Introduction

The Baltimore Magazine recently published an article taking stock of efforts to reexamine Johns Hopkins' life and legacy since 2020. According to the article's author Ron Cassie, "the fuller picture of Johns Hopkins that has emerged since the revelation of enslaved people in his household ... lays bare the myth that the university’s founding benefactor was an abolitionist."

Does it? I'm not so sure. Johns Hopkins was never a radical abolitionist, and he would not have endorsed violence as a means of ending slavery (not, at least, until the Civil War erupted). But there are some important indications that (1) he believed that slavery should be abolished through legal processes and that (2) he engaged in efforts to achieve that goal.

This essay discusses one of the most significant pieces of evidence we have that Johns Hopkins actively opposed slavery; namely, his involvement in a bold experiment spearheaded by feminist, antislavery educator Myrtilla Miner - the Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, D.C.

The Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington, D.C.

The Normal School was the brainchild of Myrtilla Miner, a teacher and self-described abolitionist who was born in Upstate New York in 1815. After witnessing the horrors of slavery first hand as a teacher in Mississippi, as well as the lack of educational opportunities for free Blacks throughout the South, Miner pledged to open her own school for Black children and decided to locate it in the nation's capital. She explained her reasoning to her friend and supporter Harriet Beecher Stowe: "Upon inquiry respecting the best locality for establishing a normal school for girls I learned that Washington, D. C., contained the greatest proportion of untaught, colored people of any city in which prohibitory laws did not exist."[1]

Many advised Miner that her plan was foolish, even dangerous. Frederick Douglass told her bluntly that the school "would prove a vain effort and bring only persecution and, possibly, death." "Your benevolent scheme [is] utterly impracticable," another friend wrote Miner. "You would be put to a great deal of inconvenience, loss, and distress to no good end." 

The stubborn, indefatigable Miner ignored all of these warnings and moved forward in founding her school, which opened in 1851. She solicited the help of prominent antislavery businessmen, publishers, and clergy, including Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe. A popular speaker on the abolitionist circuit, Beecher was probably the most radical of Miner's backers. He was known, for example, for purchasing rifles for Free State combatants in Kansas. Disguised in crates labeled “books and bibles,” the guns became known as "Beecher's Bibles.”

Yet another Beecher sibling, William Henry, served as secretary of the school, raising money and recruiting supporters throughout the North. He also helped assemble the school's star-studded roster of trustees that included Johns Hopkins, as recorded in a 1856 circular that is among Miner's papers held by the Library of Congress. Other trustees of the school were Philadelphia Quakers Samuel Rhoads and Thomas Williamson, both active supporters of the Underground Railroad and Free Produce Movement; Gamaliel Bailey, publisher and a founder of the Republican Party; and Samuel M. Janney, one of the South's most vocal critics of slavery and a maternal relative of Johns Hopkins.[2]

The Normal School encountered significant hostility from the White community in Washington, where slavery was legal and which had become a transportation nexus for the domestic slave trade. Miner received death threats, her home was pelted with rocks, and arsonists once tried to burn the school.

The Headquarters of "Slavery Agitation"

By 1856, Miner's Normal School had been operating for five years, had raised significant funding, had purchased land for a permanent school building and dormitories, and had a brand new board of trustees. Building on this momentum, William Henry Beecher produced a new promotional pamphlet and distributed it widely. Beecher hoped the circular would rally additional support for Miner's efforts to expand her school and educate Black girls in DC. Instead, it was a fiasco.

Rather than bolstering sympathy for Miner's school, the circular aroused significant opposition. On May 13, 1857, the former mayor of Washington, Walter Lenox, published a letter in the National Intelligencer (cross-posted in many other papers) castigating Johns Hopkins and his fellow trustees for their “misguided philanthropy” that, he claimed, would convert the District of Columbia into the “headquarters of ‘slavery agitation’ from which it may deal forth in every direction its treasonable blows."

