This is the first article of a five part series chronicling the life and work of the New York City abolitionist, James WC Pennington. Check back next week for the next installment.

James William Charles Pennington began life on the Tilghman plantations of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where slavery functioned not only as coerced labor but as a system that “lives and moves in the chattel principle, the property principle, the bill of sale principle” (as he later wrote).[1]

Trained from boyhood as a blacksmith and wheelwright, he took pride in the craft even as it bound him to an owner’s profit; in his memoir he admitted that “I sought to distinguish myself in the finer branches of the business,” a perfectionism that partly “reconciled him so long to being a slave.”[2] But at nineteen—in October 1827—Pennington broke from Rockland, the Tilghman home place near Hagerstown, and fled north.

The escape was harrowing: pursued by men and dogs, he dodged capture through woods and marsh, once wandering all night without a north star to guide him (“How do I know what ravenous beasts are in this wood?” he remembered) before regaining the road at dawn.[3] Eight days after leaving, starving and rain-soaked, he found Quaker sanctuary just over the Pennsylvania line.

That first refuge came from members of the Society of Friends in Chester County—families who sheltered him, paid wages, and quietly fed his hunger for learning. One Friend, identified by initials in the memoir (“J.K.”), gave him not only work but his first Bible. Pennington used “all my leisure time in study,” drawing rough solar-system maps and teaching himself to speak by practicing sermons “alone in the barn.”[4]

When he finally moved on, J.K. handed him a certificate attesting to his industry and his purpose: Pennington felt it his duty to go “where he can obtain education, so as to fit him to be more useful.”[4] These months mark the pivot of his entire life. The teenager who could not legally learn letters in Maryland took up the tools of literacy with the same craftsman’s zeal he had once lavished on ironwork. “Light is life, and truth; therefore let us read, search, and hear,” he would later write in a different context, distilling his post-escape credo into a sentence.[5]

By 1828–29 Pennington had reached the New York region, where emancipation had only recently taken effect (1827) and kidnappings under color of law remained common.[15] He worked for wages by day and invested them in evening schools and private tuition, “making encouraging progress” in Latin, Greek, and scripture. At a Sabbath school he experienced what he called “the great value of Christian knowledge,” and he felt conscience press in as he compared his new privileges with the condition of “ten brothers and sisters I had left in slavery.”

Prayer and study fused; he would have to make, as he put it, “another escape from another tyrant”—from sin as well as from an earthly master.[6] That blend of spiritual formation and practical schooling—of piety and pedagogy—became the signature of his public life.

The city’s free Black networks soon widened his world: mutual-aid societies, Sabbath-school teachers, the fledgling antislavery press, and the first wave of national Colored Conventions (beginning with Philadelphia, 1830). Those meetings taught tactics—petitions, committee work, disciplined debate—and trained a cohort of orators and organizers who would dominate antebellum Black politics.

Pennington would become one of their most durable figures, but even in these earliest years his priorities were clear: temperance, schooling, and the pursuit of ordinary civil rights (access to churches and public conveyances) as the necessary scaffolding for larger political claims.[7] The Colored Conventions Project aptly notes that, nine years before his better-known memoir, Pennington had already produced a learned Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841), a sweeping rebuttal to racial pseudoscience that flowed directly from the study habits he forged after his flight.[8]

The other great argument shaping these years was colonization. The American Colonization Society’s plan to solve slavery’s “problem” by removing free Black people to Liberia won money and endorsements from prominent whites, but Pennington rejected it from the start.

In Britain in 1843 he would summarize the case crisply, stressing both the injustice at home and the number and prospects of the free Black population; he “emphasized his disagreement with the idea of colonization,” as a contemporary abstract records.[9] Long before, in New York and Brooklyn meetings, he had allied with Theodore S. Wright and other anticolonizationists, insisting that Black Americans had a homeland already. “Light,” not exile—schools, pulpits, presses, and lawful agitation—was his remedy for prejudice. The conviction matured into a mantra he never relinquished: America was his country.

