Johns Hopkins

This article is about the Quaker philanthropist. For the university that bears his name, see Johns Hopkins University.

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Johns Hopkins (May 19, 1795, Anne Arundel County, Maryland – December 24, 1873, Baltimore ) was a wealthy entrepreneur, philanthropist, and abolitionist of 19th century Baltimore, now most noted for his philanthropic creation of the institutions that bear his name, such as the Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Birthplace, family and name

On May 19, 1795, Johns Hopkins was born on Whitehall, a 500-acre (two km²) tobacco plantation with approximately 500 slaves located in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. The site of this plantation is now close to the intersection of Reidel Road and Johns Hopkins Road in a new community in Maryland named Crofton. In the 1660s, approximately one hundred thirty five years before Johns Hopkins' birth, Gerrard Hopkins, a member of the Church of England was the first member of the paternal side of this branch of the Hopkins' family. He emigrated from Canterbury, England and settled in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. According to one of Crofton's online sites, "The Hopkins family was in the Crofton area for 270 years and accumulated more than 1000 acres (4 km²) of land".

Johns Hopkins, who was nicknamed "Johnsie", was the second son and the second child of the eleven children of Samuel, and Hannah Janney, Hopkins. His mother, Hannah Janney, was born in Loudoun County, Virginia. Maryland-born Samuel Hopkins, and Virginia-born Hannah Janney were married in a Quaker ceremony on August 19, 1792. When they married Samuel Hopkins, born in 1759, was 33 and Hannah Janney, born in 1774, was 18.

Johns Hopkins' first name, "Johns", is and was then an unusual first name for a child. However, a tradition of naming sons of the Hopkins' family "Johns" began in the second generation after Gerrard Hopkins settled in Anne Arundel County. Gerrard Hopkins married Thomasin Eard. They had four children: three girls and a boy whom they named Gerrard. This Gerrard Hopkins married Margaret Johns in a Quaker ceremony. "Johns", the wife's surname, was the first name they gave their tenth and last child. The first name "Johns" was given second to the first Johns Hopkins' oldest son, and then to the sons of Samuel and Philip Hopkins, the first and second sons of the first Johns Hopkins, by his third wife.

A tradition of adherence to the Quaker faith also emerged in the second generation after this branch of the Hopkins' family's arrival in Anne Arundel County. Unlike the Hopkins' family, Johns Hopkins' mother's family, the Janneys were Quakers before they emigrated from Cheshire, England. The paternal ancestor of Johns Hopkins' mother's family was a preacher who had been prosecuted in England because of his Quaker faith. Thomas Janney arrived in America with his family in the 1680s. He settled first in a Quaker settlement in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Later the Janney family moved to Loudoun County in Virginia. Johns Hopkins' siblings also have the Janney name as part of their names, but not as a first name.

Both the Janney and Hopkins' families arrived in America with indentured servants. Both families were farmers. Both families accumulated a lot of land. Unlike the Janney family, the Hopkins' family became slave owners like so many other tobacco farmers in Anne Arundel County. The Janney family members were rarely slaveowners, and some members of the Janney family were even outspoken opponents of slavery. Yet, at the beginning of the Civil War, one member of the Janney family who was a representative of his Loudoun County, Virginia community where many were opposed to slavery returned home after giving his support to the Confederacy. In 1778 in the Hopkins' family, the first Johns Hopkins freed his slaves. By the time of his marriage to Hannah Janney, the first son of the first "Johns Hopkins" and his third wife, and the present Johns Hopkins' father, Samuel Hopkins, had become a slaveowner who possessed nearly 500 slaves and almost all of the land he and his brothers had inherited from their father. Johns Hopkins' parents were Quaker slave owners for nearly the first fifteen years of their marriage, and for the first twelve years of Johns Hopkins' life.

The emancipation and its aftermath

In 1807 Johns Hopkins' Quaker parents freed their slaves. The family emancipated their able-bodied slaves, without any request for compensation, and took on the responsibility of taking care of the less able bodied slaves. As members of the local Quaker society, his parents had been among those who had decided on emancipating their slaves in this way and who had made this a requirement for all members who wanted to retain their membership in their local Quaker society. Because of this emancipation, the formal education of Johns and his older brother, Joseph, was interrupted. The two oldest of the eleven siblings, Joseph, the eldest who was fourteen years old, and Johns who was twelve years old, returned home from school to help with the farm and domestic work. Johns Hopkins also started to help to care for the younger children in the family, some born after this emancipation. At Whitehall the family, which after 1807 often could not afford hired labor, now worked along with the slaves remaining on the farm, young and old, to do the child care, other domestic and farm work previously done by the family's slaves.

After his father's death in 1814, Johns Hopkins helped to take care of his mother. His mother died in 1846, a year after her eldest son, Joseph, also died. Johns Hopkins who lived longer than his other brothers, and who was the most successful of his siblings, helped to take care of his brothers and sisters, and the families his siblings left after their and their spouses' deaths, and after financial and other crises. Taking care of the elderly, the less able-bodied slaves, among them the elderly slaves, his siblings and their families, were responsibilities he began to undertake in 1807 and undertook from 1807 onwards. The story of the family's struggles and their life after this emancipation was told by a relative, Mrs.Helen Hopkins Thom, in the first and only biography of Johns Hopkins, Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette. This biography was published in 1929 by the Johns Hopkins Press. Thom named "Mintie", whom Thom said was born in Africa, and she mentioned Mintie's elderly daughter as two of the less able bodied slaves of the Hopkins' family, who worked after emancipation when and if they could. Throughout his life after 1807, Johns Hopkins continued to follow in his parents' footsteps after this emancipation, especially when it came to his Quaker faith and the abolitionism he displayed thereafter. His capacity for hard work and his frugality were two qualities which are linked to this experience by the authors of most sources on him. He shared a love of learning with his mother Thom said, and Thom recounted his and his family's efforts to continue his education after his formal education ended. His mother, also early, identified his instinct for business.

