James
W.C. Pennington
African-American
Minister, Teacher, Abolitionist
The man who
made himself Dr. James William Charles Pennington was born Jim Pembroke,
a slave in Maryland. Clearly an exceptionally intelligent young boy, he
was apprenticed by his master to a stonemason and then to a blacksmith.
When he was about twenty, altercations between his parents and their master,
punctuated by savage whippings, made him determined to escape north to
freedom. His journey was hair-raising, as slave catchers apprehended and
held him for a time, though he managed a second escape. Eventually, travelling
by the North Star, he made his way to Pennsylvania, where a Quaker harbored
him and began his formal education.
In 1828 Pennington relocated to New York City, working as a blacksmith
and attending school at night. Under the spiritual guidance of Dr. S.H.
Cox, a Presbyterian minister, he cultivated a devout Christianity. And
he began to involve himself in abolitionist activities as well, participating
in several national conventions of free African-Americans in Philadelphia
in the early 1830s. Here he met William Lloyd Garrison, Simeon S. Jocelyn
and Lewis Tappan -- the latter two, of course, would be key associations
in the abolitionist management of the Amistad Africans. And he began teaching
in a school for black children in Newtown, Long Island.
In 1834 Pennington relocated again, to New Haven, where he audited classes
at Yale and meanwhile became a pastor at the Temple Street Congregational
Church. Within four years he completed his studies and was ordained a
minister. He set up his first ministry back in Newtown, but moved several
years later to Hartford, where he became minister of the black Congregational
Church (also called the Talcott Street Church) and teacher at the church's
school for African-American children. Under Pennington's leadership the
church played a leading role in the abolitionist movement, hosting the
Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society at one point, and in 1843 resolving to
ban slaveholders from taking communion or taking the pulpit. He travelled
widely through the state, meeting with other African-American ministers,
and frequently delivered sermons in other churches, both black and white,
while inviting ministers of both races to preach in the Talcott Street
Church.
Pennington's brand of abolitionism was distinctly evangelical and closely
tied to other moral reform movements. In 1833, while attending one of
the national conventions of free blacks, he joined a call for the creation
of temperance societies for African-Americans; thereafter he played a
leading role in Connecticut's black temperance society. And while he firmly
eschewed colonization schemes (which proposed returning freed American
slaves to Africa), he did support efforts to send missionaries to Africa:
his sense of African society was colored by a conviction that "benighted"
Africans languishing (as he saw it) in semi-savage heathenism.
Over the late-1830s and early-1840s Pennington frequently contributed
to the Colored American, and after that paper folded he briefly
edited his own paper, the Clarksonian. He also published sermons,
addresses, and longer projects. In 1841 he wrote what has been described
as the first history of African-America: A Text Book of the Origin
and History &c. &c. of the Colored People -- though really
it is a treatise on the pre-historical and historical evolution of race
and blackness. His most enduring work, The Fugitive Blacksmith
(1850), told of his boyhood in slavery and escape to freedom; it became
one of the most important American slave narratives.
Pennington's autobiography publicly revealed his slave past (something
he kept secret for years) just as a federal Fugitive Slave Law facilitated
the recapture of runaways. One year after he published The Fugitive
Blacksmith, associates of Pennington arranged formally to buy his
freedom from his former master's estate for $150.
By this point Pennington was an important figure abroad as well as the
U.S. In 1843 he represented Connecticut at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention
in London, the first of several international tours in Europe on behalf
of the international abolition movement. He continued to minister, educate
and agitate for abolition and equal rights up to his death in 1870.
Amistad Activism. Pennington saw the Amistad case as a prime opportunity
to further not only the cause of abolition, but of Christian evangelism
as well. Although he must have followed the Amistad story closely from
the first, Pennington's name does not appear in the public record in connection
with the case until early May 1841 -- after the U.S. Supreme Court had
freed the Africans -- when he called on African-Americans to organize
support for African missions. Subsequently, forty-three delegates from
five states convened in Hartford in August, a meeting over which Pennington
presided with five of the Amistad Africans in attendance Here the Union
Missionary Society formed and Pennington took the helm as its first president.
Working through the UMS, Pennington raised funds to pay for the Africans'
return voyage and meanwhile recruited African-American missionaries to
accompany them. Well after the Gentleman bore the Africans and
missionaries away to Sierra Leone, Pennington remained closely engaged.
In 1846, the UMS was subsumed by the larger (and largely white-controlled)
American Missionary Association and Pennington's role receded a bit, though
he served on the AMA's executive board until 1851 and continued to speak
on behalf of its mission programs.
Documents: A Colored American report calling for African missions, with Pennington chairing proceedings.
A Colored American report announcing the formation of the Union Missionary Society, with Pennington as president.
Sources: Pennington himself offers the best account of his early life,
including his youth as a slave and his escape to the North, in The Fugitive
Blacksmith: or, Events in the History of James W.C. Pennington -- one
of the most important of the American Antebellum slave narratives. Unfortunately
the narrative (published in 1850) breaks off soon after Pennington freed himself.
On his career as an abolitionist minister and teacher, see David O. White,
"The Fugitive Blacksmith of Hartford: James W.C. Pennington," Connecticut
Historical Society Bulletin , vol. 49 (Winter 1984), pp. 4-29.
