Microsoft Word - 266pennington2020final.docx


 

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J O H N  W I T T E ,  J R .  &  J U S T I N  J .  L A T T E R E L L  
 
BETWEEN MARTIN LUTHER AND MAR-
TIN LUTHER KING: 
James Pennington’s Struggle for “Sa-
cred Human Rights” Against Slavery 
 
A b s t r a c t . This Article outlines the human rights theories of nineteenth-century 
abolitionist and civil rights leader James Pennington. Born into slavery in Maryland, 
Pennington escaped North and became the first African American to attend Yale. As 
an ordained Presbyterian clergyman, educator, orator, author, and activist, he 
adapted traditional Protestant rights theories explicitly to include the rights of all, re-
gardless of race. He emphasized the authority and freedom of the individual con-
science as foundational to human rights. He advocated a central role for covenantal 
institutions including church, state, family, and school as essential for fostering a law 
and culture of human rights. And he defended the right of all to disobey unjust laws 
and resist tyrannical regimes. Pennington bridged these theories in novel ways with 
pacifist teachings, anticipating by more than a century the American civil rights 
movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. Though largely forgotten by 
historians, Pennington was well known and influential among his contemporaries. 
His life and work represent an important step in the development of law, religion, and 
human rights. 
 
A u t h o r s . John Witte, Jr. is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald 
Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and 
Religion at Emory University. This text is an expanded version of lectures given at the 
University of Heidelberg, June 14, 2016 on receipt of the James Pennington Award, and 
at Yale Divinity School, October 5, 2016 at the dedication of the James Pennington 
Room. I am deeply grateful to Professors Jan Stievermann and Michael Welker at Hei-
delberg and Deans Greg Sterling and Jennifer Herdt at Yale for their hospitality and 
generous counsel for the development of this text. Thanks as well to Professors Nathan 
Chapman, Francis Smith Foster, Robert Franklin, and Timothy Jackson for helpful com-
ments. 
 
Justin J. Latterell is the Interim Managing Director, and Research Director for Law, His-
tory and Christianity at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory Univer-
sity.   
 



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A r t i c l e  C o n t e n t s  

Introduction 255 

I. Early Biographical Origins of Pennington’s Theory of Human Rights 258 

A. The Cruelty of Slavery 258 

B. Liberation of Body, Mind, and Soul. 261 

II. Protestant Foundations of Rights, Resistance, and Revolution  

 Against Tyranny 268 

III.      Human Rights and Nonviolent Resistance in Pennington’s Thought 273 

A. Liberty of Conscience and Human Rights 273 

B. Tyranny, Slavery, and Revolution. 279 

IV.      Pennington’s Critique of Chattel Slavery 283 

A.       Chattel Slavery 283 

B.  The Curse of Ham 286 

C. The Heathendom of Africans 288 

D. Slavery in the Bible 293 

V.       The Covenantal Judgment of God on Slavery and Racism 302 

VI.      Nonviolent Resistance to Slavery and Racism 312 

A.       The Principles of Nonviolence 313 

B.       Disobeying Unjust Laws 316 

C.       Modeling Covenant Community. 320 

D.       Advocacy for Abolition 323 

VII.    Slavery, Just War, and Violence 328 

VIII.   Conclusion 336 

 



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INTRODUCTION 
 

The Reverend Dr. James W.C. Pennington (ca. 1807 to 1870) 
was a remarkable figure in the American anti-slavery movement, though 
he is largely unknown today except by specialists.1 He was born into 
slavery in Maryland. As a young child, he was whipped severely by the 
master’s overseer and taunted by the master’s children. So he spent 
long, lonely, and hungry days hiding in the woods while his parents 
worked the fields. As a youth, he was trained as a blacksmith, and peri-
odically leased out to other masters and forced to live away from his fam-
ily. In 1827, after witnessing the brutal whipping of his father, he fled 
North toward freedom. Twice along the way he was seized by fugitive 
slave hunters; twice he escaped. He made his way to Pennsylvania 
where Quakers took him in and provided food, shelter, kindness, a paid 
job, his first Bible, and his first glimpse of formal education. Pennington 
then moved to New York City and settled in a Presbyterian community, 
working during the day and attending one of the black charity schools at 
night.2 

In 1830, Pennington converted to Christianity and learned to read 
the Bible. He taught himself Latin and Greek and became a voracious 
reader of theology, history, philosophy, and rhetoric. In 1834, he became 
the first African American to study at Yale, taking courses in theology 
despite being forced to sit in the hallway outside the classrooms to hear 
the lectures. He became an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church 
in 1838, serving as pastor to churches on Long Island, Hartford, and New 
York City—and later as moderator of the New York presbytery before 
taking final pastoral calls in Maine, Mississippi, and Florida.3  

 
1 For biographical studies, see THE PENNINGTON LECTURES, 2011-2015 (Jan Stievermann 
ed., 2016); CHRISTOPHER L. WEBBER, AMERICAN TO THE BACKBONE: THE LIFE OF JAMES W.C. 
PENNINGTON, THE FUGITIVE SLAVE WHO BECAME ONE OF THE FIRST BLACK ABOLITIONISTS 
(2011); R.J.M. BLACKETT, BEATING AGAINST THE BARRIERS: BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS IN NINE-
TEENTH-CENTURY AFRO-AMERICAN HISTORY 1-86 (1986); HERMAN E. THOMAS, JAMES W.C. 
PENNINGTON: AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHMAN AND ABOLITIONIST (1995); with literature re-
view in id. at 6-12, 187-200. Pennington’s given name was James Pembroke. He 
changed his surname name to Pennington after his escape in order to elude the attention 
of fugitive slave hunters.  
2 See infra notes 21-42 and accompanying text.  
3 See infra notes 41-54 and accompanying text. 



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Also in 1830, Pennington attended his first abolitionist convention 
in New York City. His own suffering as a slave had already convinced 
him that slavery and racism were morally evil, and that he was no less 
entitled to natural liberty than his white counterparts. But as he learned 
more about the vast scope, cruelty, and injustices of the chattel-slavery 
system in America and beyond, he resolved to become an educator and 
crusader against slavery and racism, adopting and adapting the Presby-
terian theories of rights, resistance, and revolution that he was learning 
as a pastor and scholar.4 

Pennington treated slavery as a form of domestic tyranny that 
needed to be resisted and reformed in the name of human rights. Much 
like the sixteenth-century Protestant reformers who revolted against the 
spiritual tyranny of the medieval pope and the American revolutionaries 
who revolted against the political tyranny of the English king, Pennington 
called for abolitionists to revolt against the domestic tyranny of the chat-
tel-slave system. He called it “blatant hypocrisy” for the avowedly 
Protestant American nation to declare proudly that “all men are created 
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 
rights,” and then systematically to deny rights to women, children, immi-
grants, indentured servants, Native Americans, and African Americans, 
enslaved and free.5 He called it a “monstrous crime” for slaves to be 
treated as items of personal property of their masters rather than as im-
age-bearers of their creator God.6 He called it “divine treason” to refuse 
sanctuary and comfort to an escaped slave, or to return slaves to their 
masters for “thirty pieces of silver,” in the vein of Judas Iscariot.7 And he 
called the American law of slavery a “covenant with death and hell” that 
would bring the entire nation under God’s judgment and wrath.8 

But Pennington was no sword-swinging revolutionary like some 
of his Protestant forebearers.9 Anticipating by a century the civil rights 
movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, Pennington advo-
cated primarily nonviolent resistance against racism and slavery.10 To 

 
4 See infra notes 61-84 and accompanying text. 
5 See infra notes 111-149 and accompanying text. 
6 See infra notes 96, 272, 338 and accompanying text. 
7 See infra notes 307-316 and accompanying text. 
8 See infra notes 241-253, 366-370 and accompanying text. 
9 See infra notes 64-82 and accompanying text. 
10 See infra notes 285-332 and accompanying text. 



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combat racism, he led sit-ins, lawsuits, political protests, and scholarly 
refutations of popular prejudices.11 He worked assiduously for the aboli-
tion of the institution of slavery and for the emancipation and escape of 
individual slaves. He sold much of his property and collected donations 
from others in an effort to ransom his family.12 He led initiatives to pro-
mote temperance, education, family stability, missionary work, and char-
ity among free and enslaved blacks in the United States, Africa, and the 
West Indies.13 And as an elected leader of the World Antislavery Society, 
he mounted pulpits, lecterns, and soapboxes on both sides of the Atlan-
tic, pleading for the rights and liberties of all—especially for African Amer-
icans, slave and free.14 
 Pennington’s abolitionist speeches, first in London in 184315 and 
later in Paris in 1849,16 caught the appreciative ear of Heidelberg jurist, 
philosopher, and literary figure Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, himself some-
thing of a liberal freedom fighter. Carové thus took the bold step of rec-
ommending Pennington for an honorary doctorate in theology.17 “The 
University of Heidelberg,” he wrote to his colleagues, “was the first to 
confer this honor upon a Jew (Spinoza),” as a standing rebuke to many 
centuries of pogroms, expulsion, persecution, and slaughter of Jewish 
people.18 “The university was the first to establish a chair for natural and 
human rights,” he continued, to counter the many centuries of church and 
state absolutism that so abused the people.19 And now, Carové argued 
to his colleagues, this great German university should again be the “first 
to confer the doctoral degree . . . on this mistreated and despised North 
American” James Pennington and, by lifting him up, help Europe begin 
to “atone for the terribly heavy guilt for [abusing] the wretched sons of 
Africa, who for centuries have been robbed of their most sacred human 
rights.”20 

 
11 See infra notes 297-332 and accompanying text. 
12 See infra notes 280-284 and accompanying text. 
13 See infra notes 60-61, 101, 329-332, 373-376 and accompanying text. 
14 WEBBER, supra note 1, at 186. 
15 Id.  
16 Id. at 255. 
17 See a facsimile of the original diploma with translation of the dedication in THOMAS, 
supra note 1, at 179-86. 
18 Id. at 186.  
19 Id.  
20 Id. at 185. 



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 This principle of “sacred human rights” animated Pennington’s 
mature efforts to abolish chattel slavery and to purge the racism that 
marked American society. Pennington’s understanding of “sacred human 
rights” came directly from the Protestant tradition of rights, resistance, 
and revolution that he absorbed in his Presbyterian training and ministry. 
He portrayed the sixteenth-century Reformation movement in Germany 
and the abolitionist cause in America as part of the same providential 
movement from slavery and tyranny toward liberty and justice, from a 
national “covenant with death” to a natural covenant with life. Like the 
Protestant revolutionaries before him, Pennington viewed conscience as 
the “mother of all rights.” Like the black church civil rights leaders after 
him, Pennington viewed Christian faith as the “soul fire” of the human 
rights movement. As such, Pennington stands as a fulcrum between Mar-
tin Luther and Martin Luther King. 

 
I. EARLY BIOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS OF PENNINGTON’S THEORY OF HU-

MAN RIGHTS  
 

A. The Cruelty of Slavery 
 

James Pennington’s theory of human rights was born, in part, out 
of his bitter personal experience with slavery. In his 1849 autobiography, 
The Fugitive Blacksmith, he recounts the abuses and indignities that led 
him to “steal himself” from his master and flee North.21 It began with the 
commercial “business of breeding slaves” which was built on “the primary 
law of slavery . . . that the child shall follow the condition of the mother,” 
however that child was conceived.22 Each slave was viewed as a singular 
item of property that could be bought, sold, leased, gifted, or moved at 
the master’s discretion, without regard to a slave’s family ties. Penning-
ton’s master, Frisby Tilghman, in fact, gifted the four-year-old Penning-
ton, his mother, and his older brother to his newly wedded son, and the 
newlyweds promptly moved to another county with their new slaves in 
tow. So “began the first of our family troubles that I knew anything about,” 

 
21 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, THE FUGITIVE BLACKSMITH, OR, EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF JAMES 
W.C. PENNINGTON, PASTOR OF A PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK, FORMERLY A SLAVE IN 
THE STATE OF MARYLAND, UNITED STATES (London: Charles Gilpin 2d ed. 1849). 
22 Id. at 1-2. 



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Pennington recounts, “as it occasioned a separation between my mother 
and the only two children she then had, and my father, to a distance of 
about two hundred mile[s].”23 Pennington’s new owner later purchased 
his father and consequently reunited the family. Yet slavery continued to 
wreak havoc on Pennington and his family, for it prevented his parents 
from fulfilling their natural duties to care for their children. 

 
My parents were not able to give any attention to their chil-
dren during the day. I often suffered much from hunger and 
other similar causes. To estimate the sad state of a slave 
child, you must look at it as a helpless human being thrown 
up on the world without the benefit of its natural guardians. 
It is thrown into the world without a social circle to flee to for 
hope, shelter, comfort, or instruction. The social circle, with 
all its heaven-ordained blessings, is of the utmost im-
portance to the tender child; but of this, the slave child, how-
ever tender and delicate, is robbed.24  
 
Slavery not only robbed young Pennington of parental care, but 

also left him and other slave children vulnerable to the cruelty of the mas-
ter’s children and overseers. Though similar in age to his master’s sons, 
Pennington and his fellow slave children “were not only required to rec-
ognize these young sirs as our young masters, but they felt themselves 
to be such; and, in consequence of this feeling, they sought to treat us 
with the same air of authority that their father did the older slaves.”25 
Worse were the plantation overseers. Charged with managing and disci-
plining all the slaves, Tilghman’s overseers took “pleasure in torturing the 
children of slaves, long before they are large enough to be put at the hoe, 
and consequently under the whip.”26 One “extremely cruel” overseer 
named Blackstone severely flogged young Pennington. “From that [day], 
I lived in constant dread of that man; and he would show how much he 

 
23 Id. at 2. 
24 Id. 
25 Id. at 2-3. 
26 Id. at 3. 



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delighted in cruelty by chasing me from my play with threats and impre-
cations.”27  

It was even harder for Pennington to see his family members mis-
treated.28 He was especially outraged when, as a teenager, he witnessed 
the severe beating of his father. “I was near enough to hear the insolent 
words that were spoken to my father, and to hear, see, and even count 
the savage stripes inflicted upon him,” he remembered.29 That humiliat-
ing and infuriating scene steeled his opposition to slavery. “Let me ask 
any one of Anglo-Saxon blood and spirit, how would you expect a son to 
feel at such a sight?”30 It was a crucial turning point in Pennington’s life 
and that of his entire family: 

 
This act created an open rupture with our family – each 
member felt the deep insult that had been inflicted upon our 
head; the spirit of the whole family was roused; we talked of 
it in our nightly gatherings and showed it in our daily melan-
choly aspect. The oppressor saw this, and with the heart-
lessness that was in perfect keeping with the first insult, 
commenced a series of tauntings, threatenings, and insinu-
ations, with a view to crush the spirit of the whole family. 
Although it was sometime after this event before I took the 
decisive step [to escape], yet in my mind and spirit, I never 
was a Slave after it.31 
 
The natural integrity of the family—and the inherent dignity of 

each family member—would remain a lasting theme in Pennington’s 
thought.32 His father’s beating convinced Pennington that he could not 
 
27 Id. 
28 See James W.C. Pennington, [Untitled Report of Speech], MONTREAL WITNESS, Sept. 
6, 1862, available at BAA, Doc. No. 25908: "No man was contented who saw his mother 
flogged, his sister violated, and his brothers sold on the auction block,” Pennington re-
flected. 
29 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 7. 
30 Id.  
31 Id.  
32 See infra note 40. See, e.g., [Record of Lecture Given by Pennington in England], ANTI-
SLAVERY REP., June 28, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 06951, at 1-2. (Slavery “origi-
nates in the dismemberment of those portions of the human family who have been long 
and cruelly disfranchised. The human family, taken as a whole, are like the body. Each 
 



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continue to live in bondage. Yet even as this conviction grew stronger, 
relations between his family members and their master continued to de-
teriorate. “Our social state was now perfectly intolerable,” Pennington 
said of the weeks after his father’s beating. “We were on the eve of a 
general fracas,” as family members struggled to know how to respond 
and protect themselves from such manifest cruelty and injustice. Finally, 
one Saturday evening, Pennington recounted, “without counsel or advice 
from any one, I determined to fly.”33 It was the first of his many conscien-
tious acts of resistance against tyranny. 
 

B. Liberation of Body, Mind, and Soul. 
 

Pennington’s flight from slavery foreshadowed his later efforts to 
abolish slavery so much as possible by nonviolent means. Though fully 
convinced that he had the right to break his bonds and claim his freedom, 
Pennington remained troubled, both during and after his escape, by the 
deception and violence that his escape required. His master set a hefty 
two-hundred-dollar bounty on his head and Pennington was actively pur-
sued as a fugitive as he made his way, largely by night and by backroads 
and trails, from the Maryland coast to the closest free state of Pennsyl-
vania.34 When periodically confronted by white slave catchers, Penning-
ton spun lies to elude capture or fled by foot. Twice he was captured and 
held, but each time he broke free and escaped again.35 “I had resolved 
upon a plan of operation,” Pennington later said of his decision to fight 
one of his pursuers, “to stop short, face about, and commence action; 
and neither ask or give quarters, until I was free or dead!”36 But Penning-
ton also regretted such thoughts and actions. When another slave 
catcher pursued him over a hill, he reflected: “Once more I thought of 

 
class is a limb; every limb sustains its appropriate relation. Strike off a limb, and you injure 
the whole body. To treat any one class of the human family without a respect to the 
relationship they sustain, is to do injury to the entire body, and to diffuse pain throughout. 
Here is the exact position of that limb of the human family which I represent to-day. For 
hundreds of years it has been dismembered from the trunk, and hence mutual pain, mu-
tual disease, mutual agony, mutual trouble throughout the whole body. Again, I ask, What 
is the remedy? It is direct, it is close, it is reasonable. Restore the dismembered limb.”) 
33 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 11. 
34 Id. 
35 Id. at 18-30. 
36 Id. at 26.  



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self-defense. I am trying to escape peaceably, but this man is determined 
that I shall not.”37 

Pennington ultimately justified such lies and violence as sins of 
necessity born of the natural right to self-defense.38 But sins they re-
mained in his mind at the time. Faced with the prospect of “200 lashes” 
for his escape and a lifetime of even harder bondage thereafter,39 he in-
stinctively defended himself—ready to fight to the death, if necessary. 
But Pennington was also aware that his conduct was judged by a trans-
cendent moral law, which he resented having to break. 

 
If you ask me whether I had expected before I left home, to 
gain my liberty by shedding men’s blood, or breaking their 
limbs? I answer, no! . . . If you ask me if I expected when I 
left home to gain my liberty by fabrications and untruths? I 
answer, no! my parents, slaves as they were, had always 
taught me, when they could, that “truth may be blamed but 
cannot be shamed” . . . . If you ask me whether I now really 
believe that I gained my liberty by those lies? I answer, no! 
I now believe that I should be free, had I told the truth; but, 
at that moment, I could not see any other way to baffle my 
enemies, and escape their clutches. The history of that day 
has never ceased to inspire me with a deeper hatred of slav-
ery; I never recur to it but with the most intense horror at a 
system which can put a man not only in peril of liberty, limb, 
and life itself, but which may even send him in haste to the 
bar of God with a lie upon his lips.40 

 
These moral dilemmas and injustices became clearer to Penning-

ton as he pursued his education. After crossing from Maryland into Penn-
sylvania, he was taken in by Quakers who gave him food, shelter, and 
paid work. They introduced him to literature, the Bible, astronomy, and 
mathematics. They taught him basic skills in reading and writing.41 He 

 
37 Id. at 23. 
38 For Pennington’s later theory of self-defense, see infra note 358. 
39 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 23. 
40 Id. at 29-30. 
41 Id. at 40-44; see also WEBBER, supra note 1, at 35-37. 



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would later describe this six-month stay with the Quakers as a bittersweet 
period of enlightenment. All this new reading opened his mind and imag-
ination for the first time. But he also discovered the extent to which slav-
ery had shackled not only his body but also his mind, stunting his educa-
tional preparation and intellectual development. 

 
I now began to see, for the first time, the extent of the mis-
chief slavery had done to me. Twenty-one years of my life 
were gone, never again to return, and I was as profoundly 
ignorant, comparatively, as a child five years old. This was 
painful, annoying, and humiliating in the extreme. Up to this 
time, I recollected to have seen one copy of the New Testa-
ment, but the entire Bible I had never seen, and had never 
heard of the Patriarchs, or of the Lord Jesus Christ. I recol-
lected to have heard two sermons, but had heard no men-
tion in them of Christ, or the way of life by Him. It is quite 
easy to imagine, then, what was the state of my mind, hav-
ing been reared in total moral midnight; it was a sad picture 
of mental and spiritual darkness. As my friend poured light 
into my mind, I saw the darkness; it amazed and grieved me 
beyond description. Sometimes I sank down under the load, 
and became discouraged, and dared not hope that I could 
ever succeed in acquiring knowledge enough to make me 
happy, or useful to my fellow-beings.42 

 
Pennington would go on to become a renowned scholar, 

preacher, and teacher, but he always resented this lack of early educa-
tion and the handicaps it imposed on him. 

 
There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I 
never can forgive. It robbed me of my education; the injury 
is irreparable; I feel the embarrassment more seriously now 
than I ever did before. It cost me two years’ hard labour, 
after I fled, to unshackle my mind; it was three years before 
I had purged my language of slavery’s idioms; it was four 

 
42 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 43-44. 



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years before I had thrown off the crouching aspect of slav-
ery; and now the evil that besets me is a great lack of that 
general information, the foundation of which is most effectu-
ally laid in that part of life which I served as a slave. When I 
consider how much now, more than ever, depends upon 
sound and thorough education among coloured men, I am 
grievously overwhelmed with a sense of my deficiency, and 
more especially as I can never hope now to make it up. If I 
know my own heart, I have no ambition but to serve the 
cause of suffering humanity; all that I have desired or 
sought, has been to make me more efficient for good. So far 
I have some consciousness that I have done my utmost; and 
should my future days be few or many, I am reconciled to 
meet the last account, hoping to be acquitted of any wilful 
neglect of duty; but I shall have to go to my last account with 
this charge against the system of slavery, “Vile monster! 
thou hast hindered my usefulness, by robbing me of my 
early education!”43  

 
Proper education for all people—black and white, slave and free, 

male and female alike—would become another abiding theme in Pen-
nington’s theory of human rights.44 As he later put it, “The proud and self-
ish Anglo-Saxon seized upon the Negro to be used merely as a beast; 
but he was soon alarmed to find that he must undertake the difficult task 
of forging chains for a mind like his own . . . . [F]rom that moment to the 
present, slavery has been literally A WAR OF MINDS.”45 

 
43 Id. at 56-57.  
44 See, e.g., James W.C. Pennington, Common School Review – No. XI, COLORED AM., 
June 26, 1841, available at BAP, Doc. No. 13372 (“Education is so desirable that every 
effort and sacrifice ought to be made by every one to diffuse it into the mass of our needy 
people every where.”); James W.C. Pennington, Common School Review – No. [illegible], 
COLORED AM., July 4, 1840, available at BAP, Doc. No. 12589; James W.C. Pennington, 
From the Old ‘Long Island Scribe’, WKLY. ANGLO-AFR., Sept. 24, 1859, available at BAP, 
Doc. No. 9650. See, e.g., DAVID E. SWIFT, BLACK PROPHETS OF JUSTICE: ACTIVIST CLERGY 
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR 211-14 (1989).  
45 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, THE COLOURED POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES HAVE NO 
DESTINY SEPARATE FROM THAT OF THE NATION OF WHICH THEY FORM AN INTEGRAL PART: A 
LECTURE DELIVERED BEFORE THE GLASGOW YOUNG MEN’S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION AND ALSO 
BEFORE THE ST. GEORGE’S BIBLICAL, LITERARY, AND SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTE, LONDON 2, Con-
gregational Library – Anti-Slavery Pamphlets (1850), available at BAP, Doc. No. 372. 