Business years

After he left the plantation, Hopkins worked for a time in his uncle's wholesale grocery business. His first success in business came while his uncle was away during the War of 1812. This also was his first experience operating, or assisting in the operation of, a business during and immediately after a war.

While staying at his uncle's home, he fell in love with his cousin, Elizabeth Hopkins. Among Quakers prejudice against first cousins marrying was strong and Elizabeth's parents would not allow them to marry. They pledged never to marry anyone else and remained single for the rest of their lives. Just as he provided for his extended family, he provided a home for her in his will. She lived there until her death in 1889, almost fifteen years after his death in 1873.

After he left his uncle's store, Hopkins and Benjamin Moore, also a Quaker, went into business together. The business later became Hopkins & Brothers after Moore dissolved the partnership claiming that Johns loved money more than he did. One writer though calls this statement a "myth" or "fact" which "was so widely reported that the comment calling Hopkins "the only man more interested in making money than I" is variously attributed to his former business partner, a close associate, and even the international financier, George Peabody". Peabody like Johns Hopkins was also born in 1795.

After Moore's withdrawal, Hopkins partnered with three of his brothers and established Hopkins & Brothers. The company prospered by selling various wares in the Shenandoah Valley from Conestoga wagons, sometimes in exchange for corn whiskey, which was then sold in Baltimore as "Hopkins' Best." Later, Hopkins invested heavily in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and he also became a banker and a ship owner. He put up his own money more than once to save Baltimore City during financial crises, and at least twice to bail the railroad out of debt, in 1857 and 1873. During the American Civil War, this businessman was a Union man. As the railroad's financial director, he and John Work Garrett, the railroad president, were largely responsible for the use of the railroad to support the Union cause. Many Marylanders, including its leading citizens and businesspersons, sympathized with, and often were supporters of, the South and the Confederacy. After the war, Johns Hopkins selected George William Brown as a trustee on the university board of trustees later established by Johns Hopkins. Brown had been the major of Baltimore during the Civil war, and he thanked Johns Hopkins who was a member of a a number of bankers who gave $500,000 to the city of Baltimore soon after the start of the Civil War. Mayor Brown who later became a judge spent much of his term as mayor in jail because of such sympathies.

One of the first campaigns of the Civil War was planned at Johns Hopkins' his summer estate, Clifton, and it was a meeting place for local Union sympathizers. Federal officials visited his home, which also was a place where he entertained at least one royal visitor from England. In a state which did not vote for Lincoln as the US President, and which opposed Lincoln's presidency and his policies including stationing troops in the state, in 1862 this businessman wrote a letter to Lincoln requesting the President to keep troops under the command of General John Ellis Wool stationed in Maryland. In addition to using his wealth and the B & O railroad to take troops to the front, Johns Hopkins supplied horsehoes and other supplies to the Union Army.

Johns Hopkins is listed as one of the 100 wealthiest men in America, in The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates - A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present, a book by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther published by Citadel Press in 1996. Johns Hopkins is 69th on this list.

His death and his philanthropy

Johns Hopkins died without heirs on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1873. He left $7 million, mostly in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad stock, to establish his namesake institutions. This sum was the single largest philanthropic donation ever made to educational institutions up until that time. The bequest was used to found the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum first as he requested, in 1875, the Johns Hopkins University in 1876, the Johns Hopkins Press (the longest continuously operating academic press in America) in 1878, the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in 1889, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893. The first of these posthumously founded institutions, the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum (JHCCOA) aka Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Children Orphan Asylum (JHHCCOA) was founded by the trustees selected by Johns Hopkins to serve on the hospital board of trustees, one of the two interlocking boards of trustees established by Johns Hopkins.

The rest of the institutions named above were founded under the administration of the first president of the Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Coit Gilman. Gilman, formerly the president of the University of California. Gilman was unanimously chosen by the trustees of the university board of trustees, the other board of trustees established by Hopkins. The university and the hospital boards of trustees were interlocking ones in that the president of one board was a member of the other board and about nine members of the trustees on one board were also members of the second board. Some of these trustees were also the executors of his will. Johns Hopkins' views on their duties and responsibilities and his bequests can be found primarily in four documents, the incorporation papers filed in 1867, his instruction letter to the hospital trustees dated March 12, 1873. , his will, which was quoted from extensively in the Baltimore Sun's obituary, and in his will's two codicils, one dated 1870 and the other dated 1873.

The original site for Johns Hopkins University was chosen personally by Hopkins. It was to be located at his summer estate, Clifton. This property, which is now owned by the city of Baltimore, is the site of a golf course and a park named "Clifton Park." This site was referred to in his will. While a decision was made not to found the university at Clifton, the orphan asylum which was constructed by one of most famous architects of that time, was founded first as Johns Hopkins had formally requested. The educational and living facilities were praised at its opening and a Baltimore American reporter said about the orphan asylum founded by the hospital trustees, that it was a place where "nothing was wanting that could benefit science and humanity". It was constricted by one of the most prominent architects of that time, John Niernsee,and after correspodences with those in charge of similar institutions, and visirs to such sites in Europe and America. The Johns Hopkins Orphan Asylum opened with twenty four boys and girls. This orphanage was later changed to serve as an orphanage and training school for black female orphans principally as domestic workers, and next as an "orthopedic convalescent" home and school for "colored crippled" children and orphanage. It was closed in 1924 nearly fifty years after it opened and never was reopened.

Johns Hopkins' wish for a training school for female nurses was also formally stated in the March 12th 1873 letter. The Johns Hopkins School of Nursing was founded, also by the hospital trustees led by a fellow Quaker businessman and friend. Florence Nightingale was consulted. Like the colored orphan asylum, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing was closed in 1973. Unlike the asylum, it reopened in 1983.

