Egalitarian arguments for the unity of human nature served as an important underlying theme in the African American counterpoint to transatlantic slave trade revivalist arguments. Historians such as Mia Bay, Joanne Pope Melish, and Patrick Rael have assessed the limitations of black ethnological arguments and debated the extent to which black northern intellectuals “internalized the core premises of racial science.”59 Some African American intellectuals, as such scholarship shows, invoked essentialist notions of racial difference and employed condescending—even derogatory—language to discuss native-born Africans. Yet, however off-putting the rhetoric for today’s readers, it is important to understand the fundamental nature of what was at stake in antebellum black ethnological arguments. As proslavery expansionists harnessed racial science to their vision of slaveholding empire, African American intellectuals asserted a radical alternative future predicated on the principles of human unity and black redemption.
A case in point was the Glasgow-trained physician James McCune Smith, who demonstrated both the radicalism and the contradictions of black ethnological counterargument. As a coeditor of the Anglo-African Magazine, McCune Smith penned erudite essays aimed at dismantling the science of racial determinism that supported systems of slavery and “caste.”60 Specifically, McCune Smith developed a physiological explanation of how various climates influenced both human physical variation and intellectual ability.61 Both the limitations and the emancipatory potential of these arguments were illustrated one February evening in 1849, at the twelfth annual meeting of New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum. Before an audience of students and benefactors, McCune Smith, the orphanage’s medical director, lectured on a young Khoekhoe youth named Henry who had come to the asylum on a circuitous route that led from the massacre of his family in southern Africa to his rescue by a white English trader who lodged him with the American consul in Cape Town. The consul eventually traveled to New York, bringing Henry with him and placing him in the Colored Orphan Asylum.62
As a physician, McCune Smith was closely attuned to the ethnological debates of his day. After Henry demonstrated his English-language abilities to the audience, McCune Smith lectured on the climate and geography of Henry’s homeland, as well as the “Bushman” culture. Using a form of black engagement with racial science that Patrick Rael calls “concession,” McCune Smith shaped a narrative of uplift by describing Henry’s origins in “circumstances which perpetuate the lowest grade of Barbarism to which the human family can be sunk.”63 Clearly, McCune Smith’s wording reflected familiar assumptions about the superiority of Western civilization and the inferior position of nineteenth-century African societies. Even so, it is important to note the insistence on “the human family,” lodged in the heart of McCune Smith’s most derogatory remarks. Even tropical climate and geographic isolation from the West, McCune Smith insisted, could not “erase from one of God’s human creatures the stamp of humanity.” Henry’s newfound literacy, McCune Smith implied, was a reflection of that very humanity. Though McCune Smith assumed great distance between himself and Henry, he also urged his audience to see in this young boy “another link in the grand chain of facts and arguments which go to prove the unity of the human race.”64
As James McCune Smith’s address revealed, black intellectuals’ defense of human unity articulated a concept of “human rights” with as much emphasis on the human as on the rights. To understand what African American assertions of the human family had to do with illegally trafficked and recaptive Africans, one only needs to recall the intensity of ethnological inquiry aimed at Echo shipmates to justify the natural basis of their enslavement. Both the sensational representation of Wildfire “Africans” in Harper’s Weekly and the Herald’s blatant mocking of Echo recaptives as filthy “black animals” were made possible by antebellum white discourses of race that created a gulf of identification between most white readers and slave trade refugees. Despite the contradictions and condescension of their ethnological arguments, northern black leaders agreed upon a central principle of common origins. To be clear, the claim of a common human family was not a unique African American perspective, for millions of white Americans also shared the monogenist assumption. Yet black radical abolitionists (and a small number of their white comrades) followed the radical logic of shared origins to a theory of human rights that extended the notion of black uplift to the most exploited victims of the slave trade. “Human rights stand upon a common basis,” Frederick Douglass declared in his famous speech on ethnological science, and therefore belonged to “all the human family.”65 Pennington, as we shall see, employed the idea of human rights, developed across four decades of activism, in his advocacy for recaptive youth.
Although alarmed responses to slave trade revival appeared in abolitionist newspapers across the country, the reputation of New York’s port intensified the issue and elicited a strong regional critique of the slave trade. Centered in the publications of the Anglo-African, black activists examined the global markets that connected enslaved plantation workers, nineteenth-century slave ship captives, and struggling northern free black communities. In a political climate where Charleston’s counterrevolutionary theorists depicted slavery as both the creation and the destiny of Africa’s inhabitants, black intellectuals who protested the illegal slave trade linked their own fortunes to the uplift of those most vulnerable to the threat of slavery’s expansion.66 Issues of fugitive recapture, colonization, emigration, and polygenesis all intersected with the illegal slave trade’s threat to African American progress and hope. Yet, although black New Yorkers spoke out regularly against the illegal slave trade, few black leaders moved their protest into advocacy for recaptives caught up in the belated flurry of U.S. slave trade suppression efforts. James Pennington seems to have been the exception in 1860, when he entered the public arena to intervene on behalf of recaptives in Key West and in New York’s Eldridge Street jail.
