Henry Highland Garnet

Henry H. Garnett, albumen print, around 1881

Henry Highland Garnet (December 23, 1815 – February 13, 1882) was an African-American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. An advocate of militant abolitionism, Garnet was a prominent member of the movement that led beyond moral persuasion toward more political action. Renowned for his skills as a public speaker, he urged blacks to take action and claim their own destinies. For a period, he supported emigration of American free blacks to Mexico, Liberia or the West Indies, but the American Civil War ended that effort.

Early life and education

Henry Garnet was born into slavery in New Market, Kent County, Maryland, on December 23, 1815. When Garnet was ten years old, his family reunited and moved to New York City, where from 1826 through 1833, Garnet attended the African Free School, and the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth. While in school, Garnet began his career in abolitionism. With fellow schoolmates, he established the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. It garnered mass support among whites, but the club ultimately had to move due to racist feelings. Two years later, in 1835, he started studies at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire.

Due to his abolitionist activities, Henry Garnet was driven away from the Noyes Academy by an angry segregationist mob. He completed his education at the Oneida Theological Institute in Whitesboro, New York, which had recently admitted all races. Here he was acclaimed for his wit, brilliance, and rhetorical skills. After graduation in 1839, the following year he injured his knee playing sports. It never recovered, and his lower leg had to be amputated in 1839.

Marriage and family

Garnet married Julia Williams, whom he had met as a fellow student at the Noyes Academy. Together they had three children, only one of whom survived to adulthood.

Ministry

Garnet served as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, from 1864-1866. The church is shown here as it was in about 1899.

The Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church today.

In 1839, Garnet moved with his family to Troy, New York, where he taught school and studied theology. In 1842, Garnet became pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian church, a position he would hold for six years. During this time, he published papers that combined both religious and abolitionist themes. Closely identifying with the church, Garnet supported the temperance movement and became a strong advocate of political antislavery.

He later returned to New York City, where he joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and frequently spoke at abolitionist conferences. One of his most famous speeches, "Call to Rebellion," was delivered August 1843 to the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York. These conventions by black activists were called to work for abolition and equal rights. Garnet said that slaves should act for themselves to achieve total emancipation. He promoted an armed rebellion as the most effective way to end slavery. Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, along with many other abolitionists both black and white, thought Garnet's ideas were too radical and could damage the cause by arousing too much fear and resistance among whites. Garnet supported the Liberty Party, a party of reform that was eventually absorbed into the Republican Party. Garnet disagreed with the later Republicans.

Anti-slavery role

By 1849 Garnet began to support emigration of blacks to Mexico, Liberia, or the West Indies, 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 Yoruba (present-day Nigeria). Garnet advocated a kind of black nationalism in the United States, which included establishing separate sections of the nation to be black colonies.

In 1850, he went to Great Britain at the invitation of the Free Labor 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. In 1852 Garnet was sent to Kingston, Jamaica, as a missionary. He spent three years there, until his health forced him back to the United States.

When the American Civil War started, Garnet's hopes ended for emigration as a solution for American blacks. He worked to found black army units to aid the Union cause. In the three-day New York draft riots of July 1863, mobs attacked blacks and black-owned buildings. Garnet and his family escaped attack when his daughter quickly chopped their nameplate off their door before the mobs found them.

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 Liberty (Fifteenth) Street Presbyterian Church from 1864 until 1866. During this time, he was the first black minister to preach to the House of Representatives, addressing them on 12 February 1865 about the end of slavery .

Later life

After the war in 1868, Garnet was appointed president of Avery College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Later he returned to New York City as a pastor at the Shiloh Presbyterian Church (formerly the First Colored Presbyterian Church, and now St. James Presbyterian Church in Harlem).

His first wife Julia died. In 1879, Garnet married Sarah Smith Tompkins, who was a New York teacher and school principal, suffragist, and community organizer.^[1]

Garnet’s last wish was to go to Liberia to live, even for a few weeks, and to die there. He was appointed as the U.S. Minister to Liberia in late 1881, and died in Africa two months later. Garnet was given a state funeral by the Liberian government and was buried at Palm Grove Cemetery in Monrovia.^[2] 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, DC. It was painted by Allyn Cox.
• P.S. 175 or the Henry Highland Garnet School for Success in Harlem, as well as the HHG 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.^[3]

Notes

References

• Today in Black History February 12th
• American National Biography: Henry Highland Garnet

Bibliography

• Piersen, William Dillon, Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage, University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, ISBN 0-87023-859-0

External links

Wikisource has the text of a 1920 Encyclopedia Americana article about Henry Highland Garnet.

• Article, Star Tribune
• Henry H. Garnet, "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America", Buffalo, NY, 1843, Digital Commons
• Henry H. Garnet, "The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race" (1848), Digital Commons
• Works by Henry Highland Garnet at Project Gutenberg
• Underground Workshop
• Spartacus Schoolnet
•  "Garnet, Henry Highland". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900