Both the nursing school and the hospital were founded in 1889 by the hospital trustees almost sixteen years after the abovementioned instruction letter and Johns Hopkins' death. In this instruction letter completed about eight months before his death, Johns Hopkins formally stated in the section on the hospital his wish to provide assistance to the poor of "all races', and no matter the indigent patient's "age' first, the sex, second, and the "color" third. Wealthier patients, he wrote, should pay for services and thereby subsidize the care provided to the indigent. The hospital he wrote further was to be the administrative unit for the orphan asylum for African American children, which was to receive $25000 annual support out of the hospital's half of the endowment to the institutions that would become his namesake. The hospital and orphan asylum should serve 400 patients and 400 children respectively. These children could be orphaned or could be in need with one parent or two parents.In the abovementioned documents scholarships were provided for poor youths in the states where he had made his wealth. Assistance was also given to orphanages other than the one for African American children and to other institutions for youths. In addition to the assistance he gave to members of his family, Johns Hopkins provided assistance, often unsolicited, to unrelated youths who needed help to start a career or business. One of the latter youths asked Thom to write her biography on Johns Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins' abolitionism

Johns Hopkins was represented as an abolitionist during three periods in his life in Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette published in 1929 by his relative Mrs. Helen Hopkins Thom. Today her biography on him is still the first and only book-length biography on him. After the 1970s, a few other sources represented him as an abolitionist. . For instance, almost fifty years' after Thom's 1929 publication, Kathryn Jacob, a former archivist at Johns Hopkins University's library called him a unionist and an abolitionist [bolitionist before the word "abolitionist" was "invented". According to Mike Field in his 1995 article Johns Hopkins was a abolitionist before this word was "invented" . Field's article was published in the Johns Hopkins Gazette to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of Johns Hopkins' birth in 1795. Jacob's article was published in an alumni publication, the Johns Hopkins Magazine, to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Johns Hopkins' death. Both, like Thom before them, also portrayed Johns Hopkins as a child, or twelve year old, participant in what Thom referred to as his parents' "abolition" of the family's slaves in 1807.. Like most others, Both Jacob and Field, though less so Jacob, point to the paucity of writings by him, and use adjectives like "anecdotal" and "apocryphal" to describe the sources of information on him, including Thom's biography.

Before the Civil War Johns Hopkins also worked with two of America's most famous abolitionists, Myrtilla Miner and Henry Ward Beecher. During the Civil War Johns Hopkins was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln In 1862 Johns Hopkins wrote a letter to Lincoln which he signed "your servant" and "friend" . This letter can be found in the holdings of the Library of Congress. While many Marylanders were demanding the removal of troops from Maryland, in this letter Johns Hopkins asked that the troops remain stationed in Maryland. Thom also cited the 1887 memoir by Baltimore's mayor when the Civil War began. In this memoir by George William Brown Johns Hopkins was again referred to as a "wealthy Union man" and as a member of a committee of bankers who gave $500,000 to the city after the first bloodshed in the Civil War was shed in Baltimore city.

After the Civil War, Johns Hopkins was a banker, a railroad man, a ship owner and a Reconstruction actor who provided instructions in the above mentioned documents that his philanthropy should be used in ways that were often opposed to the racial practices that were beginning to emerge during the American Reconstruction period, and later even in the posthumously constructed and founded institutions that would carry his name.

In 1867 Johns Hopkins and others filed an injunction to "block" the holding of the Constitutional convention where the present constitution of Maryland was framed. The Maryland Constitution that was framed by Marylanders who were unionists and radical republicans at the 1864 Constitutional Convention had ended slavery, required oaths for those who sided with the Conferderacy, that provided state support for the education of African Americans, and the vote to all white males, but not to blacks. The Baltimore Sun article on Johns Hopkins, this injunction, and the response to it can be found in the Maryland Archives, and can be found online, and in William Starr Myer's book on "self-reconstruction" in Maryland.

1867 was also the year Johns Hopkins and others filed papers incorporating the Johns Hopkins Institutions, and the sixtieth anniversary of his fanily's emancipation of their slaves without any request for compensation. The 1867 Constitution stated that ex-owners of slaves should be compensated, removed the requirement of an oath, and the state support of education for African American schools. Finally, in articles yet unpublished, Dr. Reynolds points to Johns Hopkins' "dream" and formally stated wish for a colored children orphan asylum and the trustees' founding of it in the papers incorporating the Johns Hopkins Institutions, and discusses its existence for the nearly fifty years before it was completely closed in 1924. Reynolds presents her findings almost seventy years after Thom wrote about his wish for this orphan asylum and reported that Johns Hopkins stated this wish in his "long and painstaking will." Interestingly while Thom stated that Johns Hopkins' wish for an orphan asylum was expressed in his will, she did not mention that this institution was actually opened on Biddle Street in 1885 in her 1929 biography on him,or that it was closed only about five years before this biography was published. Thom did include Johns Hopkins' March 12th, 1873 instruction letter at the end of Thom's biography on him, and this letter was published soon after it was prepared for the members of the hospital board of trustees.

There is much more support for Thom's representation of Johns Hopkins as an almost life long abolitionist in publications during Johns Hopkins' lifetime, and immediately after Johns Hopkins' death, but not after the founding of the Johns Hopkins University. One reason for this may be that Thom's definition of the word "abolitionist" differs in many ways from the definition of the word "abolitionist" usually used by popular and academic writers. At Johns Hopkins, and in the academy in general, there has been a long-standing convention which only now seems to be ending. The word "abolitionist" coined in 1836 according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), was long used as a label only to refer to 1830s abolitionists, and their methods and activities. A 2001 publication was praised by reviewers for being one of the first publications on pre-1830s abolitionists, and on their organizations, methods, and activities. In light of this publication, Johns Hopkins appears to be more like the pre-1830s abolitionists than the 1830s abolitionists. Pre-1830s abolitionists were elite white males who used the legal system, the legislatures, petitions, and their wealth to end slavery or to provide education and social services to those of African descent. In addition, the word "abolitionist" was for many including George William Brown in his 1890 memoir, an epithet. Nor do many call the activities Johns Hopkins undertook after the Civil War abolitionist ones.