Not long after the publication of ex-Mayor Lennox's latter, a subscriber to the pro-slavery De Bow's Review wrote:

It now seems that the Abolitionists not only propose to colonize Virginia from their own numbers, but that they are about to make the District of Columbia, in the midst of the slave region, and once under the jurisdiction of a slave State, the centre of an education movement, which shall embrace the free negroes of the whole North. A vast negro boarding school or college is proposed to be established in the City of Washington ... The names of the Trustees ought to be mentioned particularly, as some of them are Southern men, and it might interest the South to know who they are: Benjamin Tatham, N.Y., Samuel M. Janney, Va.; Johns Hopkins, Baltimore..." (De Bow's Review, v.22, 1852, p. 664).

There were only two true "southern men" on the board - Hopkins and Janney (Leonard D. Gale and Gamaliel Bailey both lived in DC but were raised in the North). Their endorsements were no doubt viewed as critical to the school's credibility as it was difficult to find southerners - even those who were antislavery - willing to go on the record endorsing a scheme like Miner's. Indeed, Miner noted in one of her letters "the very ominous silence of philanthropists in [Washington]" toward her school. 

The correspondence that secured Hopkins' place on the board of trustees has not survived, nor do the existing subscriber records show what funds he may have donated to the school. His brother-in-law, Gilbert Congdon, is recorded as a supporter. I wonder by whom and how Johns Hopkins was approached about serving as a trustee. William Henry Beecher must have been involved, and Hopkins may have also been persuaded by one or more of the fellow Quakers on the board - Janney, Rhoads and/or Williamson.

The school would survive another three years after the pamphlet debacle, but much damage had been done. William Henry Beecher resigned as secretary, writing to Samuel Rhoads in September of 1857 that "Ex-Mayor Lenox's letter appeared just as we were opening our subscription & of course killed it dead!" The board was disbanded and a promised constitution for the school that was to be endorsed by the trustees was never completed.

At least one of the school’s trustees, chemist and inventor Leonard Gale, lost his job as a patent official in the Buchanan Administration as a consequence of his association with Miner and her outspoken antislavery views. He is reported to have said in response, “I can surrender my office but not my principles.” Miner herself continued to receive taunts and threats from pro-slavery neighbors up until the time she could no longer lead the school due to her failing health.

Though it would be revived via city charter in 1863, the first incarnation of the Normal School for Colored Girls closed in 1860. Myrtilla Miner, who died in 1864, is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, not far from the site of her beloved school.

A Silhouette Revisited

The oft-repeated claim that Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist derives from Helen Hopkins Thom's book Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, published by JHU Press in 1929. In her short volume, Thom relates the following story told by a contemporary of Johns Hopkins:

"My mind goes back to a hot day in the 50's . . . . The richest man in Baltimore passed down Liberty Street on a summer day, turned into Baltimore Street, down Hanover Street to the corner of German Street and walked into the firm of Woodward, Jones and Company, Dry Goods Commission Merchants. Back in the counting room was a young man in his shirt sleeves and a number of clerks. Everybody knew Mr. Hopkins, and everybody stopped what he was doing to look at him, and listened to every word. It was the first time that this man, who was President of the Merchants' Bank, Director of the B & 0 Railroad, Chairman of its Finance Committee, leading Abolitionist, hated and discounted by the slave owners, who constituted the bulk of the leading men of the city, had ever entered the office of Woodward, Jones and Company."

Whatever Thom believed about Hopkins or meant to convey by including this quotation in her book, she never depicted Hopkins as a radical abolitionist, that is, someone who endorsed the "immediate, unconditional, and universal abolition of slavery."[3] Radical abolitionists comprised an important faction of the American antislavery movement, but they were always in the minority. Most opponents of slavery in the United States were reform-minded moderates - like Abraham Lincoln and probably Johns Hopkins - who detested slavery no less than their radical counterparts in the North.[4]

Both camps – radical and moderate– were riven with disagreement, most deeply about how to bring about slavery's demise. Douglass and Garrison famously fell out over whether the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Garrison rebuked John Brown for the atrocities he committed in Kansas at Pottawatomie Creek. And Harriet Beecher Stowe criticized the stridency of both Garrison and Brown.