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 But “an increase in knowledge” brought with it “an increase in sor-
row” for Pennington.46 It first drove him to despair, but ultimately brought 
him to the Christian faith. After six months of residing with the Quaker 
family in Pennsylvania who first took him in, Pennington made his way to 
New York City in late 1828 or early 1829.47 There he joined a Presbyter-
ian community and continued his studies in Sunday schools and evening 
charity schools while working as a coachman.48 The more he learned 
about the magnitude of the suffering of slaves, however, the more he 
lamented their plight and the guiltier he felt about his own newly claimed 
liberty. His indignation and despair led to a tortuous period of introspec-
tion and ultimately to a full-scale religious conversion. 
 

The theme was more powerful than any my mind had ever 
encountered before. It entered into the deep chambers of 
my soul, and stirred the most agitating emotions I had ever 
felt. The question was, what can I do for that vast body of 
suffering brotherhood I have left behind. To add to the 
weight and magnitude of the theme, I learnt for the first time, 
how many slaves there were. The question completely stag-
gered my mind; and finding myself more and more borne 
down with it, until I was in an agony; I thought I would make 
it a subject of prayer to God, although prayer had not been 
my habit, having never attempted it but once. I not only 
prayed, but also fasted. It was while engaged thus, that my 
attention was seriously drawn to the fact that I was a lost 
sinner, and a slave to Satan; and soon I saw that I must 
make another escape from another tyrant. I did not by any 
means forget my fellow-bondmen, of whom I had been sor-
rowing so deeply, and travailing in spirit so earnestly; but I 
now saw that while man had been injuring me, I had been 
offending God; and that unless I ceased to offend him, I 
could not expect to have his sympathy in my wrongs; and 
moreover, that I could not be instrumental in eliciting his 

 
46 Ecclesiastes 1:18. 
47 WEBBER, supra note 1, at 43-44; THOMAS, supra note 1, at 45.  
48 SWIFT, supra note 44, at 209. 



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powerful aid in behalf of those for whom I mourned so 
deeply.49 

 
True liberation, Pennington now believed, required not only re-

lease of the body from the shackles of slavery and of the mind from the 
perils of ignorance, but also redemption of the soul from its enslavement 
to sin. 

 
Day after day, for about two weeks, I found myself more 
deeply convicted of personal guilt before God. My heart, 
soul and body were in the greatest distress; I thought of nei-
ther food, drink or rest, for days and nights together. Burning 
with a recollection of the wrongs man had done me – mourn-
ing for the injuries my brethren were still enduring, and 
deeply convicted of the guilt of my own sins against God. 
One evening, in the third week of the struggle, while alone 
in my chamber, and after solemn reflection for several 
hours, I concluded that I could never be happy or useful in 
that state of mind, and resolved that I would try to become 
reconciled to God.50 

 
Under the guidance of Presbyterian minister Samuel Cox, Pennington 
accepted the Christian faith. “I was brought to a saving acquaintance with 
Him, of whom Moses in the Law and Prophets” and the New Testament 
wrote at length.51 This was the God who brought his people out of literal 
slavery in Egypt into the promised land of Israel, Pennington noted.52 And 
this was the God who brings each person out of spiritual slavery to sin 
into the gracious presence of the church, the spiritual body of Christ on 
earth.53 Pennington became a devoted Christian thereafter and wor-
shipped in the Presbyterian church pastored by Rev. Cox.54  

 
49 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 51-52.  
50 Id. at 53. 
51 Id. at 54.  
52 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 2.  
53 [Record of Lecture Given by Pennington in England], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., June 28, 
1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 06951, at 4. 
54 Id. at 54; see also WEBBER, supra note 1, at 50-52, 435, 441-42.  



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Also in 1830, Pennington joined the abolitionist cause, “the great 
movement . . . of anti-slavery friends,” as he called them, including such 
notables as William Lloyd Garrison, Simeon Jocelyn, and Lewis Tap-
pan.55 He attended “those Conventions, where they came to make our 
acquaintance, and to secure our confidence in some of their preliminary 
labours.”56 As he continued to establish and educate himself in the North, 
Pennington came to view American slavery as “more hideous than 
ever.”57 
 

I saw it now as an evil under the moral government of God – 
as a sin not only against man, but also against God. The 
great and engrossing thought with me was, how shall I now 
employ my time and my talents so as to tell most effectually 
upon this system of wrong! . . . Many, many lonely hours of 
deep meditation have I passed during the years 1828 and 
1829, before the great anti-slavery movement. On the ques-
tions, What shall I do for the slave? How shall I act so that he 
will reap the benefit of my time and talents? . . . At length, 
finding that misery, ignorance, and wretchedness of the free 
coloured people was by the whites tortured into an argument 
for slavery; finding myself now among the free people of col-
our in New York, where slavery was so recently abolished; 
and finding much to do for their elevation, I resolved to give 
my strength in that direction . . . [so that each slave] may be 
speedily released from the pain of drinking a cup whose bit-
terness I have sufficiently tasted, to know that it is insuffera-
ble.58 

 
55 ANTI-SLAVERY REP., supra note 53, at 54-57. On the wide variety of abolitionists, see 
the recent massive study and copious sources cited in MANISHA SINHA, THE SLAVE’S 
CAUSE: A HISTORY OF ABOLITION (2016). 
56 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 54-57. 
57 Id. 
58 Id. Pennington continued: “And well do I remember the great movement which com-
menced among us about this time, for the holding of General Conventions, to devise 
ways and means for their elevation, which continued with happy influence up to 1834, 
when we gave way to anti-slavery friends, who had then taken up the labouring oar. And 
well do I remember that the first time I ever saw those tried friends, [William Lloyd] Gar-
rison, [Simeon] Jocelyn, and [Lewis] Tappan, was in one of those Conventions, where 
they came to make our acquaintance, and to secure our confidence in some of their pre-
liminary labours.” Id. at 57. 



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Convinced that liberation of body, mind, and soul were interde-

pendent, Pennington resolved to prepare himself for the vocation of min-
ister and educator, and from that platform to join churches, schools, fam-
ilies, and abolitionist societies alike to fight for the emancipation, 
elevation, and equality of his fellow African Americans. Pennington thus 
immersed himself in his studies and, in 1834, won a teaching position at 
a local school for black children.59 That same year, he enrolled in a two-
year program of theological training at Yale to prepare for ordination in 
Presbyterian ministry.60  

 
II. PROTESTANT FOUNDATIONS OF RIGHTS, RESISTANCE, AND REVO-

LUTION AGAINST TYRANNY 
 

Pennington would later call it “providential”61 that he had con-
verted to Presbyterianism. This was a democratic form of Protestant 
Christianity born in sixteenth-century Scotland and prominent in nine-
teenth-century America. American Presbyterians, like most churches in 
Pennington’s day, were divided between proslavery and antislavery fac-
tions.62 Several strong black Presbyterian churches in the North were 

 
59 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 56; SWIFT, supra note 44, at 211.  
60 See, e.g., Colored Ministers, N. STAR, Apr. 7,1848, available at BAP, Doc. No. 4191, 
at 8869: “He [Pennington] has ever secured the confidence and respect of the whole 
community, and has had one of the most orderly, respectable, and intelligent audiences 
that I ever knew. He is a sound theologian, a good self-made scholar, and a gentleman; 
aside from pastoral duties actively engaged, heart and hand, in temperance, education, 
anti-slavery, and all the reforms that tend to improve, refine, and elevate society.”). See 
other accounts in SWIFT, supra note 44, at 211-20. 
61 James W.C. Pennington. The Position and Duties of the Colored People: Or the Great 
Lessons to Be Learned from the Late Riotous Attack upon Them in New York, NATIONAL 
PRINCIPIA, Aug. 24, 1863, available at BAA, Doc. No. 27335, at 9. 
62 See Russell E. Hall, An Outline History of the Presbyterian Church in America, 26 J. 
PRESBYTERIAN HIST. SOC’Y 227 (Dec. 1948); J. Earl Thompson, Jr., Slavery and Presby-
terianism in the Revolutionary Era, 54 J. PRESBYTERIAN HIST. (PRESBYTERIANS AND THE 
AMERICAN REVOLUTION: AN INTERPRETIVE ACCOUNT) 121 (Spring 1976); Mark A. Noll, Pres-
byterian History, and the Civil War, 89 J. PRESBYTERIAN HIST. 4 (Spring/Summer 2011); 
Jewel L. Spangler, Proslavery Presbyterians: Virginia’s Conservative Dissenters in the 
Age of Revolution, 78 J. PRESBYTERIAN HIST. 111 (Summer 2000); Irving Stoddard Kull, 
Presbyterian Attitudes Toward Slavery, 7 CHURCH HIST. 101 (June 1938); Walter B. 
Posey, The Slavery Question in the Presbyterian Church in the Old Southwest, 15 J.S. 
 



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firmly abolitionist, led by renowned ministers like Henry Highland Gar-
net.63 The Presbyterian and related Protestant traditions offered Pen-
nington a firm theological framework in which to ground his emerging 
arguments against slavery and his early beliefs that church, family, and 
school were essential institutions for the liberation of body, mind, and 
soul. Even more, this Protestant tradition provided Pennington with a 
powerful theory of rights, resistance, and revolution against spiritual and 
political tyranny, which he adopted and then adapted into a theory of 
nonviolent resistance against the domestic tyranny of slavery.  

The idea of rights, resistance, and revolution against any form of 
tyranny, of course, was no Presbyterian or Protestant invention. This idea 
had ancient Greek and Roman roots and grew into whole forests of Cath-
olic, Protestant, and Republican thought by early modern times.64 Draw-
ing on this tradition in 1517, Martin Luther (1483-1546), the first 
Protestant reformer, led a revolution against the spiritual tyranny of the 
pope and the “Babylonian captivity of the church” by Rome.65 Through 
false doctrines and abusive canon laws, Luther charged, the pope and 

 
HIST. 311 (Aug. 1949); Jennifer Oast, “The Worst Kind of Slavery”: Slave Owning Pres-
byterian Churches in Prince Edward County, Virginia, 76 J.S. HIST. 867 (Nov. 2010); Dan-
iel Ritchie, Radical Orthodoxy: Irish Covenanters and American Slavery, circa 1830-
1865, 82 CHURCH HIST. 812 (Dec. 2013); Jack P. Maddex, Jr., Proslavery Millenialism: 
Social Eschatology in Antebellum Southern Calvinism, 31 AM. Q. 46 (Spring 1979); MAT-
THEW ANDERSON, PRESBYTERIANISM: ITS RELATION TO THE NEGRO (1897).  
63 See Pennington, supra note 61, at 12-14. For studies of African-American Presbyterian 
churches and figures see also GAYRAUD S. WILMORE, BLACK & PRESBYTERIAN: THE HERIT-
AGE AND THE HOPE (1983); David E. Swift, Black Presbyterian Attacks on Racism: Samuel 
Cornish, Theodore Wright and Their Contemporaries, 51 J. PRESBYTERIAN HIST. 433 (Win-
ter 1973); Moses N. Moore, Jr., Righteousness Exalts a Nation: Black Clergymen, Re-
form, and New School Presbyterianism, 70 AM. PRESBYTERIANS 222 (Winter 1992); Moses 
N. Moore, Jr., Revisiting the Legacy of Black Presbyterians, 84 J. PRESBYTERIAN HIST. 37 
(Spring/Summer 2006); Timothy L. Smith, Slavery and Theology: The Emergence of 
Black Christian Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America, 41 CHURCH HIST. 497 
(Dec. 1972).  
64 See, e.g., P.J. RHODES, THE GREEK CITY STATES: A SOURCEBOOK (mnno); HAROLD J. BER-
MAN, LAW AND REVOLUTION: THE FORMATION OF THE WESTERN LEGAL TRADITION (pqrs); BRIAN 
TIERNEY, THE IDEA OF NATURAL RIGHTS: STUDIES ON NATURAL RIGHTS, NATURAL LAW, AND 
CHURCH LAW, pptn–pumt (pqqo); ROBERT M. KINGDON, GENEVA AND THE CONSOLIDATION OF 
THE FRENCH PROTESTANT MOVEMENT: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF CONGREGATIONAL-
ISM, PRESYBTERIANISM, AND CALVINIST RESISTANCE THEORY (pquo).  
65  MARTIN LUTHER, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), in 36 LUTHER’S WORKS 
11 (Helmut T. Lehmann ed., A.T.W. Steinhäuser trans., Fortress Press, 1959); see 
sources in JOHN WITTE, JR., LAW AND PROTESTANTISM: THE LEGAL TEACHINGS OF THE LU-
THERAN REFORMATION 53-65 (2002). 



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his clerical retinue had destroyed the liberty of the Gospel, tyrannized the 
Christian conscience, and deceived the German people on the pretext of 
controlling their salvation. Relying on the authority of scripture and indi-
vidual conscience, Luther called on various magistrates to stand up and 
throw off this spiritual tyrant for the sake of “the freedom of the Chris-
tian.”66  

After 1550, some Protestants further revolted against political ty-
rants as they faced inquisitions and genocides that killed their coreligion-
ists by the tens of thousands from the later sixteenth century onward. In 
particular, Lutherans in Magdeburg and Calvinists in France, the Nether-
lands, Scotland, England, and North America went from turning cheeks 
to swinging swords against their oppressors. And they used their writing 
desks and pulpits to work out a logic of rights, resistance, and revolution 
that had become a Presbyterian and broader Protestant commonplace 
by the time Pennington opened his theological tracts.67  

This Protestant logic built in part on the familiar legal doctrine of 
legitimate self-defense. Defense of oneself and of third parties against 
attack, using proportionate, even deadly force and violence when neces-
sary was an ancient legal teaching.68 The law of resistance to tyranny is 
the law of self-defense writ large. When a magistrate exceeds his author-
ity, he forfeits his office and becomes like any other private person. His 
victims and third parties alike may resist him, passively or actively, just 
as if he were any other criminal thug.69  

Presbyterians and other Protestants also drew in the biblical idea 
of covenants, which they cast into a Christian social and government 
contract theory.70 The political government of each community, they ar-
gued, is formed by a three-way covenant between God, the rulers, and 
the people, modeled in part on ancient biblical covenants. By this cove-
nant, God agreed to protect and bless the rulers and the people in return 
for their proper obedience to the laws of God and nature. The rulers 

 
66 MARTIN LUTHER, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in 31 LUTHER’S WORKS 327, 327-
377 (W.A. Lambert, trans.).  
67 See detailed sources and discussion in JOHN WITTE, JR., THE REFORMATION OF RIGHTS: 
LAW, RELIGION, AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN EARLY MODERN CALVINISM (2007).  
68 See, e.g., Johannes Althusius’s theory of self-defense as informed by historical legal 
and theological precedents in WITTE, supra note 67, at 168-169. 
69 Id. at 200. 
70 Id. at 7-35, 85-89, 124-154, 185-291. 



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agreed to honor these higher laws and protect the people’s essential 
rights, particularly those rights rooted in the Bible. The people agreed to 
exercise God’s political will for the community by electing and petitioning 
their rulers and by honoring and obeying them so long as the rulers hon-
ored God’s law and protected the people’s rights. If any of the people 
violated the terms of this political covenant and became criminals, the 
ruler could properly prosecute and punish them—and sentence them to 
death in extreme cases. In turn, if any of the rulers violated the terms of 
the political covenant and became tyrants, they could be properly re-
sisted and removed from office—and sentenced to death in extreme 
cases if convicted. The remarkable trial and execution of King Charles I 
of England in 1649 was a textbook example of this stern Calvinist re-
sistance logic in action.71 But if the tyrant refused to leave or could not be 
tried and persisted in tyranny, the lower magistrates were to organize 
and direct the people in revolt, including all-out revolution if needed to 
unseat this tyrant.72  

Early-modern Protestants largely accepted the enumerated lists 
of rights and liberties (iura et libertates) set out in classical Roman law 
and expanded in medieval and early-modern laws.73 But they rear-
ranged, prioritized, and expanded this roll of rights, in part, on the basis 
of the Bible. The most important rights, they reasoned, were the religious 
rights of “liberty of conscience” and “free exercise of religion.”74 After all, 
persons are created first and foremost as subjects and ambassadors of 
God and called to honor God above all else. The Ten Commandments 
enjoined them to worship God, to observe the Sabbath, and to avoid 
blasphemy and idolatry.75 The New Testament ordered them to “obey 
God rather than men.”76 

 
71 THE TRIAL OF CHARLES I: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY (David Lagomarshino and Charles T. 
Wood ed., 1989); NOEL H. MAYFIELD: PURITANS AND REGICIDE: PRESBYTERIAN-INDEPENDENT 
DIFFERENCES OVER THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF CHARLES I STUART (1989).  
72 THEODORE BEZA, CONCERNING THE RIGHTS OF RULERS OVER THEIR SUBJECTS AND THE DU-
TIES OF SUBJECTS TOWARD THEIR RULERS 27, 36-38, 72-74 (Henri-Louis Gonin, trans. 
1956).  
73 See sources and discussion in CHRISTIANITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS: AN INTRODUCTION 20-
23, 64-80 (John Witte, Jr. & Frank S. Alexander eds., 2010); 1 CHRISTIANITY AND FREEDOM 
(Allen Hertzke & Timothy Shah eds., 2016).  
74 WITTE, supra note 67, at 45-48, 128-29, 140-41, 170-76, 226-35, 303-07.  
75 Exodus 20:1-11. 
76 Acts 5:29. 



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In practice, it became clear that protecting religious rights and du-
ties required the protection of several other correlative rights, especially 
in contexts where Protestants were persecuted minorities. An individual’s 
right to religious freedom, for example, required attendant rights to as-
semble, speak, worship, evangelize, educate, marry, parent, travel, and 
more. The rights of the religious group to worship and govern itself as an 
ecclesiastical polity required attendant rights to legal personality, corpo-
rate property, collective worship, organized charity, parochial education, 
freedom of the press, freedom of contract, freedom of association, and 
more. And both individuals and groups had to live by many other biblical 
commandments that set out the rights and duties of life, liberty, property, 
marriage, family, household, sanctuary, relief for the poor, charity, edu-
cation, and more.77 By the 1560s, Calvinist writers began calling all these 
rights “essential,” “unalienable,” and “fundamental.”78 The chronic and 
pervasive breach of these rights by a magistrate, they reasoned, trig-
gered the basic right and duty of the people, through appropriate means 
and channels, to resist or even to revolt.  

This Protestant logic had driven French, Dutch, Scottish, and 
English revolutionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to 
throw off their tyrannical oppressors in protection of their fundamental 
rights.79 It was in part to that same tradition that early American revolu-
tionaries appealed when they called their countrymen to arms against 
British tyranny.80 While seventeenth-century American colonists had 

 
77 WITTE, supra note 67, at 45-48, 128-29, 140-41, 170-76, 226-35, 303-07.  
78 See, e.g., CHRISTOPHER GOODMAN, HOW SUPERIOR POWERS OUGHT TO BE OBEYED (1558) 
52-53, 74-76, 97-99, 142, 160-61 (fasc. ed. Charles H. McIlwain, 1931); WITTE, supra note 
67, at 169-81 (describing the detailed rights theory of Johannes Althusius).  
79 See MICHAEL WALZER, THE REVOLUTION OF THE SAINTS: A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS OF RADI-
CAL POLITICS (1965); 1 AND 2 R.R. PALMER, THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION (1959-
1964); JOHN W. SAP, PAVING THE WAY FOR REVOLUTION: CALVINISM AND THE STRUGGLE FOR 
A DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTIONAL STATE (2001); DAVID T. BALL, THE HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF 
JUDICIAL REVIEW, 1536–1803: THE DUTY TO RESIST TYRANNY (2005). 
80 HARRY S. STOUT, THE NEW ENGLAND SOUL: PREACHING AND RELIGIOUS CULTURE IN COLO-
NIAL NEW ENGLAND (Oxford 1986, 2012); NATHAN O. HATCH, THE SACRED CAUSE OF LIBERTY: 
REPUBLICAN THOUGHT AND THE MILLENNIUM IN REVOLUTIONARY NEW ENGLAND (1977); James 
H. Smylie, Presbyterians and the American Revolution, 52 J. PRESBYT. HIST. 299-488 
(1974).  



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viewed themselves as the New Israel set on an “errand into the wilder-
ness”81 after escaping bondage in old England, eighteenth-century Amer-
icans saw themselves as the old Israelites shackled in another house of 
bondage. Like the ancient pharaohs, they preached, modern British kings 
were systematically breaking the laws of nature and nature’s God and 
breaching the fundamental rights and liberties of God’s people in Amer-
ica. Like the ancient Israelites led by Moses, the new American colonies 
had to break these bonds of political tyranny so that they could exercise 
their rights and duties in service of God, neighbor, and self. “Rebellion to 
tyrants is obedience to God,” the American revolutionaries argued.82  
 
III. HUMAN RIGHTS AND NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE IN PENNINGTON’S 

THOUGHT 
 

A. Liberty of Conscience and Human Rights 
 
            James Pennington discovered a deep “elective affinity”83 with this 
Protestant tradition as he immersed himself in Presbyterian theology and 
abolitionist advocacy. As he put it in a later sermon: 
  

The Reformation was a contest for the rights of the people 
in matters of religion and conscience . . . . From his monkish 
apartments Luther looked out upon the moral state of his 
countrymen. He beheld them without the word of God. He 
assumed it to be the right of every man to have and to read 
God’s Holy Word . . . . Luther was especially prompted by 
his conscience to oppose slavery, whether physical, mental, 

 
81 Title of SAMUEL DANFORTH, A BRIEF RECOGNITION OF NEW-ENGLANDS ERRAND INTO THE 
WILDERNESS (1671), discussed in PERRY MILLER, ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS (1956).  
82 See representative texts in POLITICAL SERMONS AND THE AMERICAN FOUNDING ERA, 1730-
1805, at 559-656 (Ellis Sandoz ed., 1991); PURITAN POLITICAL IDEAS, 1558-1794, at 304-
92 (Edmund S. Morgan ed., Hackett Pub’g Co. reprt. ed. 2003) (1965); JOHN WINGATE 
THORNTON, THE PULPIT OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (2d ed. 1876). 
83 The term “elective affinity” (or Wahlverwandtschaft) is drawn from the work of Max 
Weber and is used here to describe the fit between Pennington‘s worldview, experiences, 
and interests and the Protestant legal and theological traditions that he adopted after his 
escape from slavery. See MAX WEBER, The Social Psychology of the World Religions, in 
FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY 284-85 (H.H. Geerth & C. Wright Mills eds. & 
trans., 1946); Richard Herbert Howe, Max Weber’s Elective Affinities: Sociology Within 
the Bounds of Pure Reason, 84 AM. J. SOC. 366 (1978).  



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or religious. It mattered not to him whether the rights of man 
were attacked by the Pope, Emperor or Civilian; he resisted 
that attack upon the authority of his conscience in the fear 
of God alone. Liberty of conscience he claimed as the birth-
right of man.84 

 
Pennington, too, laid claim to this birthright for himself and all oth-

ers. Pennington’s earliest discussions of conscience centered on the hu-
man “intellect.” All human beings, regardless of skin color or social sta-
tus, are set apart from all animals by being created not only with instincts 
but also with an intellect, or the capacity to reason.85 The intellect can be 
cultivated or neglected, refined or rudimentary, he recognized. But its 
basic presence in each person is “fixed by the God of his nature” and is 
“identical in all human beings.”86 The intellect gives humans their unique 
ability to reason and reflect. It further vests them with the moral capacity 
to understand and adhere to God’s moral laws. God is the “moral gover-
nor of the world,” Pennington insisted, who has “given a law for the gov-
ernment of moral agents.”87 “His fixed and irrepealable law is the su-
preme law of earthly rule and empire. Call it the law of nature—the law 
of nations, or by what name we may, yet still it is there fixed”88 and bind-
ing on all people.89 
 
84 James W.C. Pennington, The Government of God Over Nations; Its Evidences; and 
the Manner in Which it Affects Individuals, in MINUTES OF THE SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING 
OF NEW YORK CENTRAL COLLEGE ASSOCIATION . . . TOGETHER WITH THE GENERAL AGENT’S 
REPORT, JULY 11, 1856, available at BAA, Doc. No. 15370, at 7.  
85 See JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, A TEXT BOOK OF THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY . . . OF THE COL-
ORED PEOPLE 59-64 (Hartford, Conn.: L. Skinner 1841); see also id. at 55 (“A mere animal 
is not a man because it has no intellect, and it never can be identical with man because 
it cannot be, by any possible process, supplied with intellect. If I am required to say what 
I intend by intellect, I reply, I mean those powers of the human soul, as distinct from mere 
instinct, which alone enable man to reason and reflect. Now if the absence of intellectual 
intelligence in the brute constitutes the difference between man and brute, then the intel-
lectual intelligence cannot be predicable of a brute or mere animal in any possible degree. 
And if the possession of intellectual intelligence be that thing which raises man above the 
brute or mere animal, this must be the dividing line; nor can we conceive of more than 
one such line.”). 
86 Id. at 54.  
87 Id. at 65.  
88 Pennington, supra note 84, at 3-4. 
89 See PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 68 (“Does it matter in the sight of God and in His 
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In his later work, Pennington also emphasized God’s role in in-
forming and animating the human “conscience.” Adducing common Pres-
byterian teachings that “God alone is the Lord of man’s conscience,”90 
Pennington treated conscience as a conduit through which God provi-
dentially guides and governs individuals’ perceptions and actions, as well 
as history itself. This exercise of divine authority through the conscience, 
he insisted, precedes and preempts the authority of parents, pastors, or 
political magistrates in each person’s life. 

