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 publishedThe 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.
