Introduction

In October of 2023, the Baltimore Magazine published an article taking stock of efforts since 2020 to reexamine Johns Hopkins' life and legacy. 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."

Part I of this essay series challenged Cassie's conclusion with details of Hopkins' tenure as a trustee of Myrtilla Miner's Normal School for Colored Girls. This second essay will discuss Johns Hopkins' gift to the Maryland State Colonization Society in 1848 to help purchase the freedom of an enslaved family, including a man named Thomas Gross. Like his support for Miner's school, this singular act of philanthropy provides additional evidence of Hopkins' antislavery convictions. And it should be understood in the context of the complexities of the contentious sectional politics, including the myriad dilemmas faced by African Americans and their White allies, that plagued Maryland during the decades immediately preceding the Civil War.

Unfortunately, Black Americans who emigrated from the United States to Africa in this period are sometimes portrayed as the victims of racist White colonizationists pursuing a program of "ethnic cleansing." Such portrayals, however, are too simplistic and at times wholly inaccurate. By focusing on the story of Thomas Gross, this essay aims to recast Black colonists not as victims - nor, it should be said, as heroes - but rather as pioneers, doing the best they could under less than ideal circumstances and under conditions of tremendous uncertainty. It also presents the rare opportunity to center enslaved people in our research based on their own words and experiences, while at the same time demonstrating that Black attitudes toward colonization were varied. Through the pages of Thomas's letters, we meet a man who was sensitive, astute, and fearless when faced with the challenges of life both before and after emigration. 

"I Am Anxious to Go to the Colony"

Thomas Gross’s first letter to the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS), addressed to Moses Shepherd, began cautiously. “I have friends who have emigrated to [Maryland in Liberia],” wrote Gross, “and I would be much pleased to hear from them.” A few lines later, he disclosed his real reason for writing. His master, William Potts, had "acknowledged" his freedom. Thomas Gross was a slave, and he was “anxious to go to the colony [in Africa].”

Thus commenced an extraordinary odyssey for Thomas Gross. Within weeks of this initial communication in the summer of 1848, the MSCS had agreed to relocate Thomas and his family to Cape Palmas in West Africa (now part of Liberia). A crowdfunding campaign gathered $300 to purchase the freedom of Thomas, his wife Mary Ann, and their two young children.[1] One of the contributors was Johns Hopkins, who gave $20 to the cause - about $780 today. Other supporters included William Potts' sister Eleanor M. Potts and his brother-in-law Richard M. Marshall. Moses Sheppard, a Hicksite Quaker, gave $50 while Miles White, an Orthodox Quaker and Johns' brother-in-law, contributed $5.

Their freedom secured, on August 1, 1849, the Gross family boarded the Liberia Packet to begin the arduous, transatlantic journey from Baltimore to Africa, arriving in Cape Palmas on October 16.

The Maryland State Colonization Society

The Maryland State Colonization Society was founded in 1817 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. In 1827, the Maryland General Assembly awarded the organization a yearly grant of $1,000 to defray the costs of relocating free Black Marylanders to locations in today's Liberia. However, after the society succeeded in sending only twelve settlers to Africa in 1828, the state discontinued its support. Colonization was widely considered a failure, and the organization almost folded.

Nat Turner’s bloody slave rebellion in August of 1831 changed everything. Maryland’s legislators, terrified that a similar uprising might occur within the state's borders, responded by passing repressive laws limiting the rights of Blacks and halting free Black migration into the state. The General Assembly also reversed its position on colonization and earmarked $200,000 for the MSCS to rekindle the work of "colonizing with their own consent, on the coast of Africa, the free people of colour residing in the United States.”

Flush with cash and renewed public support, the MSCS began to distance itself from its parent organization in subtle but important ways. The American Colonization Society, for example, never explicitly opposed slavery; the MSCS did. In a resolution passed in 1832, the Society declared that its “avowed object was the extirpation of slavery in Maryland.” Such “extirpation” would be achieved “by proper and gradual efforts,” but this was nonetheless a bold statement for an auxiliary colonization organization operating in a slave state. 

