Johns Hopkins, Orthodox Quaker

Johns Hopkins: Orthodox Quaker and Emancipationist?

Edward C. Papenfuse

Maryland State Archivist, Retired

Johns Hopkins, who endowed Johns Hopkins University with a munificent bequest at his death in 1873, became a member of the Lombard Street Meeting of Friends on the 8th of June, 1813 and is noted in the membership records of that meeting as ‘disowned,’ no date given.^[1] Why he was disowned is well known, but how he expressed his faith afterwards and how that coincided with his views on slavery and slaveholding deserves clarification, including, perhaps, a careful attention to the meaning of repentance and redemption.

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The beginnings of the Meeting on Lombard Street

Johns Hopkins “disowned” by the Lombard Street Meeting, November 10, 1826, left hand page

Johns Hopkins “disowned” by the Lombard Street Meeting, November 10, 1826, right hand page

The Hopkins family as members of the Lombard Street Meeting. Note the entry concerning Mary Hopkins’s marriage to Benjamin P. Moore. The adjoining page below indicates that they removed to the Eastern Shore from Baltimore.

Mary, (b. 12 June, 1797), daughter of Gerard T. Hopkins, at the age of 20, married Johns Hopkins’s first partner in business, B. P Moore. See: Lombard Street membership, 1807-1837, f. 17. Elizabeth Hopkins, daughter of Gerard T. Hopkins and Johns Hopkins’s forbidden love, was born the 31st of March, 1803, Ibid., f, 17 and also left the meeting in 1839..

Born on Whitehall Plantation in Anne Arundel County into a family of Quakers who once owned slaves, Johns Hopkins,at the age of 17, went to Baltimore to work for his uncle, Gerard Hopkins.^[2] He apprenticed with his uncle in the business of wholesale groceries and never looked back, becoming one of richest, if not the richest banker and insurance broker in Baltimore by the time of his death. It was not always an easy journey, especially in the economic downturn after 1837, again during the panic of 1857, and finally, in the last months of his life, during the panic of 1873. He also found himself in trouble with his Quaker meeting and, for a time, with his uncle over a desire to marry his cousin Elizabeth which forced him to live as a lifelong bachelor and for a number of years, in a hotel room, as he built his fortune and battled cholera which he probably contracted during the severe outbreak of the disease in 1832 in Baltimore.^[3]

https://exhibits.library.jhu.edu/omeka-s/files/original/c01d05567e05677c496c2dbba42149b8dc2120c1.jpg

Evidence of the consequences of the Lombard Street meeting recommending the “disowning “

of Johns Hopkins and Mahlon Hopkins from “having the right of membership with us”

In 1825 and again in 1826, Johns Hopkins and his Brother Mahlon, were investigated by the Lombard Street Friends meeting for selling spirituous liquors, whose meeting house property extended back to Whiskey Lane. Initially both were cleared by the meeting when they told the visiting committee that they would desist, but they did not. Finally the meeting reported them to the Monthly Meeting and they were disowned on November 10, 1826, a decision that was reported by Johns Hopkins’s first partner in business, and cousin-in-law, Benjamin P. Moore, clerk of the Baltimore Monthly Meeting, who had left their partnership in 1824.^[4]

American and Commercial Daily Advertiser

Wednesday, Jan 14, 1824

That did not deter either Mahlon or his brother from continuing to sell whiskey which Johns Hopkins did until the 1840s, shipping large quantities in bulk to Philadelphia for sale.^[5]

Baltimore Commercial Journal, and Lyford's Price-Current

Saturday, Oct 05, 1839, Baltimore, MD, Page: 3

Baltimore Commercial Journal, and Lyford's Price-Current,

Saturday, Mar 14, 1846, Baltimore, MD, Page: 3

The Lombard Street meeting not only disowned Johns Hopkins. The meeting was torn by internal strife over doctrine. In the late 1820s the traveling Quaker preacher, Elias Hicks sparked an internal debate among Friends who split into two camps, Hicksite and Orthodox. The Hicksites were abolitionists in the strictest sense, even refusing to buy and market the produce of slave owners, a stand fatal to the grocery business of Johns Hopkins.^[6] The majority of the Lombard Street Meeting members sided with the Hicksites and in 1839, they would disown Johns Hopkins’s brother Samuel for owning slaves.^[7] Many of the friends and family of Johns Hopkins, unlike Samuel who became an Episcopalian, left the Lombard Street meeting and withdrew to join the ‘Orthodox’ dissenters.

As Phebe Jacobsen explains in her pioneering work on Quaker Records in Maryland:

Orthodox Friends, who separated from the Hicksites at the conclusion of the Yearly Meeting in 1828, found a house on St. Paul Street to use as a place of meeting for the Baltimore Monthly Meeting for the Eastern and Western District, Baltimore Quarterly, and the Yearly Meeting. However, a new Meeting House, referred to as Courtland Street Meeting, was soon erected on a steep hill at the corner of Courtland and Saratoga Streets. In 1867, this property was sold and converted into a colored normal school. Another Meeting House was built on Eutaw Street and continued as the site of the Baltimore Monthly Meeting, Orthodox, until 1921, when it was sold.^[8]

detail from the Thomas Poppleton Map of Baltimore, 1822, showing the location of the Lombard Street Meeting House

By 1830 the Orthodox Friends had built their own meeting house on Courtland Street, having met in rented space for approximately two years. In 1833 the Courtland Street Meeting House was listed in Varle’s guide to Baltimore along with two other meeting houses.^[9]

By 1836, all three Baltimore City meeting houses (Lombard Street, Cortland Street, and Aisquith Street), are found on the Fielding Lucas map of the City, along with the McKendree School House (22) and the Branch Tabernacle (P), which was the last home of the Orthodox Friends before they moved into a new meeting house on Courtland.^[10]