 
The conscience is God’s viceregent in the soul of man. He, 
as the all-wise author of our being, has furnished us with this 
faculty of judging. As an original faculty it must be under the 
immediate control of God. God appealed to this faculty and 
predicated man’s duty upon it before the fall; and again even 
immediately after the fall, and before man had become ame-
nable to any other authority. . . . Thus, it is evident that the 
higher and more sacred duties of man grow out of the fact 
that God controls his conscience by direct influences 
brought to bear upon it. We have no philosophy which will 
just exactly describe the modus operandi of the influence of 
God upon the inward man. But the fact is clear that such an 
influence there is. Every conscience responds to the judg-
ments of God in matters of man’s duty. Even men have this 
experience. Saul had it. Ahab had it. David had it. Man in 
every state is subject to these impressions. Through this 
faculty God constantly enforced the duty of obedience to 
Himself. That which may be known of God is manifest in 
them, for God hath shown it unto them.91 

 

 
or America? Does God slacken his hand upon the idolatrous colored man? Does the 
sword of justice fall more lightly upon him for his sin of idolatry than upon the European, 
or upon the American? Nay his law ‘is truth,’ Psalm csix. 142, and ‘the Judge of all the 
earth does right.’ Gen. xviii. 25.”). 
90 THE WESTMINSTER CONFESSION OF FAITH, sect. 20.2, p. 34 (2017); see also James W.C. 
Pennington, Letter to Frederick Douglass, FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ PAPER, May 4, 1855, 
available at BAP, Doc. No. 7227, at 16521-22 (“I recognize no Lord of my of conscience 
but God only. Slave born, thou I be, I am fully awake to the right of private judgment.”). 
91 Pennington, supra note 84, at 5-6. 



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Pennington followed Protestant convention in viewing liberty of 
conscience as the natural corollary to the sovereignty of God. It is the 
liberty not merely to do as one wishes but to do as God commands. In 
practice it requires the right to discharge one’s spiritual duties: to worship 
God, to honor God’s name, to observe the Sabbath, to avoid idolatry and 
blasphemy, and to enjoy the “free exercise of religion” as one’s heart, 
mind, and Scripture commanded.92 It also includes the right to discharge 
one’s moral duties towards neighbors: to respect a neighbor’s life, prop-
erty, reputation, family, household, and business; to hearken to that 
“voice from the inner man directing, ordering and commanding, and en-
forcing justice to man.”93 The moral laws of God, revealed to and through 
the human conscience, are prior in time and superior in authority to the 
laws of the family, church, state, or society. The individual conscience 
thus communicates one’s God-given rights, status, and duties as a hu-
man being, thereby relativizing the authority of institutions and persons 
who might infringe on one’s rights, deny one’s dignity, or impede one’s 
fulfillment of moral and religious duties.  

Pennington further followed Protestant convention in seeing lib-
erty of conscience as the wellspring of “individual rights under the gov-
ernment of God.”94 Like the duties that flowed from conscience, these 
rights, too, Pennington argued, are prior in time and superior in authority 
to the laws of any government.95 “Liberty of conscience is natural to every 
human being,” Pennington explained.  

 
Conscience claims and exercises free speech. It tells man 
that he has a right to be, and to be free. It tells him that he 
has a right to have a lawful wife and children. It tells him that 
he has a right to enjoy, and have these in a state of freedom. 
That such are the convictions of the slave’s conscience is 
obvious by the achievements made by the fugitive slave . . 

 
92 Id. at 3-4.  
93 Id. at 7. The text continues: “This voice condemns all injustice, fraud and wrong, no 
matter whether sanctioned by legislation or not.” Id. 
94 Pennington, supra note 84, at 8. 
95 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, COVENANTS INVOLVING MORAL WRONG ARE NOT OBLIGATORY 
UPON MAN: A SERMON DELIVERED FOR THE FIFTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, HARTFORD, ON 
THANKSGIVING DAY, NOV. 17TH, 1842 (Hartford, Conn.: John C. Wells 1842), available at 
BAP, Doc. No. 421.  



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. . Every human being has a right to be, and to act as such. 
To possess life, liberty, and to pursue happiness. This right 
is given by the author of man’s being – God; and it cannot 
be taken away by any power in the world . . . . Man made in 
the image of God is an object of God’s love and regard. The 
happiness of man is an object of God’s government; the 
greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of HIS 
creatures.96 
Elsewhere, Pennington included the “freedom of thought,” “the 

right of private judgment,”97 and “personal liberty among the inalienable 
rights of all men.”98 “Any man, or body of men, who attempts to invade 
that sacred right, I must regard as the most dangerous of all men.”99 Pen-
nington also defended the universal right of every human being to learn 
and to educate their children in school and prepare them for their proper 
vocation.100 He insisted on the natural right of all human beings to pursue 

 
96 Pennington, supra note 84, at 8-9. A year before, Pennington defended strongly his 
right as a preacher and abolitionist to speech: “You will, therefore, appreciate me when I 
say, that I feel indignant at the thought of asking any man or party of men to endorse my 
abolitionism. I ask no man what opinions I shall hold and advocate in my pulpit, and on 
the public platform, on the question of immediate and gradual emancipation. – The right 
of the slave to take boats, horses, money, and even lives in order to secure his freedom 
– the right of others to help him in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law – the obligation of 
government to compensate slaveholders as an effective inducement to give up their 
slaves – the propriety of redeeming the poor fugitive who has been captured, or who is 
in danger of being arrested – the inconsistency of professed abolitionists trading in slave 
grown Cotton, Rice, Sugar, &c., for gain and luxury – that sort of communion with man-
stealers in the counting room which makes millionaires by scores annually; my views 
upon these and kindred subjects, connected with American Slavery, sir, are neither 
bought nor borrowed from any class of men – I inherit them from the bosom of my dear 
enslaved mother, and as I love her memory, I will stand by them till I die . . . . If the time 
has come, when colored men are to be persecuted for freedom of opinion in regard to 
their own cause, let us know it, and let us prepare for an open and manly fight." James 
W.C. Pennington, Letter from Rev. Dr. Pennington, FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ PAPER, Feb. 
23, 1855, available at BAP, Doc. No. 7210.  
97 Pennington, supra note 90.  
98 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 8. 
99 Pennington, supra note 90. 
100 James W.C. Pennington, The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the 
World, ANGLO-AFR. MAG., Oct. 1859, available at BAP, Doc. No. 10609; PENNINGTON, su-
pra note 85, at 59-64; PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 11-14; [Lecture Summary], WKLY. 
ANGLO-AFR., Oct. 15, 1859, available at BAA, Doc. No. 21204; see also James W.C. Pen-
nington, Who Will Go and Do Likewise?, CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 6, 1845, available at 
BAP, Doc. No. 4759 (“Our colored churches have settled one great question, namely, 
 



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meaningful voluntary work and to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. “The 
right to labor, earn wages, and dispose of our earnings for the support of 
our families, the education of our children, and to support religious insti-
tutions of our free choice, is inherent.”101 He defended every person’s 
right “to write, speak, and publish his own thoughts, views, reviews, as-
sents, dissents, beliefs and disbeliefs, subject only to constitutional liabil-
ities under due process of law.”102 He spoke briefly of the rights of men, 
women, and children alike.103 And Pennington repeatedly called for the 
right to universal suffrage for all adults and the right to hold public of-
fice.104 "If a man born in a country was bound to protect and provide for 
his family circle, he should have his voice heard in the assembly. They 

 
that colored men may be eminently pious and useful as Christians. The question is now, 
what is the next step in the onward course of colored men? I answer, sound scholarship. 
What next? Sound scholarship. And what next? Sound scholarship. I do not care how 
they obtain it. It will be all the same if they have to obtain it by studying in caves as some 
of the primitive scholars did. – But I say, by all means, we must have scholarship.”). See 
Pennington, supra note 61 at 8-9 (“The right to labor, earn wages, and dispose of our 
earnings for the support of our families, the education of our children, and to support 
religious institutions of our free choice, is inherent. No party, or power, in politics, or reli-
gion, can alienate this right…Let us place our daughters, and younger sons in industrial 
positions, however humble; and secure openings where they may be usefully employed. 
Every father, and every mother may be of service, not only to their own children, but also 
to those of others. You will have many applications for “colored help.” Be useful to appli-
cants. Prepare your sons and daughters for usefulness, in all the branches of domestic 
labor and service. 4th. Let our able bodied men go into the United States service. There 
is no better place for them. If I had a dozen sons, I would rather have them in the United 
States army and navy, than to have them among our loose population.”); and Pennington, 
supra note 44, Common School Review No. XI, (“Education is so desirable that every 
effort and sacrifice ought to be made by everyone to diffuse it into the mass of our needy 
people every where.”).  
101 Pennington, supra note 61, at 8-9 (“We must enter into a solemn free colored 
protestant industrial or labor league. Let the greedy foreigner know that a part of this 
country BELONGS TO US . . . that WE ARE TO HAVE ALL OUR RIGHTS AS MEN AND AS CITIZENS, 
AND, THAT THERE ARE TO BE NO SIDE ISSUES, NO RESERVATIONS, either political, civil, or reli-
gious. In this struggle we know nothing but God, Manhood, and American Nationality, full 
and unimpaired. The right to labor, earn wages, and dispose of our earnings for the sup-
port of our families, the education of our children, and to support religious institutions of 
our free choice, is inherent. No party, or power, in politics, or religion, can alienate this 
right.”). 
102 James W.C. Pennington, Circular Letter, ANGLO-AFRICAN, Dec. 23, 1865, available at 
BAP, Doc. No. 14232, at 30016. 
103 Id. 
104 [Summary of Speech], LEEDS MERCURY, August 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No 
07016; James W.C. Pennington et al., To the Good People of Connecticut: Soul or Skin, 
PA. FREEMAN, Oct. 7, 1847, available at BAP, Doc. No. 1472, at 8865-67. 



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should all be heard at the ballot-box.”105 “The monopoly of suffrage was 
an insult to common sense – that it was an offence in the sight of God, 
and an oppression to man – and it ought to be abolished, and swept from 
the face of the earth.”106  

“Which is the basis of human rights?” Pennington asked himself 
rhetorically in 1847.107 He never fully answered that question beyond 
gesturing to the Bible, human nature, the family, common sense, and 
constitutional declarations and traditions of rights. Nor did he lay out a 
comprehensive account of all the rights advocated for or protected in his 
day. The basic rights and liberties that were foreclosed to American 
slaves and to African Americans more generally drew most of his atten-
tion. What he insisted on, however, was that God has given all humans 
various “high and holy rights, which every instinct of human nature and 
every sentiment of manly virtue bid us to preserve and to protect to the 
full extent of our ability.”108 These “God-bestowed rights are common to 
all men. They may be invaded, but man never surrenders them. They 
may be impaired by oppressive legislation, but they are never aban-
doned. If misfortune ever snatches them from his embrace, the prompt-
ing of his conscience moves him to recover them.”109 
 

B. Tyranny, Slavery, and Revolution. 
 

Since “the days of immortal Luther,” Pennington continued, many 
Protestant revolutionaries have fought for human rights rooted in liberty 
of conscience.110 Seventeenth-century Presbyterians led “the twenty-
eight years’ struggle between England and Scotland” for fundamental 
rights that King James and King Charles had so blatantly violated.111 New 
England Puritan revolutionaries helped drive “the seven years’ struggle 
between Britain and the thirteen colonies” in America.112 Indeed the 

 
105 Complete Suffrage Soiree in Finsbury, NONCONFORMIST, June 28, 1843, available at 
BAP, Doc. No 8551. Also see BAA, Doc. No. 06949. 
106 Id.  
107 Pennington, supra note 104. 
108 James W.C. Pennington, Call for a Colored National Convention, FREDERICK 
DOUGLASS’ PAPER, May 20, 1853, available at BAP, Doc. No. 7585, at 14160.  
109 Pennington, supra note 84, at 8-9.  
110 Id. at 9-10. 
111 Id.  
112 Id.  



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“whole world” was now “astir upon the great question of the liberty of 
conscience.”113 Much as God himself had “moved upon the face of the 
waters”114 at the outset to create a new world, God was now moving over 
“the dark waters of oppression” to create a new society.115 “God acting 
upon individual human consciences imposes the most powerful checks 
upon the movements of tyrants, despots and bigots,”116 Pennington 
urged. “A true patriot” in a just cause “must always feel that he owns and 
contends for property which God gave him, whether it be life, or liberty, 
or the pursuit of happiness. His greatest strength will be in the firm con-
viction that God is transacting his business. . . . When the hand of God 
is with us, we are strong, and when he shows us his will, in regard to our 
duties, we should be in earnest to do it.”117 

The American revolutionaries had built their constitutional revolt 
and reconstruction on this tradition of rights, resistance, and revolution, 
Pennington continued.118 Indeed, the “brotherhood of the Human Family” 
is the “cardinal principle of true Democracy and of true Christianity.”119 
The Declaration of Independence repeated the principle that “all men are 
born free and equal,”120 making it the “fundamental maxim of the Ameri-
can republic.”121 It recited anew “certain truths concerning the rights of 
mankind universally, which in its own sense are as old as creation.”122 
“The principles of the American declaration are not merely upon the 
parchment of ’76,” Pennington argued, “they are more sublimely en-
graven on the more durable parchment of the human mind; this is what 

 
113 Id. 
114 Genesis 1:1-3.  
115 Pennington, supra note 84, at 10.  
116 Id. at 7. 
117 Pennington, supra note 61, at 14.  
118 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 25. “The States took the ground that a sovereign has 
no right to exercise power in subversion of his legitimate authority, and consequently that 
all such acts were null and void—of no binding force. And for the justness of the senti-
ment, they appealed [in the Declaration of Independence] to the judgment of the civilized 
world; and to the JUDGE OF ALL, that doeth right.” 
119 Arthur Tappan et al., To the Friends of Liberty. NAT‘L ERA, July 6, 1848, available at 
BAP, Doc. No. 14891.  
120 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 5: The Declaration says that “every man is born free 
and endowed with LIBERTY.” This “truth has its foundation in the nature of God, of man, 
and also of things.”  
121 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 25.  
122 James W.C. Pennington, [Untitled Pamphlet], PRESSCOPY – YALE UNIVERSITY – ANTI-
SLAVERY PAMPHLETS, August 1, 1839, available at BAA, Doc. No. 04137.  



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makes these principles the living glory of every freeman on earth, and 
also the terror of tyrants.”123 

For all their revolutionary efforts against the political tyranny of 
England, however, many Americans remained largely blind to the do-
mestic tyranny of their own governments. Blacks and whites, slaves and 
free, had fought shoulder to shoulder in the American Revolution, Pen-
nington explained.124 They were literally brothers-in-arms, carrying and 
caring for each other in the fight.125 Yet “notwithstanding the star bespan-
gled banner that they saw in their waters, notwithstanding all they heard 
of the Declaration of Independence and . . . the 4th of July orations,” Pen-
nington argued, America soon betrayed its founding ideals.126 While the 
Declaration of Independence proudly proclaimed that “all men are cre-
ated equal, and endowed with certain unalienable rights,” the reality was 
that many Americans were treated as being fundamentally unequal and 
were systematically denied many of their God-given rights, including 
women and children, the unpropertied and indentured, Native Ameri-
cans, and African Americans.127 More brutally, slaves were denied rights 
 
123 Id. Pennington continued: “The enemy of human liberty may take such a paper parch-
ment and put it in his nethermost pocket and claim that he has disposed of the case. The 
despot, I say, may take a paper parchment, deposit it in a shrine of iron, place the whole 
beneath the broad base of his throne, and challenge his subjects that they have no rights, 
but at his option; yet after this is done, those declarations engraven upon the living parch-
ment of the human mind, will speak to the no small discomfiture of the tyrant’s mind. It 
was so with Nero of Rome. After he thought he had reduced the liberties of the Romans 
to a nut-shell, he still found such an opposition to his pretensions, that he could wish that 
the “Romans had but one neck,” so that he might despatch them at a blow. The principles 
of our declaration, then, are as firm as the throne of the Ancient of Days, and this republic 
may be called to “pass into the memory of things beyond the flood,” and leave them 
behind, unless she adhere to them in spirit.” Id. 
124 [Summary of Speech], FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ PAPER, Oct. 1, 1852, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 13086, at 2. 
125 [Summary of speech on colonization], NAT‘L ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD, Jan. 22, 1852, 
available at BAA, Doc. No.12342, at 1-2.  
126 [Summary of Speech], LEEDS MERCURY, Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No 
07016, at 1. The full text reads: “Notwithstanding the star bespangled banner that they 
saw in their waters, notwithstanding all they heard of the Declaration of Independence, 
the celebrated document of ’76, notwithstanding the 4th of July orations, . . . notwith-
standing all the pride of liberty that reigned in the American bosom, American was still a 
land of slavery.” For comparable sentiments a decade later in Frederick Douglass, see 
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” (July 5, 1852), available at https://www.thena-
tion.com/article/what-slave-fourth-july-frederick-douglass (last visited Feb. 8, 2018). 
127 See, e.g., PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 25 (“The fundamental maxim of the American 
republic [is] ‘That all men are born free and equal.’ If we [blacks], born in America, cannot 
 



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altogether, even the right to legal recognition as human beings as image-
bearers of their Creator.128 “We profess to be the freest nation in the 
world. We have the largest number of slaves of any nation in the 
world.”129 

Both southern states’ cruel slave codes130 and the United States 
Constitution itself preserved and perpetuated the domestic tyranny of the 
chattel-slave system.131 The Constitution allowed the odious trans-Atlan-
tic slave trade to continue for at least a generation, with cargoes of hu-
man beings carrying over twelve million Africans to the Americas, with 
three million more dying in passage.132 The Constitution’s infamous 
three-fifths compromise strengthened southern states’ political power by 
counting their slaves in calculating proportional representation in the 
United States Congress, even though slaves were discounted as mere 
chattel at home and under state law.133 And the Constitution established 
the fugitive slave laws that required escaped slaves found in free states 
to be returned to their masters, reduced again to property that could be 
bought, sold, and leased; beaten, raped, and starved; worked, bred, and 
boarded like beasts; and foreclosed by state law from such basics of life 
as marriage, education, literacy, art, leisure, paid work, worship, church 
life, and more.134  

 
live upon the soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, 
Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental 
theory of the American Republic fails, and falls to the ground; and the door once opened 
to kick out the people of colour, let others be prepared for their turn.”). 
128 See supra note 96, and infra note 272 (discussing denying the image of God in the 
slave).  
129 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, MINUTES OF THE SEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF NEW YORK CEN-
TRAL COLLEGE ASSOCIATION . . . TOGETHER WITH THE GENERAL AGENTS REPORT: AND A SER-
MON . . . BY J.W.C. PENNINGTON (July 11, 1856), available at BAA, Doc. No. 15370, at 9-
10 (“[E]xcept the Brazilians”). 
130 WILLIAM GOODELL, THE AMERICAN SLAVE CODE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: ITS DISTINCTIVE 
FEATURES SHOWN BY ITS STATUTES, JUDICIAL DECISIONS AND ILLUSTRATIVE FACTS (1853); 1 
AND 2 JOHN C. HURD, THE LAW OF FREEDOM AND BONDAGE IN THE UNITED STATES (1858-62). 
131 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 5-6.  
132 DAVID ELTIS AND DAVID RICHARDSON, ATLAS OF THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (2010), 
at xvii (stating that 12.5 million Africans were deported from Africa to the “New World” 
through the slave trade between the years of 1501 and 1867). 
133 U.S. CONST. art. 1, §2, cl. 3, repealed by U.S. CONST. amend. XIV.  
134 [Summary of Speech], KELSO CHRON., Jan. 3, 1851, available at BAA, Doc. No. 11152, 
at 1-8; see also PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 7-11 (arguing further from the Declaration 
 



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“Slavery is the antipode of liberty” and the archetype of tyranny, 
Pennington thundered.135 Spiritual tyranny threatens a person’s worship 
and church life. Political tyranny threatens a person’s body and belong-
ings. But the domestic tyranny of chattel slavery threatens a person’s 
very “right to be, and to be free.”136 If it is a self-evident truth that all 
women and “men are born free . . . by the hand of God . . . that act, which 
uproots the hallowed Constitution of Nature, opposes the hand of God, 
and prostitute[s] his divine ordinance . . . is an act of mortal sinfulness.”137  
 
IV. PENNINGTON’S CRITIQUE OF CHATTEL SLAVERY  
 

A.  Chattel Slavery 
 

So far, Pennington’s argument extended the familiar Protestant 
logic of rights, resistance, and revolution to expose the problems of slav-
ery and racism in America. Because God creates all persons as equals 
with moral intelligence and liberty of conscience, he argued, African 
Americans deserve equal treatment and protection. Because God vests 
all persons with natural rights to discharge their natural duties to God, 
neighbor, and self, taught to them by conscience, African Americans 
should enjoy the same. Because the persistent and pervasive violation 
of a whole community’s natural rights by church and state authorities 
constitutes spiritual and political tyranny, similar violations of the natural 
rights of a whole race by domestic authorities constitute domestic tyr-
anny. And because all tyranny triggers the most fundamental right to re-
sist and revolt, the domestic tyranny of chattel slavery triggers that same 
right for enslaved people.  

Yet most of Pennington’s American slaveholding audience re-
mained unconvinced, for “the peculiar institution” of chattel slavery in 
nineteenth-century America rested on deeper and darker premises that 

 
of Independence, “the authority of right reason,” the Constitution itself, the “direct com-
mand of God” in Isaiah 16 (to “make a shadow to hide the outcasts”), and from Isaiah 
28:8 [properly 13] (“And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agree-
ment with Hell shall not stand.”)). 
135 Id. at 12. 
136 Pennington, supra note 84, at 8-9; see also HANNAH ARENDT, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALI-
TARIANISM 296 (1968) (arguing that the most basic right is “the right to have rights”).  
137 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 12.  



