Mark Twain and James W. C. Pennington: Huckleberry Finn's Smallpox Lie - Johns Hopkins University

Mark Twain and James W. C. Pennington: Huckleberry Finn's
   Smallpox Lie

   William L. Andrews

   Studies in American Fiction, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 1981, pp. 103-112
   (Article)

   Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1981.0026

        For additional information about this article
        https://muse.jhu.edu/article/440606/summary

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MARK TWAIN AND JAMES W. C. PENNINGTON:
         HUCKLEBERRY FINN'S SMALLPOX LIE

                         William L. Andrews
                         University of Wisconsin

     One of the more memorable episodes in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn occurs in Chapter 16, when Huck outwits a pair of
slavecatchers intent on searching his raft for the runaway Jim. Huck's
talent for extemporaneous and effective lying is never demonstrated
better than it is in this pressure-filled moment. There is inspiration in
Huck's maneuvering the bounty-hunters into the conclusion that all
aboard the raft are infected with smallpox. At the same time that the
boy's ingenuity and disingenousness are displayed for the reader's en-
joyment, the adults' gullibility, abetted by their mean and callous self-
regard, is revealed too, adding a satiric dimension to the encounter and
reminding the reader of the seriousness of the shore world's corruption.
Furthermore, as the aftermath of the scene proves, the lie itself is ger-
mane to one of the central themes in the novel, that of the conflict
between the hero's "sound heart" and his "deformed conscience." The
telling of the lie represents an act of rebellion by Huck's heart in de-
fiance of his society-trained conscience. However, reflecting on the lie
later, Huck cannot appreciate with the reader of his story the delicious
justice of his lie or its moral defensibility as a means of protecting a
fellow fugitive from injustice. Instead, in self-recrimination Huck
searches the lie for evidence of his own moral weakness and failure.
Out of the pathetic irony of his admission that he cannot "learn to do
right"1 comes his more profound inquiry into the nature of moral
responsibility and moral choice. "[A] body that don't get started right
when he's little ain't got no show," Huck protests, blaming cir-
cumstances and training more than anything else for his lying to the
slave-catchers. Finally, in a quandary over how to choose between the
ambiguous right and wrong of his heart and his conscience, Huck opts
for an ethic of expedience, which allows him to by-pass temporarily the
knotty problems the smallpox lie occasions. When he confronts these
problems once again in Chapter 32, after trying to "pray a lie" to God,
Huck realizes the eternal jeopardy in which his lies on Jim's behalf have
placed him. But a key sign of his moral growth is revealed in the
climax of Chapter 32 when Huck ignores the wages of his own
duplicities and determines to save Jim regardless.

104Notes

     The smallpox lie, therefore, serves as a deft narrative and satiric
stroke; the far-reaching and complex moral ramifications of the lie help
to endow Huck's story with an ultimately tragic significance. Much
could be said in praise of Mark Twain's perceptiveness in adapting
Huck's talent for invention to such varied and artful literary ends. But
perhaps something should be said about another author who found the
lies of a runaway a useful pretext for social criticism and moral re-
flection.
     In the summer of 1849, 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
was first published in London. A year and two subsequent editions
later, James Pennington told his publisher how pleased he was with
"the rapid sale of the Sixth Thousand of The Fugitive Blacksmith" and
how widespread was the reputation of the narrative in his preaching
and lecturing circuit.2 One of the reasons for the popularity of
Pennington's narrative stemmed undoubtedly from the extensive ac-
count the author made of his escape itself. Almost one-half of the story
is devoted to a graphic and suspenseful description of Pennington's
winter trek from a plantation eighty miles south of Baltimore to
Philadelphia. On the third day of his unplanned and unaided flight,
the ex-slave recounts his capture and detainment only a few miles from
his home by a group of suspicious Maryland farmers. With no free
papers and no plausible reason for being abroad, Pennington is con-
sidered a runaway and is taken to a tavern for questioning. Before this
crucial interrogation scene begins, the author highlights its thematic as
well as dramatic significance by introducing it with an epigraph:
"GREAT MORAL DILEMMA."
     The "great moral dilemma" for the fugitive slave arises when his
captors demand to know, " 'who do you belong to, and where did you
come from?' " In this question, the author informs his reader, lay "the
pinch of the case, the case of conscience for me even at this moment"
(p. 21). Three choices were open to him: "I must refuse to speak at all,
or I must communicate the fact [of his name and origins], or I must tell
an untruth." Concluding that "the facts in this case are my private pro-
perty" and that telling the truth will only get him sold to the Louisiana
cottonfields, Pennington goes on insisting that he is a free man. The
whites respond with skepticism and an effort to locate a magistrate. A
futile attempt to break away from his captors during this search for a
magistrate compounds the strange black man's guilt and makes his im-
prisonment for the night seem inevitable. To forestall this eventuality,
Pennington announces suddenly, " 'If you will not put me in jail, I will