Additionally, the MSCS Board of Managers decided to establish its own enclave in West Africa, separate from Liberia and thus independent of the ACS. In 1834, MSCS agents purchased land around Cape Palmas, about 400 miles south of Monrovia at the westward end of the Gulf of Guinea. They called the new colony “Maryland in Liberia” and drafted a Constitution and Bill of Rights modeled on the Declaration of Independence: “it becomes the duty of the State Society to afford to the settlements which they may cause to be established, a system of equal laws, that shall secure to every Emigrant and his descendants the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Such happiness would not include alcohol, however. The Board of Managers, most teetotalers themselves, required all emigrants to abstain from “ardent spirits.” Maryland in Liberia would be a dry colony.

The Maryland State Colonization Society (cont.)

Each emigrant or emigrant family was given five acres of land, a house in the capital city of Harper, and six months of provisions and financial support. The colony also kept an apothecary shop as well as a store of goods for purchase, though they often ran out of critical supplies in high demand like morphine and castor oil used to treat the many illnesses experienced by the colonists. Most settlers, for instance, contracted malaria soon after landing, known then as the "African fever," which could prove fatal. "I have lost my oldest child Louisa," Thomas Gross reported in 1850. "She was taken sick on the 8th of November, and before night she was a corpse." 

The leaders of Maryland in Liberia were Black Americans, with the exception of the colony's first governor, James Hall. John Brown Russwurm, a former editor of an abolitionist newspaper and a staunch supporter of colonization, succeeded Hall in 1836, serving as governor for the next 15 years until his untimely death in 1851. Hall, having returned to Baltimore, became the day-to-day accountant and operations manager of the MSCS. He answered most correspondence, ensured that the Society's bills were paid, and coordinated the myriad logistics involved in outfitting two ships a year for sail to Africa. Oversight was provided by MSCS President John H.B. Latrobe and the Board of Managers, which met periodically in Baltimore. 

The MSCS always insisted that emigration to Africa was voluntary. Free Black residents who wished to move to Africa did so of their own accord, even though state law permitted deportation: “If the party refuses to go to Liberia, the Sheriff is required to put him out” of the State. Such means were rarely if ever used, however. Latrobe remarked in 1885 that only one settler was ever forcibly deported from Maryland to Africa (no details of the case were provided).[2]

The MSCS offered enslaved people, with their owners' agreement to grant them freedom (usually for a price), the opportunity to escape enslavement and live in Africa as free citizens (only persons of African descent could become citizens of Maryland in Liberia). Anti-colonizationists like William Watkins (see below) described these "offers" as deportations, and they sometimes functioned that way.[3] It was a tough bargain, to be sure. But enslaved people had few if any viable options to achieve freedom in antebellum America. Purchasing one's liberty could be prohibitively expensive (and also required a master's permission). Flight was difficult and dangerous, particularly so after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.[4] 

Those who waited for an enslaver to die, expecting to receive their freedom by will also faced daunting uncertainties. Would the owner's heirs challenge the testamentary manumission? Would the debts of the deceased be so great that the court might order enslaved people to be sold? And then, if a sale did occur, would the slave's family be kept together or ripped apart? Despite these uncertainties, the vast majority of enslaved people in America opted to bide their time in the hopes that slavery would eventually be abolished. When that might happen could not be predicted. If Thomas Gross had remained in Maryland as a slave he would have had to wait 15 years to gain his freedom, with little ability to control his own labor or the fates of his wife and children in the interim.

Overall, emigration to Africa was a hard sell. The traveling agents of the MSCS frequently reported back to the central office in Baltimore that many of the enslaved people they met would rather remain in bondage than leave the state. Not even promises of free passage, land, and housing could entice them to go, much less convince their enslavers to let them. 

Colonization and Emigration

Many African Americans scoffed at the idea that Maryland's Black inhabitants, most of whom had roots in the state going back generations, should "return" to Africa rather than stay and fight for their rights in the land of their birth. William Watkins, a free Black minister and educator in Baltimore, was one of the nation's fiercest critics of colonization. From the pulpit, at the lectern, and in the pages of abolitionist newspapers, Watkins exposed the racism and hypocrisies he considered to be at the heart of the "African Colonization Society." He wrote in 1827: 

Its members hold out the anti-christian doctrine, that justice cannot be done to us while we remain in this land of civilization and gospel light. They tell us we can never enjoy the unalienable rights of man in this "land of the free, and home of the brave;" that if we desire the privileges of freemen, we must seek them elsewhere; not in Hayti, on account of its proximity to this country, but on the burning sands of Africa, where ... a mighty ocean will forever intervene as a barrier between us and them.