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would take more effort to parry.138 The ugliest logic of the day taught that 
slaves were not human persons at all, but items of property. Chattel 
slaves, the argument went, were marked by color and were thus easy to 
identify. They lacked intelligence and thus could not be educated. They 
lacked souls and thus could not worship. They lacked affections and thus 
could not marry or have families. They lacked agency and thus depended 
on their masters to discipline and contain them, lest they become a men-
ace to themselves and their neighbors. A whole industry of literature de-
veloped these ugly arguments in opposition to the abolitionists.139 

Pennington responded directly to such arguments. In his first 
book, A Text Book of the Origin and History of the Colored People, he 
aimed to “unembarass the origin, and to show the relative position of the 
colored people in the different periods among the different nations.”140 He 
further aimed to give his readers “a right state of feeling on the total sub-
ject of HUMAN RIGHTS,” a topic which occupied him in a long series of 
sermons and speeches thereafter.141 Some of Pennington’s arguments 
echoed those of other abolitionists in pointing out the self-serving falla-
cies and “is/ought” confusions of this crude logic of chattel slavery.142 
That slaves were treated like animals does not mean that slaves are not 
persons, he argued. That slaves were denied education does not mean 
they lack intelligence or learning. That slaves were denied Bibles does 
not mean that they lack souls. That slaves were denied marriages does 
mean they lack marital love or familial affection. That slaves were the 

 
138 KENNETH M. STAMPP, THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION: SLAVERY IN THE ANTE-BELLUM SOUTH 
(1956). For more recent literature, see Ariela Gross, Slavery, Anti-Slavery, and the Com-
ing of the Civil War, in 2 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LAW IN AMERICA 280, 280-312 (Michael 
Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins eds., 2008). 
139 Among numerous studies, see, for example, SLAVERY DEFENDED: THE VIEWS OF THE 
OLD SOUTH (Eric L. McKitrick ed, 1963); THE LAW OF AMERICAN SLAVERY: MAJOR HISTORICAL 
INTERPRETATIONS (Kermit L. Hall ed., 1987); MARK V. TUSHNET, THE SLAVE LAW IN THE AMER-
ICAN SOUTH: STATE V. MANN IN HISTORY AND LITERATURE (2003).  
140 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 3.  
141 Id. at 3. 
142 MANISHA SINGHA, THE SLAVE’S CAUSE: A HISTORY OF ABOLITION (2016); ROBERT M. 
COVER, JUSTICE ACCUSED: ANTISLAVERY AND THE JUDICIAL PROCESS (1975). For sample doc-
uments, see WILLIAM M. WIECEK, THE SOURCES OF ANTI-SLAVERY CONSTITUTIONALISM IN 
AMERICA, 1760-1848 (1977); LOUIS RUCHAMES, RACIAL THOUGHT IN AMERICA: A DOCUMEN-
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legal responsibility of their master does not mean they lack moral 
agency.143 

It was hypocrisy to insist otherwise, Pennington contended. 
Slaveholders often accused slaves of theft, even though owners them-
selves were “robbers of human liberty.”144 They accused slaves of being 
rebellious. “But what a contradiction is this to common sense! Have the 
wretched Africans formally resigned their freedom? Have the slave-hold-
ers, the receivers of stolen goods, any other claim than that of force?”145 
They accused slaves of being “vicious” and “ill-disposed.” “But can they 
be well-disposed to their oppressors?” “Have they been brought up, as 
their tyrannical masters have, under the influence of that precept which 
teaches us to love our enemies? It is well known that in their own country 
[Africa], they were just, generous, hospitable. . . . If then they are vicious, 
they must have contracted many of their vices from their masters.”146 
Slaves are accused of being inferior in “their capacities” and “void of un-
derstanding.” “Is it wonderful when by incessant labor, the continual ap-
plication of the lash, and the most inhuman treatment that imagination 
can devise, their genius is overwhelmed and hindered from breaking 
forth? No, their abilities are confounded by the severity of their servi-
tude.”147  

The “best way to fit a man for slavery is to place him in a state of 
slavery,” Pennington wrote.148 But “the best way to fit a man for freedom 
is to lay upon him the responsibility of acting the part of a free man.”149 
Pennington’s own experiences, first as slave and then as free, made all 
this abundantly clear to him. His own life was proof that once African 
Americans were treated as persons with inherent rights and dignity; 

 
143 James W.C. Pennington, The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the 
World, ANGLO-AFR. MAG., Oct. 1859. Available at BAP, Doc. No. 10609; see also PEN-
NINGTON, supra note 85, at 45-73.  
144 James W.C. Pennington, A Review of the Slave Trade, THE ANGLO-AFR. MAG., May 
1859, at 155, 156, available at Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://babel.ha-
thitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106005410862;view=1up;seq=8 (last visited Aug. 12, 2018).  
145 Id. at 157. 
146 Id. 
147 Id. 
148 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, THE REASONABLENESS OF THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AT THE 
SOUTH, A LEGITIMATE INFERENCE FROM THE SUCCESS OF BRITISH EMANCIPATION: AN ADDRESS 
DELIVERED AT HARTFORD, CONN., ON THE FIRST OF AUGUST, 1856, at 11 (Hartford, Conn.: 
Tiffany & Co. 1856), available at BAA, Doc. No. 17958. 
149 Id.  



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gained rights to education, worship, marriage, and proper work; and were 
accorded responsibility, accountability, and legal standing, these self-
serving fallacies and hypocritical caricatures of the chattel slave would 
disappear.150 
 

B.  The Curse of Ham 
 

Pennington also exposed and refuted popular religious justifica-
tions for slavery. For example, he debunked the popular teaching of the 
day that God had condemned African people to slavery. That popular 
teaching started with the biblical story of Noah, who is reported to have 
gotten drunk and fallen asleep “naked,” a likely biblical euphemism for 
having sex.151 Noah’s son Ham had watched his father, while his two 
other sons, Shem and Japheth, discreetly covered him up. When Noah 
woke up and learned what Ham had done, he was livid. He cursed Ham’s 
son, Canaan, and condemned him to slavery.152 “Cursed be Canaan; a 
servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren,” Noah declared omi-
nously.153 He blessed his two other sons and said of each of them, “Let 
Canaan be his slave.”154  

Apologists for American chattel slavery had long used this biblical 
story to support the enslavement of Africans.155 Modern Europeans and 
Americans, they argued, were the heirs of Shem and Japheth who had 
inherited the divine right to hold slaves. Modern Africans, in turn, were 
 
150 In 1859, a mature Pennington described the vaunted, if troubled, history of African 
peoples and their descendants as a source of profound hope: “A race so numerous in 
almost every populous part of the globe – a race so ancient, so well connected, and so 
intimately associated with all the leading events in universal history, cannot fail to elicit 
the attention of those unselfish minds of the various enlightened nations who are engaged 
in the great work of universal civilization,” Pennington wrote. “The past history of the de-
scendants of Africa is now appealing to her sons and daughters in the four quarters of 
the globe, to be up and doing for God, for Christ, for the race, for pure religion, for hu-
manity, for civilization, and for righteousness and truth. The response is certainly very 
creditable to the hoping and hopeful man: for such is the colored man the world over; for 
if [there] is a human being on the face of the earth who can hope alone, and even hope 
against hope, it is the colored man. And this is the secret of his amazing powers of en-
durance.” James W.C. Pennington, The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of 
the World, ANGLO-AFR. MAG., Oct. 1859, available at BAP, Doc. No. 10609, at 21106.  
151 Genesis 9:20-21. 
152 Genesis 9:21.  
153 Genesis 9:24. 
154 Genesis 9:25. For discussion, see PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 14. 
155 See, e.g., The Mark of Cain and Curse of Ham, 3 S. PRESBYTERIAN REV. 415-25 (1850). 



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the descendants of Canaan who remained under his hereditary curse to 
be slaves. Furthermore, the dark skin of Africans was the product of 
God’s earlier curse of Cain, who notoriously murdered his brother 
Abel.156 As punishment, “God put a mark on Cain,” the Bible reads.157 
That “mark of Cain” was black skin, the argument went. Canaan was 
cursed by Noah, and married a descendant of Cain, who had been 
cursed by God with black skin. The descendants of Canaan, thereafter, 
were distinguishable by their dark skin and thus marked by God and his 
servant Noah to be slaves.158 

This purported biblical exegesis was the fanciful work of “a class 
of men . . . attempting gravely to theorise themselves into the right to 
oppress, and to hate and abuse their fellow men,” Pennington coun-
tered.159 Are Bible readers really supposed to believe that “Noah cursed 
his grandson Canaan, and this dooms the black man to slavery, and con-
stitutes the white man the slaveholder! Astounding!”160 Searching 
through biblical and other genealogies, Pennington concluded that the 
more likely descendants of Canaan were the light-skinned “Canaanites” 
of the Middle East described later in the Bible, rather than the dark-
skinned Africans of West Africa who were likely descended from Noah’s 
two favored sons, Shem and Japheth.161 American slaveholders have 
misidentified their quarry, Pennington wrote in jest. “They must discharge 
the Africans, compensate them for false enslavement, and go and get 
Canaanites” if they want slaves.162  

 
156 Other variants of this argument posited that Noah’s curse itself had the effect of dark-
ening the skin of Canaan and his descendants. See DAVID M. GOLDENBERG, BLACK AND 
SLAVE: THE ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF THE CURSE OF HAM 87 (2017); Stephen R. Haynes, 
Original Dishonor: Noah’s Curse and the Southern Defense of Slavery, 3 J.S. RELIGION 
(2000), available at http://jsreligion.org/Volume3/Front3.html (last accessed Aug. 10, 
2018); DAVID M. WHITFORD, THE CURSE OF HAM IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA: THE BIBLE AND 
THE JUSTIFICATIONS FOR SLAVERY (2009).  
157 Genesis 3:15; see also GOLDENBERG, supra note 156, at 238-52. 
158 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 8-18; see Benjamin Braude, The Sons of Noah and the 
Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern 
Periods, 54 WM. & MARY Q. 103-42 (1997); RUTH MELLINKOFF, THE MARK OF CAIN (1981); 
see also Pennington, supra note 144, at 158-59. 
159 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 13. 
160 Id.  
161 Id. at 12, 19-31, 91-96.  
162 Id. at 14.  



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But rather than enslave modern-day Canaanites or “any class of 
human beings,” Pennington continued seriously, Christians should con-
sider Noah’s curse for what it really was.163 Even if Noah had cursed an 
ancestor of modern-day Africans, this was not a “divine malediction” “in-
tended to extend to posterity.”164 It was one man’s drunken threat, blurted 
out in embarrassed anger at a family member. It was certainly not a bind-
ing divine edict to “control the administrations of the great God.” The 
“spirit of wine” is hardly “the spirit of God.”165 Moreover, even if Noah or 
God had chosen to punish Ham for his misdeed, they could not harm 
Ham’s son Canaan. For elsewhere God’s law commanded clearly that 
the “son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father 
bear the iniquity of the son.”166 
 

C. The Heathendom of Africans 
 

The “curse of Ham” argument for slavery often went hand-in-hand 
with the argument that Africans were “heathens” who deserved slavery 
rather than liberty. After all, the argument went, the Old Testament rec-
ords many stories of God helping his chosen people of Israel conquer 
the heathen nations around them. Sometimes, God killed these enemies 
directly, as with the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah that threatened 
Abraham and his family,167 or the Egyptians who rejected Moses’ re-
peated demand on God’s behalf to “let my people go!”168 More often, God 
empowered the Israelites to wage and win wars against their enemies, 
even those much stronger in arms and numbers.169 Sometimes Israel 
annihilated these so-called heathens, tearing down their cities and killing 
all their residents.170 Other times, Israel spared some victims and took or 

 
163 Id. at 14-15.  
164 Id. at 15-16.  
165 Id. at 16-17. 
166 Id. (quoting Ezekiel 18:20); see also Deuteronomy 24:16. But see other biblical texts 
on the heritability of parental sins discussed in JOHN WITTE, JR., THE SINS OF THE FATHERS: 
THE LAW AND THEOLOGY OF ILLEGITIMACY RECONSIDERED 4-6, 11-16, 170-76 (2009).  
167 Genesis 19:24-29. 
168 Exodus 5:1; 7:16; 8:1, 8, 20, 21; 9:1, 13, 17.  
169 See, e.g., Exodus 17:8-16; Deuteronomy 9:1-5; Joshua 5-12; Judges 7-8; 1 Samuel 
12-17; 2 Samuel 8; 1 Kings 20.  
170 See, e.g., Numbers 21:21-35, 31:1-12, 33:50-56; Deuteronomy 2:26 - 3:11; Joshua: 
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sold them into slavery.171 These biblical narratives had long inspired 
Western Christian laws that regarded so-called heathens, pagans, idola-
ters, and infidels as fair game for such conquest, colonization, and en-
slavement.172 Not only the American slave system, but also the trans-
Atlantic slave trade, under this view, rested on solid biblical foundations.  

Pennington denounced this popular argument for slavery, too. He 
admitted that many Africans, though by no means all, were pagan or 
heathen “polytheists.”173 He further conceded that such infidelity had in 
some cases led to “blindness of mind,” “looseness of morals,” “divisions,” 
and intertribal “animosities” that “induced the tribes to make war upon 
and to sell each other” in the slave trade.174 But such conditions called 
for peaceful Christian missionaries, not enslavement—and for charity 
and education, not brutality and exploitation.175 The God of the Old Tes-
tament may have allowed his people to engage in sieges, warfare, and 
enslavement as they struggled to find their place in the violent ancient 
world. But the God of the New Testament was a God of peace and not 
of war, a God of the Word and not of the sword. The New Testament 
commanded Christians to “love their enemies,” not to curse them or wage 
war on them.176 Jesus’s final commandment to his followers was: “Go 
therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe 

 
171 See, e.g., Numbers 31:9-18; Deuteronomy 20:10-14; Joshua 9:1-27.  
172 JAMES MULDOON, POPES, LAWYERS, AND INFIDELS: THE CHURCH AND THE NON-CHRISTIAN 
WORLD, 1250-1550 (2015); JAMES MULDOON, THE AMERICAS IN THE SPANISH WORLD ORDER: 
THE JUSTIFICATION FOR CONQUEST IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (1994); Anthony Pagden, 
Law, Colonization, Legitimation, and the European Background, in 1 THE CAMBRIDGE HIS-
TORY OF LAW IN AMERICA 1, 1-31 (Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins eds., 2008).  
173 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 32-35.  
174 Id. at 32-37.  
175 James W.C. Pennington, Letter: To the Editor of the American Missionary, August, 
1853, in MS American Missionary Association Archives, 1839-1882 5538 (Amistad Re-
search Center at Tulane University), 1-7, esp. 5-6; James W.C. Pennington, Colored 
Preachers for Africa, MD. COLONIZATION J. [originally published in NEW ENG. RELIGIOUS 
HERALD], October 1847, available at BAP, Doc. No. 10995. (“The church is not called to 
educate politicians and merchants for any heathen land, nor is she for Africa. But well 
informed colored preachers of the gospel are what Africa now and ever has needed . . . 
. I will venture to say, that that branch of the Christian Church in this country which will 
take hold of this work in good faith, and do the most at educating talented and pious 
colored men for African Missions, will do the most effective work against Slavery in this 
country, and the Slave trade in Africa.”) 
176 Matthew 5:43-44; Romans 12:20. See infra notes 289-357 and accompanying text 
(discussing Pennington’s Christian pacifism). 



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all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, to the close 
of the age.”177 “Making disciples of all nations” in Africa was the proper 
Christian way to confront African heathenism, Pennington concluded. Ac-
cordingly, he spent a good deal of time encouraging and building Chris-
tian missions to Africa and to African diaspora communities in the Carib-
bean.178 

Moreover, Pennington argued, the polytheist heathenism of Afri-
cans paled in comparison to the barbaric heathenism of the white slave 
traders who came to Africa. These slave traders were aflame with the 
“same plundering, bloody and murderous spirit which characterized” the 
earlier conquests of the Americas.179 Already in the fifteenth century, 

 
Columbus sounded the news [of] “a new world,” and [a] mul-
titude of adventurers soon flew to make conquests. But to 
get gain for nought in lands was not sufficient for their pur-
pose. They must have property in human flesh. They must 
have the aborigines’ lands for nought, and in addition to this 
they must have the aborigines work it for nought. And when 
this appeared to be not so convenient, they must have a 
supply of Africans. This spirit broke forth from the old world 
like a lion from his cage, pinched with hunger; and see here 
how desperately it figures about the world to complete its 
measure of iniquity. First it pounces upon the aborigines, 
head and heels, and then away to Africa, and there is blood, 
blood and blood only in its train.180 
 
It was doubly shameful for Protestants to share and profit in this 

trade of flesh and blood, Pennington continued, now playing to the anti-
Catholic animus of his day. Not only was chattel slavery invented by the 
purportedly advanced Christian civilizations of Europe rather than by the 
purportedly backward heathen Africans. But, even worse, chattel slavery 
and the trans-Atlantic slave trade system were part and product of the 

 
177 Matthew 28:19-20; see also Acts 1:8. 
178 James W.C. Pennington, [Record of Speech on Colonization], NAT‘L ANTI-SLAVERY 
STANDARD, Jan. 22, 1852, available at BAA, Doc. No.12342, at 4-5.  
179 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 40.  
180 Id. at 42-43; see also id. at 48 (“drenched with blood by the man stealer”).  



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same tyrannical rule of the medieval Catholic Church that the Protestant 
Reformers had thrown off in the name of their own rights and liberties. 
Whether the slavery and tyranny are spiritual, political, or bodily, Pen-
nington thundered to his Protestant audience, “slavery is an institution of 
the dark age!” It pulses with the same evil spirit that gave the West the 
rack, the wheel, and the stake—as well as the Crusades, the pogroms, 
and the Inquisition.181  

 
Yes, slavery was bred, born and nurtured in the will of 
Charles the Fifth of Spain, second only to Nero of Rome; 
this rebel ghost who was capable of fulminating, and figuring 
in the darkest of the darkness of the dark age; this great 
patron of the mother of abomination; this stoutest of the co-
workers with the Pope of Rome, in his persecution of [Mar-
tin] Luther and the reformers; he was also the first patron 
and patriarch of the institution [of chattel slavery] which is so 
peculiar at the south. And who knows, perhaps these chiv-
alrous patriarchs of the south have descended from 
Charles, and have from him inherited their patents? Have 
the apologists for slavery ever thought of this? They are 
apologizing for the dark age. Have the ministers of the sa-
cred office at the south, who interpret the Bible in support of 
slavery, ever thought that they are preaching a doctrine first 
invented by a bishop of the Romish church? . . . Can any 
wonder then, that the spirit of slavery hides God and truth 
from the understanding, when it comes under the damning 
and accumulated darkness of the dark age.182 
 

 
181 Id. at 42-44.  
182 Id. at 43-44.  



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Later in his career, Pennington softened his critique of Roman 
Catholicism and praised American Catholics for resisting slavery and rac-
ism,183 as many did, sometimes at the cost of severe Protestant re-
prisal.184 But Pennington persisted in his argument that American 
Protestants should see better than others that chattel slavery was a form 
of heathenism in God’s eyes. For Americans to side with slaveholders, in 
his view, was to betray their Protestant ancestors’ sacrifices, to choose 
a new form of tyranny over true Christian liberty, and even to commit 
blasphemy against God himself. “Who is a blasphemer if not he who says 
that God is the author of American slavery?” Pennington demanded. 
“Who is a blasphemer but he who wrests the holy word of the Holy God 
from its proper meaning, and makes it to sanction iniquity?”185 
 
 
183 See, e.g., “[Untitled Report],” CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Sept. 14, 1843, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 07101; James W.C. Pennington, Address to the People of the State of New 
York, NAT‘L ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD, Feb. 5, 1852, available at BAP, Doc. No. 3131. 
(“The Catholic Church, true to her ancient and not inglorious traditions, holds its members 
equal, regardless of complexion – coloured clergymen have ministered its sacred rites in 
the city of New York; her edifices have no caste pews, and there is no coloured Catholic 
church in the United States, nor in the world.”); James W.C. Pennington, God Is No Re-
specter of Persons, LIBERATOR, Aug. 5, 1842, available at BAP, Doc. No. 6406. (“True, I 
am informed that in Catholic countries, whatever diversities of condition may obtain in 
society, none are known within the precincts of the church: there black and white, high 
and low, all bow themselves before the common Father of their souls, for ‘God is no 
respecter of persons.’ But Protestantism, in shaking off the corruptions of papacy, and 
returning to the pristine purity and simplicity of Christianity, has set up a negro pew, and 
stamped unclean on the brow of those for whom Jesus Christ was not ashamed to die. 
Would he who associated with Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, have shunned the society 
of the kind-hearted negro?”) But see Pennington, supra note 61, at 6 (noting that only 
“colored protestants” were targeted by Irish Catholic immigrants, during violent riots of 
1863.). On these riots, see infra note 269.  
184 See generally JOHN T. MCGREEVEY, CATHOLICISM AND AMERICAN FREEDOM: A HISTORY 
43-90 (2003); KENNETH J. ZANKA, AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND SLAVERY, 1789-1866: AN AN-
THOLOGY OF PRIMARY DOCUMENTS (1994); Justin Latterell, The Constitution of Religious 
Liberty: Religion, Power and the Birth of the Secular Purpose Test, 1844-1971 (2014) 
(manuscript at 99-119) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University), UMI No. 
3688121. 
185 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 84; see also PENNINGTON, REASONABLENESS OF ABOLI-
TION 15-16 (criticizing European attempts to exploit slaves in the West Indian islands on 
similar grounds: “But as it has pleased God to honor her before all the nations, as the 
instrument to accomplish this great event [of British emancipation], we may congratulate 
her upon the success of her abolition measure, while the powerful and even dangerous 
combination of the West India interest, or rather prejudice was against it, and while the 
political prayers of France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and our own 
United States, were mingling in unhallowed unison to the god of slavery (if it has any) for 
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D. Slavery in the Bible 
 

One major hurdle for abolitionists like Pennington, however, was 
that the Bible seemed to condone slavery, albeit not necessarily chattel 
slavery. The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible was teeming with laws and 
examples of God’s chosen people of Israel enslaving debtors186 and 
criminals,187 taking slaves as war booty,188 and purchasing slaves from 
neighboring nations.189 Mosaic law made clear that the enslavement of 
fellow Jews was to be temporary, humane, and closely regulated, with 
automatic manumission after six or seven years.190 Gentile and foreign 
slaves, however, were protected property who could not be harmed or 
stolen by others.191 These slaves were subject to sale, lease, barter, 
mortgage, gift, and devise.192  

But even gentile slaves were regarded as persons, not chattel, in 
ancient Jewish law and culture—and they, too, could and should be man-
umitted after a time.193 Masters were required to circumcise their male 
slaves so that they could participate in Jewish religious life,194 and mas-
ters and their sons could marry their female slaves.195 Slaves could be 
forced to work,196 though not on the Sabbath,197 and were required to be 
obedient and subservient to their masters.198 Masters could and should 

 
186 See examples in ANCHOR BIBLE DICTIONARY (David Noel Freedman et al. eds., 1992), 
“slavery.”  
187 Exodus 22:3. 
188 Numbers 31:9-18; Deuteronomy 20:10-14.  
189 See Exodus 21:2 (discussing temporary purchase of Jewish slaves); Leviticus 25:44-
46 (“As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and 
female slaves from among the nations that are round about you. You may also buy from 
among the strangers who sojourn with you and their families that are with you, who have 
been born in your land; and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your 
sons after you, to inherit as a possession for ever; you may make slaves of them, but 
over your brethren the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another, with harsh-
ness.”). 
190 Exodus 21:1-11, 16; Deuteronomy 15:1-6, 12-18, 24:7; Leviticus 25:39-55. 
191 Exodus 20:17, 21:20.  
192 Genesis 12:16, 20:14, 24:35, 30:43, 32:5. 
193 Exodus 21:1-11; Deuteronomy 15:1-6 
194 Genesis 17:13-27; Exodus 12:44: Deuteronomy 12:12; Leviticus 22:21.  
195 Deuteronomy 21:10-14.  
196 Job 7:2. 
197 Exodus 20:10, 23:12; Deuteronomy 5:14.  
198 Malachi 1:16. 



