James W.C. Pennington

African American Churchman and Abolitionist

Herman E. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815318897
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317730637
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The story of James W.C. Pennington who was a former slave, then a Yale scholar, minister, and international leader of the Antebellum abolitionist movement.  He escaped from slavery aged 19 in 1827 and soon became one of the leading voices against slavery before the Civil War. In 1837 he was ordained as a priest after studying at Yale and was soon traveling all over the world as an anti-slavery advocate.

I

Introduction

Religion has played a dual role in the experience of African-Americans. For many African-Americans, religion has functioned as a means of escaping the harsh realities of daily life. The classical expression of this view was set forth in Benjamin Mays’ The Negro’s (1938), which argued that the African-American’s conception of God made them “submissive, humble, and obedient.” Because their view of God was “otherworldly,” African-Americans would “do little or nothing to improve their status here.”¹ On the other hand, religion has also provided a source for African-American protest against oppression. This position is articulated by Vincent Harding in his analysis of “Religion and Resistance Among Antebellum Negroes” (1969). Harding raised the issue of the “doubleness of African-American religious experience.” He concluded that while it may have been true that many slaves were taught unqualified submission to the slavemaster, there “were significant, identifiable African-American responses to religion which often stormed beyond submissiveness to defiance.” Gayraud S. Wilmore has discovered a similar role for religion among free African-Americans in the North. For African-Americans in the North prior to the Civil War, religion was the primary agent of freedom from subjugation to white domination. Free African-Americans generally used religion to justify their right to freedom from socioeconomic and political repression.² It appears, then, that religion counselled both escape from and resistance to oppression.

The literature shows that Pennington was affected by and recognized those competing tendencies in the African-American religious and cultural experience.

Scope of Resource Materials

The materials for this study consist of all available published and unpublished works by J. W. C. Pennington including books, letters, published sermons, addresses, and articles. This study also makes use of biographical works on Pennington by his contemporaries and later writers. These materials, however, are neither quantitatively nor qualitatively sufficient for the presentation of a complete biography (an exhaustive study dealing with all of his inner feelings and thoughts as well as his overt acts). They will be crucial, nevertheless, in developing an interpretive perspective on his public career.

A major primary source for this study is Pennington’s The Fugitive Blacksmith. The second edition appears in William L. Katz’s Five Slave Narratives and the third in Arna Bontemp’s Great Slave, Narratives; both of these works are generally available. Pennington’s own handwritten letters written between 1841 and 1870, and obtained from the American Missionary Association Archives (AMA), Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana, have been used in this study. AMA materials, formerly at Dillard University, are now in the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. All of his published sermons, addresses, and articles have been utilized in this study. Some of the sermons Pennington preached while he was pastor of the Fifth Congregational Church, Hartford, Connecticut, and Shiloh Presbyterian Church, New York City, have been located at the Moorland Collection, Howard University. The following ecclesiastical records were consulted: Church Records and General Register, Shiloh Presbyterian Church Records, New York, New York, 1848–1855, manuscripts; Minutes of the Third Presbytery (New School) of New York, N.Y., 1853–1854; Minutes of the Convention of Ministers of the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches, in the United States, 1856; and Minutes of the Session of Shiloh Presbyterian Church, 1855–1870, allocated at the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia. The Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, Hartford, Connecticut, has significant biographical and professional data on Pennington’s ecclesiastical activity. Articles on topics such as slavery, colonization, Christianity, and the role of the Church in society, were found in libraries whose periodical collections include the Colored American, Anglo-African Magazines, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Union Missionary Herald, and the American Missionary. In addition to publishing articles, Pennington edited the Clarksonian, a newspaper available at the Yale University Library. He also wrote the first textbook history of the African-American A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People, 1841 [Text Book History], available at Perkins Library, Duke University. Primary serial minutes such as Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830–1864, and Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, Called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1843, include speeches, sermons, and/or addresses by Pennington. Some of Pennington’s contemporaries published biographical sketches of him. These included William Wells Brown in The Rising Son, 1876, and Wilson Armistead in A Tribute for the Negro, 1848.

There are many published works which deal with Protestantism, in general, and treat the religion of the African-American as an aspect thereof. Robert T. Handy’s Christian America; Marty Martin’s Righteous Empire; Winthrop Hudson’s American Protestantism; Sidney Mead’s The Lively Experiment, and H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher, American Christianity (2 volumes), were indispensable aids in better understanding Protestantism in nineteenth century America. The dated but still authoritative History of the Negro Church by Carter G. Woodson, was an invaluable source along with Benjamin Quarles’ Black Abolitionists, and Gayraud S. Wilmore’s Black Religion and Black Radicalism and Sterling Stuckey’s The Ideological Origins of African-American Nationalism. Each of these works contributed to a more clear description of issues in religion in American culture in the nineteenth century, and thus facilitated a more precise location of Pennington on issues during that era.