Studies in American Fiction105

now tell you where I am from." Receiving the white men's promise, the
black man spins for them an unpremeditated yarn:
        "Well," said I, "a few weeks ago, I was sold from the eastern shore to
        a slave-trader, who had a large gang, and set out for Georgia, but
        when he got to a town in Virginia, he was taken sick, and died with
        the small-pox. Several of his gang also died with it, so that the people
        in the town became alarmed, and did not wish the gang to remain
        among them. No one claimed us, or wished to have anything to do
        with us; I left the rest, and thought I would go somewhere and get
        work" (p. 24).
     The response to this blandly told lie is immediate and propitious.
First of all, the black man sees that his smallpox story is "evidently
believed by those who were present." But far better than the "murmur
of approbation" he hears is the behavior of his formerly threatening in-
quisitors. "I perceived that a panic began to seize some, at the idea that
I was one of a small-pox gang," Pennington observes. "Several who had
clustered near me, moved off to a respectful distance. One or two left
the bar-room, and murmured, 'better let the small-pox nigger go' "
(pp. 24-25). Pennington is not released immediately, but this
psychologically effective lie, followed by another which seems to con-
firm his story, convinces almost everyone in the tavern. As a result, he
is left in the custody of only one white man, whom the fugitive suc-
cessfully eludes the next day in a footrace over a potato field. Before
proceeding to his "final deliverance of the next chapter," however,
Pennington "cannot forbear to pause a moment here for reflection" on
the events in the tavern. The former slave with a doctorate in divinity3
and a pastorate in New York City assumes that he has some explaining
to do to the reader. What he has called "a case of conscience to me even
at this moment," whether lying to protect himself from the slave-
catchers was morally justifiable, must be addressed.
     Pennington begins his apologia by disclaiming any intention,
upon deserting his master, of gaining his freedom through immoral
means. "If you ask me if I expected when I left home to gain my liberty
by fabrications and untruths? I answer, No!" His parents had taught
him to be truthful; he respects honesty; and "if you ask me whether I
now really believe that I gained my liberty by those lies? I answer,
NoI" (p. 30). However, in his own defense Pennington adds, "at that
moment, I could not see any other way to baffle my enemies, and
escape their clutches." Shifting to the offensive, a more indignant than
penitent author asserts, "I never recur to it [the tavern episode] 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." Thus the "great

106Notes

moral dilemma" to which a Christian black man is subjected by chattel
slavery furnishes a telling indictment of the slave system. With the
following plea Chapter 2 of The Fugitive Blacksmith ends:
        Whatever my readers may think, therefore, of the history of events of
        the day, do not admire in it the fabrications; but see in it the im-
        pediments that often fall into the pathway of the flying bondman.
        See how human bloodhounds gratuitously chase, catch, and tempt
        him to shed blood and lie; how when he would do good, evil is thrust
        upon him (p. 30).
    A comparative reading of these chapters from Huckleberry Finn
and The Fugitive Blacksmith calls up several striking similarities. The
most obvious is the use of a subterfuge by both the white and black
runaways in order to deceive and scare off potential captors. The fact
that Huck Finn and James Pennington spontaneously adopt the same
kind of false identity (that of a orobable smallpox carrier) for the same
purpose (to protect a fugitive slave) is an even more remarkable coin-
cidence, if coincidence be all that it is. A further parallel between Mark
Twain's novel and Pennington's narrative arises from the thematic use
to which each author puts the smallpox lie disbursed by his pro-
tagonist. Though successful in evading exterior pursuers, neither
runaway can escape the judgments of his conscience, which sees grave
moral consequences attached to lying. As a result, both runaways must
wrestle with a "great moral dilemma" early in their fugitive careers.
Both Huck Finn and James Pennington must decide to what extent they
should conform to the moral standards of a society whose social and
political institutions they have rejected.
    After reflecting on their respective lies, each narrator pays lip ser-
vice to the moral standards which his conscience enforces. Huck says,
"I knowed very well I had done wrong," while Pennington admits that
his lie transgressed his parental teachings and should not be admired by
any reader. Still, neither James Pennington nor Mark Twain allows his
reader to judge the behavior of his protagonist so harshly or in such a
simplistic moral context. From the beginning, the fugitive blacksmith,
like the white runaway Mark Twain would later create, acts like a con-
scientious fellow anxious to avoid trouble or blame. Pennington pic-
tures himself as a man who "would do good," but because of slavery's
perversion of his options "evil is thrust upon him." Thus Pennington's
analysis of his moral dilemma during his flight enables him to foist
much of the guilt of his lie onto society. His reflection on the smallpox
lie culminates in a cry of protest, not a mea culpa, allowing James
Pennington to emerge from the episode a sympathetic figure, the un-
fortunate prey of "human bloodhounds" who "tempt him to shed blood