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discipline their slaves.199 But if their punishments physically disfigured 
their slaves, masters had to release them; if punishments were fatal, 
masters themselves were to be punished.200 Moreover, if slaves escaped 
a cruel master and sought sanctuary, they did not have to be returned as 
fugitives.201 

In the New Testament narratives, Jesus took the existence of 
slavery for granted in his parables and teachings.202 He did call for mercy 
by masters who held (self-)enslaved debtors.203 Some interpreters sug-
gested that this might have been the import of the famous line in the 
Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”204 But 
Jesus never condemned Jewish or Roman slavery directly, even though 
he attacked many other legal practices and institutions of his day. Simi-
larly, the New Testament epistles of Paul repeatedly call on slaves, in-
cluding new Christian converts, to accept their status and to remain faith-
ful to their masters, now as a matter of Christian duty. In his letters to the 
Ephesians and Colossians, for example, Paul commands:  

 
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, 
with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to 
Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but 
as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the 
heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and 
not to men, knowing that whatever good any one does, he 
will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a 
slave or free. Masters, do the same to them, and forbear 
threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and 
yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.205 
 

 
199 Proverbs 29:19, 21.  
200 Exodus 21:20-21, 26-27.  
201 Deuteronomy 23:15-16.  
202 Matthew 18:23-34, 24:45-51; Luke 15:22, 17:17. 
203 See Matthew 18:23-34.  
204 Matthew 6:12. The Greek term opheilolo/opheilema for “debts” is a legal and economic 
term that is used elsewhere in Matthew 18:24-33; Luke 7:41, 16:5-7. See S. Scott 
Bartchy, Slavery (Graeco-Roman), in 6 THE ANCHOR BIBLE DICTIONARY 65-73, 68 (citing 
R.A. HORSLEY, JESUS AND THE SPIRAL OF VIOLENCE: POPULAR JEWISH RESISTANCE IN ROMAN 
PALESTINE 254-255 (1987)). 
205 Ephesians 6:5-9; see also Colossians 3:22-25. 



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Paul’s letter to Timothy strikes a similar tone:  
 

Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their mas-
ters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the 
teaching may not be defamed. Those who have believing 
masters must not be disrespectful on the ground that they 
are brethren; rather they must serve all the better since 
those who benefit by their service are believers and be-
loved.206  

 
In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul again defended the status 

quo of slavery, though he seemed to warn against using self-enslave-
ment to repay debts:  

 
Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned 
to him, and in which God has called him. This is my rule in 
all the churches . . . . Were you a slave when called? Never 
mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the 
opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is 
a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when 
called is a slave of Christ. You were bought with a price; do 
not become slaves of men. So, brethren, in whatever state 
each was called, there let him remain with God.207 
 

It was comfort enough, Paul argued, that unity in Christ transcended the 
gender, cultural, and economic distinctions of this life, particularly since 
the second coming of Christ would likely occur in the very near future: “in 
Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. For as many of you 
as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor 
Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; 
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”208  

 
206 1 Timothy 6:1-2.  
207 1 Corinthians 7:17, 21-23; see also Colossians 4:9 (describing Paul introducing 
“Onesimus, the faithful and beloved brother” in Christ but then still sending him back to 
his master); Philemon 8-22.  
208 Galatians 3:23-28 (emphasis added); see also Colossians 3:9-11; Ephesians 2:14-15. 



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Such biblical passages led many Americans to advocate for a 
more benign version of slavery featuring benevolent Christian masters 
and obedient Christian slaves living in domestic harmony. The Rev. 
Henry J. Van Dyke, Sr., Pennington’s fellow Presbyterian minister in 
Brooklyn, New York, is representative.209 Van Dyke thought it unbiblical 
to treat slaves as mere property instead of persons and to bar slaves 
entirely from worship, education, and family life.210 He also thought that 
slavery might gradually disappear over time as subsequent generations 
of enslaved Africans became more civilized. But he did not think that the 
Bible called for the total abolition of slavery.211 After all, many biblical pa-
triarchs owned slaves. Jesus accepted slavery. Paul called slaves to ac-
cept their life with grace and humility. And the apostolic churches admit-
ted both slaves and masters as full members. “If the New Testament is 
to be received as a faithful history,” Van Dyke pointed out, “no man was 
ever rejected by the apostolic church upon the ground that he owned 
slaves.”212 

But the early church did call its members to rise above what the 
secular law around them allowed, Van Dyke continued, and it disciplined 
those who fell short of the law of Christian love and charity in their homes. 

 
If he [a member of the early Church] abused his power as a 
master, if he availed himself of the authority conferred by 
the Roman law to commit adultery, or murder, or cruelty, he 
was rejected [by the apostolic church] for these crimes, just 
as he would be rejected now for similar crimes from any 

 
209 HENRY J. VAN DYKE, THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF ABOLITIONISM: A SERMON 
PREACHED IN THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN, N.Y. ON SUNDAY EVENING, DE-
CEMBER 9, 1860 (Henry Polkinhorn, Printer, 1860).  See also RICHARD FULLER & FRANCIS 
WAYLAND, DOMESTIC SLAVERY CONSIDERED AS A SCRIPTURAL INSTITUTION IN A CORRESPOND-
ENCE BETWEEN THE REV. RICHARD FULLER OF BEAUFORT, S.C. AND THE REV. FRANCIS WAY-
LAND OF PROVIDENCE, R.I. (New York: Lewis Colby & Co. 4th ed. rev. 1847) (1845); see 
also JAMES RENWICK WILSON SLOANE, REVIEW OF REV. HENRY J. VAN DYKE‘S DISCOURSE ON 
‘THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF ABOLITIONISM,‘ A SERMON PREACHED IN THE THIRD RE-
FORMED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, TWENTY-THIRD STREET, NEW YORK, ON SABBATH EVENING, 
DECEMBER 23, 1860 (William Erving 1861).  
210 Describing the meaning of a master’s property right in his or her slave(s), Van Dyke 
argued: “The property consists not in the right to treat the slave like a brute, but simply in 
a legal claim for such services as a man in that position may properly be required to 
render.” VAN DYKE, supra note 209, at 13.  
211 Id. at 11. 
212 Id. 



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Christian church in our Southern states. If parents abused 
or neglected their children, they were censured, not for hav-
ing children, but for not treating them properly. And so with 
the slaveholder. It was not the owning of slaves, but the 
manner in which he fulfilled the duties of his station that 
made him subject for church discipline. . . . It is upon the 
recognized lawfulness of the relation, that all the precepts 
regulating the reciprocal duties of that relation are based.213 
 
In light of these “reciprocal duties,” slavery was no more sinful 

than marital family life, Van Dyke claimed. In fact, “multitudes of the no-
blest and holiest men of this land have been, and are, slaveholders,” in-
cluding the American founders who crafted the constitutional bills of 
rights.214 And “there are now in our Southern States thousands of Chris-
tian masters who give every Scriptural evidence of piety.”215 Of course, 
some masters and slaves shirk their duties and abuse their positions. But 
that does not make slavery inherently immoral. It is no fairer to abolish 
slavery because of a few abusive masters or restless slaves than to abol-
ish the marital family because of a few adulterous spouses or delinquent 
children.216 Slavery is a good domestic institution, just like the marital 
family, Van Dyke insisted. Indeed, slavery is the means by which God 
was bringing about the conversion and gradual civilization of African 
“heathens,” he added, playing another well-worn populist card.217  

 
I cordially embrace the current opinion of our church that 
slavery is permitted and regulated by the divine law under 
both Jewish and Christian dispensations, not as the final 
destiny of the enslaved, but as an important and necessary 
process in their transition from heathenism to Christianity – 
a wheel in the great machinery of Providence, by which the 
final redemption is to be accomplished. However this may 
be, one thing I know, and every abolitionist might know if he 

 
213 Id. at 10. 
214 Id. at 4. 
215 Id. 
216 Id. at 13-14.  
217 Id. at 11-12. 



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would, that there are Christian families at the South in which 
a patriarchal fidelity and affection subsist between the bond 
and the free, and where slaves are better fed and clothed 
and instructed, and have a better opportunity for salvation, 
than the majority of laboring people in the city of New York. 
If the tongue of abolitionism had only kept silent these 
twenty years past, the number of such families would be 
tenfold as great. Fanaticism at the North is one chief stum-
bling-block in the way of the gospel at the South.218 

 
Christians should promote moral virtue within the institution of 

slavery, Van Dyke concluded, not demand equal rights and liberties from 
slavery. “I stand here, at one of the main fountain-heads of the abuse we 
have complained of,” Van Dyke declared from his New York pulpit to the 
abolitionists in his community. “I stand here to rebuke this sin [of aboli-
tionism], and exhort the guilty parties to repent and forsake it. It is mag-
nanimous and Christ-like for those from whom the first provocation came 
to make the first concessions.”219 

Pennington made no such concessions. He knew well the biblical 
passages on slavery. But he insisted that these passages simply re-
flected the matter-of-fact history of slavery in ancient times. They did not 
project the proper law or ethic of domestic relations for modern Christian 
churches, states, or societies. Indeed, the whole narrative and normative 
arc of the Bible was for liberation from slavery, Pennington insisted.220 
This biblical narrative, which Pennington now connected to the struggle 
against American slavery, was one of liberation of God’s people from 
actual bondage in Egypt to the liberty of the Promised Land. It recalled 
the liberation of Jewish and gentile slaves by manumission, redemption, 
and sanctuary as prescribed by God’s law.221 It declared the liberation of 
each person from the bondage of sin to the freedom offered by divine 
grace.  

 
218 Id. at 11. 
219 Id. at 17. 
220 [Summary of Lecture in Edinburgh], CHRISTIAN NEWS, Jan. 3, 1850, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 10382, at 1-2.  
221 JAMES W.C. PENNINGTON, A TWO YEARS ABSENCE, OR A FAREWELL SERMON PREACHED IN 
THE FIFTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07929, at 16-18. 



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Against those who cited the Bible to support slavery, Pennington 
thus levied a barrage of biblical passages enjoining freedom for God’s 
people: “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” the New Testament said. 
“You were called to freedom.” “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is 
freedom.” “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” “You 
will be free indeed.” “You have all been given “the glorious liberty of the 
children of God.”222 The “general tenor and scope of the New Testament” 
is thus unequivocally “against the system” of slavery,” Pennington con-
cluded.223 “The gospel rightly understood, taught, received, felt and prac-
tised, is [as] anti-slavery as it is anti-sin.”224 “God has handed down this 
blessed book [the Bible] from heaven; we receive it with joy for the light 
it contains; we read it, we study it, and we do not believe there is a particle 
of slavery in it.”225  

Whereas apologists like Van Dyke treated cruelty toward slaves 
as an aberration in an otherwise benevolent system of domestic life, Pen-
nington insisted that slavery always tends “to barbarism; a barbarism 
which is the perfect opposite of Christian civilization.”226 “Slavery is an 
utter stranger [to] the attributes of justice, mercy, and love, those great 
elements of refinement to the human soul,” taught by the Bible.227 Not all 
slave owners were equally cruel, Pennington admitted. Yet cruelty was 
inherent to and inevitable in the institution of slavery. “The melancholy 
truth is, that cruelty is the legitimate offspring, the natural concomitant of 

 
222 Galatians 5:1, 13; 2 Corinthians 3:17; John 8:32, 36; Romans 8:21. See PENNINGTON, 
supra note 21, at 74-78, 82-84 (relating to his parents how the Gospel “proclaims liberty 
to the captives”). See other uses of these biblical texts in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 
“Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel”: Biblical Witness and African-American Freedom Strug-
gle, in THE PENNINGTON LECTURES, supra note 1, at 57-79. 
223 PENNINGTON, supra note 221, at 17-18 (“My sentence is that slavery is condemned by 
the general tenor and scope of the New Testament. Its doctrines, its precepts, and all its 
warnings are against the system. I am not bound to show that the New Testament au-
thorizes me in such a chapter and verse to reject a slaveholder. It is sufficient for me to 
show, what is fully acknowledged by my opponents, that it is murdering the poor, corrupt-
ing society, alienating brethren, and sowing the seed of discord in the bosom of the whole 
church, and covering all missionary ground with the blasting fires of controversy.”).  
224 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 76 (noting that while God had “permitted” slavery in 
order to “bring good out of the evil,” there “is not a solitary decree of the immaculate God 
that has been concerned in the ordination of slavery, nor does any possible development 
of his holy will sanction it”). 
225 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 17. 
226 Id. at 1. 
227 Id. 



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slavery; it may develop itself under different phases, according to the pe-
culiar constitution of the patient, but the virus is in the system, and the 
pustules will appear on the surface.”228  

“The sin of slavery lies in the chattel principle,” Pennington ex-
plained—the idea that one person can own another and do with him or 
her as he wishes with little legal restraint or consequence.229 “The being 
of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the 
property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and 
nakedness, are its inevitable consequences.”230 How can this ever be 
considered biblical, he demanded? “Does the Bible justify men in hatred 
and injustice?”231 

 
Does it [the Bible] sanction “cruelty”? Jas. ii.13. Does it 
sanction “Mangling?” Luke X.30. Does it sanction “imprison-
ment”? Heb. XI.36. Does it sanction “starvation”? Matt. 
XXV.45. Does it sanction “torture”? Heb. XI.37. In short, 
does it sanction “malignant spite,” “insane anger,” and 
whimsical sporting with the happiness of our fellow men?232  

 
The Bible sanctions none of these, nor the institution of chattel slavery 
that allows them.  

“My feelings are always outraged,” Pennington proclaimed defi-
antly, when he heard Christian clergy defend “kind” and “gentle” Christian 
masters against their detractors and demand that slaves practice Chris-
tian obedience, patience, and even gratitude for the relatively affluent 
conditions of plantations as compared to the purported barbarism, sav-
agery, and heathenism of their African homelands.233 Such duplicitous 

 
228 Pennington, supra note 144. 
229 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at iv-v.  
230 Id. at iv-v.  
231 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 86. 
232 PENNINGTON, supra note 221, at 19. 
233 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at iv-v; see also [Summary of Speech], LEEDS MERCURY, 
Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No 07016. For an early version of this argument 
about kind Christian masters, see Pennington’s analysis of the 1740 “Negro Plot” court 
records in PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 3-6 (“Gentlemen, – the monstrous ingratitude 
of this BLACK TRIBE is what exceedingly aggravates their guilt. Their slavery among us is 
generally softened with great indulgence; they live without care, and are commonly better 
fed and clothed, and put to less labour than the poor of most Christian countries.”). 



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talk “is calculated to mislead the public mind” and to distract the public 
eye from the “horrors of the slave system,” Pennington charged.234  

 
The opinion seems to prevail, that the negro, after having 
toiled as a slave for centuries to enrich his white brother, to 
lay the foundation of his proud institutions, after having been 
sunk as low as slavery can sink him, needs only a second-
rate civilization, a lower standard of civil and religious privi-
leges than the whites claim for themselves. 

 
During the last year or two, we have heard of nothing but 
revolutions, and the enlargements of freedoms, on both 
sides of the Atlantic. Our white brethren everywhere are 
reaching out their hands to grasp more freedom. In the place 
of absolute monarchies . . . they have republics; so tena-
cious are they of their own liberties. 
 
But when we speak of slavery and complain of the wrong it 
is doing us, and ask to have that yoke removed, we are told, 
“O, you must not be impatient, you must not create undue 
excitement. You are not so badly off, for many of your mas-
ters are kind Christian masters.” Yes, sirs, many of our mas-
ters are professed Christians; and what advantage is that to 
us? 
 
In all the bright achievements we have obtained in the great 
work of emancipation, if we have not settled that the chattel 
principle is wrong, and cannot be maintained upon Christian 
ground, then we have wrought and triumphed to little pur-
pose, and we shall have to do our first work over again.235 
 

Pennington thus chastised white Christians who demanded a full array 
of rights and privileges for themselves but subjugated blacks to servi-
tude, cruelty, and “second-rate civilization.”  
 
 
234 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at x. 
235 Id. at x-xii. 



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V. THE COVENANTAL JUDGMENT OF GOD ON SLAVERY AND RACISM 
 

The “chattel principle is wrong” not only because it is cruel and 
abusive to fellow humans, Pennington continued. It is also “blasphe-
mous” to God and divine law.236 For a chattel slaveholder to deny the 
personhood of the slave and to treat him instead as an animal defies 
God’s order of creation, which first separated and named each animal 
“according to its kind” and then created human beings as God’s unique 
image-bearers on earth with a body, mind, and soul.237 To “ADMIT THE 
RIGHT OF PROPERTY IN MAN” amounts to stealing from God himself, who 
retains lordship over humans as his ambassadors on earth, even while 
giving humans “dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of 
the air and over every living creature that moves upon the earth.”238 To 
defend the permanent subjugation of a group to slavery is to defy Christ’s 
new order of redemption that levels all false hierarchies: as St. Paul 
noted, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, 
for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”239  

The chattel principle also betrays elementary principles of God’s 
law as set out in the Decalogue. Chattel slavery is a form of “theft” of a 
man’s God-given freedom and a “kidnapping” of a person from his family 
and community. It is a “system of murder” because its brutal forms of 
work and discipline and the “barbarous treatment of slaves” shorten a 
slave’s life considerably. It is a form of forced adultery and “bigamy,” be-
cause the enslaved man is often forced to share his wife as the coerced 

 
236 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 6. 
237 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 54-59; [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN NEWS, Jan. 3, 1850, 
available at BAA, Doc. No. 10382, at 3 (“He regarded slaveholding as a heresy in every 
professor of religion, and whoever held a man as property must virtually deny the immor-
tality of that man’s soul”); see Genesis 1:20-27.  
238 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 57-59, 68-72; James W.C. Pennington, [Summary of 
Speech], KELSO CHRON., Jan. 3, 1851, available at BAA, Doc No. 11152, at 2; PENNING-
TON, supra note 95, at 6 (referencing in part Genesis 1:26-30 (on separation of animals 
and humans as image bearers of God)); see also Psalms 8:3-8 (noting human lordship 
over the rest of creation). 
239 [Record of Lecture Given by Pennington in England], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., June 28, 
1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 06951, at 4, quoting Galatians 3:23-28; see also PEN-
NINGTON, supra note 45, at 26-29. 



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concubine of his master and other accomplices, while she is forced to 
participate in “the grossest immorality and debauchery.”240  

This truly is a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” 
Pennington warned.241 And it would bring the entire nation of America 
and each of its slaveholding members under divine judgment and con-
demnation.242 For Pennington, this was not loose rhetoric. Following tra-
ditional Calvinist conventions, he believed that God had called the people 
of America into a special covenant relationship, much as God had once 
brought his chosen people of ancient Israel into special divine favor. By 
this new covenant, the American nation as a whole was to be “a beacon 
of righteousness,” “a city on a hill,” and “a light to all nations.”243 And each 
member of the American covenant community was called to love God, 
neighbor, and self, and to live by the law of God taught in conscience and 
the Bible. If they obeyed the law of God, the nation and all its members 
would be richly blessed by God. But if they disobeyed, they would be 
called into divine judgment and severely cursed. Here is one of several 
biblical texts that set out these reciprocal covenantal promises and 
threats: 

 
And if you obey the voice of the LORD your God, being care-
ful to do all his commandments which I command you this 
day, the LORD your God will set you high above all the na-
tions of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon 

 
240 [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN NEWS, Jan. 3, 1850, available at BAA, Doc. No. 10382, at 
2; [Summary of Speech], KELSO CHRON., Jan. 3, 1851, available at BAA, Doc. No. 11152, 
at 5. 
241 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 7-10. Other abolitionists in Pennington’s generation 
similarly invoked this biblical phrase (from Isaiah 28) to denounce slavery and the laws 
by which it was enforced. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, famously described both 
the Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Constitution itself as covenants with death and agree-
ments with hell. See WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS AND 
SPEECHES OF WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (R.F. Wallcut, ed., 1852), at 118; Albert B. Saye, 
A Covenant With Death: An Essay-Review, 59 THE GEORGIA HISTORICAL QUARTERLY 330-
334, 1975, at 330. For another poignant example, see BERIAH GREEN, THINGS FOR NORTH-
ERN MEN TO DO 22 (1836) (denouncing slavery and the silence of the church in the face 
of it as a “covenant with death … and our agreement with hell….”). The authors are grate-
ful to Professor Nathan Chapman for bringing other uses of this passage to our attention. 
242 See Pennington, infra notes 367-368. 
243 MICHAEL P. WINSHIP, GODLY REPUBLICANISM: PURITANS, PILGRIMS, AND A CITY ON A HILL 
(2012); John Witte, Jr., How to Govern a City on a Hill: The Early Puritan Contribution to 
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you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of 
the LORD your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and 
blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of 
your body, and the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your 
beasts, the increase of your cattle, and the young of your 
flock. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading-
trough. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and 
blessed shall you be when you go out. The LORD will cause 
your enemies who rise against you to be defeated before 
you. . . .  

 
But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be 
careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which 
I command you this day, then all these curses shall come 
upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, 
and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your 
basket and your kneading-trough. Cursed shall be the fruit 
of your body, and the fruit of your ground, the increase of 
your cattle, and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be 
when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go 
out. . . . The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your 
enemies . . . and you shall be a horror to all the kingdoms of 
the earth.244 
 
It was thus particularly blasphemous that the slave laws under-

mined the religious freedom of African Americans, including their ability 
to receive God’s word, to worship God freely in communion with others, 
and to learn and to abide by the law of God in all areas of life. In his 
autobiography, Pennington recounted how southern slave masters, for 
all their own outward piety, “sternly resisted” the efforts of Christian mis-
sionaries and pastors to evangelize and to educate slaves.245 One Meth-

 
244 Deuteronomy 28:1-35. On the heavy use of this covenant imagery in American 
Protestant thought, see DAVID A. WEIR, EARLY NEW ENGLAND: A COVENANT SOCIETY (2005); 
DANIEL J. ELAZAR, COVENANT AND CONSTITUTIONALISM: THE GREAT FRONTIER AND THE MATRIX 
OF FEDERAL DEMOCRACY (1998); E. BROOKS HOLIFIELD, THEOLOGY IN AMERICA: CHRISTIAN 
THOUGHT FROM THE AGE OF THE PURITANS TO THE CIVIL WAR 273-398 (2003).  
245 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 67. 



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odist preacher, he observed, was “arrested and tried for his life” for “ad-
dressing words of comfort” to slaves at the door of the church.246 Another 
slave owner “instigated the authorities of the town where he attended 
service, to break up a Sabbath-school some humane members of the 
Methodist and Lutheran denominations had set up to teach the free ne-
groes, lest the slaves should get some benefit of it.”247 In later lectures, 
Pennington recounted how Christian missionaries and teachers in south-
ern slave states were assaulted and driven away just because they 
shared the good news of the Bible to slaves.248 He also noted that pastors 
and deacons who dared provide food and shelter to slaves were run out 
of their churches, homes, and towns at gunpoint.249 Black and white 
churches, in both the north and south, that tried to provide sanctuary to 
fleeing slaves faced criminal prosecution and state fines and confiscation 
of their properties, as well as private acts of vandalism and arson that 
went unpunished.250 “The effects of slavery upon the Christian church are 
horrible to contemplate,” Pennington wrote. “All the great denominations 
in the country have their hands . . . stained with human blood.”251 “[T]hink 
not only of the bleeding hearts and manacled limbs; the nakedness, the 
starvation, the darkness of mind, the premature death,” the murder, theft, 
and rape of slaves which the church has countenanced by its silence, its 
support for slavery, and its harboring of abusive masters. Think even 
more of “the LOSS OF THE IMMORTAL SOULS, to which it is an accessory.”252 
This truly is a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell!”253 

Even freed or free-born blacks had little religious freedom or 
equality in Christian churches, Pennington lamented, now broadening his 
attack to include the racism that lay at the heart of American chattel slav-
ery. Blacks were “treated with indignity in the white churches,” forced to 
sit in their own pews or to stand, if allowed in the door at all.254 They were 

 
246 Id. at 68. He was eventually acquitted.  
247 Id. at 71. 
248 Id.; [Summary of Speech], LEEDS MERCURY, Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No. 
07016  
249 Id. 
250 Id.  
251 Id. 
252 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 10. 
253 Id. at 10 (citing Isaiah 28). 
254 [Transcript of Speech], NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY STANDARD, May 3, 1849, available at 
BAA, Doc. No. 9720, at 1-2.  