Materials on abolitionism are many. This study has made use of Dwight L. Dumond’s comprehensive work on antislavery, A Bibliography of Anti-Slavery in America, which includes entries on individual representative of white and African-American abolitionists in this study. The leading comprehensive work on African-American abolitionists is Carter G. Woodson’s The Mind of the Negro as Reflected by Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800–1860. Woodson’s Negro Orators and their Orations was consulted. Further information on African-American abolitionism is found in G. H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, Letters of Theordore D. Weld, Angelina G. Weld, and Sarah Grimle, 1822–1844, and Annie H. Abel and Frank J. Klingberg, eds. A Side-Light on Anglo American Relations, 1839–1859, furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The Letters of Lewis Tappan, Library of Congress, contain important letters from Tappan to Pennington and shed light on the latter’s personal and professional life. The Letters of William L. Garrison (3 volumes), published between 1971–1973, contain correspondence from Garrison to Pennington.

The perspective of Erik Erikson in recent studies in psychoanalysis served as the basis for an interpretative analysis of Pennington’s struggle for “identity.” Erikson’s Childhood and Society and Youth, Identity and Crisis were especially helpful in understanding growth and development in Pennington.

A Review of Literature Regarding Pennington

The name, James W. C. Pennington, has appeared in the works of numerous writers on a variety of subjects. Since this study will utilize the interpretative framework of evangelical Protestantism, social reform, and the free northern African-American community, to understand Pennington, the literature about him will be viewed from these three categories.³ In other words, writers on Pennington will be construed relative to their general view of Pennington as an evangelical Protestant, a social reformer, or a leader in the northern free African-American community. Of course, these classifications are approximate and may overlap. The fact that they may overlap, however, emphasizes the interrelationship between individual, society, and community; each contributes to the growth and development of the other two. This may help explain the appearance of Pennington’s name in several contexts.

Pennington was an evangelical Protestant in that he subscribed to the general tenets of Protestantism which emphasized individual conversion followed by behavior consistent with one’s new condition in Christ. Several biographical sketches or brief studies drawing attention to these emphases have been written. An appreciative “believe it or not” biographical account of the first African-American pastor of Talcott Street (Fifth) Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, was recorded by Sherrod Soule in Congregational Connecticut (1939). In this first article published on Pennington in the twentieth century, Soule strongly emphasized Pennington’s role as pastor and his unusual intellectual ability.

The desire of evangelical Protestants to convert others was reflected in their missionary zeal. Pennington’s prominent role in organizing the Union Missionary Society, the forerunner of the American Missionary Association, was recognized by Carol DeBoer in her dissertation on “The Role of Afro-Americans in the Origin and Work of the American Missionary Association,” (1974). In the introduction to her dissertation, DeBoer noted Pennington as a major figure about whom much new information was discovered during her research. For DeBoer, Pennington was essentially the most important pre-Civil War African-American administrator/agent because of his role in the Union Missionary Society and his affiliation with the Association until his death.

Through his reflections upon the theology undergirding missions, Pennington exhibited a concern for a “pure” Gospel. In his Major African-American Religious Thinkers (1977), Henry J. Young focused on African-American religion seeking the transformation of human character and institutions in order that all men, particularly African-American men, might be liberated. Pennington is seen as an African-American Biblical theologian whose thinking was imbedded deeply in the Old and New Testaments. Young depicted Pennington as a Christian theologian who refused to compartmentalize reality into the sacred and the profane. For Pennington, the African-American religionist, any area of life could be the just concern of the Creator, and thus, of his moral agents, men.