Other Black abolitionists supported emigration but to locations other than Africa. In A Plea for Emigration, Mary Ann Shadd Cary extolled "Canada West" as an ideal destination for Blacks wishing to leave the United States, where the institution of slavery seemed interminable and options to settle in the free states were rapidly closing.[5] Shadd Cary herself moved to Windsor, Ontario, where in 1853 she founded The Provincial Freeman, a paper dedicated to “antislavery, temperance and general literature.” In numerous columns and separate publications, Shadd Cary called on her fellow African Americans to abandon the United States, echoing at times the same language employed by the MSCS to encourage migration to Africa. Ironically, colonizationists and emigrationists shared a certain pessimism about Black life in American society (as well as a mutual interest in temperance and moral reform).[6] For these opposing groups, the United States was, and always would be, a White man's republic.

For colonizationists like James Hall, Canada, where slavery had been prohibited since 1834, may have been an improvement over the United States, but Blacks could not govern there. In "An address to the free people of color of the state of Maryland," he put the case for emigration to Africa in stark terms: 

Go for such motives, the highest that can influence man for worldly good! Go and live, the saviours of yourselves, your families and your people! Or take the other and only alternative, stay and enjoy a living death, condemn your posterity to a like degradation, and entail on them the curse of caste; stay, and confirm the bold assertions of your enemies, that, “The black man is only fit for a dependent state of existence—a serf and a slave."

Between 1831 and 1855, more than 1,000 free and formerly enslaved Black Americans emigrated to Maryland in Liberia with the assistance of the MSCS, including the five members of the family of Thomas Gross.[7] “In Africa," writes historian Richard L. Hall, "[colonists] hoped to have religious and political freedom; they hoped to acquire land and the means to make a comfortable living; they hoped to educate their children and leave them in better circumstances than their own; and they hoped to convert Africans, whom they regarded as savage heathens, to their way of life.”[8] Their motives were not unlike those of White Europeans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in search of new and better lives in North America, or others who, urged on by influencers like Shadd Cary, relocated to Canada. Thomas Gross was one of these intrepid Christian settlers.

The Gross and Potts Families of Maryland

In six letters to the MSCS and his supporters - that can be read here - Thomas described his odyssey from Baltimore County to Cape Palmas, West Africa, in fascinating detail. These documents provide a rare opportunity to understand the circumstances and motives of an enslaved proponent of colonization.

Thomas Gross's story begins within the confines of a society and state deeply entrenched in the institution of slavery. He was born around 1820 near Frederick, Maryland, where a large number of Blacks with the surname Gross, both free and enslaved, lived during the early nineteenth century. By 1840 he was the property of William Potts and living on a 140-acre farm located near the Powhatan Cotton Works factory eight miles due west of Baltimore City.[9]

Thomas’s experience as a slave in Maryland was not typical. William Potts, an affluent farmer, permitted Thomas to learn to read and write. Even rarer, Potts "acknowledged" Thomas's freedom for a discounted price. In Thomas's words:

I am living with the worthy family of Mr. Wm. Potts near Franklin Town, the family has acknowledged my freedom. Also they have been so kind as to give me some knowledge of the English language. 

We do not know if the Gross family’s emigration to Africa was a condition of their manumission, although that would not have been unusual. We do know, based on his letters, that Thomas eagerly agreed to move to Cape Palmas and that he had the support of several members of the powerful Potts family. Eleanor M. Potts, William's sister, gave the largest single donation ($70) to the Gross family freedom fund and continued to correspond with Thomas years after he moved to Africa.

Thomas was partly driven to emigrate because he had family, possibly even his father, already living in the colony.[10] He asked Moses Sheppard to reply with news of his relatives Jacob and Philip Gross in Liberia, and the return letter he received, which has been lost, must have been positive. "I am extremely glad to hear that they are comfortably settled and doing well," Thomas wrote back to the MSCS. "I am much pleased at your benevolence in answering my letters agreeable to my request."