The Orthodox Friends left the Lombard Street meeting in 1828 and went across the street to the McKendree School House, owned by the Methodists. They then established their meeting at the Branch Tabernacle on St. Paul Street until their own meeting house was built nearby on Courtland Street in 1830. Among those who left Lombard Street for the Orthodox meeting were Johns Hopkins’s uncle and aunt, Gerard T. Hopkins (1769-1834) and Dorothy Brooke Hopkins (1776-1857), who were “discontinued by relinquishing” membership in the Lombard Street meeting on the 9th of January 1829, along with several friends and family of Johns Hopkins.^[11]

Although it is not known for certain when Johns Hopkins began attending the Orthodox Meeting, he and his friend Galloway Cheston were members in good standing by 1839, and contributed heavily to the building fund which was used in 1868 to construct the new meeting house at the corner of Eutaw and Monument Street.^[12]

1879 Sanborn map showing the former Courtland and Saratoga Meeting house,

by then a Normal School (colored) for teachers.^[13]

Baltimore Sun, 1867/09/04

1879 Sanborn, detail plate 7 of the Quaker Meeting house which Johns Hopkins apparently attended.

1879 Sanborn,plate 7 detail, JHU campus

1896 Bromley Atlas, Plate 2 detail

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The corner of Eutaw and Monument from Google Maps, dated 2019

In 1921 the Orthodox meeting house and academy at the corner of Eutaw and Monument were sold, and by 2019 the site was a vacant lot.^[14]

It is clear that Johns Hopkins attended the Orthodox Meeting of Friends at the corner of Eutaw and Monument as well as the Courtland Street meeting. The Baltimore Sun’s obituary (December 25, 1873) reported at the time of his death, that he was a member of that meeting, where also a number of the initial trustees of his bequests attended, including the first president of the Board of Trustees, Galloway Cheston .^[15]

The Baltimore Sun, December 25, 1873

When did Johns Hopkins first begin to attend meeting with his Orthodox family and friends? By the middle 1840s he was attending with his mother, Hannah, who moved to Baltimore from the family home at Whitehall in Anne Arundel county, possibly as early as 1840, after the death of Mahlon.

Mahlon Hopkins’s death was reported as far away as Maine in the

February 11, 1840 Portland, Maine, Portland Weekly Advertiser.

Mahlon died at the home he shared with his brother on Sharp Street

Hannah died in February 1846. Three years earlier Johns Hopkins had moved from Sharp street to a larger house, 177 West Lombard Street, possibly to accommodate his mother’s move to Baltimore.

At the time of her death Hannah Hopkins was well known as “a minister on the Orthodox side of Friends”.^[16] As such she was a strong influence on her son. The only surviving highly personal letter in the hand of Johns Hopkins is to his mother written two months after Mahlon’s death. It was carried to his mother at Whitehall plantation by his brother Philip, a partner in Hopkins Brothers, offering to send a doctor to her for medical treatment. In it he writes that

I have led a life of great devotion to worldly prosperity- but in the death of my endeared brother Mahlon a total change has been brought about in my feelings… What is pass’d I have no power to undo one single act and were it not for the redeeming blood, and the divine grace of our dear redeemer where should we find any hope -- Oh my dear mother the Main of sin is strong -- and I have prayed for that grace we are told is sufficient -- may I not (in the mercy) of god have sinned away my day--^[17]

Initially the Orthodox Courtland Street meeting was considered a small splinter group of Orthodox Quakers, according to an account of Dr. Richard H. Thomas (1853-1904) of his father’s joining the meeting. In his memoir, Dr. Thomas recalled reading a letter from his aunt Henrietta to his father (also a doctor) about paying close attention to a cousin who she felt was to be “trusted and advised with.”

About this time, the small orthodox party withdrew from the majority of the Yearly meeting, which as a body had agreed to recognise what were called the Hicksite separatists. A few days after, this cousin met father in the street and asked him, “Well, doctor, which side is thee intending to join?” “Really, cousin ----, I have given it very little thought. I have not decided.” “Well, thee’ll come with us, of course.” ... “ At any rate, I never would join that wretched little body of ‘orthodox’ at the McKendree School House,” sneeringly replied the other, as he walked away. …. My father said to himself, “I will at least see what this ‘wretched little body of orthodox’ is like first.” So he attended their meeting the next First-day, and was so impressed with the weighty solemnity that was over the meeting, that he decided that this was the place for him to remain, and he acted accordingly.^[18]

That this “wretched little body of Orthodox” was also opposed to slavery and to owning slaves, is attested to by Dr. Thomas’s memoir. His father “had courted an attractive young lady successfully,” only to discover that she intended to bring some slaves, a gift from her father, into their home. They could not come to terms and finally she had to choose between her lover and her slaves. She chose her slaves.^[19]

The most powerful influence on the Courtland Street Meeting and in all likelihood Johns Hopkins was the arrival of the affluent Quaker Banker from Norwich, England, Joseph John Gurney. Gurney was received with open arms by the Orthodox meeting where he wrote and published in Baltimore a reasoned attack on the majority of Baltimore Quakers who were Hicksite. It was also in Baltimore that he contemplated and later published his letter to Henry Clay in which he made it clear that Friends should favor immediate emancipation and work assiduously towards that goal including persuading the African tribes that supplied the Atlantic Slave Trade to abandon their role in feeding slaves to a global slave based economy.^[20]

