An antislavery radical, Henry Highland Garnet is best known for “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” in 1843 a speech delivered in Buffalo at the National Convention of Colored Citizens. In the “Address” and later texts, he advocated active resistance to slavery, urging slaves to take freedom for themselves. Henry was born into slavery on December 23, 1815, the son of George and Henrietta Trusty, near New Market, Maryland. His grandfather was an African chief chief and warrior, who was captured and sold into slavery. His father was a shoemaker and his mother performed domestic work. Garnet’s early years were shaped by both hardship and hope. In 1824, at age nine, his slave master died and he and his family of 11 escaped from slavery after obtaining permission to attend a funeral of a slave. They all escaped in a covered wagon, with help from Quakers and the Underground Railroad in Delaware.
Upon arriving in the north, the family split up and Henry headed to New Hope, Pennsylvania with his parents and sister. A year later his family reunited and moved to New York City, where Henry joined the A.M.E. Church. They changed their surname to Garnet to avoid recapture. They also changed their first names but there is no record of the name that was used before Henry. While in New York, Henry began to look for places where he could go to school. He was first enrolled in school in Pennsylvania and later attended the African Free School, which was one of several schools established in northeastern cities by White philanthropists. His classmates included future Black abolitionist leaders such as Alexander Crummell, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and James McCune Smith.
Despite the potential threat of a violent response, Garnet and several classmates formed an abolitionist club, the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. Many of Garnet’s classmates would go on to become prominent figures in the abolitionist movement as well as other facets of society. Like all free Blacks during the antebellum era, the Garnets were always in danger of capture by slave catchers. Because of the poverty of his family and the inhospitality of New York City to people of color, Garnet dropped out of school, at age thirteen, to earn money as a hand on sailing vessels. While Henry Garnet was at sea working as a cabin boy and cook, his parents narrowly escaped slave catchers, who roamed the streets, destroyed or stole the furniture from their home, Even worse, his beloved sister was captured. The event had a profound impact on Garnet. Vowing revenge, he began carrying a large knife, hoping that a slave catcher would seize him.
Family and friends fearing for his safety, interceded and sent him to Jericho, Long Island to hide for a short time. After he returned home, Garnet then suffered a debilitating leg injury that plagued him for the rest of his life. He suffered ever afterwards from a strange malady appropriately named "white swelling." The injury left him reliant on crutches for the rest of his life and ultimately led to the amputation of his leg at the hip several years later. Although he was in almost constant pain Garnet returned to New York and resumed his education. In 1831, he enrolled in the newly established high school for Black students, where he reunited with Crummell. Following his injury, he found solace and inspiration in the church. Between 1833 and 1835, he joined the First Colored Presbyterian Church in New York where he also found a community of abolitionists. At this time he became more involved with religion and made plans to enter the ministry.
Under the mentorship of Rev. Theodore Sedgewick Wright, a prominent abolitionist and the first Black graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Garnet experienced a religious conversion and decided to pursue ministry. In 1835, Garnet along with Crummell enrolled at the new Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, one of the first integrated schools in the United States. But when students gave impassioned speeches at an abolitionist meeting, anti-abolitionists soon destroyed the school building and forced the Negro students out of town. In 1841, Henry Garnet married Julia Williams, who was also an abolitionist. They had met at the Noyes Academy. He completed his education at the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which had recently begun admitting all races. Here he was acclaimed for his wit, brilliance, and rhetorical skills, and he graduated with honors in 1840.
Settling in Troy, New York, Garnet continued studying theology, began teaching, and was ordained. In 1840, while still a strident, he had attracted national attention with a slashing attack on slavery at the annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Now, with a base of operations, he branched out, operating an Underground Railroad station in Troy and editing the Clarion and other pioneer Negro newspapers. During the 1840s Garnet started lecturing, working and campaigning for the Liberty Party, a political organization dedicated to ending slavery. By aligning himself with political activism, Garnet distanced himself from William Lloyd Garrison’s moral suasion approach and embraced more pragmatic strategies for achieving racial justice. In 1842, he became the pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church, where he served for six years. Garnet used his church to help fugitive slaves hide. During this time he became involved with the Temperance Movement. Also, Garnet worked on initiatives for Black education and efforts to achieve voting rights for Black males.
After the Liberty Party lost power, Garnet shifted to the Republican Party. A gifted orator, Garnet delivered powerful speeches advocating for African American rights and abolition. Garnet, who rejected passive resistance as a policy of liberation, had nothing but scorn for the dominant drift of the movement. Men, he said, cannot be freed by agents; nor, he added significantly, can they be freed by White friends, however sincere or sacrificial. Taking a stance on the left of the movement, rejecting both paternalism and gradualism, Garnet reasserted the Negro's role as an architect of his own destiny. Garnet spoke to the delegates of the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, in 1843, where he called for a militant slave revolt against the plantation owners of the South. In what has come to be known as his “Call to Rebellion,” Garnet, he was only 28, gave an impassioned speech in which he encouraged people who were enslaved to revolt against their enslavers. Many abolitionists at the time thought the call for self-emancipation was too radical.