In the same letter, Thomas also noted, "I am surprised at my uncle’s children that are in Frederick County, refusing to go to a place where they can enjoy all the privileges that freedom can afford."[11] Thomas felt they were making a mistake:

I will venture to say that in fifty years from this date Africa will contain thousands of inhabitants from these grand United States. I am truly interested in the welfare of our old country, that the inhabitants thereof may become an enlightened and civilized nation.

Once in Africa, Thomas continued to correspond with the MSCS and the Potts family. He wrote in early 1850 to report that he had experienced a "good voyage," arriving first in Monrovia before continuing onward to Cape Palmas. He also delivered the sad news of his daughter's passing the prior November. "I trust she is better off," said Thomas matter-of-factly.

With his five acres of land in Maryland in Liberia, Thomas Gross planted coffee trees. He also joined the military company in Cape Palmas, and he taught at one of the colonial schools. In 1852, Thomas and his wife Mary Ann welcomed a new child to their family, as recorded in the population reports sent back to Baltimore from the Society's agents in Cape Palmas.

Conclusion

Scholars debate whether the causes, goals, and consequences of the colonization movement were anti- or pro-slavery, and for good reason. Colonization was an eclectic social movement of strange bedfellows, a fact that its leaders fully acknowledged. In 1833, Latrobe wrote that "Colonization had two sets of friends, who supported it from motives diametrically opposed to each other."[12] For the defenders of slavery, colonization reduced the population of free Blacks who, in their view, undermined the slave economy and encouraged slave uprisings. For the opponents of slavery, Quakers included, resettlement in Africa was a way to gradually, legally, and peacefully dismantle the slave system while at the same time ensuring the separation of Whites and Blacks, which many in the nineteenth century believed was for the betterment of both races. 

The $20 that Johns Hopkins gave to the Gross family freedom fund was the largest donation he made to the MSCS. Only two other contributions connected to Hopkins are recorded in the Society's account books, $5.00 in 1835 and $10 in 1851. As of this writing, we have uncovered no further involvement by Johns Hopkins with the MSCS beyond these limited subscriptions. Few members of the Orthodox Meeting appear to have supported the MSCS, although several of Hopkins' friends, relatives, and business associates - among them Enoch Pratt, Miles White, Thomas Swann, Basil B. Hopkins and Thomas Hopkins - gave to the Society sums ranging from $1 to $10.[13]

Thus, Johns Hopkins’ gift to purchase the freedom of the Gross family should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the colonization movement writ large, but rather as a humanitarian gesture aimed at helping an enslaved Black father and his young family pursue their dreams of freedom and prosperity. For wealthy southern Friends like Moses Sheppard and Johns Hopkins, colonization presented an opportunity to honor the Quaker testimony against slavery without breaking the law or alienating important business associates.[14] For women like Eleanor M. Potts, colonization provided a “respectable” outlet for paternalistic antislavery sentiments. And for reformers like James Hall, colonization was a way to spread the twin virtues of democratic governance and evangelical Protestantism. The deeply pious leaders of the MSCS held uncompromising beliefs in Christianity as a pathway to personal improvement and civic advancement. To these White elites, the newly freed Blacks who populated the colony were more than just settlers or "colonizers." They were Christian pilgrims bringing the “light” of religion and Western civilization to the “dark continent” of Africa.

Despite the efforts of the MSCS, African colonization was a failed philanthropy that never came close to achieving its lofty goals. As noted above, relatively few Black Marylanders wanted to go, and abolitionists made sure their critiques of colonization were widely disseminated. One travelling agent tasked with visiting free and enslaved Blacks in Southern Maryland, wrote to the MSCS of his experience there:

I doubt not that these people have been visited & prejudiced against Liberia by the emissaries of the hellish abolitionists. I might as well have preached colonization to a stable of horses, as to them.

