Garnet, Henry Highland (1815–1882)
A teacher, preacher, editor, and apostle of revolt,
Maryland-born Henry Highland Garnet “held up
a banner of uncompromising resistance” (Ben-
nett, 149) to slavery and other forms of oppres-
sion. Born in slavery, he bore witness to “what
the monster had done” (Bennett, 155). Thus, his
unreserved conviction and motto was “resistance!
resistance! RESISTANCE!”: “No oppressed people
have ever secured their liberty without resistance”
(Garnet, 153).
As a child, Garnet, who had been born into
a cohesive slave family that included his father
George, his mother Elizabeth, and his sister Eliza,
learned about and embraced with pride the his-
tory of his African past. The fact that he was the
progeny of Mandingo warriors and rulers gave
him a positive sense of self and security, despite
his legal status. When Garnet was nine, his father
escaped from his New Market plantation with
the entire family to a life of temporary freedom
in New York City, where the young Garnet briefly
attended the Free African Schools, founded by the
New York Manumission Society and supported by
such leaders as Samuel Cornish and John Russ-
wurm, the editors of Freedom’s Journal. However,
he dropped out and went to work as a hired hand
on a sailing vessel because his education proved
financially prohibitive for his parents.
Returning home from work one day, Garnet
discovered that slave catchers had raided his family
home, scattered his fugitive family, and returned
Eliza to slavery. To protect him, friends sent Garnet
to live on Long Island. Returning to New York City
two years later, he pursued his education in a high
school established for black youths; along with
Alexander Crummell, he was among the black
students who sought to integrate Noyes Academy
in Canaan, New Hampshire. The students were
placed in danger by a group of Canaan citizens
who destroyed the building by pushing it into a
creek to prevent the black students from integrat-
ing. Garnet, despite an injured leg that eventually
had to be amputated, took the leadership role in
protecting the group.
In 1840 Garnet graduated from Oneida Insti-
tute at Whitesboro and settled in Troy, New York,
where he taught school, studied theology, and pro-
vided a station for travelers on the Underground
Railroad. Garnet later became an ordained Presby-
terian minister, an inspirational leader in the anti-
slavery movement, and the editor of the Clarion,
a black newspaper. In these many roles, Garnet
“consistently took progressive stands on vital is-
sues from labor to anti-imperialism” (Ofari, x).
For example, Garnet strongly opposed the emigra-
tion program to Liberia established by the Ameri-
can Colonization Society.
Throughout his exemplary career as an intel-
lectual, pioneer Black Nationalist, and creator of a
black protest tradition in America, Garnet, a pro-
lific writer, expressed his ideas in sermons, letters,
essays, and newspaper articles published in such
venues as the Colored American, a black newspa-
per. Also, Garnet, an eloquent orator, was a popu-
lar speaker on the antislavery circuit and at various
conventions, including the American Anti-Slavery
Society and the founding convention of the Amer-
ican and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which fa-
vored direct political action against slavery.
However, Garnet made his most significant
contribution to this movement with “An Address
to the Slaves of the United States,” which he first
read at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo,
New York, in 1843. Convention delegates, par-
ticularly the “moral suassionists” and Garrisoni-
anists (including FREDERICK DOUGLASS), rejected
“An Address” on the grounds that it was “warlike
and encouraged insurrection” (Ofari, 38) and out
of fear for their lives; the motion to adopt was
defeated by one vote. Five years later Garnet, as
a result of requests from friends, supporters like
John Brown, and convention delegates who had
voted for it, published “An Address,” along with
DAVID WALKER’s Appeal, “praying God that [it]
may be borne on the four winds of heaven, until
the principles it contains shall be understood and
adopted by every slave in the Union” (preface to
“An Address”).
In “An Address,” Garnet assured those in bond-
age that their brothers and sisters who are free
fully sympathized with them. “We, therefore,
write to you as being bound with you” (144), he
informed them. Garnet also criticizes Christians196 Garnet, Henry Highland