Garnet's radicalism was not imposed or borrowed, it grew out of the wellspring of his being. Slavery to him was not a word or an abstraction. Slavery was his sister in the hands of brutish slaveowners; his mother menaced by clanking chains; his kinsmen suffering a fate he considered worse than hell or death. Among the many delegates were such notable figures as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Charles L. Remond and other prominent abolitionists. Garnet was an ardent supporter of the dynamic and extremely militant David Walker. Frederick Douglass, who was still committed to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's approach of moral suasion, spoke out against the speech, while James McCune Smith expressed admiration for it.
In 1848, he published "The Past and Present Condition, and The Destiny, of the Colored Race", elaborating his ideas on abolition and emigration. In addition to his domestic efforts, Garnet engaged with international abolitionist movements. Feeling a lack of progress towards equality in America Garnet began to consider the feasibility of Black people emigrating to improve their quality of life. Was is it necessary to leave the country in order to secure a fuller freedom elsewhere? Although many African Americans viewed colonization with suspicion due to its association with White supremacist agendas, such as the American Colonization Society, Garnet saw emigration as a potential path to dignity and self-determination. At the same time, he argued that African Americans had earned the right to full American citizenship through their centuries-long labor and contribution to the creation of the nation.
By 1849, Garnet began to favor emigration to Liberia, a country in Africa inhabited by freed Blacks from the New World. In 1850, he traveled to Great Britain at the invitation of the Free Labor Movement to promote the boycott of goods produced by enslaved labor. He lived abroad in Geneva and Great Britain where he spoke as an abolitionist and spent time in Jamaica as a missionary under the auspices of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. His speeches were well-received, earning him recognition as one of the first African Americans of full African descent to advocate for abolition abroad. Illness forced him to return to America and used the time to promote Jamaica as a place to which Black Americans should consider immigrating. His position on emigration drew criticism from figures like Frederick Douglass but found support among allies such as Alexander Crummell and Edward Wilmot Blyden.
Throughout this period, there was a continuing dialogue between Douglass and Garnet. Between these two titans, the major Black actors in the antislavery drama, no love was lost. Usually, in this period, Garnet could be found on the opposite side of any issue Douglass raised and vice versa. After Douglass abandoned the Garrisonian program, the two men were not divided on substantive matters. But the clash continued to the detriment of a Unified Black front. Worse, White men were able to pit Douglass against Garnet, thereby diminishing the force of both. This intramural squabble, between two independent and strong willed men, receded in importance and all segments of the African American community joined forces for the final push toward Black freedom. The role of women in the abolitionist movement caused a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garnet and other Black ministers formed a new group called the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. This group focused on using political action to end slavery and believed men should lead the organization.
Garnet's ideas about slave resistance, violence, and emigration gained growing acceptance among abolitionists, influencing militants like John Brown. In 1855 Garnet was asked to become pastor of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City, succeeding his former mentor, Theodore Wright. By this time, the antislavery movement had caught up with Garnet and he threw himself, with renewed vigor, into the fight. After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, Garnet openly supported John Brown's actions. He said that anyone who loved freedom should agree that the raid was right. Brown conferred with him on the plans for the Harpers Ferry assault. In 1859 Henry Highland Garnet was president of the African Civilization Society, whose declared goal, in its Constitution, was "to engage in the great work of Christianizing and civilizing Africa and people of African descent in other areas of the world."
When the Civil War started, Garnet's hopes ended for emigration as a solution for African Americans. During the Civil War, Garnet actively supported the Union cause. He advocated for the recruitment of Black soldiers and served as chaplain to African American troops stationed on Riker’s Island. His efforts extended to improving conditions for African American soldiers and their families through charitable organizations. Because of Garnet's outspoken views and national reputation, he was a prime target of a working-class mob during the July 1863 draft riots in New York City. Rioters mobbed the street where Garnet lived and called for him by name. Fortunately several White neighbors helped to conceal Henry Garnet and his family. Towards the end of the war, Rev. Garnet was asked to become the minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Garnet used the pulpit to champion unpopular causes.
The Lincoln Administration recognized his key role by designating him speaker for the anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. Garnet delivered the "Memorial Discourse" on February 12th, 1865 in the House of Representatives, thereby becoming the first African American to speak in the halls of Congress. When President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his widow presented two of his canes to Garnet and Douglass, the two major Black leaders. After the war, Garnet campaigned for civil rights, speaking out against the counterrevolution in the South, championed Cuban independence, and developed his always keen interest in Africa and the West Indies. He toured the South to assess conditions for newly freed African Americans and briefly served as president of Avery College in Pittsburgh. Later, he returned to New York City and became a pastor at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church.
Despite beginning to physically and mentally decline in the mid-1870s, Garnet aspired to move to Liberia. Several of his childhood friends had moved to Liberia and Garnet campaigned to join them as minister to Liberia. He achieved a long-held ambition when he accepted an appointment as Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia. Arriving in Monrovia on December 28, 1881, Garnet, unfortunately, passed away a little under two months later. Even though Frederick Douglass and Garnet had disagreed for many years, Douglass still honored Garnet's life and achievements after his death. Henry Highland Garnet’s life was one of extraordinary achievement and sacrifice. As a minister, abolitionist, educator, and advocate for Black self-determination, he left an indelible mark on both American society and the broader struggle for human rights. His legacy endures as a testament to the power of resilience and conviction in the face of injustice.