Studies in American Fiction107

and lie" as the price of his freedom. While the reader should not ad-
mire his "fabrications," he should not dwell on them either, for the cir-
cumstances which compelled those fabrications and victimized the in-
nocent slave merit the greater moral condemnation.
     A similar plea of no contest against circumstances comes from a
similarly conscientious runaway when Huck Finn surveys his moral op-
tions after telling his smallpox lie. Unlike his black predecessor, Huck
cannot claim to have been blessed with parental guides who might
have helped him resist temptation. However, denied this guidance,
Huck concludes as Pennington does that he has been betrayed by cir-
cumstances beyond his control: "A body that don't get started right
when he's little ain't got no show. . . ." Thus, like his fore-runner, the
"flying bondman" who "would do good," Huck Finn, the unrespec-
table boy who tries "to do right," emerges from his apparent moral
failure in a sympathetic light. Echoing Pennington's argument, Mark
Twain lays Huck's guilt at the door of his society, underlining Huck's
no-win ethical predicament by having him discover that the "wages" of
doing right or doing wrong are the same. By Chapter 32, however,
Huck is reminded that the eternal "wages" of his doing right or wrong
vis-à-vis Jim are not the same. Trying to pray a lie to God, Huck
realizes the eternal jeopardy in which he stands because of the lies he
continues to tell to aid an escaping slave. Such a realization of the
ultimate tragic consequences of his lies also struck James Pennington
with "the most intense horror" when he saw how slavery not only im-
perils its victim's temporal welfare, but "may even send him in haste to
the bar of God with a lie upon his lips." Nevertheless, for both
Huckleberry Finn and James Pennington, immediate liberation
supersedes all future fears. In both Huckleberry Finn and The Fugitive
Blacksmith, the fugitive protagonists achieve dignity as well as sym-
pathy because they risk both body and soul for the ideal of freedom.
      The similarities of substance, tone, and thematic purpose which
exist between the smallpox lie episodes in The Fugitive Blacksmith and
Huckleberry Finn inevitably raise the question of James Pennington's
influence on Mark Twain. Unfortunately, a conclusive answer cannot
be returned. Mark Twain knew about the fugitive slave narrative genre
and owned a copy of Charles Ball's Slavery in the United States: A Nar-
rative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man, which
he used as a source for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.*
Fugitive slave narratives were the sort of book Mark Twain liked to
read, combining, as they do, the staples of his literary diet: " 'History,
biography, travels, curious facts and strange happenings.' "5 These
literary preferences, his life-long interest in Afro-Americans, and the

108Notes

evidence of his knowledge and use of one slave narrative all suggest
that, given the opportunity to read a short and exciting account like
Pennington's, Mark Twain may well have done so. There were,
moreover, at least two such opportunities for Samuel Clemens to learn
of James Pennington and his work.
     Their paths crossed twice, once in Europe and once in America. It
is conceivable that, during a summer spent in Heidelberg in 1878,
Mark Twain could have heard about James Pennington, the first black
American to receive a D.D. from that city's university. Gathering notes
for A Tramp Abroad, Clemens frequented the university a good deal
and spoke there with great success, as had Pennington thirty years
before.6 Still, thirty years is a long time for the reputation of an
honorary degree winner to survive. It is more likely, therefore, that
Sam Clemens encountered the reputation of Rev. James Pennington in
the United States, at a time when a prominent, educated, and suc-
cessful black man would have made the maximum impression on him,
in his youth.
     On August 24, 1853, seventeen-year-old Sam Clemens arrived in
New York City for the first time, having left Missouri a week earlier on
his initial foray into the North. He took a job setting type in John A.
Gray's printing house on Cliff Street in lower Manhattan. Across
Broadway and about a mile from Gray's, young Sam lived and boarded
in a rooming house on Duane Street.7 During his two-month stay in the
city, Clemens occupied his after-hours time in two ways, sightseeing
and reading. Like a typical tourist he visited such attractions as the
World's Fair, held at that time in the Crystal Palace, several miles from
Clemens' neighborhood. He also took in at least one play at the Broad-
way Theatre.8 His letters home indicate further that while scouting
Manhattan, the young Missourian found much to catch his Southern
eye in this fascinating but occasionally shocking non-slaveholding
society. Comments on Borneo aborigines at large in the streets, "infer-
nal abolitionists" in Syracuse, and the exotic racial mix to be viewed on
Broadway dominate Clemens' two surviving letters to his mother.9
When he was not on his rambles, however, Sam whiled away his hours
reading. "You ask me where I spend my evenings," he replied to his
sister Pamela back in St. Louis. "Where would you suppose, with a free
printers' library containing more than 4,000 volumes within a quarter
of a mile of me, and nobody at home to talk to?"10 Apparently on one of
his walks down the street from his rooming house, near the corner of
Duane and Broadway, Sam found the Printers' Free Library and
Reading Room of the New York Typographical Society, open every
evening from 6 to 10 PM for "all connected with the business."11 The