That did not mean however that members of the Orthodox meeting that John”s Hopkins could not hire slaves or free blacks as servants or farm laborers, or for that matter trade in the produce of slave-based plantations. In 1839 Samuel, Johns Hopkins brother was disowned by the Lombard Street meeting for owning two slaves that on the 1840 census were noted as free.^[21] Galloway Cheston, Johns Hopkins’s closest acquaintance, and prominent member of the Courtland/Eutaw street meeting had three such servants in 1850 when he lived next door to Dr. Thomas’s father.^[22] That same year Johns Hopkins had four slaves listed on the slave schedule for his country estate, Clifton, District 2, Baltimore County, but they could easily have been former slaves or ultimately destined to be freed slaves, hired at wages and not ‘owned’ at all by Johns Hopkins.^[23] Such ‘apprenticeship’ and labor contracts were common in Maryland, a practice that did not end until 1867 when it was declared unconstitutional by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.^[24]

Justice Chase was a noted radical abolitionist and a visitor to Clifton during the Civil War when he was Secretary of the Treasury in President Lincoln’s cabinet. By 1863, Johns Hopkins was a decided “emancipationist.” In 1860 the census taker could find no slaves at Clifton and Salmon P. Chase mentioned none on his visit to Clifton in 1863. Instead in his diary for September 26, 1863, Chase describes a bucolic scene followed by a dinner simple but in the best taste:

We reached Mr. Hopkins's about four o'clock. Only two or three of the guests had arrived, and Mr. Hopkins proposed to show us his place. We therefore accompanied him on a walk around the grounds, which are very spacious and beautiful. Extensive graperies with every variety of grapes in rich clusters; a pleasant fruit orchard, the trees of which were loaded with fruit; a vegetable garden, conveniently situated, with commodious and handsome farm buildings near, together with a lake so artistically contrived with islands, trees and shores, as to give it the appearance of great extent,—formed the principal features of this beautiful place. The whole extent of the grounds is about four hundred acres, of which perhaps sixty are used for the purpose just mentioned, while the rest are devoted to farm cultivation. Mr. Hopkins insists that though a gentleman farmer, he contrives to make both ends meet, at the close of each year. His dinner was simple, but excellently prepared and in the best taste. His dessert of grapes exceeded in beauty and variety and flavor anything I had ever seen. My indisposition condemned me to almost total abstinence, much to my regret. The guests were intelligent and substantial men, constituting, as Mr. Hopkins said, the best part of the Baltimore merchants and capitalists. And all of them earnest Union men. And nearly all, if not all, decided Emancipationists. It was about nine o'clock when we left his hospitable mansion and returned to the City, where I soon found myself established in comfortable quarters at Mr. Garrett's.^[25]

Sanborn Insurance Maps, 1879

The Garrett house on Mount Vernon Place where Salmon P. Chase stayed in 1863

and where George Peabody met with Johns Hopkins in 1866 or 1867

Later Johns Hopkins would meet at the same Garrett home with George Peabody and be inspired to leave his fortune in part to found a university, a hospital and a colored orphan asylum.^[26] In the last year of his life, the Black community of Baltimore came to gether to express their appreciation to Johns Hopkins and to praise him for being in the words of Isaac Meyers,

...true to the instincts of his own nature, to the teachings of the Friends’ Society, he persevered, and declared there should be no distinction of race or color with the walls of the noble institution he has founded.

The Baltimore Sun, April 9, 1873

Sadly Johns Hopkins’s dream of Clifton becoming the campus of the university he envisioned never materialized, nor did his 3-400 bed orphan asylum for colored children^[27], but his legacy does live on in a world renowned hospital and university.

While there is no direct evidence to date of Johns Hopkins ever owning slaves, there is no question that by 1860 he neither owned or had slaves in his employ. Indeed he favored emancipation by 1863 and supported the abolition of slavery in Maryland which took place on November 1, 1864, several months before the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.^[28] Even if it is established that in the years leading up to the Civil War he took on on term slaves in payment of debts owed by his Southern customers, his Orthodox Meeting, his mother, and he believed in emancipation, and in using his considerable fortune to benefit the whole population of Maryland regardless of color. How he made that fortune is a question that remains to be answered.

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[1]U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935, Maryland, Baltimore, Baltimore Preparative Meeting, Western District Minutes, 1823-1843, Ancestry.com. Link only works with a membership log on.

[2] There is no evidence among the surviving manumission records of Samuel Hopkins, Johns Hopkin’s father ever manumitting a slave, although his first biographer, Helen Hopkins Thom (1929), asserts that Samuel freed his slaves in 1807. It is plausible that he converted his slaves to term slaves promising freedom at a specific age.

[3] According to Helen Hopkins Thom, Johns Hopkins, a silhouette, 1929, p. 28, after having lived with his Uncle Gerard until the fall out over Elizabeth, Johns Hopkins moved to Beltzhoover’s Indian Queen Hotel, until he suffered an attack of Cholera and moved “to one of two houses on Franklin and St. Paul streets left to him by his father, taking his two brothers with him.” According to the 1835/36 Baltimore City Directory, by the time the directory was compiled, Johns Hopkins was living at Franklin Street, the second door from St Paul. There are no entries for where Johns Hopkins was living in the extant directories before the 1835/1836 directory. For the Cholera pandemic as it affected Baltimore in 1832, see: Baltimore City Health Department : the first thirty-five annual reports, 1815-1849, Baltimore (Md.). Health Department. Baltimore : Commissioner of Health of Baltimore, Md., 1953 . There were 877 deaths from cholera in Baltimore in 1832. Of these at least 351 were colored.

[4] Baltimore Preparative Meeting [Lombard Street], Western District,Minutes, 1823-1843, images 40,43. Ancestry.com. Johns Hopkins attended the wedding of Mary Hopkins, daughter of Gerard T. Hopkins, to Benjamin P. Moore as one of the required witnesses. May 21, 1817 at Lombard Street Meeting.

[5] See for example the 40 barrels of whiskey dispatched to Philadelphia on the Schooner Elizabeth Jane, Baltimore Commercial Journal and Lyford’s Prices Current for 10/05/1839, also The American and Commercial Daily Advertiser for May 28, 1847.