James W. C. Pennington and the Crisis of Recaptivity
When James Pennington spoke out about the condition of recaptive Africans in Key West and New York, he acted from deeply held convictions about black historical struggles for progress and justice. He responded to news of the Wildfire’s arrival in Key West by publishing two letters that questioned the priorities of U.S. suppression policy and elevated the issue of justice for recaptive Africans. Pennington’s choice of The World, a newly established white-owned and moderate religious New York daily, as a platform for his ideas suggests the desire to reach an interracial reformist audience.67 His subsequent visit to three jailed African boys in New York extended the focus on recaptives as overlooked casualties of the illegal slave trade. These initiatives of an activist minister and former fugitive slave applied an expansive concept of human rights to those made vulnerable by their mobility across treacherous boundaries of slavery and freedom.
Motivated by more than simple charity, Pennington believed that slave trade recaptives had a role to play in a historical project of black uplift. According to his biographer Richard Blackett, Pennington adapted French philosopher Auguste Comte’s law of progress to the historical travails of African descendants around the world. His speeches and writings emphasized the possibility of black progress through self-improvement and the exertion of moral power—or “Christian Zeal”—against sin and oppression.68 As Pennington phrased it, “Our trials, as a people, have been peculiar and severe.” In his 1859 essay for the Anglo-African Magazine titled “The Great Conflict Requires Great Faith,” Pennington painted a millennial view of history, in which good would eventually prevail in its struggle with evil. As a Christian activist, he exhorted his readers to maintain “holy courage” and trust that the coming confrontation between liberty and slavery would culminate in the “year of jubilee.”69 Not limited to the condition of African Americans, Pennington’s vision of history also had a part for recaptives of the illegal trade to play in the ongoing battle for black redemption and justice.
In addition to Pennington’s theolog
ical convictions, his personal experience with the physical violence and social isolation of enslavement uniquely shaped his concern for the condition of recaptive youth. Born into slavery in 1807 on Maryland’s eastern shore, Pennington knew family separation, physical violence, fear, and hunger from an early age.70 After acquiring blacksmithing and carpentry skills, the young Pennington determined to emancipate himself when he came of age. Escaping over dangerous terrain, he arrived in New York City in 1827, just as the state extinguished legal slavery. With this fortuitous timing, Pennington merged his life with what historian Graham Hodges has called New York City’s rising “freedom generation.”71 He soon found work as a coachman and embarked on a fierce pursuit of knowledge that eventually led him to audit classes at Yale’s School of Divinity. Despite Pennington’s own exodus from Maryland, his family remained enslaved, and for much of his adult life the threat of recapture under fugitive slave law hung over him. Nevertheless, Pennington married a free black woman named Harriet. Together they had a son, and Pennington immersed himself in abolition and teaching, eventually becoming a prominent Presbyterian pastor.72 Pennington settled first in Brooklyn and then took a teaching job at a school for African American students in Newtown, Long Island. He went on to pastor the Talcott Street Colored Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City. In 1849, he published his narrative The Fugitive Blacksmith and received an honorary doctorate of divinity from the University of Heidelberg. By the 1850s, his political and moral vision embraced not only immediate abolition and full equality but also deep concern about the persistence of the transatlantic slave trade.73
International travel as an abolitionist further expanded Pennington’s view of slavery in world history and informed his critique of the illegal slave trade. His travels to international conferences in London, Paris, and Frankfurt as well as lectures to abolitionist societies in England and Scotland deepened his understanding of emancipation and its relationship to the “second slavery” of the United States.74 During his trip to England in 1849, Pennington encountered a fugitive man, “about my color and size,” from New Orleans, who—after multiple escape attempts and lashings—had managed to sail to Liverpool. Pointing to the persistent insecurity of this self-emancipated passenger, Pennington wrote, “Here you see American slavery reaching forth its blood-stained hand all over the world, feeling after its victim, and seizing by the throat, all who dare aid him.”75 Pennington’s obvious identification with the man as a fellow fugitive indicated his understanding of both slaveholder power and black insecurity as transatlantic problems. In a later article for the Anglo-African Magazine titled “A Review of Slavery and the Slave Trade,” Pennington further expanded his historical analysis of “that commerce of the human species” that reached back to the Romans and extended forward in racialized form to his immediate family.76 Both scholarship and international activism developed Pennington’s broad historical and geographic framework for contemplating the crisis of slave trade recaptives.
