Henry Highland Garnet
(1815-1882)
He was an American abolitionist, minister, educator, and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism on religion.
Garnet was a prominent member of the movement that led beyond moral suasion toward more political action. Renowned for his skills as a public speaker, he urged black Americans to take action and claim their own destinies. For a period, he supported the emigration of American free blacks to Mexico, Liberia, or the West Indies, but the American Civil War ended that effort. In 1841 he married abolitionist Julia Williams and they had a family. Stella (Mary Jane) Weems, a runaway slave from Maryland, lived with the Garnets. She may have been adopted by them or employed as their governess. When Henry preached against slavery, he brought her up to talk about her own experiences and about her family still enslaved in Maryland. On one such trip in England, Garnet was hired by a Scottish church as a missionary. The family moved to Jamaica in 1852 and soon caught yellow fever. Stella died and was buried there. The rest, while sickened, boarded a ship for America. After the war, the couple worked in Washington, D.C.
On Sunday, February 12, 1865, he delivered a sermon in the U.S. House of Representatives while it was not in session, becoming the first African American to speak in that chamber. on the occasion of Congress’s passage on January 31 of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery.
Bio
Henry Highland Garnet was born a slave in Maryland in 1815. In 1824, his family received permission to attend a funeral and capitalized on the opportunity to secure their freedom. The Garnets arrived in New York City in 1825, and Henry entered the African Free School on Mott Street in 1826. There he met and formed lifelong friendships with James McCune Smith and Alexander Crummell, among others. In 1834, Garnet and some of his classmates formed their own club, the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. Because the society was named after a controversial abolitionist, the public school where the group wanted to meet insisted that the group first change its name. To do otherwise would be to risk mob violence. The club decided to keep its name and instead change its venue. The first meeting (PDF) of the group garnered over 150 African American people under 20—a powerful indicator of the dedication of the younger generation to nationwide abolition.
Perhaps drawing on his studies in navigation and seamanship at the New York African Free School, Garnet made two sea voyages to Cuba in 1828. After another sea voyage in 1829, he returned to learn that his family had separated in the hopes of escaping slave catchers. Enraged and worried, Garnet wandered up and down Broadway with a knife. Eventually, friends were able to locate him and spirit him off the Long Island to hide. Garnet is perhaps most famous for his radical speech of 1843, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America.” In this speech, Garnet breaks with tradition. Instead of hoping to convince free people (primarily free white people, of course) of the evils of slavery, Garnet speaks directly to those enslaved, urging them to rebel against their masters. 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.
Garnet further radicalized his position when he supported the colonization movement, which was largely unpopular among the black community.
By 1849, Garnet began to support the emigration of blacks to Mexico, Liberia, or Haiti, where he thought they would have more opportunities. In support of this, he founded the African Civilization Society. Similar to the British African Aid Society, it sought to establish a West African colony in Yorubaland (part of present-day Nigeria). Garnet advocated a kind of Black nationalism in the United States, which included establishing Black colonies in the sparsely-inhabited Western territories. Other prominent members of this movement included minister Daniel Payne, J. Sella Martin, Rufus L. Perry, Henry M. Wilson, and Amos Noë Freeman.
In 1850, Garnet went to Great Britain at the invitation of Anna Richardson of the free produce movement, which opposed slavery by rejecting the use of products produced by slave labor.He was a popular lecturer and spent two and a half years lecturing. At first, the work separated Garnet from his family, who remained back in New York State. While he was abroad, his seven-year-old son, James Crummell Garnet, died on March 1, 1851, while Garnet was abroad. His wife Julia, his young son Henry, and their adopted daughter Stella Weims joined Garnet in Great Britain later that year.
In 1852, Garnet was sent to Kingston, Jamaica, as a missionary. He and his family spent three years there; his wife Julia Garnet led an industrial school for girls. Garnet had health problems that led to the family returning to the United States.
After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, Garnet in a sermon “declared [it] to be the duty of every man who loved the cause of freedom to declare that the Harper’s Ferry movement was right and that anyone who would not say so boldly had much better say nothing at all.” He was described as “friend and admirer” of “the heroic John Brown”.
In 1859 Garnet was president of the African Civilization Society, whose declared goal was “to engage in the great work of Christianizing and civilizing Africa”. When the Civil War started, Garnet’s hopes ended for emigration as a solution for American Blacks. In the three-day New York draft riots of July 1863, mobs attacked Blacks and Black-owned buildings. Garnet and his family escaped the attack because his daughter quickly chopped their nameplate off their door before the mobs found them. He organized a committee for sick soldiers and served as an almoner to the New York Benevolent Society for victims of the mob.
When the federal government approved creating Black units, Garnet helped with recruiting United States Colored Troops. He moved with his family to Washington, DC, so that he could support the black soldiers and the war effort. He preached to many of them while serving as pastor of the prominent Liberty (Fifteenth) Street Presbyterian Church from 1864 until 1866. During this time, Garnet was the first Black minister to preach to the US House of Representatives, addressing them on February 12, 1865, about the end of slavery, on occasion of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
.He went to Jamaica as a missionary in 1852. In 1859 he founded the African Civilization Society and in an 1860 speech wrote of his belief that “Africa is to be redeemed by Christian civilization.”
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 Garnet and his family.
In February 12, 1865, Garnet became the first black person to deliver a sermon in the House of Representatives. In 1876 Garnet began a physical and mental decline and expressed a great wish to die and be buried on African soil.
Garnet’s last wish was to go, even for a few weeks, to Liberia, where his daughter Mary Garnet Barboza was,[26] and to die there. He was appointed as the U.S. Minister (ambassador) to Liberia, where he arrived on December 28, 1881, and died on February 13 of malaria. Garnet was given a state funeral by the Liberian government. As described by Alexander Crummell:
They buried him like a prince, this princely man, with the blood of a long line of chieftains in his veins, in the soil of his fathers. The entire military forces of the capital of the republic turned out to render a last tribute of respect and honor. The President and his cabinet, the ministry of every name, the president, professors and students of the college, large bodies of citizens from the river settlement, as well as the townsmen, attended his obsequies as mourners. A noble tribute was accorded him by Rev. E. W. Blyden, D. D., LL. D., one of the finest scholars and thinkers in the nation. Minute guns were fired at every footfall of the solemn procession. He was buried at Palm Grove Cemetery in Monrovia.
Frederick Douglass, who had not been on speaking terms with Garnet for many years because of their differences, still mourned Garnet’s passing and noted his achievements.
Legacy and honors
1952, Garnet’s portrait was included among those in Civil Rights Bill Passes, 1866, a mural painted in the Hall of Capitols, the Cox Corridors of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. It was painted by Allyn Cox.
P.S. 175 or the Henry Highland Garnet School for Success in Harlem, as well as the Henry Highland Garnet Elementary School in Chestertown, Maryland, are named for him.
In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Henry Highland Garnet on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.
The Garnet School at 10th Street and U Avenue, N.W., in Washington, D.C., was named in his honor in 1880. It was merged with the Patterson School in a new building erected in 1929 and renamed Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson. It was closed in 2013.
Garnet High School, Charleston, West Virginia, was named for him from 1900 until 1956 when it closed with desegregation. The building served as John Adams Junior High until 1969 when a new John Adams school was built. Garnet’s name was restored as the Garnet Adult Education Center and is now Garnet Career Center.
Garnet is included on a New Hampshire historical marker (number 246) commemorating Noyes Academy in Canaan.
Resource New York Historical Society