Introduction

In the first Chapter of Helen Hopkins Thom’s book, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, where she described how in 1807 Samuel Hopkins and the Hopkins family grappled with the Quaker directive to free the enslaved, we are told about a woman named "Aunt Minty" (page 6). Thom writes: “There was ‘Aunt Minty,’ the well-beloved Mammy. Could they part with her? And there was her mother, a very old woman, who had come over from Africa years before, bringing with her a lump of Guinea gold which she had given to her mistress Hannah.”[1]

Unfortunately, there are a couple big problems with this story. First, Minty wasn’t owned by Samuel Hopkins but rather by an unknown master and then, briefly, by Thom’s grandfather and Samuel’s son, Joseph J. Hopkins. And second, she was freed in 1832, not 1807. Her Deed of Manumission, which I located in the Maryland State Archives online database, reads (emphasis added):

Maryland A A County to wit:

To all whom it may concern be it known that that I Joseph J. Hopkins of said county in the state of Maryland for divers good causes and considerations me thereunto moving as also in further consideration of the sum of one hundred dollars current money to me in hand paid have released from slavery liberated manumitted and set free my negro woman named Minty aged about forty three years Louiza aged about fourteen & their heirs for ever all of which are able to work and gain a sufficient livelihood and maintainance & the said negroes named I do declare to be free manumitted and discharged from all manner of servitude or service to me my executors administrators or assigns for ever.

In testimony whereof I hereunto set my hand and affix my seal this 25th May 1832

Signed sealed and delivered in the presence of Caleb White Isaac H White

 Jos. J Hopkins  (seal)

Minty and Louisa, who was likely Minty's daughter, were fully emancipated in 1832, as were their heirs.[2] But for a price. Minty had to pay Joseph J. Hopkins $100 to secure her and daughter's freedom. $100 in 1832 is equivalent to about $3,000 today (see CPI Inflation Calculator at https://www.officialdata.org/).

It is worth noting that most of the manumissions in this period involved nominal payments of only a few dollars or even cents. Very few involved sums of $100 or more. According to Jessica Millward, only five percent of women manumitted in Anne Arundel county between 1780 and 1840 had to buy their freedom.[3]

Minty is also mentioned in an undated letter from Johns' mother Hannah Hopkins to Johns' younger brother Philip. In the letter (written between 1826 and 1832), Hannah tells her son to "write by Minty." This is precisely the time period during which Minty began to associate with the Hopkins family. 

Life After Manumission

What happened to Minty and Louisa after their manumission in 1832? Minty, about whom I have found the most information, appears to have led a rather precarious life after buying her freedom from Joseph J. Hopkins, never occupying a permanent home of her own except perhaps in 1860. It also appears that she remained close to the Hopkins family.

In 1840, Minty and Louisa probably still lived with Joseph J. Hopkins, which we can infer from the unnamed free Blacks listed in the census at White Hall in that year. In 1850, I found Minty, but not Louisa, living with Sarah Hopkins Janney and Richard M. Janney in Baltimore County at their country estate named Edgely. Next, in 1860, Minty Wells, age 70, lived again in Anne Arundel county, quite near to White Hall. In the federal census for 1860, Minty and Louisa are recorded living with a boy of 15 named Isaac Wells, who is listed as an "apprentice." We do not know Isaac's relationship to Minty and Louisa. The census notes that neither Minta nor Louisa can read or write.

I have not been able to locate Minty or Louisa Wells' places of residence in 1870. At least one document from a Hopkins family members claims that Minty died sometime during or just after the Civil War.

(Ten years later, on the 1880 federal census for New Orleans, a Minty Wells, age 90, is listed living with a woman named Louisa Wallace. Minty is described as a widowed head of household and a mulatto who was born in Maryland. Her occupation is "keeps house." Is this Minty Wells our Minty? Did Louisa marry a man named Wallace? And why did they move to Louisiana?)

Life Before White Hall

Let's go back in time now and ask the question: how and when was Minty Wells acquired by Joseph Janney Hopkins? If Minty worked for or was owned by Joseph Janney longer than two years, she should have appeared on the 1850 census in the household of Hannah Hopkins. But there are no slaves recorded at White's Hall in 1830. We can deduce from these facts that Minty was acquired between 1830 and 1832.

Was Minty related to anyone who may have previously been owned by the Hopkins family and lived at White's Hall in the 18th century? We know only a few of the surnames associated with the enslaved people who lived and worked at White Hall before 1800. The documents I have examined give some clue to possible surnames among this group - Johnson, Parker, Cromwell, and possibly Green. Wells is not among the names I have encountered. Similarly, the first names Minty, Minta, Araminta, or Louisa do not appear in any of the documents at hand. (Of course, Minty could have acquired the last name Wells through marriage. This is a serious possibility as there were free and enslaved Blacks living near White Hall with the surname Wells.) 

