James William Charles Pennington was an American author and educator. He was also a clergyman.
Background
James William Charles Pennington was born in 1809 in slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. While he was a slave he was known as Jim Pembroke. In his own story of his early life he recalls the desolate, terrifying days of his childhood, deprived of parental care, lacking education, and shrinking from the tyranny of his master's children and the brutality of the overseers. When he was four years old he was given, with his mother, to his first master's son, Frisbie Tilghman of Hagerstown, and was taken to live in Washington County.
At nine, James Pennington was hired out to a stone mason. Returning two years later to the home plantation, he was trained as a blacksmith and followed that trade until he was about twenty-one, when he decided to run away. After experiencing hunger, exhaustion, and escape from capture, he was welcomed one morning by a Pennsylvania Quaker with the friendly greeting, "Come in and take thy breakfast, and get warm". He spent six months in this home, and under the guidance of his Quaker teacher, laid the foundation of an extensive education.
Education
James William Charles Pennington attended evening school and was privately tutored.
Career
James William Charles Pennington found work on western Long Island, near New York City. Five years after his escape he qualified to teach in colored schools, first at Newtown, Long Island, then at New Haven, Connecticut. While at New Haven he studied theology, and pastorates in African Congregational churches at Newtown, Long Island (1838 - 1840) and at Hartford, Connecticut (1840 - 1847) followed. His scholarship and pulpit eloquence attracted favorable attention in Hartford, and he served twice as president of the Hartford Central Association of Congregational Ministers, the membership being all white except himself. During this time he examined two candidates (one a Kentuckian) for their licenses to preach. Closely identified with measures to help his race, he was five times elected a member of the General Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Colour, and in 1843 was sent to represent Connecticut at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention at London. He was also the delegate of the American Peace Convention to the World's Peace Society meeting in London the same year. While in Europe he lectured or preached in London, Paris, and Brussels.
Until a short time before the passage of the "Fugitive Slave Law" (1850), James Pennington kept secret, even from his wife, the fact that he was a runaway slave. Fearing recapture, he appealed to John Hooker, of Hartford, to negotiate for his freedom and went abroad until his status should be determined. After many discouragements, a payment of $150 to the estate of his one-time master brought a bill of sale, and a deed of manumission was recorded in the town records of Hartford, June 5, 1851. In the meantime Pennington had become the first pastor of the First (Shiloh) Presbyterian Church on Prince Street in New York City. This pulpit he occupied for eight years (1847 - 1855). During this time his story of his early life, The Fugitive Blacksmith (preface dated 1849; 3rd ed. , 1850) was published in London, the proceeds of the sale of the same being intended to aid in financing the new church. He had previously published Text Book of the Origin and History, &c, &c of the Colored People (1841). A few of his sermons and addresses survive, including Covenants Involving Moral Wrong Are Not Obligatory upon Man: A Sermon (1842), and The Reasonableness of the Abolition of Slavery (1856).
In 1859 James Pennington contributed to the Anglo-African Magazine several articles on the capabilities of his race. After 1855 he is listed in the Minutes of the Presbyterian General Assembly as a member of the Third New York Presbytery, without a pastorate, his address appearing as New York, Hartford, occasionally Maine. During his last years his usefulness was much impaired by the excessive use of intoxicants. In 1869 or early in 1870 he went to Florida, hoping to benefit his health, and at Jacksonville he gathered together a colored Presbyterian church, but he died there soon after on October 22, 1870.