[6] Elias Hicks (1834). Letters of Elias Hicks, Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendents, (1811). Isaac T. Hopper. pp. 11, 12..

[7]1839 is an important year for the family of Johns Hopkins. Many withdrew from the Lombard Street Meeting that year and moved to the Orthodox meeting on Courtland Street. Samuel may have been read out of meeting for owning slaves, but according to the family genealogy he also could have been discontinued for marrying an Episcopalian,and was buried as such. It is also debatable whether or not he actually owned slaves. In the 1840 census he had two free Blacks in his household and no slaves.

[8] Jacobsen, Phebe R. Quaker Records in Maryland. Annapolis: Hall of Records Commission, State of Maryland, 1966, p. 93. Phebe was instrumental in having the extant Quaker records in Maryland microfilmed and provided this excellent Guide to those records. While most of the records have been removed to Haverford and Swarthmore, the microfilm remains in the custody of the Maryland State Archives where they have been imaged and are available on Archives computers.

[9] Varle, Charles. A Complete View of Baltimore, with a Statistical Sketch: Of All the Commercial, Mercantile, Manufacturing, Literary, Scientific, and Religious Institutions and Establishments, in the Same and in Its Vicinity for Fifteen Miles Around, Derived from Personal Observation and Research into the Most Authentic Sources of Information. Baltimore, Maryland: Samuel Young, 1833, p

[10]The Hicksite Lombard Street meeting remained on Lombard Street until 1887, when, after the default of the meeting’s treasurer (he misplaced over $6,000), it was sold to a merchant who leased or sold the building to Warder, Bushnell & Glessner, who appear on the 1896 Bromley Atlas of Baltimore City. See The Daily Sentinel (Garden City, Kansas, June 1, 1887, p. 1, for an account of the treasurer’s default. While the predecessor firm of International Harvester farm machinery, Warder, Busnell & Glessner, are long gone from what was 307 West Lombard Street. the name Warder lives on in Baltimore. The Baltimore city police department has a series of crime scenes in miniature created by the only daughter of John Warder which are used in the instruction of detectives on the force. See: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-woman-who-invented-forensics-training-with-doll-houses. The first substantial building housing the Friends School, now on North Charles Street, was constructed in front of the Lombard Street Meeting House. See

Dean R. Esslinger, Friends for Two Hundred Years, 1983, When the Lombard Street Meeting House property was sold in 1887, Friends School moved with the meeting to their new home on Park Avenue.

[11] for the obituary for Gerard T. Hopkins, see: BALTIMORE PATRIOT & MERCANTILE ADVERTISER, Saturday, Mar 29, 1834, Baltimore, MD, Vol: XLII Issue: 251, Page: 3. For Dorothy Brooke Hopkins see: the Baltimore Sun, Wednesday, Dec 16, 1857, Baltimore, MD, Vol: XLII, Issue: 25, Page: 2. For a recent analysis of PROPERTIES OF MEETINGS IN BALTIMORE YEARLY MEETINGS, see; http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/friends/BYM/Property.pdf. The author notes the removal of the dissident members of the Lombard Street meeting, see: Thomas C. Hill (815 Old Turner Mountain Lane Charlottesville, VA 22901-6355, QuakerTomHill@gmail.com). Richard Townsend in his diary records the initial departure from the Lombard Street meeting that took place in 1828:

our Yearly Meeting came on; and at this session, the two parties, into which the Society had been steadily forming itself, during the past five years, divided and separated* The orthodox party, however, very small in number, went off by themselves during the Session of the Yearly Meeting:- into the McKendrean School House; on the N. side of Lombard Street; about a square above, where the old Yearly Meeting, was sitting. ...

On the ensuing First day, after the Yearly Meeting, the orthodox - who it appears had determined, fully to separate from Friends;- opened their first public meeting, in the Branch Tabernacle; on St. Paul Street;- a sort of half school-house, half meeting-house; built by the late Charles Garfield, and rented by them, of him:- The names of the principal persons, Baltimoreans, males, who left our Yearly Meeting, at this time:- were Gerard T. Hopkins, Jacob Tyson, James Gillingham, Daniel Cobb, George Williamson, William Dallam, Nicholas Popplein, Hugh Balderston, Ennion Williams, Isaac Brooks, William W. Handy, Samuel Carey, William Procter, Joseph King, Junior. Besides these, there were some who had once been members of Society: and were in the habit of attending Friends meetings:-Ely Balderston, Samuel Harris,Samuel Wilson, of In., Daniel Howland, Thomas Wilson, of In. Here they continued, perhaps a year, in the Tabernacle; when they built the meeting house they now occupy, at the corner of Courtland and Saratoga Streets, Townsend Diary transcripts, Enoch Pratt Library, pp. 125-127.

[12] Perhaps it was no coincidence that the meeting's new home would prove to be within a short walking distance of what would become the first campus of the University Johns Hopkins so richly endowed and which bears his name.Mallonee, Barbara C. et. al. Minute By Minute. A History of the Baltimore Monthly Meetings of Friends Homewood and Stony Run. Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore Monthly Meetings of Friends, 1992, pp., 61-62. Curiously, ECP's copy of this book was the one inscribed by the authors and presented to the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of the Johns Hopkins University “in celebration of the contribution of Baltimore Quakers to the life of the University”. It was purchased by ECP from Wonder Books in December, 2020.

[13] see: deed from the Meeting to Trustees of Normal School for Teachers (1868) including Francis King, John W. Locks, BALTIMORE CITY SUPERIOR COURT (Land Records) 1868-1868 GR 367, pp. 0149-0150 [2 images] MSA CE 168-375, on Block 604, BALTIMORE CITY SUPERIOR COURT (Block Book) 1851-1886, 596-615, p. 0163 MSA CE 9-26.