In line with this conventional way of defining abolitionists, it is unsurprising that writers on Johns Hopkins and on the institutions that carry his name rarely use the label of "abolitionist" for Johns Hopkins. Furthermore, it is almost never reported that the first, and the most well known of the Johns Hopkins Institutions were all posthumously constructed and founded during Reconstruction. This period is an understudied one, especially when one compares attention to it and to the Civil War. Studies of this period like that of Hawkins who wrote the second major history of the Johns Hopkins University and reviewed local newspapers to do so, may well uncover the competing definitions of science, research, medicine, public health, doctoral education, medical education, and education in general, and of services and institutions for and of the poor, the aged, women and African Americans, and of the role of those employed by and educated in the elite institutions that emerged during this period, the role and legacy of this real world actor in his world. Studies of this period may give us a better understanding of the winners and losers in such contests, the silences, including that which surrounded Johns Hopkins and his life story, his abolitionism, and the emphases in the academy, public relations, and the media during his lifetime, and since.

For these and other reasons Thom's conclusions have not been often taken seriously, including Thom's discussions of the negative responses to his activities as an abolitionist from 1807 to his death. In her opinion, "hostility" towards Johns Hopkins began with his family's 1807 emancipation in a tobacco growing county dependent on slave labor since slavery became legal in the 1660s. This hostility Thom wrote persisted when he became a banker, philanthropist, and railroad man who often did not subscribe to many of the racial and class prejudices of his time. In addition she criticized those who misrepresented him as illiterate, and as a self-made man. The letter she wrote ignored the support he received from his own family in Maryland and Virginia, and other Quakers. There are also her statements that because of his abolitionism many leaders of Baltimore were his enemies and those whom she felt would "belittle", negatively portray, or misrepresent him after his death, or after he was no longer living and no longer able to successfully defend himself. Similarly, until today Johns Hopkins is cited for saving Baltimore city and the B&O railroad after financial crises, most rarely cite him for being a businessman who used his earlier war time experiences during and after the War of 1812 to rebuild Baltimore city's economy after the Civil War, as Thom suggested. Further studies may well provide further support for both her representation of Johns Hopkins as an abolitionist, and the December 2006 statement by Ross Jones, an alumnus and a retired assistant to six presidents of the Johns Hopkins University, and to the university's board of trustees, namely that "Without Johns Hopkins, I don't think the city of Baltimore or the state or the world would be what it is”.

The legacy of Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins' greatest legacy are the institutions that carry his name. The Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Public Health, and the other institutions that carry his name are some of the most renown institutions in the nation, and the world. These institution are renown for the world class services provided in the areas of research and the sciences, medicine, public health, arts, humanities and education as presented in the biography by Thom.

Almost fifty years after Johns Hopkins in 1873, Thom in her 1929 biography on him expressed how proud she was of the legacy of her relative. She was proud of the Johns Hopkins Institutions not just because of their emphases on research and on science, these institution's contributions to higher education, medicine and public health,, their role in founding doctoral education in America, but also for the Johns Hopkins' Hospital' many services to the poor, both blacks and whites. Thom argued further that the legacy of Quakers to America was similar to that of Puritans. Members of both religions, she wrote, had used their wealth to increase freedom in the world. She felt that there was much more knowledge about Puritans in this regard than about Quakers, and she hoped that her biography of Johns Hopkins would provide one example of a Quaker who contributed his wealth and increased freedom in the world community.

In other areas it is difficult to assess the legacy of this man who lived under the first eighteen presidents in America, more specifically, from the second term of the America's Revolutionary hero and first president, George Washington, then died at seventy eight during the second term of Civil War hero and America's eighteenth president Ulysses Grant. There is selective reporting of and a general lack of knowledge about his life, and of Johns Hopkins' legacy as an opponent of slavery, a proponent of quality education and medicine for the poor, the elderly, women and blacks, and as a philanthropist, businessman, banker and an abolitionist.

Adding to the difficulties of assessing hiis legacy are two facts: his last acts and his death occurred during the Reconstruction period, and the first and nost renown of the Johns Hopkins Institutions were founded during this period. This period is known for the growth of segregation, and Jim Crow practices. Less is known today about those like him if and when they defied such practices. Yet, when one looks at newspapers, magazine articles and books during Reconstruction, many writers before Thom did in her biography on him represented him as an abolitionist, or an opponent to slavery, and of separate but unequal practices when it came to the issues of race, class.and less so gender. Those who knew him, like she later did, mentioned his bequests to a colored children orphan asylum, and stated that he was a successful and wealthy individual, businessman and philanthropist wno was opposed to slavery and other current practices, and who provided for quality institutions,practitioners, services, and facilities for the poor, again no matter their age, sex, or color.

For instance, in a 1870's article in the Baltimore American, Baltimore City's premier newspaper at that time, Johns Hopkins was praised for being a man whose "humanity knows no race". He was praised for three "projected charities' of a university, a hospital, and an orphanage. Johns Hopkins, it has been and is now often said, left no instruction letter to the university board of trustees like he did for the hospital board of trustees. This 1870 newspaper article did present views on some of Hopkins' ideas on the university and the hospital just days after the first and only meeting of a board of trustees before Hopkins' death. This board was the university board of trustees. Its board meeting was held in June 1870.