Studies in American Fiction109

library's four-thousand volumes must have been a diverse collection for
the young Clemens to browse through, for it was made up "principally
from donations of the members and the publishers in the city."12
Whatever he read from this library, it seems to have been his mainstay
against loneliness and boredom until he left for Philadelphia in
October of 1853.
     Did Sam Clemens find The Fugitive Blacksmith on some drowsy,
solitary evening in the Printers' Free Library during his 1853 New York
visit? Much might be learned about early literary influences on the
mind of Mark Twain if any records of this library could be recovered,
but thus far no catalogs of the holdings of this institution have turned
up.13 What can be ascertained, however, is the notoriety of J.W. C.
Pennington himself in New York City in the early 1850s, a fact which
would have made his name and his book more accessible to local
journeyman printers with curious minds, active reading habits, and
eclectic libraries to sample.
      Among the most prominent and militant pulpit leaders for black
civil rights in the pre-bellum North,14 James Pennington had made a
considerable name for himself by the summer of 1853. Self-educated
and highly motivated toward intellectual achievement, he wrote an
early schoolroom history of blacks in America,15 attended Yale Univer-
sity (without official admission, a fact that forced him to hear lectures
from hallways and recite only for other students), traveled and lec-
tured extensively on anti-slavery in Europe, and, after his triumph at
the University of Heidelberg, returned to New York City in 1847 to
assume the pastorate of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in lower
Manhattan.16 After The Fugitive Blacksmith went through three edi-
tions in two years, Pennington immersed himself in religious and
reform work in New York, speaking, by his own estimate, "an average
five evenings weekly on slavery, temperance, missions, and sabbath-
schools, and preach[ing] on an average three times each sabbath. In
almost every instance where I have gone into a place," he continued, "I
have found the way prepared by the book."17 In September 1852, after
being forcibly ejected from a New York City omnibus because of his
color, Pennington publicized his grievance, saw his case reviewed
favorably by the New York Times, and went on to challenge streetcar
segregation in court in the mid-1850s.18 In early July 1853, a little more
than a month before Sam Clemens would visit that city, Rochester
became the scene of Pennington's greatest success when he presided
over the most important and influential of the national Negro conven-
tions of the pre-Civil War era.19

