Johns Hopkins (May 19, 1795 – December 24, 1873) was an American merchant, investor, and philanthropist best known for funding the establishment of Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital, which have since become leading institutions for scientific research and medical advancements. At the time of his death, his donation was the largest philanthropic bequest ever made to an American educational institution.
Born on a plantation in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Hopkins left his home to start a career at the age of seventeen, and settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where he remained for most of his life. He accumulated his fortune primarily through investing in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), for which he later served as finance director. He was also president of Baltimore-based Merchants' National Bank.
A Quaker, Hopkins strongly backed Abraham Lincoln and the Union during the American Civil War and was described as holding "antislavery political views." In 2020, new archival research prompted renewed scholarly debate over Hopkins’s relationship to slavery and his long-standing reputation as a staunch abolitionist. Researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins University reported evidence suggesting that he may have owned or employed enslaved people earlier in his life, while other scholars have disputed these findings and emphasized his documented opposition to slavery and philanthropic support for Black education and social welfare.
Johns Hopkins was born on May 19, 1795, at his family's home of White's Hall, a 500-acre (200 ha) tobacco plantation in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. His first name was inherited from his grandfather Johns Hopkins, who received his first name from his mother Margaret Johns. He was one of eleven children born to Samuel Hopkins of Crofton, Maryland, and Hannah Janney, of Loudoun County, Virginia.
The Hopkins family were of English and Welsh descent and Quakers. Hopkins' sister, Sarah Hopkins Janney became a prominent member, and eventually an elder, at Baltimore Quaker Meeting. They emancipated their slaves in 1778 in accordance with their Quaker meeting's decree, which called for freeing the able-bodied and caring for the others, who would remain at the plantation and provide labor as they could. The second eldest of eleven children, Hopkins was required to work on the farm alongside his siblings and indentured and free Black laborers. From 1806 to 1809, he likely attended The Free School of Anne Arundel County, which was located in modern-day Davidsonville, Maryland.
In 1812, at the age of 17, Hopkins left the plantation to work in his uncle Gerard T. Hopkins's Baltimore wholesale grocery business. Gerard T. Hopkins was an established merchant and clerk of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends. While living with his uncle's family, Johns and his cousin, Elizabeth, fell in love; however, the Quaker taboo against the marriage of first cousins was strong, and neither Johns nor Elizabeth ever married.
Hopkins's early experiences and successes in business came when he was put in charge of the store while his uncle was away during the War of 1812. After seven years with his uncle, Hopkins went into business together with Benjamin Moore, a fellow Quaker. The business partnership was later dissolved with Moore alleging Hopkins's penchant for capital accumulation as the cause for the divide.
After Moore's withdrawal, Hopkins partnered with three of his brothers and established Hopkins & Brothers Wholesalers in 1819. 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". The bulk of Hopkins's fortune, however, was made by his judicious investments in myriad ventures, most notably the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O), of which he became a director in 1847 and chairman of the Finance Committee in 1855. He was also President of Merchants' Bank as well as director of a number of other organizations. After a successful career, Hopkins was able to retire at the age of 52 in 1847.
A charitable individual, Hopkins put up his own money more than once to not only aid Baltimore City during times of financial crises but also to twice bail the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company out of debt, in 1857 and 1873.
In 1996, Johns Hopkins ranked 69th in "The Wealthy 100: From Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates: A Ranking of the Richest Americans, Past and Present".
One of the first campaigns of the American Civil War was planned at Hopkins's summer estate, Clifton, where he had also entertained a number of foreign dignitaries, including the future King Edward VII. Hopkins was a strong supporter of the Union, unlike some Marylanders, who sympathized with and often supported the South and the Confederacy. During the Civil War, Clifton became a frequent meeting place for local Union sympathizers, and federal officials.
Hopkins' support of Abraham Lincoln also often put him at odds with some of Maryland's most prominent people, including Supreme Court justice Roger B. Taney who continually opposed Lincoln's presidential decisions such as limiting habeas corpus and stationing Union Army troops in Maryland. In 1862, Hopkins wrote a letter to Lincoln requesting that he not heed the detractors' calls and continue to keep soldiers stationed in Maryland. Hopkins also pledged financial and logistic support to Lincoln, in particular the free use of the B&O railway system.
Hopkins's reputation as an abolitionist remains the subject of ongoing historical debate. In 2020, researchers affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, including historian Martha S. Jones, cited census records from 1840 and 1850 to claim that Hopkins owned enslaved individuals at his Baltimore residence and country estate. Their findings also emphasized the absence of documentary evidence confirming longstanding claims that Hopkins was an abolitionist, while noting his involvement in a regional economy shaped by slavery and his firm’s financial dealings involving enslaved people as collateral.
At the same time, the researchers identified sources indicating that Hopkins held antislavery political views, supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union, once purchased an enslaved person with the intention of securing their freedom, as well as contemporary praise from prominent Black leaders for his philanthropic support for Black communities.
Subsequent scholarship has challenged aspects of this interpretation while adding to evidence that Hopkins' held anti-slavery views. In a 2024 peer-reviewed article in the Maryland Historical Magazine, Sydney Van Morgan and three co-authors, including former Maryland state archivist Edward C. Papenfuse, argue that the 1850 census slave schedule does not constitute definitive evidence of slave ownership, citing the methodological limitations of the census and the lack of corroborating documentation such as tax records, wills, or bills of sale linking Hopkins directly to slaveholding. They propose several alternative explanations for the presence of enslaved individuals associated with Hopkins’s estate, including hired labor, temporary trusteeship arrangements connected to Quaker manumission practices, or possible errors in census enumeration.
Before the discovery of the census records, Johns Hopkins had been described as an "abolitionist before the word was even invented", having been represented as such both prior to the Civil War period, as well as during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. Prior to the Civil War, Johns Hopkins worked closely with two of America's most famous abolitionists, Myrtilla Miner and Henry Ward Beecher. During the Civil War, Johns Hopkins, a staunch supporter of Lincoln and the Union, was instrumental in bringing Lincoln's emancipatory vision to fruition.
After the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Johns Hopkins's stance on abolitionism infuriated many prominent people in Baltimore. During Reconstruction and up to his death his abolitionism was expressed in the documents founding the Johns Hopkins Institutions and reported in newspaper articles before, during, and after the founding of these institutions. Before the war, there was significant written opposition to his support for Myrtilla Miner's founding of a school for African American females (now the University of the District of Columbia). In a letter to the editor, one subscriber to the widely circulated De Bow's Review wrote: