Monday, February 8, 2021

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.


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


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.


[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.

[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

[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.

[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

1 comment:

  1. Up until today, I had ignored the link on MSA to Papenfuse's essay on the Disaster Recovery films at the Huntingdon Library. I noted that there were no comments, from which I inferred that most people who saw it, were like me, amateur family historians and primarily motivated to follow a trail that led to filling in blanks on their family trees.
    Having taken the time to read it, I was impressed with the efforts of the professional archivists involved, but also the humanitarian implications of their work.
    Since this was my first visit to this blog, I wanted to see what kind of activity it still attracted and came to this post. It's a moving piece of scholarship, and the kind of work so necessary today to resolve the conflicts that still exist as the products of our history.
    I hope the view meter of your site, evidences more traffic than the number of comments.

    ReplyDelete