Henry Highland Garnet

Henry Highland Garnet was born on the twenty-third of December 1815 on the Maryland plantation of Colonel William Spencer, near New Market (later Chesterville) in Kent County. He was the son of George Trusty — a man descended, by family tradition, from a Mandingo warrior prince — who labored as a shoemaker and served his community as a religious class-leader and lay preacher. Enslaved from birth, young Henry carried the surname Trusty until his family remade their names in freedom.

In 1824, upon the death of their enslaver, the family fled bondage — traveling by covered wagon and on foot to Wilmington, then onward until they settled in New York City. There George Trusty gave the family new given names and took the surname Garnet. Henry was educated at the African Free School, endured the peril of slave-catchers who pursued his kin, and grew into one of the most electrifying orators of the abolitionist age.

Ordained a Presbyterian minister, Garnet startled the nation in 1843 with his "Address to the Slaves," a bold summons to resistance. He preached, taught, and organized across decades of struggle, and on the twelfth of February 1865 he became the first African American to speak in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives, delivering a sermon that marked the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 1881 he was appointed United States Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia. He arrived in Monrovia that December and died there on the thirteenth of February 1882. May the fire of his voice, and the dignity of the freedom he claimed for his people, be honored forever.