In 1853, Stowe wrote to William Lloyd Garrison in an effort to help repair his relationship with Douglass. She gently advised Garrison to be more understanding of Douglass's change of heart, reminding him that effective antislavery appeals could take many forms: "Is there but one true anti-slavery church and all others infidels?" And even if so, "who shall declare which it is?"

Stowe understood what Garrison refused to accept – that successful movements involve coalitions of actors who share the same goals but often endorse divergent methods. Such "modularities" are the hallmarks of all major modern social movements.[5] 

"An Anti-Slavery Man All His Life"

Where should Johns Hopkins be placed in the panoply of American antislavery politics? Certainly, he was no firebrand. As a birthright Quaker and member of Baltimore’s Orthodox Quaker Meeting, Hopkins had been taught since childhood to embrace pacifism, to be modest, and to "do good by stealth.”[6] Uncomfortable in the spotlight, Johns Hopkins never gave a public speech or wrote anything for publication - on any subject - until his last will and testament was released in 1867.

Quakers, of course, also opposed slavery. And when he died six years after publishing his will, one obituary stated: "Although Mr. Hopkins was always too greatly engrossed in business to pay much attention to politics, he had strong political convictions. He was an anti-slavery man all his life."

There is plenty for scholars to debate about Johns Hopkins' "strong political convictions," including with respect to slavery, but any reassessment of his life and legacy should, at the very least, acknowledge his brief tenure as a trustee for Myrtilla Miner's school for Black girls. It's not as if this information was lost or unknown until now; Hopkins' involvement with the school has been detailed in his Wikipedia bio sketch since well before 2020. It was discussed by Antero Pietila in his 2018 book The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins. In addition, Miner's papers can be easily accessed online (see Gale) or at the Library of Congress. In my view, revisionist scholars unwilling to grapple with such relevant facts aren't shattering old "myths" about Johns Hopkins. They're just making new ones.

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Coming Soon! "Was Johns Hopkins an Abolitionist?, Part II: The Maryland State Colonization Society"

Notes

[1] Unless otherwise noted, quotations are taken from the Myrtilla Miner papers, Manuscript/Mixed Material, Library of Congress: https://lccn.loc.gov/mm78033027.

[2] See Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, Late of Lincoln, Loudoun County, VA., A Minster in the Religious Society of Friends. Janney, a Hicksite Quaker and member of Loudoun County's Goose Creek meeting, was related to Johns Hopkins in three ways - as a distant maternal cousin, as the husband of Johns' paternal first cousin, and as the brother of Johns' brother-in-law Richard Mott Janney.

[3] James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Princeton University Press, 2014.

[4] Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War, 2nd edition, 1995.

[5] Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 4th Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

[6] "Doing good by stealth" was a personal and professional ethic adopted by many Quaker philanthropists. The phrase derives from Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733): “Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”

Sources

As mentioned above, Miner's papers can be accessed online via Gale or viewed at the Library of Congress. A number of scholars have used this collection to write about Myrtilla Miner, including:

1. Michael Greenburg, This Noble Woman: Myrtilla Miner and Her Fight to Establish a School for African American Girls in the Slaveholding South, Chicago Review Press, 2018.

2. Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865, Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

3. Druscilla J. Null, "Myrtilla Miner's 'School for Colored Girls': A Mirror on Antebellum Washington," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 52, 1989.

4. Lester Grosvenor Wells, "Mytilla Miner," New York History, vol. 24, no. 3, July 1943.

5. G. Smith Wormley, "Myrtilla Miner," Journal of Negro History, v. 5, 1920. 

6. Ellen M. O'Connor, Myrtilla Miner: A Memoir, Houghton, Mifflin, 1885.

Revision Log

11/3/2023: Added reference to Antero Pietila, The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins: The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

11/5/2023: Corrected name of Johns Hopkins' brother-in-law, made other minor corrections, and added images of Miner's headstone.