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rarely allowed to stand in the white pulpit or in leadership positions.255 
They were never allowed to approach the Eucharist table and eat the 
bread and drink the cup of redemption from sin, unless and until all whites 
had been served—even unrepentant white slaveholders who were al-
lowed to worship freely in states that have abolished slavery.256 Except 
for the Catholics and Socinians, Pennington charged, all Christian de-
nominations in America were beset by a “spirit of caste.”257 “I could not 
go either to the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, 
or Baptist churches, without being reminded that I am a coloured man, 
and therefore not permitted to enjoy the privilege of worshipping God with 
them.”258 This “sacrareligious,” “man-hating” principle is especially blas-
phemous in the church.259 “[T]he coloured people of America, are testing 
the genuineness of the spirit of Christianity and the great advantages of 
Christian civilization.”260  

“Coloured people” were also testing the genuineness of the spirit 
of America, Pennington continued, and its commitment to the founding 
principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all. Even in free states, free-
born or emancipated African Americans were not restricted only as to 
their pews and churches.261 They also had to stay in their own houses, 
neighborhoods, schools, boarding houses, orphanages, asylums, chari-
ties, businesses, and more.262 They could not marry or employ whites. 
They had to sit in their own seats in railcars, ships, ferries, and carriages. 
They could not vote in many free states or participate on equal terms with 

 
255 [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 2, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07163. 
256 [Untitled Report]. CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, September 14, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. 
07101. 
257 [Untitled Report] CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 2, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07163. 
258 “[Untitled Report].” CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, September 14, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. 
07101. 
259 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 80-84.  
260 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 22-25; see also [Record of Lecture Given by Penning-
ton in England], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., June 28, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 06951, at 
4; PENNINGTON, supra note 221, at 1-22; [Untitled Report], LIBERATOR, Jan. 5, 1855, avail-
able at BAA, Doc. No. 16221.  
261 But they “could have no property in those churches, nor in anything else, according to 
American law.” [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN NEWS, Sept. 26, 1850, available at BAA, Doc. 
No. 10883, at 1; [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 2, 1843, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 07163, at 2. 
262 James W.C. Pennington, Call for a Colored National Convention, FREDERICK 
DOUGLASS’ PAPER, May 20, 1853, available at BAP, Doc. No. 7585, at 14160.  



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whites in other government offices and activities.263 Moreover, African 
Americans were excluded, segregated, or otherwise discouraged from 
applying even to avowedly liberal northern schools to protect the feelings 
of their white counterparts, many of whom travelled north for their school-
ing. This was because of the purported “fickleness, inconstancy and un-
sound morality” of the “coloured” race.264 

 
Hence it appears that Southern young men, arrogating 
themselves the title of gentlemen, who, in infancy, had 
drawn nutriment from the breasts of black mothers, the cost 
of whose bringing up – nay, the very clothes upon whose 
backs are paid for out of the unrequited toil of black men and 
women, have come into the free [North] . . . and succeeded 

 
263 [Summary of Speech], NONCONFORMIST, June 28, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 
06949, at 1 (arguing that blacks and others were denied the franchise, and could not vote 
to improve their plight. “The monopoly of suffrage was not only an evil, but a fatalism, 
offensive to God, and offensive to man. If a man born in a country was bound to protect 
and provide for his family circle, he should have his voice heard in the assembly. They 
should all be heard at the ballot-box.”). But see [Summary of Speech], LEEDS MERCURY, 
Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No 07016, at 2 (“In the Free States of Rhode Island, 
Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire, he was glad to say, the coloured 
man was now permitted to vote in the elections, but in his own state of Connecticut, which 
was held to the one of the most highly favored and enlightened in the Union, there was a 
provision in the constitution, by which coloured men were excluded from that privilege. 
By coloured men they meant not simply black men, but even men who could scarcely be 
distinguished from the whites by their complexion. If a man had, he almost might say, 
one thousandth part of black blood in his veins, if but one hair of his head were wrinkly, 
he was on the black side of the line, and was prohibited by the constitution of Connecticut 
from saying who should make laws he was to obey, and which were to protect or take 
away his life. In the States of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, the same 
was true, and yet all these were what were called free states. When the state of things 
existed in the free states, what must they expect in the slaves states?”).  
264 See James Pennington, J.W.C. Pennington to H., CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, December 18, 
1845, available at BAP, Doc. No. 4765. Pennington here responds to a published letter 
from the president of Dartmouth, Nathan Lord, explaining that, of the three African Amer-
ican students who had enrolled there, two had “failed, from fickleness, inconstancy and 
unsound morality. We are afraid for the future. We doubt the fitness of Africans, in their 
present state of civilization, for the grave and considerate pursuit of students. We doubt 
the expediency of attempting to educate many of them far beyond the level of their race. 
Now and then there may be a successful instance. But they will need cultivation as a 
people, for centuries, before many of them will hold their way with long civilized and 
Christian Saxons, if indeed, that is ever to be expected, which I doubt. Still we resolve to 
proceed upon the Christian idea, and help a struggling people. It shall not be our fault if 
any seek and find not. We should not choose to have a flood of blacks at this college. But 
we should refuse none of the proper character. We are disposed to leave this matter to 
the Divine Providence.” 



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in closing these seats of learning to coloured men, in order 
to make capital for perpetual Slavery out of the necessary 
ignorance of free persons of colour.265 
 
All such manifest racism and “injustice is the subversion of rights,” 

Pennington argued. “It is prejudice itself to the rights of those on whom it 
is brought to bear. This prejudice, however, is not a single act of injustice, 
but a series of acts. Hence, we have only to see that a minister, a judge, 
a teacher, or a church is prejudiced against our interests, and we are 
hopeless for justice from such.”266 

Pennington further challenged those who presented the “separa-
tion of the races” as a “perfectly natural” way of allowing each group to 
be with its own kind. After all, the argument went, animals naturally sep-
arate into groups of their own species, colors, sizes, and shapes. Hu-
mans, too, are naturally attracted to their own kind and averse to others. 
How then can the segregation of races into separate schools, churches, 
and neighborhoods be sinful?267 Pennington countered that such “sepa-
ration of the races” principles were not merely natural aversions, but 
spiteful expressions of vice that led to the oppression of African Ameri-
cans. Racism fosters the vices of “dishonesty,” “hypocrisy,” “supreme 
selfishness,” and “[b]rutish and uncivil manners” toward those in other 
groups.268  

 
Mere aversion does not abuse and insult a man in the public 
street, in the stage, in the rail car, in the steam boat, and in 
the church. It is ill will that does this. Mere aversion would 

 
265 James W.C. Pennington, Address to the People of the State of New York, NAT‘L ANTI-
SLAVERY STANDARD, Feb. 5, 1852, available at BAP, Doc. No. 3131; see also [Untitled 
Report], LEEDS MERCURY, Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No 07016 (“It was gener-
ally thought that the most highly educated men would be the most liberal, but in America 
it seemed just the reverse; and it was a common thing for the men who presided in their 
institutions of learning, to turn away the coloured youth who sought to obtain there the 
advantages and blessings of instruction. The story was that the coloured people were 
ignorant, worthless, degraded, unfit to associate with, incapable of being taught, and yet 
this was the way in which the experiment of improvement was made, by driving them 
away from their institutions of education.”).  
266 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 78.  
267 See, e.g., WEBBER, supra note 1, at 391.  
268 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 77-85; [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 2, 
1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07163, at 2-4. 



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be satisfied to let the victim pass unmolested, but ill will is 
always known by its perseverance in seeking the injury of 
its victim.269 
 

Segregation, like slavery, is part and product of the same mortal sin of 
racism and destroys the covenant community. 

Racism, Pennington continued, is like a “great tree, having four 
enormous roots . . . piercing down through the entire moral soil of the 
country” and gradually tearing apart the foundations of American 
churches, states, schools, and social relations alike.270 This “prejudice 
against color” was partly “founded in a will to tread down the weak and 
poor” whom God and his word always favored. “As much as you do it to 
the least of these, you do it me,” Jesus said.271 Color prejudice was a 
form of “hating the image of God,” which is represented in all God’s chil-
dren, “male and female,” black and white, young and old, rich and poor, 
whole and maimed alike.272 Color prejudice “seeks no glory for God, nor 
good for man, but is pointedly opposed to both.”273 Color prejudice is a 
form of “sacrareligion” that is leading America “down to a state of refined 
heathenism.”274  

 
God is not before the eyes of this nation in all these things. 
Now who is a heathen but him who acts as if the God of 
heaven did not hear, see, and govern him? But this is sadly 
true of those who are actuated by this prejudice. There is 
not only a heathenlike disregard to the [covenant] relation 
which God has established between man and man, but this 
disregard is acted out just as bravely, and as silly as if God 

 
269 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 76; see also Pennington, supra note 61 (describing 
recent “bloody riots” and other violent acts perpetrated against African Americans and 
abolitionists in the North). 
270 [Untitled Report], LEEDS MERCURY, Aug. 5, 1843, available at BAP, Doc. No 07016.  
271 Matthew 25:40. 
272 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 6, 74; James W.C. Pennington, God Is No Respecter 
of Persons, LIBERATOR, Aug. 5, 1842, available at BAP, Doc. No. 6406, at 6693.  
273 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 74.  
274 Id. at 80, 85.  



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could not discern it, or rather as if there was no God to dis-
cern it. A nation covered in Egypt’s darkness could do noth-
ing more. “He that hateth his brother is in darkness.”275  
 
The sins of slavery and racism put the entire nation and each of 

its members “in danger of the judgments of God,”276 Pennington re-
peated, sounding his familiar covenant argument.277 For such sins violate 
the cardinal commands of “faith, hope, and love” set out in the Bible, and 
of “justice, liberty, and equality” set out in the natural and constitutional 
law.278 

 
That great principle of law which God proposes to apply to 
national conduct imposes obligations which are immutable 
as His throne. It is a law like God’s nature which tolerates 
nothing but that which is right, and condemns all that is 
wrong. “Justice and judgment are the habitation of God’s 
Throne.” Earthly governments derive all the authority they 
have from His. They are but tributary. Independence of God 
can in no sense be predicated of nations. His fixed and irre-
pealable law is the supreme law of earthly rule and empire. 
Call it the law of nature—the law of nations, or by what name 
we may, yet still it is there fixed. It is the habitation of His 
high and glorious Throne. “Mercy and Truth shall go before 
Him.” This is the practice of Divine government—a practice 
which is solemnly and imperatively binding upon all earthly 
governments. As a lawgiver His authority extends and ap-
plies to nations in their organized and governmental capac-
ity. His superintending hand is in all national matters. He has 
to do with the Throne, and with the Chair of State, the 
Bench, the Bar, and the Jury Box.— The hearts of all men 
are in His hands and he turns them as the rivers of water 
are turned.279 

 
275 Id. at 85-86; see also id. at 77 (“Who can be blinder than he who abuses all relation 
and obligation, and argues that he is doing no wrong?”). 
276 Id. at 85.  
277 Id. at 64-73, 85.  
278 PENNINGTON, supra note 221, at 14-17, 22-24.  
279 Pennington, supra note 84, at 4-5.  



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Pennington put this same argument about pending divine judg-

ment in intensely personal terms to his former master, Frisby Tilghman. 
After settling into his ministry, Pennington sold much of his precious li-
brary and other goods and had gathered enough donated funds to try to 
ransom his enslaved family and to redeem himself from his continued 
fugitive status.280 He then wrote a poignant letter to Tilghman in 1844.281 
He recounted his two decades of service while enduring the persistent 
abuse that ultimately drove him to escape. He then appealed directly to 
Tilghman’s conscience, entreating him at his advanced age to repent of 
slavery and to release his slaves before facing the final judgment of God.  

 
I . . . remind you of your coming destiny. You are now over 
seventy years of age, pressing on to eternity with the weight 
of these seventy years upon you. Is not this enough without 
the blood of some half-score of souls? You are aware that 
your right to property in man is now disputed by the civilized 
world. You are fully aware, also, that the question, whether 
the Bible sanctions slavery, has distinctly divided this nation 
in sentiment. On the side of Biblical Anti-slavery, we have 
many of the most learned, wise and holy men in the land. If 
the Bible affords no sanction to slavery, (and I claim that it 
cannot,) then it must be a sin of the deepest dye; and can 
you, sir, think to go to God in hope with a sin of such mag-
nitude upon your soul? . . .  

 
What will become of those long groans and unsatisfied com-
plaints of your slaves, for vexing them with insulting words, 
placing them in the power of dogish and abusive overseers, 
or under your stripling, misguided, hot-headed son, to drive 
and whip at pleasure, and for selling parts or whole families 
to Georgia? They will meet you at that bar [of God]. . . . As 

 
280 THOMAS, supra note 1, at 55. Pennington struggled with finances all of his life, and in 
1862 was convicted and sentenced to a month of labor for stealing a copy of “Pope’s 
Homer’s Odyssey” from a book shop. See “Troubles of a Colored Divine,” Detroit Free 
Press (July 17, 1862).  
281 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 79-84. 



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for myself, I am quite ready to meet you face to face at the 
bar of God. I have done you no wrong; I have nothing to fear 
when we both fall into the hands of the just God. I beseech 
you, dear sir, to look well and consider this matter soundly. 
In yonder world you can have no slaves – you can be no 
man’s master – you can neither sell, buy, or whip, or drive. 
Are you then, by sustaining the relation of a slaveholder, 
forming a character to dwell with God in peace?282  
 
Here, Pennington appealed to God’s law not as an abstract sys-

tem of moral norms, but as a literal body of law binding on conscience 
and enforced in a heavenly courtroom. He wrote not just of the general 
judgment of God on the nation for its acceptance of chattel slavery, but 
of the specific judgment of God on each master who refuses to let God’s 
enslaved people go. He wrote not just of an abstract covenant with death 
and hell, but of a personal indictment of the slaveholder that threatens 
real, eternal punishment. Slaveholders like Tilghman would ultimately 
confront their enslaved victims as witnesses and equals at the “bar of 
God,” Pennington believed, and be compelled by God to answer for their 
sins and crimes. Pennington hoped that the prospect of eternal punish-
ment, presented plainly and in the “most kind and respectful terms,” 
would lead Tilghman to repent and to release his slaves.283 His persistent 
efforts helped secure the freedom of his father and two brothers, but his 
mother died in slavery.284 
 
VI. NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE TO SLAVERY AND RACISM 
 

If preaching and personal appeals against slavery and racism 
availed little—and if exposing the fallacies and dangers of this national 
and personal “covenant with death” moved few hearts and minds—then 
what was a conscientious Christian to do? Here, too, Pennington 

 
282 Id. 
283 James W.C. Pennington, Freedom’s Son and Daughter. COLORED AM., June 26, 1841, 
available at BAP, Doc. No. 13355.  
284 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 63; WEBBER, supra note 1, at 216-219, 255; Story of 
Stephen Pembroke, PA. FREEMAN, Aug. 5, 1854, available at BAP, Doc. No. 5792; James 
W.C. Pennington, Letter of From Rev. Dr. Pennington – Appeal for Help, PA. FREEMAN, 
June 8, 1854, available at BAP, Doc. No. 6939, at 15273.  



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adopted but reformulated traditional Protestant teachings on rights, re-
sistance, and revolution. “The happiness of man is an object of God’s 
government,” he explained.285 “To effect this happiness he has bestowed 
upon man certain rights and privileges under his own government which 
do not depend upon any other government.”286 Insofar as earthly rulers 
(in states, churches, homes, schools, businesses, or other organized 
communities) exercise their authority in accordance with God’s laws and 
in protection of the people’s rights, these rulers must be honored and 
obeyed. But if these rulers persistently and pervasively abuse their au-
thority and violate the God-given rights of their subjects—if they practice 
manifest “injustice . . . in subversion of rights”287—the people have a God-
given right and duty to resist, rebel, and revolt against these authorities 
and to reform, restore, and reconstruct a better covenantal order. God 
“shall ere long dispense the rich blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit 
of happiness to every slave in our land,” Pennington wrote already in 
1839. “For this we should pray − for this we should labor. If this be rebel-
lion against the powers of earth, we have only to say that it is loyalty to 
God.”288 
 

A. The Principles of Nonviolence 
 

But “rebellion” against the powers of earth should be as nonvio-
lent as possible, Pennington insisted, contrary to the more revolutionary 
strains of historical Protestantism. In the 1830s and 1840s, Pennington 
was a principled pacifist, committed to nonviolent protest and change. 
“Colored people must bear and forbear,” he wrote in 1842.289 Some abo-
litionists, including fellow black Presbyterian minister Henry Highland 

 
285 Pennington, supra note 84, at 8-9.  
286 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 87-88. 
287 Id. at 78.  
288 Pennington, supra note 123, at 14.  
289 PENNINGTON, supra note 85, at 87-88. He continues: “We have borne and forborne 
much, and whether we have done this with good will, God will show. The writer can only 
say for his own heart, I have come in contact with prejudice at every step, and God is my 
record, that I regard the haters of my people only with pity. I am sorry that they are so 
silly before God and the enlightened world, and that they can act as if there was no umpire 
of strife, no judge of right and wrong but themselves. I owe them nothing but good will. If 
I could deliver them from their blindness and folly and turn their hatred into love, I would 
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Garnet, called for a slave uprising, urging his listeners: “Fellow-men! pa-
tient sufferers! Behold your dearest rights crushed to the earth! See your 
sons murdered, and your wives, mothers and sisters doomed to prostitu-
tion. In the name of the merciful God, and by all that life is worth, let it no 
longer be a debatable question, whether it is better to choose Liberty or 
death. . . . Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties.”290  

Yet Pennington, in an 1843 sermon, contrasted sharply “the doc-
trines of Christianity and the doctrines of war.”291 Christ “proclaimed a 
new doctrine,” he said: “‘Love your enemies, do good to them that hate 
you, and pray for them that spitefully use and persecute you,’ ‘Resist not 
evil, but overcome evil with good.’”292 For “right was generally on the side 
of the weak, and wrong on the side of power.”293 Moreover, “conquests 
gained by the sword, never stay settled. . . . But the operations of the 
principles of the gospel of peace were different. They struck at the root 
of the evil; for when they converted an enemy into a friend, he stayed a 
friend.”294 At the 1849 General Peace Congress held in Paris, Pennington 
declared, 

 
We [African-Americans] are wronged, but we do not wrong 
others. In our character you will find an element of Peace, 
which naturally accords with the spirit of the resolution – nay 
with that of the Gospel, we ENDURE our wrongs. . . . No 
class of the human family of man has suffered more unqual-
ified and unprovoked wrongs than we. We have pressing 
upon our minds the recollection of centuries of oppression, 
including the loss of time, wealth, education, character, and 
every thing that man holds dear. . . . Surely then, if being 
robbed of all of one’s rights is a justification for disturbing 
the peace of society, we have that justification. . . . We take 

 
290 Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America, 
Buffalo, N.Y., 1843” (1843), available at Electronic Texts in American Studies, http://dig-
italcommons.unl.edu/etas/8 (last visited August 14, 2018).  
291 [Report of speech on nonviolence], EMANCIPATOR, Oct. 26, 1843, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 107140, at 1-2; see also [Summary of Speech?], LIBERATOR, Sept. 21, 1849, 
available at BAA, Doc. No. 10060, at 1. 
292 [Report of speech on nonviolence], EMANCIPATOR, Oct. 26, 1843, available at BAA, 
Doc. No. 107140, at 1. 
293 Id. at 1-2.  
294 Id.. 



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a higher and broader view of the subject. That element of 
peace in our character gives us a more substantial ground 
of hope. We rely upon the immutable justice of God. We, all 
things considered, prefer to keep the peace, and choose 
God as our arbiter. The sword settles nothing. Physical 
force, however powerful, substantiates nothing. But the arm 
of God does. The noise of revolutions that has greeted our 
ears from all parts of the world has not moved us from our 
fidelity to the principles of peace.295 
 
But pacifism does not connote passivity, Pennington insisted, and 

turning the other cheek does not require martyrdom. “[T]he best way to 
fit a man for freedom is to lay upon him the responsibility of acting the 
part of a free man,” he said.296 That requires him to disobey all unjust 
laws and to join others to challenge such laws in public squares, courts, 
and legislatures. It requires each person to “preach, practice, and pray” 
for justice.297 Each person must help create churches, families, neighbor-
hoods, schools, and businesses that model equality and proper covenant 
living. People are also required to: 

 
organize in school districts, in town and villages; hold fre-
quent meetings; go to other political meetings, to proselyt-
ize, and not to be proselytised; abandon not an inch of 
ground already acquired, but make aggressive movements. 
Invoke the aid of the Pulpit, the Press, the Lyceum; above 
all, invoke the God of the oppressed—the God of our fa-
thers—that he will make this indeed a Model Republic; that 
here all men may rejoice in equal rights.298  

 
295 James W.C. Pennington, Speech by J.W.C. Pennington, in 1 BLACK ABOLITIONIST PA-
PERS 157, 158-159 (August 24, 1849) (C. Peter Ripley, et al, eds., 1985). Also see an 
alternative account of the speech in J.W.C. Pennington, “Les congress des amis de la 
paix universelle, compte rendee,” (Paris, 1850), available at BAA, Doc. No. 10295, at 1-
2.  
296 PENNINGTON, supra note 148, at 11. 
297 Language in an Abolitionist Petition co-signed by Pennington and 10 others: Arthur 
Tappan, S.S. Jocelyn, George Whipple, Lewis Tappan, J. Warner, Luther Lee, James 
W.C. Pennington et al., To the Friends of Liberty, NAT‘L ERA, July 6, 1848, available at 
BAP, Doc. No. 14891.  
298 Id.  



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Here in a nutshell was Pennington’s new variation on Protestant teach-
ings about “rights, resistance, and revolution.” Human laws were to be 
made—or unmade—in the image of divine duties and sacred human 
rights. 
 

B. Disobeying Unjust Laws 
 

The first “way to fit a man for freedom” is to disobey those unjust 
human laws that violate the laws of God and the rights of God’s children. 
The most notorious examples for Pennington were the laws of slavery 
and of fugitive slave return. These laws were blatantly unjust when 
judged by Scripture, reason, and nature. Christians could, and should, in 
good conscience break them. Using familiar Protestant language, Pen-
nington wrote: 

 
As God neither wills [n]or commands any thing that is wrong, 
He cannot consistently with this rule of rectitude, make or 
sanction a Covenant that binds men to do wrong. The same 
is true whether the action is contemplated to be between 
himself and man, or between man and man. Hence, all 
those promises, oaths, agreements, and Covenants which 
originate among men, and are intended to operate, between 
man and man, to have binding force, must have regard to 
right. No law, Covenant, or agreement, can legalize wrong 
in such a sense, as to give it the character of moral rectitude. 
. . . Any agreement, Covenant, or compact, which assumes 
to legalize and bind men to do moral wrong, is positively, by 
virtue of its conflict with the will of God null and void.299 

 
In practice, this meant that slaves had the right to escape their 

masters if they were able to do so without undue violence, although Pen-
nington defended “the right of the slave to take boats, horses, money, 
and even lives in order to secure his freedom.”300 Perhaps remembering 

 
299 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 4.  
300 James W.C. Pennington, Letter from Rev. Dr. Pennington, FREDERICK DOUGLASS’ PA-
PER, Feb. 23, 1855, available at BAA, Doc. No. 7210.  



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his own escape, he wrote: “In this great work of self-emancipation, the 
slave evinces all the great elements of mind, out-scheming mind, iron 
will, penetrating judgment, quick invention, profound insight of human na-
ture, power of endurance, physical and moral courage, and practical 
knowledge of heavenly bodies” to guide him at night.301 A slave need not 
wait passively in hopes that his master might release him or that the slave 
laws might be abolished, Pennington wrote in 1843. “Although the cause 
[of abolition] was advancing, slavery was still the same” for the individual 
slave; he still “breathed in pain, and blood, and sorrow; and the only way 
to change his condition was to break his fetters.”302 He had a right to 
escape.303 Here, again, Pennington appealed to the authority of individ-
ual conscience and sacred human rights:  

 
The loud voice of natural conscience is the tribunal which 
charges every man with what he has a right to be, as well 
as what it is his duty to do. It tells the suffering slave what 
are his rights, and what are his wrongs. It prompts him to 
escape from his oppressors. Chains cannot bind him. Bolts 
and bars cannot confine him. The horse whip cannot deter 
him. Every fugitive who comes to our free district is a mon-
ument of the power and daring of silent prompting by the 
sacred whisperings of the voice of God, and of nature.304 

 
Pennington described the escape of individual slaves as: 

  
the divinely ordered method for the effective destruction of 
American slavery. . . . The masters may legislate, rave like 
madmen, pursue with bloodhounds, and offer rewards 
which call to their aid the vile and the murderous. But we 
fear them not. . . .  We have the right of the question upon 
Christian principles. We deny utterly and positively their 

 
301 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 10. 
302 James W.C. Pennington, [Report of Speech Given by Pennington in Birmingham, 
England], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., Aug. 9, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07020, at 3. 
303 [Untitled Report], KELSO CHRON., Jan. 3, 1851, available at BAA, Doc. No. 11152, at 2 
(“[T]he slave had decidedly a casus belli against this oppressor, for he believed he had 
as much right to escape out of the hands of his captor as a bird from the fowler.”).  
304 Pennington, supra note 84, at 9.  



