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“The evidence is pretty strong that Johns Hopkins was an abolitionist,” Crenson said, and the possibility exists that he owned enslaved people for the possibility of manumitting them.

Tubman’s father was granted 10 acres of land when he was manumitted, or freed from slavery, around five years after his former owner Anthony Thompson’s death in 1836.

In 1917, a former director of the Hopkins hospital, in an article, told the story about Hopkins’s father, Samuel, manumitting his slaves, which he seems to have gotten from interviews with Hopkins family members.

As a new employee, I sat through an orientation that told of how Johns Hopkins had come from a long line of Quakers who had, out of conviction, manumitted their slaves.

“I was manumitted into the world at large,” he wrote.