Introduction

I have long been intrigued by the possibility that Clifton, the country estate of Johns Hopkins, could have served as a station on the Underground Railroad (UGRR). Hopkins was an antislavery Quaker who assisted at least six enslaved people - that we know of - gain their freedom.* He associated with and was related to many people who worked to free slaves. These included Elisha Tyson, Francis T. King, brothers Nathan and Jesse Tyson, Nathaniel Crenshaw, Samuel M. Janney and Miles White. King, a very important figure in Hopkins' life and in the initial organization of his charities, wrote in his memoir, "I bought several slaves after I grew to manhood - once a mother and her young children - freed them, never however taking the title myself. I risked the illegality of the act rather than recognize the right of any man to hold a fellow human being as property."

I’ve wondered about Clifton’s role in the UGRR ever since viewing a series of etchings in the mansion's sub-basement. The letters are difficult to read but a few names are clear - Jones, Hancock, Coulson. The year "1860" and the month "June" can also be made out. Could these markings, carved and painted onto a basement wall on the eve of one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history and subsequent Civil War, be the signatures of fugitive slaves hiding at Clifton?

*They were James H. Jones, sometime after 1846, and the Gross family of five in 1848.

The Underground - and Aboveground - Railroads

Those who supported the UGRR normally did not leave records, and for good reason. Assisting fugitive slaves was illegal in Maryland. If discovered, Hopkins could have faced fines or even prison time. He certainly would have angered many in the Baltimore business community who defended the institution of slavery. Worse, he might have exposed other stations and stationmasters involved in the UGRR. (For those wishing to read more about the UGRR, I recommend Fergus Bordewich's Bound for Canaan and Vigilance: The Life of William Still by Andrew Diemer.)

Before the Civil War there was another transportation network sometimes known as the Aboveground Railroad or, as Frederick Douglass called it, the "Upperground Railroad." Running parallel in many ways to the clandestine UGRR and using some of the same safehouses, the Aboveground Railroad was employed by abolitionists and their allies to help secure the liberty of slaves using legal means of moving them to places where they could live safely as free people. Such locations might be in the West, the Northern states, Canada or even Haiti or Liberia.

Quakers were heavily involved in the Aboveground Railroad. In his book By Land and By Sea, Hiram Hilty explains how Quakers in North Carolina freed hundreds of enslaved people owned by their members using ostensibly legal and often quite public methods. American Quakers had been directed by their yearly meetings to free all enslaved people, but this was not easy to achieve in North Carolina on an individual basis. Local meetings came up with a clever solution to this problem by exploiting a loophole in state law that permitted corporate entities like churches to own enslaved people as part of trusts. Once the members' slaves were transferred to ownership with the Society of Friends writ large, Quakers, acting as trustees armed with powers of attorney, could employ a wide range of creative schemes to shepherd them to legal freedom outside the state. 

One of the conductors on North Carolina's Quaker Aboveground Railroad was Miles White, Johns Hopkins' brother-in-law and the husband of his sister Margaret. In 1834, White was part of a caravan of Quakers from North Carolina's Eastern Quarter of the Society of Friends who helped usher 133 enslaved men, women and children to freedom in the Midwest. On expeditions like this, White was often accompanied by his brother Caleb White. In 1848, like Johns Hopkins, White also contributed to the fund that enabled Thomas Gross and his young family to pursue their dreams of freedom and prosperity in Africa. Much later, in 1863, an enslaved woman named Amy Alston was "consigned" to Miles White so that he could assist her in moving to Ohio.

"In Trust to Liberation"

Another conductor on the Aboveground Railroad was Nathaniel C. Crenshaw, Johns Hopkins' brother-in-law and the husband of his sister Eliza. For almost four decades, Crenshaw, a Quaker minister in Virginia, worked tirelessly to liberate hundreds of enslaved people, starting in 1825 with the 60 slaves he inherited from his parents. The Crenshaw family was based in Hanover County, near Richmond, where slaveholders wishing to manumit their slaves faced some of the same obstacles that existed in North Carolina. Virginia, for example, required all manumitted people to leave the state within one year of liberation. From the mid-1840s to at least the mid-1850s, Crenshaw served on the "committee having charge of the defence [sic] of rights to freedom of persons of color," established by the Half-Years Meeting of Virginia Quakers. The Freedom Committee provided a number of services - they hired lawyers to file freedom suits on behalf of people illegally held in bondage, they submitted antislavery petitions to the Virginia and Maryland state assemblies, they intervened to prevent the sales of enslaved people to the Deep South, and they helped freed or soon-to-be-freed people relocate outside the state. Some of the enslaved people Crenshaw assisted emigrated to the colonies of Liberia and Maryland in Liberia, while others resettled in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana.