110Notes

      James Pennington, therefore, was no minor or obscure black
preacher in New York City when Sam Clemens arrived there; he was
an active speaker, a recognized author, and a very public man of af-
fairs, known to the press and reform-minded people of his city.
Moreover, in 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe had given the ex-slave
minister a national identity in her impassioned conclusion to Uncle
Tom's Cabin, in which "Pennington, among clergymen, [and] Douglas
[sic] and Ward, among editors" were singled out as "well known in-
stances" of "men, but yesterday burst from the shackles of slavery,
who, by a self-educating force . . . have risen to highly respectable
stations in society."20 As the sub-editor of the Hannibal Journal, a
paper which had had much to say about Stowe and her book,21 Sam
Clemens may have become aware of the fugitive slave success story of
James Pennington even before he arrived in the letter's hometown.
Once in New York, the reputation of Pennington could easily have
reached Clemens as he walked the streets of Manhattan and explored
the libraries and reading rooms of his trade, his Southern sensibilities
alive to the presence of abolitionists and free blacks in the Yankee
metropolis. For instance, James Pennington's church, located on the
corner of Marion and Prince Streets,22 was only about a dozen blocks
from the Printers' Free Library and Clemens' nearby rooming house on
Duane Street. It is possible that on one of his long sightseeing trips up
Broadway Clemens could have detoured a block eastward and found
the first congregation of black fellow-Presbyterians he probably ever
saw, led by the famous Rev. Pennington.
     If Sam Clemens did encounter Pennington's book, either in the
Printers' Free Library or in the neighborhood he shared with the Shiloh
Presbyterian Church, one thing seems clear. He is not likely to have
read casually the story of Pennington's smallpox lie, his subsequent
struggle with his conscience, and his distress over the possible eternal
consequences of the evil that was forced upon him. The use of lies to
escape punishment, the suffering at the hands of an over-active con-
science, the fear of eternal retribution and the incipient protest against
the injustice of the sufferer's position, these were themes that Sam
Clemens could have read in his own career as a good bad boy at odds
with the Calvinistic and Victorian proprieties of Hannibal, Missouri.
Through The Fugitive Blacksmith, therefore, Samuel Clemens may
have received not only the germ of a memorable scene for Huckleberry
Finn but also a stimulus to reflect back on his own boyhood, from
which the heroes of his greatest work would come, led by a fugitive
white youth whose unresolved ethical dilemmas and quest for an

Studies in American Fiction111

uncompromised freedom made him the spiritual brother of fugitive
slave narrators like James W. C. Pennington.

                                         Notes

     'Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond
Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long (1885; rpt. New York: Norton, 1962), p. 76.
     2See the "Preface to Third Edition" of The Fugitive Blacksmith (London: Charles
Gilpin, 1850), p. xvi. Further references to The Fugitive Blacksmith are from this edition.
     3Pennington received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of
Heidelberg in the late 1840s. See the biographical sketch in William Wells Brown's The
Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements, 2nd ed. (New York:
Thomas Hamilton, 1863), p. 277.
     'Howard G. Baetzhold, Mark Twain and John Bull (Bloomington: Indiana Univ.
Press, 1970), pp. 349-5On.
     5DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (1943; rpt. New York: Russell
& Russell, 1966), p. 206.
     "See Ferguson, pp. 192-93 and William Wells Brown, p. 277.
     7Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper, 1917), I, 22.
     "Mark Twain's Letters, pp. 21, 24.
     "See Minnie M. Brashear's reprinting of Mark Twain's letters to his mother in Mark
Twain: Son of Missouri (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1934), pp. 153-57.
     '"Mark Twain's Letters, I, 22.
     "The New York City Directory (New York: Charles R. Rode, 1853), Appendix,
p. 36.
     1277ie New York City Directory (New York: Charles R. Rode, 1855), Appendix,
p. 115.
     13In 1855 the Printers' Free Library moved with the New York Typographical Society
to No. 3 Chambers Street. A year later the Society became the Typographical Union and
moved to 163 Bowery Street, leaving the Printers' Free Library on Chambers. The last
reference to the Printers' Free Library in the New York City Directory is in the 1885
volume. Subsequent inquiries have located a collection of some of the Typographical
Society's records in the New York Public Library, but no catalogs of the holdings of the
Printers' Free Library are contained in those records.
     '4In North of Slavery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 187, Leon F. Lit-
wack lists Pennington among six other black ministers who "contributed some of the most
militant leadership to the Negro's struggle for equal rights" in the pre-Civil War North.
     15A Text Book of the Origin, and History . . . of the Colored People (Hartford,
Conn.: L. Skinner, 1841).
     '6A. Everett Peterson, "Pennington, James W. C," Dictionary of American
Biography (1934). See also the biographical sketch in Andrew E. Murray, Presbyterians
and the Negro—A History (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Historical Society, 1966), p. 40.
     "From the "Preface to Third Edition" of The Fugitive Blacksmith, p. xvi.

112Notes

     "See Pennington's letter reprinted with editorial comment under the title "A Hard
Case," New York Times, 25 Sept. 1852, p. 2. For more information on Pennington's suit
against the segregated transportation systems of New York, see "Important and Interesting
Trial—Can Colored People Ride in the City Cars?" New York Times, 18 December 1856,
p. 2.
     "Benjamin Queries, The Negro in the Making of America, rev. ed. (London: Collier-
Macmillan, 1969), p. 103.
   "Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston: John Jewett, 1852), II, 321.
   "Brashear, p. 143.
   "The New York City Directory (New York: Charles R. Rode, 1853), Appendix,
p. 32.

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