Henry Highland Garnet

• Born: December 23, 1815
• Birthplace: New Market, Maryland
• Died: February 13, 1882
• Place of death: Monrovia, Liberia

Activist, religious leader, and journalist

An abolitionist active in the national Black Convention movement, Garnet was noted for his controversial “Address to the Slaves of the United States” in 1843, which issued a call to resist slavery.

Early Life

Henry Highland Garnet (GAHR-neht) was born into slavery in Maryland in 1815, the son of George and Henrietta Trusty; they later changed their surname to Garnet. In 1824, Garnet’s family escaped to Pennsylvania, then to New York City. Despite his family’s continued vulnerability to capture and reenslavement and his need to work to support himself, Garnet embarked on a mission to secure his education, He attended New York City schools, such as the African Free School and the Phoenix Academy for Colored Youth, and later Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, and the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. In these schools, Garnet developed his oratorical and political talents, and he joined with other committed young African Americans, who would become key leaders in antislavery activism.

Garnet was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1842, serving in Troy, New York, during the 1840’s, a key decade during which he published the speeches for which he remains best known.

Life’s Work

Garnet was active as a minister, a journalist, and a national and international human rights activist all through his life. He worked in coalitions before and after the Civil War with other American leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Alexander Crummell, and with a range of political and religious leaders in Jamaica, Great Britain, and, at the end of his life, Liberia. For decades, Garnet placed himself squarely in sometimes contentious political and religious debates over the ways and means of African American freedom, in which he worked to understand and advance “The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race,” to quote the title of one of his famous speeches from 1848.

Garnet remains best known for his involvement in two long-standing debates over questions of considerable importance among African American activists and citizens before and after the Civil War: When, if ever, should the African American community employ physical force as a direct political tactic to resist and overthrow slavery and institutionalized white supremacy? Given the long and foundational role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, is it possible for African Americans to attain full freedom as citizens in American democracy, or is it necessary to leave the country in order to secure a fuller freedom elsewhere? In speeches still read today as key contributions to nineteenth century African American literary and political history, Garnet seemed to assert the legitimacy of “last resort” political force and the legitimacy of emigration and colonization.

Garnet is remembered specifically for a speech he delivered in 1843 entitled “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” where he used the occasion of the Buffalo, New York, meeting of the Black Convention movement to issue a call from African American abolitionists in the North to slaves in the South to resist slavery. Convention attendees, including Frederick Douglass, argued sharply over the wording and implication of the speech, with a close vote that ultimately rejected the speech and its rhetoric of “by any means necessary.” Subsequently, even historians sympathetic to the urgency of Garnet’s argument and its context as a challenge to the violence of slavery itself have wondered at the degree of responsibility he seemed to place on slaves for their own suffering in bondage.

However, Garnet’s views cannot be reduced to singular arguments and polarized stands. Garnet couched his call for slaves to resist and fight back within his demands that white slaveholding society redress its moral failings, and Garnet’s Christian political theology clearly claimed God’s role in history as primary and decisive. He also supported emigration and African colonization while simultaneously arguing that African Americans had earned the right to full American citizenship through their centuries-long labor and contribution to the creation of the nation. Living out that historical tension, Garnet died in Liberia in 1882 while serving as United States minister to that country.

Significance

African American activists of the nineteenth century grappled with serious and sometimes contradictory demands: How to end slavery, by which actions, on whose behalf, according to which principles, and at what costs? How to confront racial segregation and persistent white supremacy while claiming full citizenship in a democracy struggling with racial violence and disenfranchisement of black citizens? Henry Garnet’s writings and activism engaged these questions in ways that still illuminate their enduring complexity.

Bibliography

Banks, William M. Black Intellectuals: Race, and Responsibility in American Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. A good introduction to African American intellectual history, placing Garnet’s life and work in relation to debates that preceded and followed his lifetime.

Harding, Vincent. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Mariner Books, 1993. Originally published in 1981, Harding’s book remains a fair-minded yet strongly interpretive source for understanding Garnet’s activism and writings in the broader contexts of black abolitionism.

Jasinski, James. “Constituting Antebellum African American Identity: Resistance, Violence, and Masculinity in Henry Highland Garnet’s (1843) ’Address to the Slaves.’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 1 (2007): 27-57. Makes a strong case for reevaluating Garnet’s famous 1843 speech and understanding Garnet’s political language as rhetorically complex. Also includes references for major biographies and critical works on Garnet.

Newman, Richard, Patrick Rael, and Philip Lapsansky, eds. Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790-1860. New York: Routledge, 2001. Excellent collection of African American abolitionist writings, including Garnet’s 1843 “Address to the Slaves of the United States,” that offers readers a chance to compare Garnet with other political writers from the same period.