A group of Maryland historians and genealogists is pushing back on the widely repeated claim that Johns Hopkins, the 19th-century Baltimore philanthropist behind the city’s university and hospital, was a slaveholder. In a new peer-reviewed paper, they argue that the government census slave schedules cited in 2020 do not, on their own, prove that Hopkins legally owned enslaved people and have to be interpreted alongside other archival records.
As reported by The Baltimore Sun, the research team is led by Sydney Van Morgan, with co-authors Edward C. Papenfuse, Samuel B. Hopkins, and Stan Becker. The Sun notes that the group spent years digging through archives before publishing its findings in a peer-reviewed venue.
New Paper Says the Census Is Not the Last Word
The authors say their five-year investigation turned up manumission deeds, tax ledgers, and contemporaneous documents about how the census was taken, all of which complicate a simple reading of the slave schedules. In a paper published in Maryland Historical Magazine, the team contends that a 15-year-old listed at a Hopkins Baltimore address in 1840 was actually the property of Samuel Hopkins Jr., and that tax records show Samuel, not Johns, paying taxes on that enslaved person.
How the University’s 2020 Disclosure Landed
Johns Hopkins University publicly stated in December 2020 that federal census records listed one enslaved person in Hopkins’ household in 1840 and four in 1850. That acknowledgement came in an open message from the university presidency and quickly reshaped the public story about its namesake. In its coverage of the new research, The Baltimore Sun notes that university officials now say the Maryland Historical Magazine article concludes that the census slave schedule alone cannot prove Hopkins owned enslaved people, and also cannot, by itself, prove that he did not.
Why the Evidence Is So Murky
Historians caution that mid-19th-century urban census returns, local labor customs, and on-and-off construction work can blur whether people listed at an address were actually enslaved by that household or were temporarily present as hired laborers or contractors. The Maryland Historical Magazine article describes how properties such as the Clifton estate hosted a “small army” of contractors, artisans, and itinerant workers during renovation projects, a detail the authors say makes any straightforward reading of the slave schedules risky at best.
Local Legacy and What Comes Next
The renewed debate is unfolding alongside Hopkins’ well-documented philanthropic directives. In his 1873 will, he instructed trustees to create a hospital to serve the indigent “without regard to sex, age or color” and to establish an orphan asylum for Black children, language that appears in the Johns Hopkins Biographical Archive. Local coverage and academic commentary say the Maryland Historical Magazine paper brings substantial new evidence to the table but stops short of settling the question; both the scholars and university representatives are calling for more archival digging and ongoing public conversation, according to reporting by CBS Baltimore.
For Baltimore, it is a reminder that institutional histories rarely come in neat packages and that even well-known figures can sit in a cloud of archival ambiguity. The Maryland Historical Magazine study has reintroduced uncertainty into a high-profile claim and highlighted just how much research and how many more documents may still stand between the city and firmer answers about Johns Hopkins and the people connected to his properties.