[14] Eutaw Street Meeting, acquired and sold: Baltimore City Land Records, 1864/03/02 AM 2246/156-157; 1918/01/05 SCL 3179/385; 1921/5/4 SCL 3721/426-427 with covenant not to sell to Negroes for at least seven years …. These land records can be found on http://mdlandrec.net. The ground rents for the property were extinguished in 1877 according to The Baltimore Sun, March 27,1877, p. 4.

[15] I am indebted to Stan Becker for his assistance in helping untangle the records of the two Orthodox meetings, Lombard and Courtland/Eutaw as they related to the meeting that Johns Hopkins attended after his .

[16] Townsend Diary, p. 352, Enoch Pratt Library Transcripts

[17] https://medicalarchivescatalog.jhmi.edu/jhmi_permalink.html?key=276434

[18] Thomas, Richard Henry, Anna Braithwaite Thomas, and Robert B. Warder. Richard H. Thomas, M.D. Life and Letters. London: Headley Bros, 1905, pp. 53-54..

[19] Ibid.

[20] See: Martha Schoolman & Jared Hickman (2011) Atlantic Studies, Atlantic Studies, 8:2, 133-140, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2011.565553, https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2011.565553

[21] Samuel Hopkins, Johns Hopkins’s brother and partner in the sale of spirituous liquors was read out of meeting for “ having in his family two slaves” (Minutes of the 1839 Baltimore Monthly Meeting of Eastern and Western Districts, p 521. I am grateful to Stan Becker for this reference. By the 1840 census the two ‘slaves’ were noted as ‘free’.

[22] 1850, U.S. Census, 13th Ward, Baltimore City. The most exhaustive work to date on Quakers and Slavery is Thomas Edward Drake. . Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr, 1950. See especially his assessment of the Orthodox Quakers in 1829 on Slavery, 134, their rejection of the radical views of English Quakers, 143, and the matter of buying only free produce, 172-173. Clearly not all Orthodox Quakers, particularly those in Virginia and Baltimore, favored buying only produce produced by free labor, but the Orthodox Friends stood firm against slavery and the ownership of slaves. See Professor Drake, p 134, citing The Testimony of the Society of Friends on the continent of America (Philadelphia, 1830), p. 29.

[23] The instructions to the census takers used the term “slaves’ broadly to encompass any Black workers they found that could not produce proof they were ‘free’. In this era of absolutes, care must be taken in asserting who did or did not ‘own’ slaves and what their attitudes were towards ending slavery. The evidence to date as to whether or not Johns Hopkins of University fame owned slaves is inconclusive at best. There were contemporary Johns Hopkins, one in Prince George's County and the other on York Road in Baltimore County who did own slaves. The latter was a Quaker who despite his ownership of slaves was buried in the Friends cemetery on Harford Road. Being a Quaker, even some who attended a Hicksite meeting, did not mean being an immediate or radical abolitionist of the ilk of William Lloyd Garrison.

[24] Johns Hopkins father had at least one such contract in 1897 for two young negroes who were to learn the trade of planter before they were freed at the age of 21. See: https://exhibits.library.jhu.edu/omeka-s/s/johnshopkinsbiographicalarchive/item/2862. See: Stephen T. Whitman, The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in Baltimore and Early National Maryland. New York: Routledge, 2000, and Stephen T. Whitman, Challenging Slavery in the Chesapeake: Black and White Resistance to Human Bondage, 1775-1865. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2007. <http://books.google.com/books?id=O5B4AAAAMAAJ>

[25] The Salmon P. Chase Papers, VOLUME 1, Journals, 1829—1872, John Niven, Editor, James P. McClure, Senior Associate Editor, Leigh Johnsen, Associate Editor’ William M. Ferraro, Assistant Editor, Steve Leikin, Assistant Editor, The Kent State University Press, 1993, p. 455. Garrett’s home was 50 Mount Vernon Place, today 12 East Mount Vernon Place , the same house in which Johns Hopkins would later meet with George Peabody (1866/67) and, according to one author, was inspired to create the University, the Hospital and the Orphanage for Colored Orphans. “George Peabody, 1795-1869: His Influence on Educational Philanthropy”, by Franklin Parker, Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 78, No. 2 (2003), p. 112. Parker’s article is not entirely factual. He asserts Hopkins was married, but he was not. I am indebted to Lance Humphries for the information about Garrett’s Mount Vernon residence in 1863 and 1866/67.

[26] Ibid.

[27] http://www.rememberingbaltimore.net/2020/12/whatever-happened-to-birdie-shine.html

[28] The fifteen Amendment was passed by Congress in January 1865 and ratified on December 6, 1865. Maryland abolished with the adoption of a new State Constitution which went into effect on November 1, 1864. See: https://msa.maryland.gov/msa/speccol/sc2600/sc2685/html/conv1864.html

Frederick Douglass, the Edmondson Sisters, and Macedon, New York

Baltimore, Maryland,

Rochester, and Macedon New York:

Frederick Douglass and the Edmondson Sisters

as an introduction to

The First Volume of the Town Records

of Macedon, New York (1823-1851)

by

Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse

Maryland State Archivist and Commissioner of Land Patents, retired

Macedon, 1853

detail from https://www.loc.gov/item/2009579478/

All meaningful history is local in nature. It is through local connections and local examples that the fabric of American Society is best explained and understood as long as they are connected and placed in the context of the collective history of the nation. Macedon New York did not exist in isolation. Those who lived and worked there, and those who passed through, left trails of connectivity to the major and minor issues of the day. In the period covered by this first volume of the Macedon Town Records, there are are ties to model philosophies of local government, general education, and the ultimately successful efforts to remove the stain of slavery from the nation that deserve further exploration and accurate story telling.