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claim to property in us, and if as men they are determined 
to be so heartless, cruel, and barbarous, that we cannot 
dwell with them in peace – God, the spirit of peace, the love 
of order, and the spirit of liberty, says to us, come out from 
among them.305  
 
As the “underground railroad” and other avenues of escape 

brought more slaves north, Pennington lauded such efforts. Escaping 
from slavery is the “most striking illustration” of the slave’s godly re-
sistance to tyranny and unjust laws the world has seen since biblical 
days, when “two millions five hundred thousand souls were led out of a 
tyrant’s land under the leadership of one man [Moses].”306 That natural 
right and drive to be free, illustrated by the exodus from Egypt, is now 
dictated by the conscience of each and every slave today, Pennington 
insisted. 

Pennington further claimed that Christians could not, in good con-
science, assist with the capture and return of fugitive slaves, regardless 
of American law to the contrary. The United States Constitution clearly 
required the return of fugitive slaves: “No person held to service or labor 
in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in con-
sequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such ser-
vice or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such 
service or labor may be due.”307 The United States Congress used this 
Article to pass statutes penalizing individuals and states for assisting or 
harboring fugitives, failing to return them to their masters, or refusing to 
deliver them to the master’s slave-catching agents.308 In the 1830s and 
1840s, the United States Supreme Court upheld these laws against con-
stitutional challenges that they violated the basic rights and liberties of 
individual citizens, and the power of free states to deal with their own 
citizens as they saw fit.309 All this remained firm law until the Civil War.  

 
305 James W.C. Pennington, James W.C. Pennington to Charles Gilpin, in THE FUGITIVE 
BLACKSMITH (London, July 30, 1850), available at BAP, Doc. No. 480, at 10807. 
306 Pennington, supra note 84, at 9. 
307 U.S. CONST. art. 4, § 2, cl. 3. 
308 Act of February 12, 1793, 1 Stat. 302 (1793); Act of September 18, 1850, 9 Stat. 462 
(1850).  
309 See, e.g., Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842). 



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Perhaps it was firm law, but it was not just law, Pennington in-
sisted. “American fugitive slave law was based upon the assumed right 
that man had a property in man, and it perpetuated that right to the slave-
holder after his victim had been free and escaped out of his hand.”310 But 
rather than protecting the rights of the escaped man in his newly acquired 
freedom—even one living in a free state that has abolished slavery—the 
fugitive slave law protects the false rights of his master to have and to 
hold him. Even worse, this law also protects the right of a perfect stranger 
to assault, batter, capture, and kidnap a newly free man—and to drag 
him from his home in a free state to his hovel in a slave state to face the 
brutal retribution of his master. But rather than imprison the fugitive slave 
catcher for his seeming crimes, the law rewards him with a lucrative 
finder’s fee that courts will enforce against a recalcitrant master.311  

All this piles injustice upon injustice, Pennington lamented. The 
laws that condone it are not morally binding, no matter how august their 
authorship or authority. “To deliver up a fugitive from bondage, is to com-
mit a moral wrong, in taking away a man’s liberty and [again] reducing 
him to slavery. But, nothing is binding that is morally wrong. Therefore, 
[the law requiring a person] to deliver a fugitive is not binding.”312 When 
criticized for condoning insurrection against God-given federal authori-
ties, Pennington defended his “defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law.”313 

 
We do not want to break the Constitution, but we want to 
mend it; for we contend that just at this clause, there is no 
Constitution, as applied to slavery. There is a breach here 
which is only filled with dead letters. What is the Constitu-
tion? Is it a sovereign over the will and the power of the peo-
ple? No, it is the creature of that will and power. Now the will 
and power of the people is supreme in all matters, where 
they have the right to exercise will and power. But, we state 
here as a position, that in this clause there is an assumption 

 
310 [Untitled Report], KELSO CHRON., Jan. 3, 1851, available at BAA, Doc. No. 11152, at 
2. 
311 Id. at 3-4.  
312 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 8. 
313 Black Abolitionist Papers James W.C. Pennington, Letter from Rev. Dr. Pennington, 
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of power which the framers of the Constitution never had 
lodged in hands.314 

 
While earlier Protestants had accused monarchs and magistrates 

of trespassing on natural rights, Pennington here emphasized the limits 
on the democratic will of the people themselves. Neither monarchs nor 
duly elected representatives nor agents of the state could rightfully in-
fringe upon the fundamental rights of any person, regardless of skin color 
or slave status. To hold a man in slavery is sin, Pennington again ex-
plained. “If you [re-]enslave a man, you do not only rob him of his own 
dear liberty and happiness, but you rob God of his right as Creator and 
Redeemer of that man.”315 It was even worse to collect a bounty for slave 
catching. A slave catcher is a modern-day Judas Iscariot, Pennington 
charged, who “betrays” another son of God “for thirty pieces of silver.”316 
 

C. Modeling Covenant Community. 
 

Nonviolent resistance to slavery and racism also included model-
ling what a racially integrated and just covenant community should look 
like, locally if not nationally. That effort starts with the Christian church, 
Pennington insisted, where racism, slavery, and segregation should find 
their least refuge and strongest rebuke. Enrolling at the Yale Divinity 
School, in this sense, was an act of civil disobedience that informed Pen-
nington’s subsequent efforts to integrate American pews and pulpits. 
Pennington insisted on preparing for the ministry at Yale even though no 
African American student had enrolled there before. He persistently sat 
in white pews, knelt at white communion rails, and stood in white pulpits, 
even though many white churches had turned him away. He resolutely 
served as the duly elected moderator of the Presbytery of New York, 
even though that required him to judge the ordination and discipline of 
white ministers, likely including those who, like Henry Van Dyke, were 
apologists for slavery.  

Pennington urged other African American ministers to volunteer 
to preach in white pulpits and urged African American parishioners to try 

 
314 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 7.  
315 Id. at 6, 14.  
316 Id. at 10. 



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to attend white churches and religious schools, regardless of the slim 
odds of successful admission.317 He proposed banning slaveholders and 
fugitive slave catchers from communion tables in order to convict them 
of their sins and pressure them to repent.318 He urged all Christians to 
pray publicly and privately for the slaves—and for the slaveholders, too—
thereby “mak[ing] slaveholding disreputable.”319 He asked churches to 
lead in boycotting slave-produced goods and thereby make the labor of 
slaves so “unprofitable” that their masters “would be willing to let them 
go.”320 And he appealed to leaders of church, state, and business to raise 
ransom funds for the purchase and release of slaves wherever possible, 
as he did in seeking to rescue his own enslaved family.321 

 
317 [Untitled Report], CHRISTIAN FREEMAN, Nov. 2, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07163, 
at 3-4. But see PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 16 (crediting those who leave racist con-
gregations for conscientious reasons: “The coloured people do not think they are bound 
to worship where their consciences are wounded. They will leave any church where they 
find the feeling is not cordial and Christianlike. There is no instance on record in America 
where the coloured people have maintained any church quarrel or battle with their white 
brethren.”). 
318 [Untitled Report], LIBERATOR, Jan. 5, 1855, available at BAA, Doc. No. 16221, at 2.  
319 Id. at 2; [Untitled Report], GATESHEAD OBSERVER, September 28, 1850, available at 
BAA, Doc. No. 10894(b); James W.C. Pennington, [Report of Pennington Describing the 
Injustices of Slavery to a Foreign Audience], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., June 21, 1843, available 
at BAA, Doc. No. 06940, at 3 (“Men and brethren, help. Do you ask how you are to help 
us? You can help us through the channel of emigration. The world is pouring in its popu-
lation upon the shores of America. Your emigrants, in many instances, become slave-
holders and man-haters. When your friends come to settle among us, use your influence 
to have them bring right principles with them. Americans visit your countries. When they 
come, question them on the subject of slavery. Ask them how they feel towards the col-
oured people. Tell them how they stand before the world, and ask them what they are 
doing to abolish slavery? You visit America. When you go, do not forget that there is a 
certain man there who has fallen among thieves and robbers! Go as good Samaritans. 
Make inquiries regarding the condition of the coloured population, and drop a kind word 
for them; it will have its effect and due weight on the American mind. That was due to 
them. The world owed the coloured race a debt of justice. (Loud cheers.) Where was the 
nation that had not wronged the African race? He and his brethren felt warranted in de-
claring that the world owed them a debt of justice; and he asked for justice−only simple 
justice. (Loud cheers.) If you extend to us your sympathy, and aid us in endeavouring to 
procure justice, we live; deprive us of your sympathy, we pine and die.”) 
320 LIBERATOR, supra note 320, at 3; see also [Untitled Pamphlet], PRESSCOPY – YALE UNI-
VERSITY – ANTI-SLAVERY PAMPHLETS, Aug. 1, 1839, available at BAA, Doc. No. 04137, at 
8-9 (“But the day is also hastening, when we shall see a combination of all the great and 
generous powers of the earth against the bloody slave system of this land, by a proscrip-
tion of slave produce . . .When the eyes of the civilized nations shall be turned with unan-
imous indignity upon the crying sin of this land, the south will feel and think differently 
about her system.”) 
321 See supra note 284 and accompanying text. 



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Pennington pushed this same message of liberation and equality 
outside the church as well. After being repeatedly denied seats on public 
carriages and trains,322 he helped found the Legal Rights Association in 
New York City, which brought successful lawsuits to end segregated 
seating on public transportation in several northern cities.323 To break 
down economic segregation, he urged African American families to 
“place our daughters, and young sons in industrial positions, however 
humble; and secure openings where they may be usefully employed.”324 
He further urged African American workers to collaborate, unionize, and 
petition for fair labor and economic standards.325 He called for universal 
suffrage in federal, state, and local elections—for blacks and whites, men 
and women alike.326 And he urged African American families to stay to-
gether or reunite after emancipation or escape—even if chattel-slave 
laws had prevented couples from marrying; even if slave owners had 
separated parents, children, and siblings; and even if masters had raped, 
scandalized, and impregnated enslaved women and girls.327 The intact 
marital family for him was a bastion and bulwark of liberty, for men, 
women, and children alike.328 

Pennington noted several signs of hope in African American com-
munities in the 1830s and 1840s. “[H]ere and there, individual minds 
have been struggling up from among the masses and have slowly pro-
gressed against great odds.”329 Despite legal and cultural barriers, free 

 
322 James W.C. Pennington, A Hard Case [Originally Published as a Letter to the Editor 
in the New York Evangelist], AFR. REPOSITORY, March 1853, available at BAP, Doc. No. 
8240 (noting, after recounting “rudely refused” service on busses and trains in New York 
City while trying to tend to get to his ministry: “I shall be told that the majority of the public 
will object to my riding in the 'busses. Is that true? Will the members of a Christian public 
object to me, a minister of Christ, using the facilities of a public conveyance, while about 
my Master's business?”).  
323 See 4 BLACK ABOLITIONIST PAPERS 274, 277 n.10 (C. Peter Ripley, et al., eds., 1991); 
see also THOMAS, supra note 1, at 57-58.  
324 Pennington, supra note 61, at 8-9, 14. 
325 Id. at 8-9. 
326 See sources supra notes 104 to 106. 
327 See sources supra note 240.  
328 See PENNINGTON, supra note 148, at 18-19. For comparable views among pre- and 
post-Emancipation African Americans, see FRANCES SMITH FOSTER, ‘TIL DEATH OR DIS-
TANCE DO US PART: LOVE AND MARRIAGE IN AFRICAN AMERICA (2010); LOVE & MARRIAGE IN 
EARLY AFRICAN AMERICA (Frances Smith Foster ed., 2008).  
329 James W.C. Pennington, The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races of the 
World, ANGLO-AFR. MAG., Oct. 1859, available at BAP, Doc. No. 10609, at 21105.  



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African Americans have proven themselves in the fields of education, 
agriculture, “mechanical arts and manufactures,” commerce, and Chris-
tianity.330 African American churches of all denominations have exempli-
fied orthodox preaching and practice, despite discriminatory ecclesial 
and state laws: 

 
In these churches all the institutions of the gospel are held 
sacred. A regular ministry is highly esteemed; the Sabbath 
is sanctified; the Bible is held to be the only rule of faith and 
practice. Our people also prize all those other means which 
Christian communities regard as essential – Sabbath 
schools, Bible classes, temperance, and moral reformation 
societies. The coloured pulpit of the country is the most effi-
cient and disinterested.”331  
 

Despite persistent discrimination and exclusion from public schools, 
schools for “colored” students were also making progress in “the work of 
civilization.332 

 
D. Advocacy for Abolition 

 
These individual acts of civil disobedience and community building, 

Pennington believed, were critical steps toward the ultimate abolition of 
 
330 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 11-16, 23-25; James W.C. Pennington, From the Old 
‘Long Island Scribe’, WKLY. ANGLO-AFR., Sept. 24, 1859, available at BAP, Doc. No. 9650 
(“On the subject of farming, our colored men of this town are among the most intelligent 
on the Island. As cultivators of their own small portions of soil they are not excelled in skill 
by any other class. All they need is more broad acres to make them A No. 1 in the busi-
ness. As it is they are most valuable in their connexion with the New York garden and 
market agriculture.”). 
331 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 16.  
332 Id. at 13; James W.C. Pennington, The Self-Redeeming Power of the Colored Races 
of the World, ANGLO-AFR. MAG., Oct. 1859, available at BAP, Doc. No. 10609, at 21106. 
But Pennington also conceded that African Americans lagged behind their European and 
Euro-American counterparts in other ways. “In answer to the voice of our history calling 
upon us to reproduce the works of our past, it will be seen that our literature, and produc-
tions of science and art, attest that our’s are a recovering people,” he poignantly reflected 
in 1859. If many African cultures and communities were less advanced or refined than 
their Euro-American counterparts, however, it was not for lack of intellect or virtue. The 
abilities of African races “expand in proportion to their state,” Pennington observed, and 
“if they were equally improved, they would be equally ingenious.” Pennington, supra note 
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slave laws. The “laws and compacts, designed to legalize a system of 
human bondage” are patently unjust, he wrote.333 And despite the grow-
ing success of freeborn African Americans and emancipated or escaped 
slaves, many African Americans were still suffering gravely in many quar-
ters: 

 
The race has served the Republic in all the domestic rela-
tions, giving patriots leisure for study, and preparation for 
affairs. It has served the Republic in the Revolutionary field; 
and produced for the nation the enriching luxury of the plan-
tation. The cotton plant which has done more than any thing 
else to enrich and refine the Saxon, has also done most to 
brutify and bind fast the slave. In the use of this, and other 
heavy staples of slave growth, the whole nation North, 
South, East and West, has invaded the rights of the slave. . 
. . The American horsewhip; the American Senate; the 
American Pulpit; and the American Press, have all in part 
lent their efforts.334 

 
Even though pulpit, press, and politics might have “consecrated” these 
slave laws “with great veneration, and baptised [them] with much solem-
nity,” they need to “be swept away,” Pennington insisted.335 The nation 
needs new laws to secure “the personal liberty and rights of the slave. . 
. . With the Bible and Declaration of Independence for our weapons, we 
will make a bold push.”336 

Pennington pointed repeatedly to the peaceful and successful 
British abolitionists as promising models for American legal reformers.337 
British abolitionists, Pennington wrote, had 

 
displayed their talents and energy in collecting and arranging 
their antislavery facts so as to carry the question home to the 
moral feelings of the nation. . . . They pushed their arguments 
to the throne, and . . . to the parliament, DECLARING, that the 

 
333 See PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 4. 
334 Pennington, supra note 84, at 11.  
335 PENNINGTON, supra note 95, at 4. 
336 PENNINGTON, supra note 148, at 18-20. 
337 Id. at 2; see Pennington, supra note 144. 



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enslavement of men is a monstrous crime, which endangers 
the very existence of a nation, by exposing it to the wrath of 
heaven; that freedom is the slave’s birth right; that the only 
way to do him justice is to set him free immediately and un-
conditionally; that the slave’s ignorance which has been en-
tailed upon him by slavery, is no argument for delaying his 
emancipation; that whatever preparation he may need for 
freedom, can not be made while in a state of slavery.338 
 
These British abolitionists exercised “moral power” in demanding 

to Parliament that “the oppressed should go free,” Pennington wrote with 
admiration.339 Like Moses commanding Pharaoh, these abolitionists “did 
not suppose they were asking a mere favor” for slaves.340 They were in-
stead demanding “what was the bondman’s right,” to receive, and what 
was “the duty of the Parliament to give.”341 They “appealed nobly to the 
dreadful code of God; they appealed to the law of nature, sanctioned by 
the universal consent of mankind. And they appealed, too, with just pride 
to the great charter of British liberty,” the Magna Carta.342 These persis-
tent abolitionist appeals ultimately transformed English law, Pennington 
noted. England abolished slavery in 1838.343 

This 1838 law was a sublime historical moment that liberated the 
body, mind, and soul of former slaves and restored to them their bodies, 
natural rights, and family relationships, Pennington waxed poignantly:  

 
It restored the bondman his body; his body that was marked, 
bruised and lacerated; but it was his body, dear to him still, 
as was the body of his oppressor to him, whose skin had 
never been broken by a scratch of a pin. The law came and 
the bondman received back his soul; his soul long benighted 

 
338 PENNINGTON, supra note 148, at 11. 
339 James W.C. Pennington, [Untitled Pamphlet], PRESSCOPY – YALE UNIVERSITY – ANTI-
SLAVERY PAMPHLETS, Aug. 1, 1839, available at BAA, Doc. No. 04137, at 2. 
340 Id. at 4-5.  
341 Id. 
342 Id. at 4-5.  
343 Parliament abolished slavery with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (3 & 4 Will. IV c. 
73), but enacted a controversial “apprenticeship“ program that delayed full abolition, in 
practice, until August 1, 1838.  



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and vexed, but it was still his soul, possessed of its own im-
mortality, an immortality of which the cart-whip and other in-
struments of torture, plied with deadly effect to the body that 
enshrined it, could not divest it.  
 
And here is an eternal truth that is destined to beat away 
every refuge of lies that can be brought by the ingenuity of 
critics, tyrants, and cavilers, to support slavery. When you 
have made of man a slave by a seven-fold process of sell-
ing, bartering and chaining, and garnished him with that 
rough and bloody brush, the cart-whip, and set him to the 
full by blowing into the eyes of his mind cloud after cloud of 
moral darkness, his own immortality still remains. Subtract 
from him what you can, immortality still remains; and this is 
a weapon in the bosom of the slave which is more terrible 
and terrifying to the slaveholder than the thunder of trium-
phal artillery in the ears of a retreating army. At every stripe 
of the cart-whip there is a plaintive shriek which betokens 
the inwardly dwelling immortality of the soul. 
 
The law of 1838 came, and the bondman received back his 
wife, his children, his Bible, his Sabbath, his sanctuary.  

 
Oh, what moral sublimity is here, when the law spoke with 
such stern eloquence to the tyrant, in regard to the personal 
liberty and rights of the slave, and the mandate was, “give 
them, give them back!” and when the man of chains and 
stripes came forth, and reached out his hand to receive the 
precious trust!344 

 
344 PENNINGTON, REASONABLENESS OF ABOLITION 18-19; James W.C. Pennington, [Untitled 
Pamphlet], PRESSCOPY – YALE UNIVERSITY – ANTI-SLAVERY PAMPHLETS, Aug. 1, 1839, avail-
able at BAA, Doc. No. 04137, at 1. On the anniversary of the abolition of slavery under 
British law, Pennington poetically declared that universal emancipation was all but inevi-
table: “We may congratulate ourselves that the day-star of universal emancipation which, 
under God, is destined to illumine the world with its resistless light, has risen. It is far up 
in yonder heaven, and like a ‘strong man rejoicing to run a race,’ it moves on majestically. 
Possibly we shall meet the charge of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may run riot. It may tell a 
piteous tale on which truth may be compelled to ‘frown and turn aside her face, it may 
 



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Pennington saw in these actions both the hand of God and a 

model for American abolitionists. Britain’s emancipated slaves “are now 
talked of by politicians and people of all ranks in all lands, the slaves of 
America not excepted,” he wrote. They are “beginning to shake every 
empire of blood” and move them to reform.345 Indeed, Britain’s abolition 
of slavery in the West Indies freed “800,000 men” “without the shedding 
of a drop of blood.”346  

Pennington was optimistic that legal reforms and peaceable abo-
lition would reach America, too. “Just so far and so fast as the true spirit 
of the gospel obtains in the land,” Pennington declared, “will the spirit of 
slavery sicken and become powerless.”347 For “the Gospel is the great 
law of progressive civilization. It is an express order of heaven’s govern-
ment that it shall be carried into all the world to every creature.”348 He 
was delighted to see evidence of “the operation of conscience on the 
religious people of America” and that “heaven had worked” in favor of the 
abolitionists. He noted that “multitudes, who had not yet decided to act, 
nevertheless felt conscious that the principles which the abolitionists ad-
vanced were right.”349 He further noted that abolitionists could now speak 
more fully and frankly about abolitionism in the pulpit, press, and political 
chamber. In a speech in 1850, he listed examples of progress.  

 
The anti-slavery spirit is advancing in all the free states. . . . 
We have swept the Jim Crow carriage from almost every 
railway south of Mason and Dixon’s line. We have abolished 

 
bend the pillow of truth, and for a time, unhinge from its proper centre, the common sense 
of the moral world. But the tale of joy which we rehearse to-day, is no fiction.” 
345 James W.C. Pennington, [Untitled Pamphlet], PRESSCOPY – YALE UNIVERSITY – ANTI-
SLAVERY PAMPHLETS, Aug. 1, 1839, available at BAA, Doc. No. 04137, at 2. 
346 James W.C. Pennington, [Report of Speech Given by Pennington in Birmingham, 
England], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., Aug. 9, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 07020; see also 
PENNINGTON, supra note 148, at 17 (“What slave in ours or any other country need despair 
of liberty since the British slave has gone free! His case was a desperate one, literally 
imprisoned in the sea, dark waters were the boundary of his habitation of sorrow. No free 
States or Canadas bounded him on either side, to which he could fly. But God, who or-
dained that the isles should wait for his law, enforced that law in due season.”).  
347 PENNINGTON, supra note 21, at 76.  
348 Pennington, supra note 84, at 7.  
349 James W.C. Pennington, [Speech], ANTI-SLAVERY REP., Aug. 9, 1843, available at 
BAA, Doc. No. 07020, at 2. 



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the Black Laws of Ohio and Connecticut. We have enacted 
laws in most of the free states protecting fugitive slaves from 
the interference of their citizens, from being seized by war-
rants from the magistrates, being confined in their prisons. 
Several colleges have been thrown open for the reception 
of coloured youth, upon equal terms with whites. Large por-
tions of several of the largest ecclesiastical bodies have 
taken decided anti-slavery ground. Numerous individual 
churches have excluded slave-holders from their commun-
ion [and promoted blacks to leadership positions]. . . . 
Fredrick Douglass, editor of the North Star, has been wel-
comed to the Association of Printers and Editors at Roches-
ter.350 
 

In another speech that same year of 1850, he declared that: 
 

[t]he mind of the slaves, as well as the free people of colour 
in America, was rapidly expanding, and coming more and 
more into contact with the great principles of truth and civil 
and religious liberty which had fired the hearts and minds of 
the Anglo-Saxons in other times. . . . The tide of negro emi-
gration from the South to the North would still roll on. No 
power would be able to arrest it. It was propelled by the phi-
losophy of human nature, of common sense, civilization, 
and of Christianity.351 
 

VII. SLAVERY, JUST WAR, AND VIOLENCE 
 
But despite all these efforts and advances, slavery remained 

firmly in place in the United States. The number of slave states was in 
fact expanding, not contracting, as slaves bore children and new states 

 
350 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 26-27. 
351 James W.C. Pennington, [Summary of Speech], CHRISTIAN NEWS, June 27, 1850, 
available at BAA, Doc. No. 10773, at 3-4; see also James W.C. Pennington, [Report of 
Pennington Describing the Injustices of Slavery to a Foreign Audience], ANTI-SLAVERY 
REP., June 21, 1843, available at BAA, Doc. No. 06940, at 1-3. 



