Garnet, Henry Highland

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Garnet, Henry Highland

December 23, 1815
February 12, 1882

Clergyman and abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet was one of the most formidable African-American leaders of the mid-nineteenth century. He was born on a slave plantation in New Market, Maryland, where his grandfather, likely a former Mandingo chief, was a leader of the slave community. At the age of nine he escaped from slavery with his family to New York City, where he was reared in an African-American community committed to evangelical Protestantism, "mental and moral improvement," and the antislavery cause. Young Garnet, whose father was a shoemaker and a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, received an excellent education for a black youth in Jacksonian America in schools established by abolitionists, black and white. Beginning in 1825 he attended the famous African Free School on Mulberry Street. After several years as a seaman, followed by an apprenticeship to a Quaker farmer on Long Island (whose son became his tutor), Garnet in 1832 entered the Canal Street High School, which was directed by Theodore S. Wright and Peter Williams, Jr., two of the leading black clergymen and abolitionists of the era. Wright, who had been educated at Princeton, became his mentor, and in 1833 Garnet joined Wright's First Colored Presbyterian Church, a church that Garnet himself was later to pastor.

In 1835 Garnet, along with Alexander Crummell and another black youth, matriculated at the newly opened Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. Not long after their arrival, following a harrowing journey on segregated transportation, a mob of neighboring farmers, angered by the boys' presence and their participation in local abolition meetings, dragged the makeshift school building into a nearby swamp and forced them to leave. The next

year Garnet enrolled in Oneida Institute at Whitesboro, New York, from which he graduated in 1839.

In 1843 Garnet became an ordained minister in the Presbyterian church, although he had already pastored the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, since 1840, turning the church into a center of abolitionism and black self-help in the Troy area. He made his church an important station on the Underground Railroad; he set up a grammar school at the church, for education was the key to black progress; he preached temperance because drink undermined black advancement; and he edited two short-lived antislavery newspapers, the Clarion (1842) and the National Watchman (1847), so that African Americans could have their own voice. He also urged African Americans to leave the cities and pursue the greater independence of farm ownership.

During his Troy years, Garnet became heavily involved in radical antislavery politics. Shortly after joining in 1841, he became a leader in the newly formed Liberty Party, which pledged to end slavery through participation in the political process, an approach that contrasted with the moral suasionist, antigovernment approach of William Lloyd Garrison and his followers. At the same time, Garnet played a leading role in the struggle—unsuccessful until 1870—to eliminate property restrictions on the black franchise in New York State. In addition to state conventions, Garnet was active in the national Negro conventions movement, designed to establish policies on problems of slavery and race. It was at the Buffalo, New York, meeting in 1843 that he delivered his provocative "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America." In it he urged them to meet their moral obligation to the just God who had created all people in his image by using whatever means the situation dictated to throw off the oppressor's yoke. Garrisonians, led by Frederick Douglass, who interpreted Garnet's remarks as a call for slave rebellion, opposed a resolution authorizing the convention to distribute the speech. After heated debates the resolution was defeated. Garnet reintroduced the speech in the Troy convention in 1847 and shortly afterward published it, together with David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), from which he had drawn some of the ideas contained in the "Address." By 1849 Douglass himself, no longer a Garrisonian, was stating publicly that he welcomed news of a rising of the slaves.

In 1850, following two years of successful mission work in Geneva, New York, Garnet left for England to lecture in the free-produce movement, whose major object was to strike at slavery through the boycott of goods produced by slave labor. Garnet remained in the British Isles until 1853 and then served as a missionary in Jamaica until illness forced his return to the United States in 1856. He then was named pastor at the Shiloh (formerly First Colored) Presbyterian Church in New York City and remained there until 1864, when he was called to the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.

Garnet's restless search for ways to liberate African Americans from the bonds of slavery and color prejudice took another turn in 1858, when he became president of the newly formed and black-led African Civilization Society (ACS). Its grand design was the development of an "African nationality" through the "selective" emigration of African Americans to the Niger Valley, there to embark upon the civilizing mission of introducing evangelical Protestantism, expanding trade and commerce, and cultivating cotton and other crops that would compete with slave-grown produce to undermine slavery. His incipient Pan-Africanism was enhanced by his early contacts with Africans in New York City and his years in Jamaica, and it is likely that only illness prevented him from shifting his ministry to Africa in 1856, following the example of his longtime friend Alexander Crummell, who had earlier undertaken a mission to Liberia. Although opposed by anti-colonizationists such as Frederick Douglass, Garnet eventually won the support of many African nationalists, including Martin Delany, who joined the African Civilization Society in 1861. Even as the ACS gradually turned its missionary impulse toward meeting the relief and educational needs of the freed people during and after the Civil War, Garnet never relinquished his vision of African redemption.

Henry Highland Garnet

"You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen, than live to be slaves. Remember that you are three millions."

address to the slaves of the united states of america, delivered before the national convention of colored citizens. buffalo, new york, august 16, 1843. in the black abolitionist papers. vol.3., the united states, 1830-1846, edited by c. peter ripley. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1991, 403-412.

Garnet also viewed the Civil War as a grand opportunity for African Americans, who were destined for freedom, to lead in the redemption of the United States. This faith was sorely tested, however, by the New York City Draft Riots in July 1863, which took a heavy toll on black lives and property, endangering Garnet's life and resulting in the sacking of his church. He was a leader in the organized effort to aid victims of the violence. Undeterred, he continued at great personal risk to recruit black volunteers for the Union armies. Soon after he became minister to Washington, D.C.'s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in 1864, he took up missionary work among the recently freed slaves flocking into the national capital. In February 1865 he was invited to deliver a sermon in the U.S. House of Representatives commemorating passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the first African American so asked. His message was a call for national atonement: "Emancipate, enfranchise, educate, and give the blessings of the gospel to every American citizen" (Garnet's italics).

After the Civil War, those who had long been in the forefront of the liberation struggle were gradually replaced by another generation. Garnet left Washington in 1868 to assume the presidency of Avery College in Pittsburgh; he remained there for a year before returning to Shiloh Presbyterian. His beloved wife, Julia, died in 1871, and in 1878 he married Sarah Thompson, a feminist and educator. During the 1870s he continued to champion civil rights and other reform causes, notably the emancipation of blacks in Cuba. He also grew increasingly disillusioned by the failures of Reconstruction and was especially upset by the government's refusal to distribute land to the freed-people. And he came to believe that his lifelong efforts in the cause of liberation had gone largely unappreciated by his own people. In 1881, tired, in ill health, and against the advice of friends, he accepted the appointment as American minister to Liberia. He died in Liberia, and as was his wish, he was buried in the soil of Africa.