Beyond Ownership: Slavery, Trust Law, and Quaker Emancipation in the Upper South
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This essay examines the appearance of four enslaved men on the 1850 census at Johns Hopkins’ Clifton estate and explores the possibility that they were under the temporary custody of his sister, Eliza Hopkins Crenshaw, and her husband, Nathaniel C. Crenshaw, a Virginia Quaker minister known for using legal trusts to facilitate gradual manumission. Drawing on census records, Quaker meeting minutes, and probate documents, the essay situates the Clifton census entry within a broader network of Quaker antislavery activity in the Upper South. It argues that the presence of these men likely reflected an emancipationist strategy rather than slaveholding by Hopkins himself, offering new insight into the intersecting histories of slavery, legal trust instruments, and Quaker reform in antebellum Maryland and Virginia.
