The reverends James W. C. Pennington and Henry Highland Garnet were among the community leaders who became involved in the broader organizing that followed the incident. Pennington was a minister who had himself escaped slavery, had studied at Yale, and had been deeply active in abolitionist causes for decades. Garnet was another towering figure in Black abolitionism, known for a famous 1843 address urging enslaved people to rise against their enslavers. These were not peripheral figures lending their names to a minor cause; they were leaders who understood the case as an opportunity to push on a pressure point in New York’s racial geography.
Frederick Douglass publicized the case in his paper, which further broadened its reach. The organizing around Elizabeth Jennings’s case was, in effect, a coordinated campaign involving the Black church, the Black press, the Black legal community, and prominent abolitionists of both races.
## Hiring the Lawyers
The legal path ran through Erasmus Culver, a white attorney who had represented the Black community in significant cases before, including the Lemmon slave case — a New York proceeding in which enslaved people brought by a Virginia slaveholder through New York were argued to be free under New York law. Culver was a known ally, part of a strand of white antislavery legal practice in New York that made common cause with Black activists on specific cases.
Culver passed the Jennings case to a younger member of his firm: Chester A. Arthur.
Arthur in 1854 was twenty-four years old and had passed the bar only about two months before. He was a junior partner at the firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur, and the Jennings case appears to have been among the first significant matters he handled independently. He was the son of an abolitionist Baptist minister, William Arthur, who had educated him with a set of convictions about law and justice that fit reasonably well with the work the firm was doing.