This mold-stained, water damaged volume of the first records of the town of Macedon is a survivor, symbolic of the resilience of the local body politic to changing times. Most of it is nearly legible, despite its neglect over the years. Salvaged once in the1970s and used to convince a local congressman to sponsor legislation designed to save it and other precious public records from further decay, the legislation passed to great fanfare, only to see this volume relegated to a bottom drawer in a file cabinet where it was later inundated by water from a nearby bathroom. Sally Millick, working with Judy Gravino, the Macedon town clerk, and others who realized the importance of the history it contained, were determined that this time the volume would get proper attention and a permanent archival home. A conservator cleaned and stabilized the contents. Kirtas Technologies, Inc., with support from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, scanned the pages for the bound volume reprint edition of which this introduction is a part. The Maryland State Archives, scanned the conserved pages for an on-line ebook, and rebound the original in protective polyester for the Town of Macedon as a permanent memorial to a former Macedon Town Attorney, Supervisor, and Wayne County District Attorney, John M. Wilson, and his aunt Sara E. Wilson, who, in the 1960s, saved it from being lost altogether.

The journey to save this priceless volume documenting the first decades of town government in Macedon New York began for me in 1962 with the sudden death of my uncle John M. Wilson who had just been elected district attorney for Wayne County. He had given Sara E. Wilson the volume along with a 1904 atlas and an 1877 history of Wayne County for safekeeping, which she in turn passed on to me to see to their preservation and use.

In 1973 my career path led to becoming the Assistant State Archivist for Maryland, after having worked in the offices of Congresswoman Jessica McCullough Weis and Frank Horton (both of whom represented Macedon in Congress), and at the American Historical Association (AHA). While at the AHA, I served as liaison and staff to a committee headed by Charles Lee, Archivist of South Carolina, that was determined to expand the role of the National Historical Publications Commission (NHPC) to include the preservation of records, particularly state and local records. I convinced my former employer, Frank Horton, the then ranking minority member on the Government Operations Committee of the House of Representatives, to co-sponsor the legislation in the House along with his chairman. I was able to do so in part by showing him this volume and suggesting that once I had it properly boxed at my own expense, he might want to give it back to the town in a special ceremony at the dedication of the then new canal park on July 3, 1973. He liked the idea and combined the presentation back to the town with a press release explaining the importance of the new legislation placing the 'R' in the NHPC. Unfortunately the recipients, the Macedon Historical Society, did not have the resources at the time to care for it properly, and eventually it was relegated to a bottom drawer of a file cabinet at their headquarters that became rusted shut after a plumbing accident.

While not all the pages of the volume are legible here, the recent advances in technology raise hopes that even more will be readable in the future once the techniques of imaging have been refined by Roger Easton, Bill Christens-Barry, Fennella France, and their colleagues. Fortunately the ink used in the writing of the volume has left a residue that may be possible to extract in greater detail, although the process at the moment needs further testing and is currently very expensive.

The journey of the town records from Macedon to Maryland and back, is the story of the quest to preserve permanently the rich local history of the past and to place it in the context of the struggle to establish a government responsive to the needs and dreams of all its citizens.

The volume itself is but a bare outline of the concerns and actions of local town government in Macedon from 1823, when it was part of Ontario County, until the prosperous pre-civil war years of the 1850s, by which time it had been incorporated into Wayne County. It records the outcome of local elections and provides insight into who was charged with administering local affairs including the assessment of property and the collection of taxes. Cattle and sheep marks are recorded to help recognize who owned wandering animals and to help prevent theft. It concerns itself with roads, schools and the outline of who was elected to conduct the town's business from 1823 to 1851. Clearly the emphasis in this volume is keeping the roads in good order, resolving disputes over where roads ran, and meeting the educational requirements of the State which called for uniform school districts with overseers, supervisors, standard text books and an accounting of the students served. Indeed periodically the text books to be found in the school district libraries were listed in this volume. My grandmother Pearl Wilson (sister-in-law of Sara E. Wilson) was the last teacher at Macedon District #4 school house. She salvaged a couple of the original texts from the trash which she passed on to me, including a well worn copy of one of arithmetic primers listed in the earliest accounting of texts (Nathan Daboll's Schoolmaster's Assistant owned by Orran Green of Macedon), and book no. 67, District No. 4, which is an 1840 history of Spain and Portugal featuring a glowing chapter on the period of African rule over Spain.

The traditions of education and local government found here are largely New England in origin with the town meeting at the center of local affairs, the town clerk charged with recording all actions of the meeting, and the justices of the peace left to keep the peace among neighbors. Yet no matter how bare the outline, the stories this volume helps tell of family and place, and their geographical reach is far greater than it first might seem.

Macedon and its residents in the period covered by this volume were active players in the movement to abolish slavery and promote citizenry among all Americans regardless of color. The Erie Canal brought farmers and nurserymen to the town with its fulfilled promise of affordable transportation of goods and services. Crops, fruits, and manufactured goods made their way to Albany and beyond. It was a time of growth and optimism in which religion played a major role. Macedon was in what came to be known as the 'burnt over region' for the large number of proselytizing religious groups that lived there. Among them were the Quakers who allied themselves with the increasingly activist and vocal anti-slavery movement.

