ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Jennings did not join St. Philip’s Church until her mature years. James Egert Allen’s The Negro in New York does not mention Elizabeth Jennings at all. A long-term search for Elizabeth Jennings had begun. Firm support for Elizabeth Jennings’ cause in New York City came from as far away as San Francisco. The matter concerning Elizabeth Jennings was assigned to the firm’s newest and youngest partner, Chester A. Arthur, then age twenty-four, later to become the President of the United States. Arthur, who had been admitted to the bar in May of 1854, only two months before the assault on Elizabeth Jennings in July, apparently began to pursue the case with vigor. The Elizabeth Jennings case “was one of the few bright spots for blacks in an otherwise gloomy picture of impending crisis, one historian commented about life for African Americans in mid-nineteenth-century New York.