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were added to the Union.352 In 1850, Congress passed yet another fugi-
tive slave law353 and, in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case, the Supreme 
Court upheld that law, with Chief Justice Taney opining that slaves were 
not persons with constitutional rights even when they set foot in free 
states.354 This betrayal of the abolitionist cause at the highest levels of 
national government hardened Pennington’s opposition to slavery and 
opened him to more strident means of opposition.  

Already in an 1849 speech before the Paris Peace Conference, 
he acknowledged that American slavery, perhaps more than any other 
form of oppression in human history, merited an uprising of the op-
pressed: 

 
Surely then, if being robbed of all of one’s rights is a justifi-
cation for disturbing the peace of society, we have that jus-
tification. Our wrongs are far greater than those of many 
who have set us the example in disturbing the peace. Nor 
can anyone who takes a candid view of the whole subject, 
doubt that we have it in our power to disturb the peace of 
society.355 
 
Even so, Pennington still insisted that violent insurrection would 

be inconsistent with the Gospel, at odds with the motives and moral char-
acter of African Americans, and detrimental to the final success of the 
emancipation movement. Echoing the peaceful British abolitionists and 
anticipating the teachings of nonviolence of the later American civil rights 
movement, he wrote that the “element of peace in our character gives us 
a more substantial ground of hope” than violence.356 

 
The goodwill we bear to all mankind, even to our oppres-
sors, can do more to aid us to our high destiny of civilization, 

 
352 PENNINGTON, supra note 45, at 7-10. Documentation and analysis of this constitutional 
history can be found in DERRICK A. BELL, RACE, RACISM, AND AMERICAN LAW 19-72 (6th ed. 
2008).  
353 Act of September 18, 1850, 9 Stat. 462 (1850).  
354 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), superseded by constitutional 
amendment, U.S. CONST. amend. XIV.  
355 James W.C. Pennington, Speech by J.W.C. Pennington, in 1 THE BLACK ABOLITIONIST 
PAPERS 157, 158 (C. Peter Ripley et al. eds., 1992). 
356 Id. 



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than all the physical force in the world can do to hinder us . 
. . . If the gospel be true, our [nonviolent] course is right, and 
must prevail. If the gospel is to make further progress, its 
next step must be to destroy the sword . . . . Wherever the 
sword holds sway, it holds the gospel in check: every battle 
throws society back into the labyrinths of barbarism.357  

 
But escalating political tensions on the eve of the Civil War led 

Pennington to reevaluate the theological meaning of violence. When 
bloody riots against African American communities erupted in New York 
in the later 1850s and early 1860s, Pennington asserted the right of 
blacks to “use arms for self-defense. There is no principle of civil, or reli-
gious obligation, that requires [us] to live on, in hazard, and leave our 
person, property, and our wives and children at the mercy of barbarians. 
Self defense is the first law of nature.”358 When the abolitionist John 
Brown was put on trial for leading an armed insurrection at Harper’s Ferry 
in 1859—just one week after he had been a guest in Pennington’s home 
in New York359—Pennington published a public letter not to denounce 
this violence, but to encourage readers “to pray for old John Brown . . . 
that his blood may be sanctified to the cause of freedom.”360  

Pennington never publicly advocated violent insurrection before 
the Civil War began, however, and he was “thankful” that the first shots 
of the war had been fired by slaveholders instead of slaves. 

 
Had the slaves risen and attacked Fort Sumpter [sic], the 
world would have cried out against them, and proclaimed 
tauntingly, that this was the result of the abolition doctrines 
preached by [British abolitionist, William] Wilberforce and 
others. But now, no one could oppose emancipation on ac-
count of the turbulence and bloodthirstiness of the slaves.361  
 

 
357 Id. 
358 Pennington, supra note 61, at 7-8.  
359 WEBBER, supra note 1, at 396, 401.  
360 James W.C. Pennington, Pray for Old John Brown, WKLY. ANGLO-AFR. (Nov. 5, 1859), 
http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth596356. 
361 [Untitled Report of Speech], MONTREAL WITNESS, Sept. 6, 1862, available at BAA, Doc. 
No. 25908. 



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The Civil War, once begun, was a just war against the domestic tyranny 
of slavery, Pennington believed, just as the American Revolution had 
been a just war against the political tyranny of England. Otherwise-
peaceable advocates for freedom could fight in the Civil War, just as their 
forefathers had fought in the Revolutionary War.  Indeed, Pennington 
strongly encouraged African American men to enlist in the Civil War effort 
as soldiers and even offered to serve himself.362 “The army of the United 
States must, hereafter, be the great bulwark of our life, as a nation,” he 
argued in 1863:  

 
The rebellion has rendered it necessary that we should have 
a powerful standing army. Colored men should enter the 
army in force, for the sake of the strength it will give them, 
the education they will obtain, the pay they will get; and the 
good service they will do for God, this country, and the 
race.363  
 
Pennington acknowledged that the Union remained a bastion of 

racial inequality. And he admitted the “terrible contingency” that black 
Union soldiers might meet their enslaved brethren as enemies on the 
battlefield. Enslaved blacks, he argued, “cannot be expected to exercise 
any more liberty of choice” in fighting for the Confederacy “than the poor 
white union men” conscripted into the Union army.”364 But the higher 
cause of abolition called for the assistance of able-bodied African Amer-
ican Union soldiers:  

 

 
362 WEBBER, supra note 1, at 411. African Americans initially were not permitted to serve 
in the Union Army. In a speech delivered in October of 1861, Pennington reportedly urged 
his audience to “ever stand firm and loyal to the country, and although their loyalty was 
spurned, their aid coldly rejected, and the fiery ardor of their patriotism partially quenched 
by the cold waters of prejudice against them – yet he knew that the vital spark was still 
alive in the smouldering embers of adversity, which would yet be kindled into a flame, 
that would assist in warming into cheerfulness the sad hearthstones made vacant by the 
fall of their brave white brethren – who have led the van in the strife of battle.” See James 
W.C. Pennington, A Discourse by Dr. Pennington, WKLY. ANGLO-AFR., Oct. 5, 1861, avail-
able at BAA, Doc. No. 24510; see also H.H. Garnet, Great Meeting at Shiloh Church, 
DOUGLASS’ MONTHLY, June 1863, available at BAP, Doc. No. 12265. (reporting that Pen-
nington “showed how vitally necessary it is that black men should now enlist”).  
363 Pennington, supra note 61, at 9.  
364 Id.  



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There are some among us, who still doub[t] whether we are 
in duty bound to take up arms in support of the Government; 
and whether the Government has a right to draft colored 
men. The answer is obvious. NATURE AND CIVIL LAW HAS IN-
STITUTED a relation between colored men and the United 
States Government, which is mutually binding. We are 
BOUND to support the Government, and the Government is 
BOUND to protect us. Neither party has a right to ignore this 
duty. The plain and safe course for colored men, is to do 
service and claim their rights.365  

 
Pennington believed that the Civil War was, in part, God’s judg-

ment and just retribution for America’s “covenant with death”—its ac-
ceptance of chattel slavery and the odious racism that inspired and sus-
tained it.366 He believed that God would set all of his people free, but now 
only at grave cost to the enslaved and free alike. “An intelligent view of 
the history of God’s providential dealings with slavery,” he explained, 
“leaves no room to doubt that its doom is sealed in this country.”367 But 
the same providential God who had emancipated British slaves without 
the sword now was purging slavery from American soil with the sword. 
Neither the North nor the South would escape God’s wrath, for neither 
were free from guilt: 

 
On our side, the only wise and safe course is to press rapidly 
into the heart of the slave country, and work out the problem 
of the Proclamation of freedom [i.e. the Emancipation Proc-
lamation of 1863]. We must prove to the slaves that we have 
both the will and the power to give effect to the proclamation, 
and that it is not a mere sound, reaching their ears, upon the 

 
365 Id. at 9; [Untitled Report of Speech], MONTREAL WITNESS, Sept. 6, 1862, available at 
BAA, Doc. No. 25908, at 1-2; Great Meeting at Shiloh Church, DOUGLASS’ MONTHLY, June 
1863, available at BAP Doc. No. 12265, at 26600.  
366 Id. at 1 (“[E]nslaved brethren see clearly the hand of God in this war. They believe He 
has arisen to make inquisition for blood, and to purge the land by blood of the guilt which 
rests upon it because of slavery; and they are willing to leave their cause with Him, in the 
assured faith and hope that He would send deliverance.”). 
367 Pennington, supra note 61, at 14. 



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wings of the wind. Here is where our danger lies. The Pres-
ident [Lincoln] is right. The proclamation is the word of God’s 
holy Providence, so to speak; but the great North is slow to 
repent of slavery. There is yet a great deal of wicked, angry, 
and unrighteous feeling in the heart of the North people. It 
may be that God intends to use the sword as a lance to 
bleed the whole nation, until she begins to faint, for very loss 
of blood, and then to swathe up the opened vein, and apply 
restoratives. Let us, then, not flatter ourselves that we shall 
escape. Let us not be deceived by those who would per-
suade us that there is any destiny for us, as an integral part 
of this American nation, separate from the nation, as a 
whole.368  

 
African Americans, too, would therefore suffer with their nation for 

the sins of slavery, Pennington believed. Pennington’s sentiments on 
these points anticipated the words of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugu-
ral address, two years later. There, the President declared that God 
“gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those 
by whom the offence [of slavery] came.”369 Pennington believed that the 
Civil War was an act of Providence, even while resisting simplistic notions 
that the Union represented God’s conquering army. He understood that 
war was the ultimate means by which God was excising and exorcising 
the sin of slavery from American law and culture. Violence, at least in this 
case, was a tragic but necessary duty—a form of acquiescence to God’s 
just wrath and obedience to God’s providential will.370  

 
368 Id. at 16. 
369 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865), in ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 
HIS SPEECHES AND WRITINGS 792-93 (Roy P. Basler ed., Da Capo Press 2d ed. 2001) 
(1946); see Justin J. Latterell, In God We Trust: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Death-
bed Repentance, 12 POL. THEOLOGY 594-607 (2011). 
370 Elsewhere Pennington was more bullish about securing financial recompense and 
economic opportunities for African American communities by serving in the Union army. 
See James W.C. Pennington, A Word to Colored Politicians, WKLY. ANGLO-AFR., Aug. 10, 
1861, available at BAP, Doc. No. 24280. “Mark my words, gentlemen, we cannot get out 
of this terrible scrape, without in some way helping to decide the contest; and I believe 
that we are on the eve of the grand heroic age of the race, when the last vestige of African 
Slavery shall be wiped out; and I repeat what I said yesterday, that an army of 25,000 
black troops marching from the North west, upon the rear of Jeff. Davis, can recapture 
 



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Pennington’s pen evidently went largely silent in the aftermath of 
the Civil War.371 The archives hold no sustained comments from him 
about the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amend-
ments, which together struck proslavery provisions from the United 
States Constitution. Nor do we have record of him opining on the pas-
sage of the first Civil Rights Act of 1866 or of various other measures that 
the Reconstruction Congress enacted in an effort to upend the law and 
 
king cotton – or take that great gun which has been worth from $80,000,000 to 
$100,000,000, to the South per annum. And then the race will hold the position of the 
world. Because if cotton is king in the money market of the world, our race in America 
has by its blood, tears, and sweat crowned it a king, and are therefore entitled to the 
benefit of his reign.”  
371 An interesting editorial, “The New Evangel,” published in the Anglo-African on October 
7, 1865, may have been written by Pennington. See WEBBER, supra note 1, at 420 (as-
cribing it to Pennington), 430 (suggesting it may have been by the journal editor). The 
text reads, in part, as follows, including a strong call to exchange “the gospel of endur-
ance” for “the gospel of resistance”: “We have fulfilled the gospel of endurance; thor-
oughly, completely, exhaustively, in such way as the gospel never was fulfilled before, 
never can be fulfilled again: if that gospel meant an expiation of the curse of Ham, then 
we have expiated it; if it meant the earning of a better lot for our descendants, then we 
have earned it. We have fulfilled it as individuals; each and every one of us, we have 
fulfilled it as a race, through six generations; we have fulfilled it in all the relations of life, 
family, social, political, through all the recesses of the soul, mind and body, drenched, 
drained, filled to the overflowing, saturated, crushed, from birth to death with this doom 
of endurance under slavery and caste. Like the Patriarch of old, we have served this 
American people more than a century, and, instead of the promised Goddess of Liberty 
they put us off with the blear-eyed Leah of negroism, and, now that we have served them 
another century, and saved them from the ‘jaws of death’ they would place us anew under 
the doom of endurance! Endurance indeed! That game is ‘played out.’ There is nothing 
left of it: no amount of ingenuity can wrench anything now out of it. It is too soon for history 
to repeat itself: the trick is too transparent. There must be a new deal . . . We must ex-
change the gospel of endurance for the gospel of resistance. Our advancement to equal-
ity before the law will not be a sudden process. It is now little more than an idea between 
which and the practical enforcement or application thereof, there is a long and weary 
stride. This must be accomplished to a great extent by FORCE. . . Let this new evangel 
of resistance, or self-assertion, be clearly understood. We do not offer it as a substitute 
for the laws of the land, nor for the exercise of the State laws in the free States, nor for 
United States laws in the rebel States. . . . The great benefit of this new evangel is imme-
diate to ourselves. For that odious, imbecile, plaintive dependence upon others, we in-
stantly substitute dependence on ourselves. Instead of calling upon Andy Johnson, Gen-
eral Grant, General Dix, or the Provost Marshal to bring their authority, and their troops 
to quell a man who has called us ‘nigger’ with a blow, we simply return the compliment 
and settle the question for ourselves in the best way for all concerned. It is by this or an 
equivalent method only that we can attain and maintain equality. Equal Suffrage, equality 
before the law, may be written in State Constitutions, and yet if we fail to make ourselves 
felt as equals, will avail but little. It is by our constant assertion of our own manhood only 
that we can positively obtain and perpetually uphold our equality.” Compare his state-
ments on self defense, supra notes 37-40 and 355-358. 



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culture of slavery and racism. Pennington surely welcomed these legal 
measures, which did much to advance the principles of liberty, equality, 
and human rights for which he had risked his life, and to which he had 
devoted so much of his work. He certainly lamented, too, the persistence 
of racism in American law and culture even after constitutional amend-
ments formally ended chattel slavery and granted civil and religious rights 
to all Americans regardless of skin color.372 

From the end of the Civil War in 1865 until his death in 1870, 
Pennington shifted his energies to serving newly emancipated and en-
franchised African American communities. Before the war ended, he had 
called on Northern churches to prepare and fund more missionaries to 
serve African American communities in the South. Shortly after the war 
ended in 1865, Pennington led the way South to Louisiana and then to 
Natchez, Mississippi. There, he briefly served as pastor of an African 
Methodist Episcopal Church, a denominational shift perhaps born of his 
effort to avoid the bitter fights over slavery and abolition that divided 
Northern and Southern Presbyterians in the 1860s.373 These new pasto-
ral callings came with a substantial pay cut for Pennington, and his family 
was forced to remain in New York where his wife had a decent job. Fol-
lowing his wife’s death in 1867, Pennington spent three years pastoring 
a church in Portland, Maine.374 Finally, in February of 1870, he accepted 
what would become his final call to the First Presbyterian Church of Jack-
sonville, Florida. “Duty calls me to go to the State of Florida and assist 
my brethren and others in that interesting field in the great cause of edu-
cation and christian Reconstruction,” he wrote to his friend and benefac-
tor, Gerrit Smith. “There is a fine prospect in that state and a pressing 
call for education.”375  

Teaching and preaching to newly emancipated communities in 
the South was a fitting, if anticlimactic capstone to Pennington’s life. He 
had escaped from slavery as a young man; educated himself and faced 

 
372 WEBBER, supra note 1, at 422-424.  
373 See The Schism of 1861, http://www.americanpresbyterianchurch.org/apc-his-
tory/presbyterian-history/the-schism-of-1861, and further documents in ALBERT BARNES, 
THE CHURCH AND SLAVERY (2010). This internal Presbyterian division gave rise to the first 
major United States Supreme Court on church property disputes, Watson v. Jones, 80 
U.S. (13 Wall.) 679 (1871). 
374 See WEBBER, supra note 1 at 428.  
375 Id. at 431.  



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down countless barriers of racial prejudice; educated and evangelized 
African American communities in the North while fighting for legal equal-
ity and rights; and contributed substantially to the abolition of slavery in 
the South. In Florida, Pennington discovered that slavery was “a malig-
nant cancer [that] leaves its roots after being apparently cured.” Yet he 
remained hopeful. “[U]nder God,” he wrote, “I have confidence in our 
cause and a cheerful hope of our ultimate success.”376  

Born into the shackles of slavery sixty-three years earlier, he died 
as the Reverend Doctor James W.C. Pennington on October 22, 1870—
a free man and “Doctor of Divinity” with his shoulder still to the wheel of 
his life’s calling: emancipating, elevating, and educating those whose 
“sacred human rights” had for so long been denied.  
 
VIII. CONCLUSION 
 

James Pennington opened a new chapter in Protestant political 
theology and civil disobedience. He repeated the cardinal Protestant 
themes of rights, resistance, and revolution by a covenant community 
called to obey God before men. He echoed the central premise of 
Protestant rights talk that freedom of conscience is the font and focus of 
civil and religious liberties for individuals and communities alike. He un-
derscored the Protestant teaching that the reform and renewal of law, 
politics, and society must include and involve religion and the church. 
And he repeated the Protestant mantra that a Christian church and com-
munity must always be restless to reform (semper reformanda), particu-
larly in times of tyranny. Pennington thus adopted and adapted the cen-
turies-old tradition of Protestant political theology and activism that had 
been sparked by Martin Luther’s earliest declarations of Christian liberty 
in Europe. 

But Pennington also added appreciably to this tradition. First and 
foremost, he argued that human rights belonged to all humans, regard-
less of race or skin color. He treated slavery as a domestic form of tyr-
anny that needed to be resisted and reformed in the name of those same 
human rights. He called it blatant hypocrisy for a Protestant nation to de-
clare proudly that all persons are created equal with unalienable rights, 

 
376 Id. at 432. 



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and then systematically deny rights to women, children, immigrants, in-
dentured servants, Native Americans, and African Americans, enslaved 
and free. He decried the monstrous blasphemy of treating human beings 
as items of property and not as image bearers of God. He judged it divine 
treason to refuse sanctuary and comfort to an escaped slave, or to return 
that slave to his master. And he condemned the American laws of slavery 
as a “covenant with death and agreement with hell,” that would bring the 
whole nation under the same divine retribution that the biblical God vis-
ited on the Israelites when they forsook his laws. 

Emancipation from slavery, Pennington believed, must begin with 
proclamation of the Gospel and the free exercise of faith. Just as God 
miraculously led his chosen people out of the house of bondage in 
Egypt—and just as God’s grace irresistibly leads his elect from their 
bondage to sin—so God will ultimately break the bonds of human slav-
ery. God equips the conscience of each slave to know that he or she is 
endowed with liberty and has the right to break free from slavery and 
escape when the right time comes. God pricks the conscience of each 
slaveholder to know that slavery is wrong and emancipation is right, 
whatever the wrong laws and false prophets (and profits) of his day might 
tell him. God calls on everyone to exercise the three-fold office of 
prophet, priest, and king on behalf of slaves: as prophets, to speak pow-
erfully in opposition to slavery and racism; as priests, to evangelize 
slaves and masters and provide pastoral care and comfort, healing and 
sanctuary; and, as kings, to work hard to break those unjust laws of slav-
ery that betray God’s word and to work for justice, mercy, and rights and 
liberties for all. 

But Pennington was no sword-swinging revolutionary like some 
of his Protestant predecessors. Anticipating by a century the American 
civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, An-
drew Young, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, Vernon Johns, and oth-
ers, Pennington advocated primarily nonviolent resistance against slav-
ery and racism. He led sit-ins, lawsuits, political protests, and 
constitutional challenges. He advocated the integration of churches, 
schools, charities, workplaces, and public accommodations. He encour-
aged blacks to prepare and to place themselves in positions of leadership 
in all sectors of society, starting with the church, whose segregation of 
blacks and whites and exclusion of slaves he called outrageous heresy.  



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Pennington, in prescient and prophetic ways, anticipated the 
twentieth-century civil rights movement led by the Protestant black 
churches. He anticipated that the more fully the state protects religious 
freedom, the more readily the church helps in the great task of bringing 
liberty and justice for all. He anticipated Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 
saying that: 

 
if the church will free itself from the shackles of a deadening 
status quo, and, recovering its great historic mission, will 
speak and act fearlessly and insistently in terms of justice 
and peace, it will enkindle the imagination of mankind and 
fire the souls of men, imbuing them with a glowing and ar-
dent love for truth, justice, and peace. Men far and near will 
know the church as a great fellowship of love that provides 
light and bread for lonely travelers at midnight.377 
 
Pennington also anticipated our late-modern recognition that reli-

gion is a cornerstone of human rights and that religious freedom is indis-
pensable to constitutional order.378 Even in today’s liberal and pluralistic 
societies, religions help to define the local meanings and measures of 
restraint and respect, responsibility and restitution that a human rights 
regime presupposes. Much as churches in Pennington’s day played an 
important role, for better or worse, in shaping their communities’ moral 
commitments, diverse religious communities today help define ideals of 
human dignity and human community, and the essentials of human na-
ture, need, and capacity upon which human rights are built. Much as 
churches and schools in Pennington’s day could serve as important in-
stitutions of social uplift and support, religious organizations today often 
stand alongside the state and other institutions in helping to implement 
and to protect the rights of a person and community—especially at times 
when the state is weak, distracted, divided, cash-strapped, transitioning, 
or corrupt. Religious communities can create the conditions (sometimes 

 
377 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., A TESTAMENT OF HOPE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS AND 
SPEECHES OF MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. 501 (James M. Washington ed., 1986).  
378 See generally THE FUTURE OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: GLOBAL CHALLENGES (Allen D. 
Hertzke ed. 2013); RELIGION AND HUMAN RIGHTS: AN INTRODUCTION (John Witte, Jr. & M. 
Christian Green, eds., 2012). 



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the prototypes) for the realization of civil and political rights of speech, 
press, assembly, and more. They can provide a critical (and sometimes 
the principal) means of education, healthcare, childcare, labor organiza-
tions, employment, and artistic opportunities, among other things. And 
they offer some of the deepest insights into duties of stewardship and 
servanthood that lie at the heart of environmental care, humane devel-
opment, and the rights of nature.  

Finally, Pennington challenges us to see that tyranny comes in 
many forms beyond that of the totalitarian state or the authoritarian 
church. Other legitimate authorities, too, across families, schools, corpo-
rations, hospitals, charities, farms, factories, unions, and other institu-
tions wield enormous, but often invisible and unchecked, power. And 
these authorities can become corrupt and can crush the sacred human 
rights of their local subjects with as much cruelty, devastation, and out-
rage as the early-modern state inflicted on its local subjects. Particularly, 
in contrast to the loud and brash nativist and xenophobic voices that we 
now hear today on both sides of the Atlantic, we can take comfort and 
courage from Pennington’s abiding message of hope and resilience; of 
peace and reform; of righteous protest and rights-based living; of just war 
and juster reconstruction – built on the foundations of family, church, and 
school; of democracy, constitutional order, and rule of law; and of the firm 
resolve to ensure that every member of society may enjoy their “sacred 
human rights.”