The Quaker emphasis was on education, improving responsive and responsible local government, and a political end to slavery. Their chief supporter in all these efforts in Macedon was Gerrit Smith who brought his Liberty Party Convention to Macedon in June of 1847, and Frederick Douglass, the former slave from Maryland who moved to Rochester the following December. In Macedon, Gerrit Smith was allied with Asa Smith and his son William R. Smith, who lived across from each other on what is now the Victor road . The house has been identified as still standing by local historians Charles Lenhart and Marjorie Perez. It clearly deserves recognition on the National Register of Historic places, as well as an explanation on the New York web site devoted to the underground railroad. Sally Millick, Charles Lenhart, Wayne County historian Peter Evans, former Wayne County Historian Marjorie Perez and Sue Jane Evans of the Pultneyville Historical Society in fact deserve enormous credit and praise for their efforts to rediscover the Abolitionists, Underground Railroad agents and Afro-American history in Wayne County. Without their aid and careful research the importance of the connections between Macedon and Maryland would remain broken and forgotten.

https://www.google.com/maps/@43.0497395,-77.3363091,3a,15y,149.4h,89.41t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sWbFJHZNGLt8mszixXhPvUg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

With backing from Gerrit Smith and personal visits from Douglass, William R. Smith opened a school in his home for runaway slaves and former slaves to aid them on their way to freedom in Canada and to prepare some who remained for the Abolitionist lecture circuit, part of the 7,000 sought by the Liberty Party as teachers and civil activists. Willliam R. Smith would later be the unsuccessful Liberty Party candidate for governor of New York, and would fall victim to the stringent Fugitive Slave Law that came in 1850 as a Southern reaction to the increasing success of the underground railroad movement in arousing the ire and fear of slave owners with regard to the loss of their labor force.

detail from: https://www.loc.gov/item/2009579478/

Gerrit Smith's allies took a different tact from the abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison (himself a former Marylander whose mother continued to live in Baltimore until her death). Garrison believed the Constitution created slavery and ought to be ignored, instructing his supporters to not participate in the political process, but to work to overthrow it. Gerrit Smith believed in working within the system to a degree, mounting a political party of his own, and ultimately serving a term in Congress as an independent. As he did not recognize human beings as property, he conscienced aiding and abetting their escape from slavery, working at the same time to change the laws that legitimized the institution in some states, and to mount a campaign of education that would unlock the minds and promote the citizenry of the enslaved.

For four days in June, 1847, the town of Macedon was the center of the political universe, at least for those abolitionists who had formed their own political movement which they called the Liberty Party. There they nominated Gerrit Smith for President of the United States. Their proposed reforms extended to the abolition of the post office monopoly opening it up to competition, a measure that would not be enacted for over another century, but their main issue was slavery. "We hold slavery to be illegal and unconstitutional, and that the Federal Government is bound to secure its abolition by the guaranty, to every State in this Union, of a republican form of government. If the South demurs, let her, peacefully, withdraw from the Union." "Give us seven thousand men in this great nation who will hold up by their votes and their teachings, the great fundamental principles and objects of civil government, as God and nature have established them, and we are fully persuaded that it will be the most powerful political party in the nation or the world. It will be a great teacher of the long neglected but vitally important sciences of civil government, of political morality, of political economy."

William R. Smith was inspired by the principles set forth by the Liberty Party, and would stand as its candidate for Governor, but he was also a man of action who believed that education was the key to good citizenship. Throughout this volume there is a constant refrain that there were no colored students attending Macedon schools, yet they were taught at William R. Smith's home on the Victor road. Because the Macedon school for free and runaway Negroes founded by William R. Smith, and funded by the Presidential candidate of the Liberal Party, Gerrit Smith, was, in the eyes of Federal law, illegal when it aided runaway slaves, little has survived of the actual records of the school. It is known that in 1848 Smith taught the two recently freed Edmondson sisters, seen below in plaid wraps and bonnets, at a Liberal Party/Abolitionist rally attended by Frederick Douglass.

https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_L_NPG.19.95

William R. Smith also welcomed Myrtilla Minor to his home and school as possibly a teacher or at least to be inspired by her association with him and his friends. From correspondence on line from the Clements Library written from Macedon, Minor outlined her future plans as a teacher. She went on, with support from abolitionist friends, to found the first school for Free Blacks in the District of Columbia, where she was joined for a time by Emily Edmon[d]son.

It is also known that William R. Smith had a close working relationship with Frederick Douglass, and probably played a role with the Gerrit Smith and Amy Post families in weaning him away from the radical abolitionist policies of William Lloyd Garrison to the ideals of Smith and the Liberty Party. It is not known when Frederick Douglass first met William R. Smith, but by September 11, 1849, he was writing from Macedon on his way to attend the funeral of Hannah Sexton, wife of a prominent Quaker Banker who held mortgages on many of the farms and nurseries in Macedon and Palmyra. At least one letter survives from William R. Smith to Douglass in the fall of 1851 which was published in the Frederick Douglass' Paper, when Smith was deeply immersed in the William Chaplin case. In July 1852, Douglass probably went to Smith's house in Macedon to "spend a day ...with a view to aid him in drawing up a statement of the facts in the case [of William Chaplin's default in raising repayment of the bond for his release from prison]."

The story of the Macedon Abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, the Edmon[d]son sisters and Willliam Chaplin are very much a part of the fabric of the history encompassed by these town minutes. William R. Smith served as Inspector of the Common Schools in 1833, 1837, and 1838, and at times an overseer of the roads. William R. Smith's father, Asa, appears in the records as one of the first Assessors as well as often as an overseer of the roads, and as a Commissioner and Inspector of Common Schools. To obtain a fuller account of Macedon's participation in the effort to abolish slavery, the record needs to be expanded to encompass the lives of those that Gerrit and William R. Smith took under their wings, sheltering and seeking to teach them to read, write, and be well informed citizens. The road to freedom leads back to Maryland, where the citizens of Macedon came face to face with the evils of slavery and engaged their enemy. The records they left behind not only document the road to freedom, they provide an expanded insight into the operations of the legal system in Maryland and the charitable giving of Marylanders in a State where slavery was legal until 1864, and supporters of slavery controlled most aspects of the political world.

