James Miller McKim was an American abolitionist anti-slavery leader.
Background
James Miller McKim was born on November 10, 1810 at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was the grandson of James McKim who came in 1774 from the north of Ireland to Carlisle and there married Hannah McIlvaine; he was the son of James McKim (1779 - 1831) and Catharine Miller (1783 - 1831), the latter of German descent.
Education
Graduating at Dickinson College at the age of eighteen (1828), McKim studied for a few weeks in 1831 at Princeton Theological Seminary and attended Andover Theological Seminary (1832 - 33).
Career
After ordination by the Wilmington Presbytery in October 1835, McKim was settled as the first pastor of the Presbyterian church at Womelsdorf, Berks County, Pennsylvania, virtually a home-missionary field rather than the foreign field to which he aspired. William Lloyd Garrison's attack on the American Colonization Society led McKim into the movement for the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and in 1833, he represented a Carlisle negro constituency in the Philadelphia convention at which the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. Being the youngest delegate, he attracted the attention of the leaders, among them Lucretia Mott. His "New School" theology had already closed orthodox Presbyterian doors; his talks against slavery in Carlisle and elsewhere, together with the permanent conversion of the entire membership of his church to the anti-slavery cause, brought him into antagonism with the prevailing public sentiment. Drawn into association and cooperation with James and Lucretia Mott, McKim resigned his charge and, in a letter explaining the growth of his religious convictions, withdrew from the ministry. He became one of the "seventy" gathered from all professions, whom the eloquence of Theodore D. Weld inspired to spread the gospel of emancipation. His stipend of eight dollars a week laid him open to the charge of being bought by "British gold. " In 1838-39, the name of James M. McKim appears on the rolls of the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania.
The McKims found their service mainly in the protection of fugitive-slaves, and in systematic resistance to legalized slave-hunts and slave-captures. At the time of his marriage McKim was publishing agent of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, in Philadelphia; he succeeded John Greenleaf Whittier as editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman; then as corresponding secretary he had a share in all the anti-slavery work both local and national. These duties were particularly arduous by reason of the fact that, to use his own expression, the Fugitive slave Law had "turned Southeastern Pennsylvania into another Guinea Coast". In 1859, McKim and his wife accompanied Mrs. John Brown to Harpers Ferry to take leave of her husband and receive his body. In the winter of 1862 McKim started the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee to provide for the wants of ten thousand slaves suddenly liberated, and the report on his visit to the Sea Islands of South Carolina was used in America and in Europe as the basis of operations. He urged the enlistment of colored men as soldiers and had a part in creating Camp William Penn, which added eleven regiments to the Union army. In 1863 he became corresponding secretary of the Pennsylvania Freedmen's Relief Association, traveling through the South to establish schools and through the North to organize public sentiment. In 1865, he removed to New York as the corresponding secretary of the American Freedman's Union Commission, which he helped to organize with the aim of promoting education among the blacks. On his motion the Commission disbanded (July 1, 1869), its work having been accomplished. In 1865 he raised a portion of the capital required to found The Nation, with which his son-in-law Wendell Phillips Garrison was so long connected, first as literary editor and finally as editor-in-charge. McKim established the family home at Llewellyn Park, Orange, New Jersey, where he died June 13, 1874.
Achievements
Membership
a member of the Union League
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
William Still wrote from fourteen years' companionship: "James Miller McKim, as one of the earliest, most faithful, and ablest abolitionists in Pennsylvania, occupied a position of influence, labor and usefulness, scarcely second to Mr. Garrison".
In “Garrison and His Times, ” Johnson says of McKim: “Fitted by his intellectual gifts as well as by education, for any place of influence and power to which he might have chosen to aspire, he devoted himself unreservedly for a generation to the cause of the slave, rendering it service of the very highest character by his pen and his voice, as well as by his wisdom in counsel. ”
Connections
On October 1, 1840, McKim married Sarah Allibone Speakman (1813 - 1891), great-grand-daughter of Thomas Speakman, who came in 1712 from Reading, Berks, England, and settled in Chester County, Pa. She was a Quaker beauty who used her feminine attractions to further the anti-slavery cause. They had two children, Charles Follen and Lucy, who married Wendell Phillips Garrison; their adopted daughter, McKim's niece, became Garrison's second wife.