The bitter debates and personal feuds between abolitionists, colonizationists, and emigrationists that marked the period from 1830 to the end of the Civil War were never fully resolved. William Watkins, who once said that he would rather "die in Maryland under the pressure of unrighteous and cruel laws than be driven like cattle to the pestilential clime of Liberia," passed away in Canada. Depressed and defeated, he fled Baltimore in 1852 for Toronto where he opened a grocery store and continued his work as a minister and abolitionist. Mary Ann Shadd Cary eventually returned to the United States from Ontario, settled in Washington, D.C., and embarked on an active postwar career as an educator, lawyer, and suffragette.[15]

Sadly, we do not know what became of Thomas Gross or his descendants, though we will continue to research his family's story. Maryland in Liberia declared independence in 1854 but three years later was annexed by Liberia. The territory's population was too small, and its economy too weak, to survive on its own. After annexation, many colonists moved from Cape Palmas to Monrovia in search of greater economic opportunities, although some stayed in the colony, which was renamed Maryland County of Liberia. The last expedition to West Africa organized by the Maryland State Colonization Society departed Baltimore in 1862 carrying a mere fifteen passengers, though the organization continued raising funds for schools and charities in Liberia for many years. In 1864, slavery was finally abolished in Maryland with the ratification of a new state constitution. Thirty-eight years later, in 1902, the MSCS was officially dissolved.[16]

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Coming Next! "Was Johns Hopkins an Abolitionist?, Part III: The Know-Nothing Party in Baltimore."

Notes

[1] A third child was born before the Gross family set sail to Africa; it is unclear whether or not his freedom had to be purchased separately from the others.

[2] John Hazlehurst Boneval Latrobe, Maryland in Liberia: a history of the colony planted by the Maryland State Colonization Society under the auspices of the State of Maryland, U.S., at Cape Palmas on the south-west coast of Africa, 1833-1853, a paper read before the Maryland Historical Society, March 9th, 1885. See also this letter from one of the MSCS's traveling agents, Henry B. Goodwin, to James Hall that discusses the forced removal of Black Marylanders to Africa: http://mdhistory.msa.maryland.gov/msa_sc5977/scm013228/html/msa_sc5977_scm13228-0910.html. 

[3] For an example, see http://mdhistory.msa.maryland.gov/msa_sc5977/scm013229/html/msa_sc5977_scm13229-0663.html. 

[4] Richard Bell, “Border State, Border War,” in The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered, edited by Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell, Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

[5] Mary Ann Shadd Cary, A plea for emigration, or, Notes of Canada West in its moral, social, and political aspect; with suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies, and Vancouver's Island, for the information of colored emigrants, 1852.

[6] Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863, University of Illinois Press, 1975.

[7] A fair number of migrants were from states other than Maryland. The MSCS transported Black Americans to Africa from New Jersey, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia. One notable group, that founded the settlement of Mount Tubman, was transported from Georgia to Maryland in Liberia via the MSCS. See James M. Gifford, "Emily Tubman and the African Colonization Movement in Georgia," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 1975), pp. 10-24.

[8] Richard L. Hall, On Afric's Shore: A History of Maryland in Liberia, 1834-1857, Maryland Center for History and Culture, 2004, p. 5.

[9] 1840 United States Federal Census for William Potts, Maryland, Baltimore County, District 1.; “Died,” Baltimore Sun, June 5, 1848; “A Valuable Farm in Baltimore County,” American and Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 21, 1848. Richard Potts (1753-1808), William Potts’ father, Richard Potts (1753-1808) was an important early resident of Frederick, Maryland. In Frederick, the Potts were friendly with the families of many renowned Maryland lawyers, included Francis Scott Key and Roger B. Taney. In fact, Key wrote a poem for Richard's wife Eleanor Murdoch Potts (1773-1842). I wish to thank Chris Haugh, Community Relations & Historic Preservation Manager at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland, for this information. Check out his blog, "Stories in Stone," here.

[10] MSCS records indicate that there was a man living in the colony named Thomas Gross, Sr., before 1848. Thomas Gross, the subject of this essay, signed one of his letters “Thomas Gross of Thomas.”

[11] Their names were Wesley and Solomon Gross. Solomon eventually moved to Maryland in Liberia, but Wesley was too sick to accompany him.

[12] Susan E. Lindsey, Liberty Brought Us Here: The True Story of American Slaves Who Migrated to Liberia, University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

[13] It is worth nothing that John H.B. Latrobe was a lawyer for the B&O Railroad.

[14] Margaret Hope Bacon, “Quakers and Colonization,” Quaker History, 2006, Vol.95 (1), p.26-43; Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: the Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865, Indiana University Press, 2007.

[15] Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted On Equality For All, Basic Books, 2020.

[16] See http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/casestudies/mscscountycs.html.