Reflective of the times, women were not mentioned that much, if at all, in most of the publications on Johns Hopkins written during his lifetime and thereafter. His statement that he was interested in women being trained to work in the hospital, however as stated previously, did appearin the widely published March 12th, 1873 instruction letter to the hospital board of trustees. After his death, the women campaigned for entry into the medical school and their fundraising efforts were highly publicized. They successfully gained entry into the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions after they provided the funds needed to open the Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1893. A stipulation that required that women be admitted to the medical institutions was attached to these funds. The daughters of fathers who were members of the boards of trustees established by Johns Hopkins were the leaders of this campaign, and some but not all of their trustee fathers supported their daughters' promotion of the coeducation of the university and the the medical institutions.

Now, it has been and is often said that almost no one knows what Johns Hopkins thought about admitting blacks,or women, because his writings were so few. Many do not refer to the fact that he specifically stated that the hospital should provide quality personnel, facilities, services and care free to the poor, again, no matter their age first, their sex second, and their color third, and that the well off should pay to subsidize the free services for the poor. When Johns Hopkins Hospital was opened in 1889 African Americans were served and they have been served ever since, though largely in segregated wards and affected in various ways by segregation and Jim Crow tendencies of the times until after the 1940s.

Johns Hopkins' legacy during his lifetime and post-war perceptions of slavery and segregation:

Post war political changes and other changes seem to have affected the Johns Hopkins Institutions and the services provided. The media at first seemed not to follow the politics of the times. In 1870 when a journalist praised him for being a man whose "humanity knows no race", Marylanders were rejecting the Fifteenth Amendment. Similarly, three years before, in 1867 when Johns Hopkins filed the papers incorporating the Johns Hopkins Institutions, Marylanders were then rejecting the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1867 political leadership in the state had begun to shift from the republicans who had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the democrats. As stated previously, democrats and conservatives rejected the constitution framed by the republicans which incidentally provided state support for the education of black children (Wolff, 2006). The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were not passed in Maryland until 1959 and 1972, respectively.

However, just as newspapers and magazine articles during this Reconstruction period reported that Johns Hopkins was a man whose "humanity knows no race", and his March 12th 1873 instruction letter to the trustees of the hospital board of trustees with its provisions for the poor of all races, and without regard for age, sex, and color was published in part and in its entirety in the newspapers of Baltimore City and New York City, and in the 1874 book Chronicles cited earlier, the author of the latter book, had fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. He used newspaper articles as his major sources. Included in Chronicles also was the Baltimore city council expressions of their appreciation to Johns Hopkins which soon followed this letter. During the Civil War, Niernsee, the renown architect of the orphan asylum, who assisted in building the hospital, also had fought on the Confederate side.

In 1875, Baltimore city newspapers and The Nation, founded in New York in 1865 and which is today the longest operating publication of its kind in the nation, covered the opening of the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Orphan Asylum. The Nation praised John Niernsee and his plans for constructing the orphan asylum. After Johns Hopkins' 1873 death, the obituaries and later articles which were published in New York and Chicago, presented him similarly and the latter praised him for not taking the actions, business and philanthropic, now associated with the capitalists or those now called robber barons, or with Peabody when it comes to the latter's involvement in slavery. Overall newspaper, magazine articles, and books report and comment favorably on Johns Hopkins between 1870 and until about three years after his death in 1875. Unlike today's coverage, much of the coverage in the past referred to the colored orphan asylum. The obituary of Baltimore American even referred to Johns Hopkins' grandfather's freeing of his slaves in 1778.

Many will not be aware of these early accounts and they will also miss and even question or challenge Jones' praise of Johns Hopkins when he stated that "Without Johns Hopkins, I don't think the city of Baltimore or the state or the world would be what it is”. This statement moreover was reported by a Baltimore Sun reporter Laura Vozzella in a December 27th 2006 article with the title “They've wiped us off the map”. This article starts by mentioning that Baltimore had recently been left off of a National Geographic map. This omission in part happened, she writes, because a Baltimore publisher stopped publishing the organization’s maps and has since gone out of business. Below these comments in this short article in the “Maryland News” section of the paper, Vozzella reports Ross' statement, and on the recently established tradition of visiting Johns Hopkins' grave on the anniversary of his death on Christmas Eve, December 24th. Vozella also writes that the Baltimore American, a newspaper no longer published, and not the Baltimore Sun was the first newspaper to report on Johns Hopkins' death. The Baltimore Sun obituary is the obituary posted on the official website of the Johns Hopkins Institutions. This graveside ceremony is usually sparsely attended.

Johns Hopkins' Legacy After the Posthumous Founding of the Schools that are his Namesakes

Traditionally publications now focus, not on Johns Hopkins, but instead on the first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, as the founder of the posthumously founded Johns Hopkins Institutions. The Johns Hopkins (Hospital) Colored Children Orphanage is usually omitted from these accounts. Gilman, not Hopkins is the central figure in most celebrations of founders day. Founders day usually occurs on February 22nd, the month and day of Gilman's inauguration. This day was chosen because it is the birth day of America's revolutionary hero and first President, George Washington. The year 1876 was also the centennial anniversary of the birth of America as an independent nation, and of its Constitution. In his inaugural address on February 22th, 1875, Gilman stated that he would "leave the commemoration" of Johns Hopkins to those who knew him better. Others since seem to have followed in Gilman's footsteps, and inattention to Johns Hopkins in general, and Johns Hopkins as represented herein and by Thom is quite evident in publications until today.

The two major histories of the Johns Hopkins University are by alumni of the Johns Hopkins Unoversity. In A History of the University Founded by Johns Hopkins, the first major history of Johns Hopkins University published in 1946, John C. French, an alumnus and then university librarian, asked in this book's opening paragraph why 1876,and not 1867, was the founding year of the Johns Hopkins University. Unlike leaders of the posthumously built Johns Hopkins Institutions, French wrote, the leaders of most other educational institutions in America, had displayed an interest in showing the "antiquity" of their institutions by searching for the oldest document, and then dating their institutions from this document. French added information on the trustees selected by Johns Hopkins and on Mintie, an African born slave of the Hopkins' family who was discussed by Thom.

