected in Virginia and in Maryland. As secondary sources, I have consulted Helen Hopkins Thom's book Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette (1929) and William Jolliffe's book Historical, Genealogical, and Biographical Account of the Jolliffe Family of Virginia, 1652 to 1893 (1893). I also wish to thank all of the librarians and archivists at the Frederick County Circuit Court, Library of Virginia, Maryland State Archives, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Special Collections Archive of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, Loudoun County Circuit Court Historic Records Division, and Virginia Tech Special Collections. The staff and grounds crew at Green Mount Cemetery have been particularly generous in sharing information and documentation related to the internments of Johns Hopkins, Sam Hopkins and their many relatives. Edward C. Papenfuse deserves credit for locating the declarations for Sydney and George in the Baltimore City Archives.

As mentioned in the text, Daina Ramey Berry's Their Price for a Pound of Flesh and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers' They Were Her Property are good sources of information about slave ownership in general and the shameful trade in human beings that occurred throughout the era of slavery in the United States. See also the secondary sources I have listed here.

It is a regrettable that so many records, including manumission deeds and related documents filed with courts in Baltimore City and County, simply no longer exist, making it unlikely that we will ever learn the fates of Sydney, George, Nancy, Selina, Margaret and the unnamed enslaved male listed in the 1860 census. It is to them that I dedicate this essay.

Quaker Testimony Against Slavery from the 1821 Book of Discipline of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends:

"As a religious society we have found it to be our indispensable duty to declare to the world, our belief of the repugnancy of slavery to the Christian religion. It therefore remains to be our continued concern to prohibit our members from holding in bondage our fellow-men. And at the present time, we apprehend it to be incumbent on every individual, deeply to consider his own particular share in this testimony. The slow progress in the emancipation of this part of the human family we lament; but nevertheless do not despair of their ultimate enlargement. And we desire that Friends may not suffer the deplorable condition of these, our enslaved fellow-beings to lose its force upon their minds, through the delay, which the opposition of the interested my occasion, in this work of justice and mercy; but rather be animated to consider, that the longer the opposition remains, the greater is the necessity on the side of righteousness and benevolence, for our steady perseverance in pleading their cause.

In relation to the descendants of the African race, we earnestly desire, that those who may be under the care of any of our members, may be treated with kindness; and as objects of the common salvation, instructed in the principles of the Christian religion, as well as in such branches of school-learning as may fit them for freedom, and to become useful members of civil society. Also that Friends in their respective neighbourhoods, advise and assist those who are at liberty, in the education of their children, and common worldly concerns."

Revision Log

7/15/2023 - minor corrections and stylistic changes.

7/18/2023 - added links, other minor corrections and stylistic changes.