Although Pennington is not considered among the early architects of black nationalism, his message of African redemption and the importance of black self-determination nevertheless reiterated some classical black nationalist themes.77 On a tour of Jamaican churches in 1846, Pennington told U.S. mission supporters, “The people are becoming very desirous to see black men in their pulpits.” Furthermore, he urged U.S. missions that any educational plan proposed to Jamaican church congregations “must come from their colored brethren or the abolitionists.”78 As the title of one of Pennington’s essays suggests, the jubilee would be brought about through “The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the World.” Common goals, he believed, should unite African descendants across the boundaries of nation. “The free colored men of the North look further than the South,” he proclaimed, and in return, “colored men of other localities in the world are exchanging views with us.” As the battle over slavery gathered steam in the United States, Pennington noted, “the minds of the colored people of the world are coming earnestly to a thinking point.”79 Over the course of his career, Pennington developed the idea that the responsibility for black self-redemption extended to the entire African continent. Not only that, but the very laws of nature ensured continued improvement in the condition of all people of African descent, as defined by Pennington’s ideas of Christianity, self-governance, literacy, and collective pride. Slave trade recaptives would have been part of this diaspora of people of color, which inspired in Pennington a sense of both affiliation and duty.
Prior personal involvement with African captives of the transatlantic trade deeply influenced Pennington’s 1860 interventions. The seizure of the Amistad in 1839 and the extended freedom suit of the self-liberated shipmates at district and Supreme Court levels served as formative events in developing Pennington’s ideas about African redemption. When a U.S. Supreme Court decision finally ordered the release of the Amistad shipmates in 1841, Pennington rallied his modest congregation to the cause of their repatriation. The Talcott Street Colored Congregational Church hosted the founding meeting of the Union Missionary Society, which aimed to use the shipmates’ African return to establish a mission known as the Mendi mission. As the church’s minister, Pennington mentored Henry and Tamar Wilson, a husband-and-wife missionary team with respective origins in Barbados and the Connecticut town of Brooklyn. In a speech at New York’s Zion Chapel commissioning the missionary couple for their travels to Sierra Leone, Pennington contemplated what he believed to be God’s providential hand in history. Imagine, he invited his listeners, the moment that linked the Amistad hero Cinque’s “bitter farewell” to Africa with Henry Wilson’s early missionary training in Berbice.80 His rhetorical mapping of Cinque and Henry as contrasting black travelers across zones of enslavement and emancipation vividly illustrated Pennington’s global vision of African-descended people engaged in a historical project of self-redemption. Pennington’s personal contact with the Amistad shipmates thus shaped his conviction that free people of color should involve themselves in the future of the African continent through missions, not colonization.81
Building on ideas cultivated in the Amistad case, Pennington developed with other black abolitionists a critique of colonialism that went far beyond simply opposing the ACS.82 Notwithstanding the occasional reference to Africa’s “benighted and afflicted shores,” Pennington (who once described himself as “3rd generation from pure Mandingo stock”) tended to identify with the African continent more positively and engage in less condescending rhetoric than some other African American leaders.83 In his 1843 speech against British recruitment of West African laborers for Caribbean plantations, Pennington opposed the extraction of people from a continent possessing rich natural resources and “room enough for all its inhabitants.”84 Neither did he support the emigration of African Americans to Liberia, whose founding Pennington classified in the category with every other European “system of Colonization.”85 More than once, Pennington referenced the sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s fiery condemnation of colonization and indigenous slavery.86 What we might call today an anticolonial ideology developed more fully in direct opposition to the ACS when Pennington chaired the Committee on Colonization at the 1853 Rochester Colored National Convention. As author of the committee report, Pennington invoked the historical examples of Dutch settler impositions and British appropriation of indigenous land in South Africa. As for Liberia, he charged, “the condition of the natives is worse, rather than better, since the domination of these self-styled pioneers of African civilization.”87 Opposition to the ACS entailed a defense not only of the rights of African Americans in the United States but also of the rights of indigenous polities in Liberia.
Closer to home, Pennington’s immediate experience with a different sort of recapture enhanced his sensitivity to the insecurity of slave ship refugees in U.S. custody. For years of his ministry, Pennington hid the fact of his fugitive status fr
om even his wife Harriet and closest associates. (Harriet Pennington died of an illness in 1846, and by the time James remarried Elmira Way two years later, he had publicly established his identity as a fugitive from slavery.)88 He traveled frequently to avoid slave-catchers and worried deeply about family members still in slavery, some of whom were sold away after his escape.89 Only in May 1851 did an arranged purchase from the estate of Pennington’s ex-master, Frisby Tilghman, put the stamp of legality on the free life Pennington had seized for himself more than twenty years earlier.90
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