Another alumnus Hugh Hawkins says little about Johns Hopkins in the second major history of the Johns Hopkins University, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University 1874 - 1889. "The Uninvited" is the title of one chapter in this book which is principally on when Gilman was and was not a "pioneer". In this chapter Hawkins discusses women and less so African Americans at the Johns Hopkins University. He provides additional information on the early African American applicants to Johns Hopkins in this chapter where Gilman is described as a "conservative" and not a "pioneer" when it came to gender and race relations. Hawkins like most others is also critical of Thom's biography on Johns Hopkins, this time, because of her lack of knowledge of what was really going on at the university.

In other chapters, Hawkins notes other problems as well, such as Gilman's handling of a conflict in the economics department. Because of a choice of Gilman's, Hawkins' writes, Darwinism permeated even the "vocabulary" of those working and studying at this university. Although this was a typical choice by academicians during Gilman's lifetime, Hawkins suggests that the latter choice was later seen as less than a positive development.

In Pioneer, Hawkins presents and analyzes local newspapers where charges of elitism, and of not carrying out Johns Hopkins' wishes, were not uncommon. Reported in these newspapers were local sentiments for and against Gilman, and on the differences between Hopkins' and Gilman's vision of the Johns Hopkins Institutions. Charges of elitism were leveled at Gilman as they had been leveled at him when he was president of California state university.

Like so many others, Hawkins - cited earlier for writing the second major history of the Johns Hopkins University, says little about Johns Hopkins or his life story in "Pioneer" in the 1960 edition of this book or in the 2001 edition published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was at first a dissertation. Hawkins interestingly later studied abolitionists and abolitionism, but "Johns Hopkins" was not one of them. Still, when one closely at Johns Hopkins as an abolitionist and as a founder of the institutions which are his namesakes,, and of Hawkins' portrayal of the treatment of these two groups by Gilman and the trustees who worked most closely with him, it is much easier to say that these rwo groups were the "the uninvited" under Gilman as Hawkins did, but not in the light of Johns Hopkins statements in the documents he used to found the Johns Hopkins Institutions. Neither Hawkins nor the two writers who later labeled Johns Hopkins an abolitionist (Jacob and Field) mention the Colored Children Orphan Asylum as one of the Johns Hopkins established. While the latter

The loss of Johns Hopkins'legacy as an abolitionist in part appears to account for so less attention to the founding of the Johns Hopkins Colored Children Asylum, and to the fact that persons of African descent were viewed and treated as "the uninvited". And, the reception of Thom's biography of Johns Hopkins appears to also to account for the inattention to Thom's linkage of his bequests to the Colored Children Orphan Assulm to his early interactions with those like the African born "Mintie" and her elderly daughter who were two of the slaves who remained on the White Hall plantation, Johns Hopkins' birthplace, after the able-bodied slaves were freed. There are in addition one or more letters between Johns Hopkins and his mother which mentioned "Mintie". Johns Hopkins was also in a many ways a man and a Quaker of his times. To him a hospital for instance was an institution that served the poor as it was to Johns Hopkins and most men of his time, it was a fellow Quaker, businessmen, friend and trustee, Francis T. King,who was the leader of the hospital trustees when they built the orphan asylum, the nursing school, and the hospital, and who appears to be more responsible than Johns Hopkins for the lack of segregation initially at the hospital. Other trustees he selected to lead the institutions named after Johns Hopkins frequently seem not to have taken the leadership like Hopkins and King did when it came to "color", "age", "sex" or the indigent of "all races". Hopkins' interest in age is almost never cited. Nor are his views on religion's role in the hospital. His nonsectarianism was note noted during his lifetime. Nnne of the trustees were of African descent, and there seems to be almost no record of his dealings with persons of African descent who were not his slaves or servants.

But, would these institutions have survived or flourished if they had followed his and King's lead is a questio that must be asked, especially when one looks at other developments of that time. Was their an interest or desire to follow their lead, by the leaders of the posthumously founded Johns Hopkins Institutions is another qiestion. Some would state "no" to the latter question. Rather, another alumnus commented that another germ theory, the Anglo Saxon germ theory or whig theory found a home in history and the social sciences at the Johns Hopkins University. Notice that [Basil Gildersleeve]], who taught at the University of Virginia, and served as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War, was the first faculty member and a proponent of the lost cause thesis or "myth", as this alumnus called it. W.E.B DuBois in Black Reconstruction stated that Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University were the two centers where publications on such ideas were produced. As reported elsewhere, the signature of "Gilman", who was then the head of the Slater Fund, was on the letter that denied DuBois the funds to complete the doctoral program he was enrolled in at the University of Berlin. Gilman was much closer to Booker T. Washington than to W.E.B. DuBois.

Johns Hopkins University did not admit undergraduate women to Johns Hopkins University until 1970, making it one of the last educational institutions to admit undergraduate women. Women already were attending the university's graduate school and the medical school. The story of the struggles that culminated in their entry into these schools were widely reported in the 1880s and 1890s as they are now. Hawkins, the alumnus, reports this story and writes much more on women than on blacks as the "uninvited" of the Johns Hopkins University. Yet the nursing school was segregated like the other institutions that were founded as Johns Hopkins' namesakes.

At first persons of African descent were not treated as among "the uninvited" by those who posthumously founded these institutions. As stated before, the orphan asylum like the other Johns Hopkins Institutions was constructed by one of the best architects of the time, and after travels to Europe and in America to identify best practices. It is also reported that because those who knew Johns Hopkins were still alive and memories of Johns Hopkins were still fresh, Kelly Miller was admitted to the Johns Hopkins University's graduate school to study physics, mathematics, and astronomy in the 1880s, and he became the university's graduate student. Miller did not graduate because of a tuition increase. He would later become the future founder of Howard University's sociology department, Howard University's Dean of the Arts and Sciences, and a prolific writer. At least one source reports that Howard University was sometimes called "Kelly Miller's University". Yet, this part of his legacy soon waned within the Johns Hopkins Institutions.

