James W. C. Pennington

Born: Maryland; 1809
Died: Jacksonville, Florida; October 20 (or 22), 1870

Entry by James P. Walsh

Although the people of Connecticut detested the institution of slavery, they were by no means ready to accept blacks as social equals or to allow them even the right to vote. Most free blacks were content just to be free; James Pennington was not. He challenged not just the Southern system of slavery but Connecticut's refusal to accord blacks their elementary civil rights.

Because he was born a slave in Maryland, Pennington never knew the exact date of his birth or his family name. He was known as Jim Pembroke before he managed to escape to freedom in 1828. He found shelter in Pennsylvania and began his formal education. Before long, he was qualified enough to accept a position in New Haven teaching fellow blacks. While doing so, Pennington studied theology on his own. In 1838 he became a Congregational minister, serving for a time as pastor of a church in New Haven.

At this time, many blacks who were tired of being assigned segregated seating in white churches organized their own congregations. One such was the Talcott Street Church in Hartford which called Pennington to its pulpit in 1840. Pennington soon became an active leader in Hartford's religious and civic life. He served as president of the Hartford Central Association of Congregational Ministers, and he helped organize the American Missionary Association.

Pennington never forgot those he had left behind in bondage. He became a fervent abolitionist who soon acquired a national reputation. In 1843 he was sent to Europe to represent Connecticut at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention, and in time his trips abroad became so frequent that he resigned his Hartford post in 1847. He had only one more significant contact with the state. In 1850, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, Pennington found himself in grave danger of being reenslaved. John Hooker, a Connecticut friend, purchased his freedom.

While Pennington's main crusade was against slavery, he attacked also the prejudice of Northerners. Unlike many white abolitionists, Pennington completely rejected the idea of "colonization," that is, of freeing the slaves and transporting them from the United States. He rebuked his "white brother ministers" who blushed if they were seen in his company and questioned the moral worth of a society where strangers would come up to him on the streets of Hartford and knock off his hat simply because he was black.

Pennington lived to see the end of slavery but not of racism. His whole life was a struggle to maintain his dignity in a society that at best accepted him, to use his own words, as "a nigger among niggers..."  The struggle took its toll. "My nature was sensitive," he once said, "and I wanted to hear singing." Had he been born with a hard heart and a dead soul, Pennington might have suffered less. But because he had neither, he gradually drank himself to death.

For Further Reading

Pennington published an autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith, in 1849, but it is difficult to find. There is a short entry by Rayford W. Logan in The Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 1982), and an article by David 0. White, "The Fugitive Blacksmith of Hartford: James W.C. Pennington," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 49 (Winter 1984), 5-30.

* Entry under revision.