The coordinated movement of enslaved people out of the southern slave states to free locations was a complex undertaking. Each conductor had to locate "stations" along the way, make arrangements for different modes of travel, draw up manumission papers and other legal documents, collect food and supplies, provision ships, provide medical care as needed, and so on. Clifton, located along one of the busiest UGRR routes, would have been an ideal place to temporarily place not-yet-free people. In some cases, Baltimore was the final destination of people fleeing enslavement. In By Land and By Sea, Hilty tells the story of a Virginia woman named Harriet Lane who migrated to Baltimore in 1863 where she started a new life of liberty among the city's large free Black community. Nathaniel Crenshaw's son, John B. Crenshaw, arranged Lane's transportation to Baltimore at the height of the Civil War with the help of a sympathetic white family flying a flag of truce over their wagon. 

Interestingly, in the same year that the individuals in Johns Hopkins' basement memorialized their presence at Clifton by etching their names on the wall - 1860 - Nathaniel Crenshaw is recorded on the federal census for Hanover, Virginia with 20 enslaved people in his "possession." Did Crenshaw, a lifelong abolitionist, suddenly return to slaveholding on the eve of the Civil War? Fortunately, a notation added by the census enumerator helps us understand what was really going on. The enumerator wrote, just under Crenshaw's name, "in trust to liberation." That is to say, this was another group of enslaved people Crenshaw was helping to emancipate as a "trustee" of the Society of Friends.

Could the same arrangement have existed at Clifton in 1850 when four enslaved men were recorded living on the property? It's quite possible. The group may have been stationed at the estate by White or Crenshaw - or even Francis T. King - on their way to freedom in Baltimore or elsewhere via the UGRR or Aboveground Railroad. Much to the frustration of future historians, census takers in 1850, unlike in 1860, were not required to make notations clarifying the relationships between property owners and resident enslaved people. Nor were they required to indicate the number of slave dwellings on a given property or, indeed, provide any information about where the enslaved people lived or how they were employed. The 1850 slave schedule census form was a crude population survey, not a detailed household survey like the 1850 and 1860 free inhabitant census forms.

"An Antislavery Man All His Life"

Back to the question that motivated this essay - could the markings on a basement wall in Clifton be evidence that Johns Hopkins harbored fugitive slaves at Clifton? There is no clear proof at this time, but the possibility also cannot be ruled out. "Jones" could be James H. Jones, Hopkins' free Black "Coachman," or Edward Jones, a white "Garden Laborer," as enumerated in the 1860 census. But other names - Hancock and Coulson - do not correspond to any of the free residents recorded at Clifton during the summer of 1860. 

If the 1860 basement dwellers were there illicitly, perhaps fleeing to freedom, then the men located at Clifton in 1850 may have been there under similar, albeit less covert, circumstances, quietly biding their time in the care of Baltimore's wealthiest man and his Quaker kinfolk while others worked to secure their legal freedom. Indeed, they might have been working at the estate temporarily and legally as the charges of, for instance, the Friend's Freedom Committee of Virginia. Either way, Clifton would have been a relatively secure place to station enslaved people, safely out of reach of slave catchers and kidnappers. And during the busy summer of 1850, extra hands would have been very welcome.

When the leaders of Baltimore's free Black community gathered to honor Hopkins in April of 1873 (as we have described elsewhere), their praise for the millionaire philanthropist was effusive. They were of course grateful that Hopkins was planning to create institutions in Baltimore that would directly benefit Black families. They knew about Hopkins' strong support for Black education, his efforts to abolish slavery in Maryland as a member of the Unconditional Unionist party, and his concerns for Black children orphaned by the Civil War. But maybe they knew something else that others didn't. Namely, that Johns Hopkins had worked publicly and in secret during the darkest days of slavery to bring freedom to the enslaved and to shelter them when others would not, or could not, be seen openly assisting enslaved people. Maybe this is what the Baltimore American was referring to when it wrote about Johns Hopkins after his death in 1873:

Although Mr. Hopkins was always too greatly engrossed in business to pay much attention to politics, he had strong political convictions. He was an antislavery man all his life. His great wealth and high position saved him from the reproach that would otherwise have fallen upon him in a community that had but little toleration for the views he entertained upon the subject.

In other words, Hopkins could get away with things that others of his day and age could not. He always preferred to work behind the scenes and was never one to toot his own horn. And like all dutiful Quakers, including so many of his dear friends and close relatives, he followed the dictum of the poet Alexander Pope: “Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”

We'll continue to examine the etchings uncovered at Clifton, researching who may have been the people who wanted future generations to know they had been there, in the basement of Johns Hopkins' country mansion, in 1860. Stay tuned!

Revision Log

12/5/24 - Made stylistic edits, added to sources.

12/8/24 - Expanded text; added images of Hopkins' sisters, RMJ, SMJ, FTK, the Lincoln pass.