In addition to Gilman's "conservative" response to race relations reported by Hawkins', it is also reported that the chemist, Ira Remsen, who became the second president of Johns Hopkins and whom Gilman had a hand in selecting as both one of the first faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, and its second president, stated that it would be "almost suicidal" if he followed the practices of the Quaker Johns Hopkins and admitted persons of African descent as students. Many of Hopkins' students were from the south and “the natural feelings of men from that part of the country” were opposed to admitting such persons to the Johns Hopkins University.

Because of the socio-political climate, of the views of these and other leaders of the Johns Hopkins Institutions, including what some called their elitism, and because of the segregation within and around Johns Hopkins University, the first undergraduate African American student, a Baltimore native Frederick Isadore Scott, was not admitted until the mid-1940s. Scott also became the first African American graduate of the Johns Hopkins University in 1950. He majored in chemical engineering. In 1950 Scott also became the first African American graduate of the Johns Hopkins University, of its engineering program, and of the university's undergraduate peogram.

Johns Hopkins' memories positively affected the first African American member of the Medical and Chirugical Society, and of another medical society that merged with it, Dr. Whitfield Winsey. Two other Africans also became members and they could attend Med-Chi meetings since they were held in McCoy Hall on Johns Hopkins University's campus. After these three men left Med-Chi or died, no other African Americans were allowed to become members of Med- Chi until the 1940s. Memories of Johns Hopkins, his influence, and local knowledge of his abolitionism, soon waned both within and outside of the institutions named for him.

Reports around the 1960s also showed that African Americans were paid less for decades. And, it was not until 1967, seventeen years after Scott's graduation in 1950, that an African American, the late Robert Gamble and the Kenyan born British trained James F. Nabwangu, graduated PHI BETA KAPPA from the famed Johns Hopkins Medical School. That same year African Americans, Miriam DeCosta Sugarmon and Percy Pierre received doctorates from Johns Hopkins University, she in Romance Languages and he in Electrical Engineering, making them the first African Americans to graduate from Johns Hopkins University's doctoral programs. That same year, 1967, was the one hundredth anniversary of the documents Johns Hopkins used to incorporate the Johns Hopkins Institutions, the one hundredth and sixtieth anniversary of his family's 1807 emancipation of their slaves, the one hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of the Dred Scott case in 1857 and of Johns Hopkins' service as a trustee of the school Myrtilla Miner founded for black females. This school is now considered to be the founding institution of the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), one of the HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities}. The year, 2007, is the two hundredth anniversary of the 1807 emancipation, and the one hundredth and fortieth anniversary of his incorporation of a university, a hospital, and a colored orphan asylum in 1867.

DeCosta Sugarmon received a master's degree in Romance Languages from the Johns Hopkins University in 1960 making an African American woman the first African American to receive a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University. In 1964, fourteen years after Scott graduated from the university with a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1950,James Nabwangu now a neurosurgeon in the Dakotas, received a bachelor's degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences In 1948 and 1949, and about sixty years after Kelly Miller enrolled in Johns Hopkins University's graduate school, Dr. Clifton Wharton, Jr., attended and graduated from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. making him the first graduate of a Johns hopkins institution, and of a graduate program of the Johns Hopkins Institutions. He later became the president of Michigan State University, the first African American CEO of a Fortune 500 company (TIAA-CREF), and a foreign policy advisor to six presidents.

In sum, Wharton's graduation occurred about one hundred and fifty four years after the birth of this child of Quaker slave owners in 1795, one hundred and forty one years since the 1807 emancipation and eighty years before Johns Hopkins incorporated a university, hospital and colored children orphan asylum, seventy six years after Johns Hopkins' request that the orphan asylum be founded first, sixty four years after the colored orphan asylum was constructed by one of the best architects of his time, and twenty five years after the orphan asylum was closed, again after about fifty years of existence in 1924.

Change was even slower when it came to persons of African descent and women as faculty members and administrators. In the case of the former, change has been so slow that persons of African descent in staff positions and in service jobs have a history of employment as long as the history of the Johns Hopkins Institutions while most of the first students, alumni, faculty, and administrators of the Johns Hopkins University are still living. For instance, Jamaican born Dr. Franklin Knight became a faculty member in the 1970s, and became the first tenured faculty member in the 1980s. The first faculty member, staff, and administrator, though was Vivien Thomas. He worked with Dr. Alfred Blalock and Dr. Helen Taussig by helping to devise the blue baby shunt for babies with the blue baby syndrome, and by assisting in the "first operation" on a baby with the blue baby syndrome. Thomas' contributions are not always cited. Thomas was the head of a laboratory, a laboratory worker, and a laboratory instructor to Hopkins' students and other African Americans workers, starting in the 1940s. Other faculty members following him were Dr. Ralph Young, "the first African-American physician to practice at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the first African-American to be appointed to the state board of health",, Dr. Walter Shervington was a president of the National Medical Association, the African American medical association, and Hopkins' second African American physician. Young did not have admitting privileges. Shervington was not allowed admitting privileges for twenty five years Dr. Roland Smoot was the first African American hired with admitting privileges, and later the first African American president of Med-Chi.

Until today reporting on Johns Hopkins' bequests to the poor and to those of African descent in quite uneven. In 1995 Field for instance reports on Johns Hopkins' scholarships to poor youths. He also reports that after the 1807 emancipation Johns Hopkins "would carry the habits of thrift and hard work he developed at this time with him throughout his life. Nor would he lose his sense of social justice. An abolitionist before the term was even invented, Johns Hopkins demonstrated a lifelong concern for those the larger society exploited or ignored". Yet, he wrote. mistakenly, that rural blacks were the poor and so they were the chief recipients of Johns Hopkins' bequests to the hospital.