There is a second possibility: Joseph J. Hopkins acquired Minty in payment of a debt owed to him or to his father. In Samuel Hopkins' estate inventory, his executors listed a $55 "desperate" debt connected to a man named Zadock Wells. As awful as it sounds, it was common in this period to pay debts with enslaved "property." Sometimes such transactions, including slave sales, were mandated by the courts to reconcile unpaid loans. Thus, Zadock may have given or "sold" Minty and Louisa to Joseph J. Hopkins to settle his debt with the Hopkins family. And then Joseph did the Quakerly thing and quickly manumitted both women.

Addendum: Revisiting Minty’s Origins—A New Quaker Connection

Since first publishing this essay in 2021, a new finding has surfaced that reframes the story of Minty and Louisa Wells’ manumission. In revisiting the original deed of manumission executed by Joseph J. Hopkins on May 25, 1832, I noticed that the two men who served as witnesses to the document were Caleb White and Isaac H. White, prominent Quaker abolitionists with deep connections to antislavery activism in North Carolina.

This detail—overlooked in my earlier analysis—has critical implications. Caleb White (1790–1860) was the elder brother of Miles White (1792–1876), who would later marry Margaret Hopkins, sister of Johns Hopkins, in 1849. Both White brothers were affiliated with the Perquimans Monthly Meeting in northeastern North Carolina, a Quaker community that played a key role in freeing enslaved people and relocating them to free territories in the Midwest and elsewhere. During the 1830s, around the same time the Minty and Louisa arrived at White's Hall, Miles White helped coordinate the resettlement of 133 formerly enslaved people from North Carolina, most of whom were emancipated by Friends under increasing pressure from hostile state laws and angry slave holders. 

Caleb's appearance as a witness to Minty and Louisa’s manumission offers new insights into how and why these two women came to live and work at White’s Hall. It debunks the debt-settlement theory I had previously posited, which hypothesized that Minty may have been transferred to Joseph Hopkins to repay a financial obligation. (I was never comfortable with this theory because Quakers were not allowed to accept slaves as payments for debt and both Joseph and Hannah were very observant Quakers.) In contrast, the presence of Caleb and Isaac White as legal witnesses suggests that Minty and Louisa were almost certainly connected to the Quaker-led freedom migration from North Carolina, as individuals under the supervision of Friends like the Whites.

This revised interpretation also ties the Hopkins and White families together much earlier than previously documented—at least seventeen years before the marriage of Margaret Hopkins and Miles White in 1849. It suggests that Hannah Hopkins and her son Joseph J. Hopkins were already embedded within a regional Quaker emancipationist network by the early 1830s. This, in turn, extends the timeline of the involvement of Johns Hopkins' immediate family in quiet acts of manumission and resettlement—decades before Hopkins’ better-known philanthropic endeavors of the postbellum perioda and a decade and a half before  Johns Hopkins and Miles White contributed to the fund to free the family in Thomas Gross in 1848.

Finally, this finding strengthens my claim that Minty and Louisa Wells were not descended - indeed could not have been descended - from the enslaved individuals freed by Johns Hopkins the Elder or his sisters in the 1778 manumission deed. Their apparent introduction via Quaker emancipationist networks in the 1830s, all support the conclusion that they entered the Hopkins household under entirely different circumstances. Rather than vestiges of the family’s eighteenth-century slaveholding past, Minty and Louisa were likely part of a newer wave of freedom-seeking migrants aided by Quaker coordination and legal maneuvers.

And what about the $100 payment that Minty and Louisa Wells gave to Joseph Hopkins in 1832 as part of their manumission? This may have been money collected by Friends from North Carolina and distributed to those families who, like the Hopkins, were willing to accept Quaker Free Negroes.

As some of my other recent work on the emancipationist efforts of Johns Hopkins' family has also shown, this new information calls for a fuller recognition of the "above ground railroad"—a term applied to the legal, bureaucratic, and interpersonal channels through which freedom was quietly achieved by emancipationist Quakers like the White family of North Carolina and Crenshaw family of Virginia.

READ MORE about this fascinating story in the next essay "Minty Wells, Part 2."

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[1] Helen Hopkins Thom, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette, JHU Press, 1929.

[2] Note that the maximum age for manumission in Maryland at the time was 45.

[3] Jessica Millward, Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland, University of Georgia Press, 2015, p. 47.

Revision Log

7/21/2023: Removed this text - "One obvious possibility is that Minty was the daughter of one of the enslaved people manumitted in 1778 by Johns Hopkins the Elder. There are more than a dozen women among the Group of 1778 who could be Minty's mother, including Nelly Hopkins, who lived adjacent to White Hall (perhaps even in a house on the plantation) in 1810. Other candidates include Lucy, Jenny, Phillis, Dinah, and Debby." In fact, Minty could not have been the child of these women because their subsequent children were also freed when they were manumitted in 1778. Minty could, however, be the daughter of one of the men manumitted in 1778 who may have had children with enslaved women on another planation. The practice of marrying across plantations was very common. 

3/13/2024: Removed text dscussing the possibility is that Minty was purchased after the death of Samuel Hopkins in 1814. There are no enslaved people living at White Hall in 1820 or 1830 according the census.

7/26/25: Added section describing Minty and Louisa Wells' connection to the Quaker Free Negro phenomenon in North Carolina.