Two good books have been written about the ship Pearl, one by Josephine F. Pacheco and the other by Mary Kay Ricks. Abolitionists chartered it with the intent of aiding slaves working in Washington D. C. to escape to freedom. In the Spring of 1848 seventy-six slaves fled on Pearl, but were caught on the Potomac by a chasing steamship when the wind failed. On board were the Edmon[d]son sisters, Mary and Emily, children of a free black Maryland farmer and his slave wife (slavery descended through the mother). As punishment for attempting to escape, the sisters were about to be sold into prostitution at New Orleans, when they were purchased with funds raised by the Abolitionists who had encouraged them to flee in the first place. Further fund raising efforts by such as Henry Ward Beecher, brother to the future author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, to assist in their education, floundered until a benefactor, possibly General William Chaplin, came to their aid, sending them in 1849 to attend William R. Smith's school in Macedon. Chaplin in turn became more aggressive in his efforts to free Washington slaves, aiding Garland and Allen, the body servants of Congressman Robert Augustus Toombs and Senator Alexander H. Stephens to escape by coach one night in the summer of 1850, probably on their way to William R. Smith's farm. They were caught on the edge of the District of Columbia, and shots were fired. Ultimately it was determined that they had passed into Maryland (the penalties were harsher there) and jurisdiction over the case was transferred to Maryland courts. William R. Smith wrote a spirited defense of his erstwhile friend Chaplin, attacking the Maryland court system and complaining that excessive bail was used as an unconstitutional deterrent. When Chaplin refused to raise funds to help pay back the bond that set him free (nearly $2,000 in a day when a normal bond for allegedly attempting to steal property would not have exceeded $250), Smith and Frederick Douglass pondered what they should do next. It was to no avail. In the meantime, Congress had passed the fugitive slave law which meant that those aiding and abetting escaped slaves faced harsh punishment and the effective use of the courts to suppress those who aided escaping slaves. It is perhaps no coincidence that when William R. Smith's daughter ran off with a farm hand and Smith forcibly brought her back, he was charged with kidnapping and pursued vigorously in the courts to the point where he was forced to leave Macedon and sell his farm. While the farm hand brought the suit, it is unlikely he had the money to do so, and possibly was financed by pro-slavery elements intent on suppressing the efforts of Smith and his friends to aid and educate runaway slaves.

The Country Gentleman, Volume 3

Edited by Luther Tucker and John J. Thomas

Published by Luther Tucker, No. 395 Broadway, Corner of Hudson Street, Albany , N.Y.

January to July 1854, p. 130

William R. Smith ultimately ended up in California, after first relocating to Delaware and the Midwest.

The tradition of protecting and advancing the rights of others continued in Macedon, long after William R. Smith found it necessary to leave. As migrant labor from the South became increasingly important to the planting and harvesting of crops throughout Wayne County in the 20th century, relations between migrants and farmers at time became strained. John M. Wilson, Macedon Town Attorney and Supervisor before he was elected Wayne County District Attorney, was assigned the defense of a migrant worker accused of murdering his employer. My earliest memories of the courthouse in Lyons are attending the trial in which my uncle defended Moses Tunstill. He lost the case at trial, but believed so strongly that justice had not been served that he appealed as Moses's pro-bono lawyer. He won the appeal, Moses was freed, and the case today stands as a precedent in N.Y. for the administration of justice to the accused.

All meaningful history is local in nature, but to ensure that meaning is extracted, local records must be preserved and accessible for persistent consultation, review, and extrapolation. This volume is a survivor, but with its restoration to the Town, comes a lesson hopefully learned. We need to better preserve and care for the fragmentary evidence of the past, if we are to chart a better course for the future. Both the original of this volume and its images need to be placed in a safe and secure environment in which its pages can be transcribed, edited, and annotated in a manner that engages as many interested parties as possible and saves the results in a permanent, update-able, readily accessible, and search-able format.

As a tribute to the Maryland connections, I have placed the electronic images in an ebook that can be edited, annotated, and improved over time as part of the permanent electronic archives of the State of Maryland at: http://mdhistory.net/macedon_ny/macedon_ny_town_records/html/index.html. When better images become available, they will be added, and as pages are transcribed and edited they will be accessible through the universally available search engines of Google, Bing, and their successors.

NOTE: First posted June 13, 2010; corrections August 18, 2010, and November 27, 2010, with particular appreciation to Charles Lenhart without whose detailed notes and erudite observations this essay introduction to the first Volume of Macedon Town Records would not have been possible. Much of the research on the W.R. Smith site and Smith is documented and derived from Judith Wellman and Marjory Allen Perez, with Charles Lenhart and others, Survey of Sites Relating to the Underground Railroad, Abolitionism, and African American Life in Wayne County, New York, 1820-1880 (Lyons, New York: Wayne County Historian's Office, 2009), which is excerpted here with permission of the authors. JudithWellman also recommends Stanley Harrold's Subversives: The Anti-Slavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (2003) on the Edmonson sisters. Upon their release from slavery, the Edmondson sisters came directly to. At least one of them lived for a time with William R. Smith and Eliza Smith in Macedon. The records were returned to the Town of Macedon in a special ceremony before the town board on September 23, 2010. My comments included a charge to the Board reported in the Wayne Post:

“These volumes don’t just simply represent the essence of democracy here, the way in which you all attempt to give the services to the people of this town that they deserve. They also are very much connected with the fabric of the whole of American history. I charge you with the responsibility of seeing to their permanent and long term care and preservation and of making them accessible, but also to help use them in such a way that they teach each generation the importance of local government.”

Contents

There are 369 images of pages and fragments in the on-line ebook.

First image

Last Image

A version of this essay is also available on the blog http://marylandarchivist.blogspot.com.