Similar to the Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, was segregated until after the 1940s. The Johns Hopkins Hospital, as stated before was segregated in 1892, a few years before the passage of Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 which legally sanctioned "separate but equal" as the law of the land. Furthermore, these institutions in many ways seemed to have been much more influenced by Johns Hopkins' contemporaries' and later generations' definitions of a "separate but equal" approach as "separate and unequal" one. The latter definition many times contrasted with Johns Hopkins' actions and possibly moreso the actions of the leader of the hospital trustees, Francis King before and after Hopkins' death. This was not the case when one looks at other trustees like Reverdy Johnson,Jr. and ex-mayor Brown. In a similar vein, the second president who had been one of the faculty members handpicked by Gilman said that the university could not afford to follow the model of its Quaker founder since it had so many students from the South. It would be "suicidal" to follow Johns Hopkins' practices, he said.

Because the hospital was constructed under the leadership of King, the members of the board of trustees later had to make a decision to segregate the hospital. They did so within a year or two after the death of Francis King. King was a Quaker, and the person who knew Johns' Hopkins' plans before and better than most others according to French. King led in the building and the founding of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and over a decade before, of the Johns Hopkins (Hospital) Colored Children Orphan Asylum. Under his leadership both the hospital and the orphan asylum were built by one of the most renown architects of their time, John Niernsee and only then after travels, correspondences, and visits to similar institutions in Europe. Billings, handpicked by Gilman, was the lead architect of the hospital. King visited and consulted with Florence Nightingale while in Europe, and was a supporter of the women's efforts to attend the university and the hospital in the 1890s, and of their successful efforts to integrate the graduate school of the university according to Hopkins. He also helped to select the university's faculty members.

Even after the racial incidents at Johns Hopkins University in October 2006, there are questions about whether or not Johns Hopkins and his family's emancipation of their slaves 200 years after the founding of Jamestown will be celebrated in 2007, whether the publications after both Jacob and Field, and Thom before them, will still be ones where the word "abolitionist " is not used to label him, his words, deeds, or writings. Those who write that Johns Hopkins had no vision are still around as well as those who omit the orphan asylum as part of that vision. Except for a few exceptions, Johns Hopkins is almost never viewed and treated as a founder other than financially. There is an inattention to his deeds, his writings, and others' writings on him before the founding of the renown Johns Hopkins Institutions. All of this has meant that these institutions still are not known as ones that express a "humanity that knows no race". So many have been deprived of an exemplar of someone who carried "the habits of thrift and hard work ... throughout his life", who would not "lose his sense of social justice". So many are unaware of him as an abolitionist before and after this term was "invented". Johns Hopkins is not known as as someone who "demonstrated a lifelong concern for those the larger society exploited or ignored" as Field describes him. Two founders Hopkins and Gilman's, two legacies, together, could possibly mean a future of even greater triumphs, and of less tribulations especially in the areas of research, science, education, business, philanthropy and the services provided to the poor no matter their age, sex, or color. Politics and other factors prevented the realization of his dream and his vision in the past, but the "dream" of Johns Hopkins still lives when this founder is viewed as someone who was influenced by his participation in an emancipation two hundred years ago in 2007, as almost a lifelong abolitionist whether one looks at his words or deeds, as a man who formally stated his dream of quality personnel, male and female, quality services, facilities and institutions for all races and classes and no matter the age, sex or color of the patient almost one hundred and forty years ago in 1867, or as someone who was continuing the tradition of Benjamin Franklin when the latter founded free hospitals, including emergency care, in Philadelphia, as a journalist described the hospital as envisioned by Johns Hopkins in 1870.

External links

• Genealogical Records on Marylanders
• Thom and Jacob discuss his love for his cousin and Quaker traditions
• In his 1887 memoir, Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of the War, George William Brown city Johns Hopkins as a wealthy Union man in Baltimore, a city with strong Confederate and Southern leanings
• In The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of "Baltimore Town" and Baltimore City from the Earliest Period to the Present Time published in 1874, John Thomas Scharf cited the 1873 instruction letter to the hospital trustees and a city council resolution thanking Johns Hopkins for his philanthropy. Thom's biography and New York and Maryland newspapers were sources that published parts or all of this letter
• The Institutional Records of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum
• Abstract Johns Hopkins Dream for a Model of its Kind: The JHH Colored Orphans Asylum", 2000 Conference International Society for the History of Medicine BY Dr. P. Reynolds
• Grave site of Johns Hopkins
• Graveside ceremony for Johns Hopkins
• Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of the War, the memoir of George William Brown then the mayor of Baltimore city, later a member of the university board of trustees of the Johns Hopkins University
• The Chronicles of Baltimore: Being a Complete History of "Baltimore Town" and Baltimore City from the Earliest Period to the Present Time published in 1874 by John Thomas Scharf
• "If He Could See Us Now: Mr. Johns Hopkins' Legacy Strong University, Hospital Benefactor Turned 200 on May 19, 1995", Mike Field, the author, contradicts this statement
• Chronology, Nursing school
• The Institutional Records of The Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan
• Abstract Johns Hopkins Dream for a Model of its Kind: The JHH Colored Orphans Asylum" By Dr. P. Reynolds
• "If He Could See Us Now: Mr. Johns Hopkins' Legacy Strong University, Hospital Benefactor Turned 200 on May 19, 1995" by Mike Field a writer for the Johns Hopkins Gazette. Field, Thom, and Jacob called Johns Hopkins an abolitionist. See also The Racial Record of Johns Hopkins University in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 25, Autumn, 1999, pp. 42-43/ JSTOR
• Johns Hopkins, Maryland State Archives
• "The History of African Americans @ Johns Hopkins University" See in particular the chronology and the paper by Danton Rodriguez.