Marriage tested that conviction against danger. On October 20, 1832, still a fugitive, Pennington married Harriet Walker at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn; prudence kept the ceremony quiet, but it rooted his public ambitions in a home life always at risk from slavecatchers.[10] The next spring brought vocation into sharper focus.

In March 1833 he accepted a $200 salary from a Queens County trust to open a one-room school for Black children in Newtown (today Elmhurst). Supplies were scarce; on day one he had nine pupils and no books because the local white charity school had already “borrowed” them. He answered with method and affection: re-benching the room to curb whispering, insisting on punctuality and home study, and holding “Dr. Hickory” in reserve.

Over days the roll grew from nine to twelve to a steady class, because he spent nights in a sleigh knocking on doors and persuading skeptical parents that years, not months, of schooling would change their children’s prospects.[11] Those habits—patient institution-building, pedagogical detail married to theological purpose—became his template for abolition itself.

Evenings and Sundays he crossed to Manhattan to worship at First Colored Presbyterian (later Shiloh) with the Rev. Theodore S. Wright. When Wright’s health failed, Pennington helped sustain the ministry—early proof that his calling braided classroom, pulpit, and press. To prepare for ordination, he moved in 1834 to New Haven.

Barred from matriculating at Yale because of his race, he was permitted to audit lectures at the Divinity School. He would remember the humiliation—no place in the catalogue, no right to ask a question in class—plainly: such “oppression” taught him where northern lines were drawn.[12] But he also listened assiduously to Nathaniel William Taylor on “moral government” and Josiah Willard Gibbs on exegesis, adopting a theology that treated conscience and public law together—a frame he later used to dismantle pro-slavery readings of Scripture and to argue that no covenant binding human beings to wrong could be valid.[13] (A later Yale retrospective calls him “the first African American to attend Yale,” albeit under degrading conditions.)[14]

By the time he returned to Long Island in 1837, Pennington had stitched a durable pattern: labor and learning in tandem; pastoral care joined to movement strategy; and a relentless fight against caste in the most ordinary places—pews, classrooms, ferries, and soon, streetcars. As he wrote in his Text Book, the work was to uproot prejudice and let truth “walk forth with her olive branch.” The method was as simple—and as demanding—as the counsel he gave a wary friend: “Light is life… therefore let us read, search, and hear.”[5]

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Endnotes

1. James W. C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849), ch. on slavery’s “chattel principle.”
2. National Park Service, “James W. C. Pennington,” background note summarizing his early craft pride and later reflections (citing Fugitive Blacksmith).
3. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, escape narrative (night in the woods; fears of “ravenous beasts”).
4. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, Chester County Friends episodes (J.K.; first Bible; certificate; “all my leisure time in study”).
5. James W. C. Pennington, A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People (Hartford, 1841), preface/introductory appeals to “read, search, and hear.”
6. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith, Sabbath school and “another escape from another tyrant” passages.
7. Christopher L. Webber, American to the Backbone (Pegasus), chs. 5–7 (Brooklyn/New Haven years) and Chapter Six: “School Teacher in Newtown,” detailing temperance, schooling, and everyday rights agendas.
8. Colored Conventions Project, Pennington profile and CCP essays noting his 1841 Text Book as an early intellectual intervention.
9. Abstracts from Pennington’s 1843–44 British lectures, summarizing his stated opposition to colonization; see Webber, American to the Backbone, ch. 13–14.
10. Webber, American to the Backbone, ch. 6 (marriage to Harriet Walker at St. Ann’s, Brooklyn, 1832).
11. Webber, American to the Backbone, Chapter Six: “School Teacher in Newtown,” on the nine pupils, missing books, sleigh recruiting, and “Dr. Hickory.”
12. Webber, American to the Backbone, Chapter Seven: “Yale,” on Pennington’s auditor status and exclusions.
13. Pennington’s later constitutional–theological arguments derived from Taylor’s “moral government” (see Webber, chs. 7 & 12) and from his 1841 Text Book.
14. Yale retrospective materials acknowledging Pennington as the first African American to attend Yale (auditing), with context on restrictions.
15. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 4, on New York’s gradual emancipation completed in 1827 and continuing threat of kidnapping.