While Young was concerned primarily with the theological thought of Pennington, Andrew Murray in his Presbyterians and the Negro⚋A History (1966), focused on with the experience of African-Americans in the Presbyterian denomination. Considerable attention was devoted to the establishment and success of Presbyterianism among African-Americans. Murray highlighted Pennington’s career as minister of Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City, the most prestigious African-American Presbyterian Church in America. Murray was impressed with Pennington’s written efforts against race prejudice contained in his Text Book History. Though critical of prejudiced whites, according to Murray, Pennington encouraged African-Americans to bear prejudice “in the spirit of Christian love” (p. 45). In a more recent treatment on African American-Presbyterianism, Gayraud Wilmore in Black and Presbyterian: The Heritage and the Hope (1986) concluded that education and status motivated men like Pennington to affiliate with Presbyterianism. He placed Pennington among those early African-American Presbyterians who “us[ed] every resource of a trained mind and a gentle spirit to uplift the race, and to hold constantly before the eyes of the church and the conscience of the nation the mandate of liberty and justice for all.” (p. 65)

Protestant ideology spilled over into Pennington’s activity as a social reformer. That is, he took seriously the claim of most evangelical Protestants that meaningful social action followed true conversion. Carter G. Woodson in his classic, The History of the Negro Church (1921), viewed Pennington as a versatile African-American preacher who spent more time agitating on behalf of his race than he did preaching to his congregation. Woodson, whose primary purpose was to note the importance of the African-American church as an “institution” in the African-American community prior to 1920, identified Pennington more with causes like abolition and anticolonization than with African-American churches.

Gayraud S. Wilmore, unlike Woodson, approved of the secularization of African-American religion he saw in Pennington. Wilmore selected Pennington as a good example of an African-American minister who supported the National Negro Convention movement as an adjunct of the African-American church in the nineteenth century. In his African-American Religion and African-American Radicalism (1972), Wilmore argued that African-American antislavery radicalism was built on nineteenth century Christian principles, but twentieth century African-American religious nationalism reflects a non-Christian orientation. To him, Pennington was among a “brilliant group of African-American preachers” who affiliated with predominantly white denominations but who, nonetheless, kept the African-American convention movement self-consciously African-American in its view of slavery and racial discrimination (p. 129).

Howard H. Bell acknowledged Pennington as a strong leader in the early National Negro Convention movement, but Bell roundly criticized Pennington for his role in opposing colonization in the 1850’s. In The Negro Convention Movement (1969), Bell presented emigration as a neglected area of African-American history which, during the pre-Civil War era, was designed to establish an African-American nation in another land to compete with slavery in the South. More importantly, Bell argued that emigration was also an effective means of elevation for the free African-Americans in the United States. According to Bell, Pennington disagreed; therefore, in this area of social reform, Pennington was placed among the “conservatives” who opposed emigration.

Emigration was only one issue among African-American abolitionists who, according to Benjamin Quarles, constituted abolition’s “different drummer.” African-American abolitionists were both symbols of the struggle in addition to being participants. In Quarles’ African-American Abolitionists (1969), a historical study which portrayed African-Americans as a significant but neglected element in the fight against slavery, Pennington emerged as an abolitionist who articulated a view of slavery not just as a domestic but as a universal question. Like some abolitionists, he insisted that separate African-American organizations were necessary to combat slavery and racial prejudice.

Despite his belief in separate African-American antislavery organizations, Pennington continuously associated with predominantly white antislavery bodies. According to Betty Fladeland, Pennington was closely identified with the Tappans during his travels to Europe where he attended antislavery and peace conventions. In Men and Brothers (1972), Fladeland argued that a close relationship existed between the antislavery struggles in Great Britain and the United States. Great Britain, however, did not have the power to abolish slavery in the “land of the free”; but the federal government of the United States did.

Wisdom may have led Pennington to work with mostly white organizations to abolish slavery, for his wisdom may have been what the Peases’ conclude in They Who Would Be Free (1974). They presented Pennington as one of many articulate abolitionists and respected leaders in the northern free African-American community who were powerless to abolish slavery or effect equality for African-American people. According to Jane and William H. Pease, African-American powerlessness was the reason for the failure of African-American abolitionism.

Although he may have been powerless to abolish slavery, Pennington was a leader in the effort to organize the northern free African-American community for survival. In his role as leader, he became an articulator of the destiny of African-American people. In this regard, a number of writers have seen Pennington primarily as an early contributor to intellectual African-American history. Leonard I. Sweet, in African-American Images of America, 1784–1970 (1976), presented Pennington as one who hoped that the United States would live up to its creed of justice and equality, but Pennigton was awed by God's mysterious permission of African-American slavery in a nation destined by Him to civilize the world. In general, Sweet contended that while ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two In Search of a Christian America: Pennington in the Religious and Cultural Pattern of the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Three The Fugitive Blacksmith
• Chapter Four Pennington and African-American Religion
• Chapter Five Pennington and the Abolition Movement
• Chapter Six Pennington: Advocate of Liberation through Education, Civil Rights, and Civil War
• Chapter Seven Summary and Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index