Henry Highland Garnet

Henry Highland Garnet was born on the twenty-third of December 1815 at the Trusty plantation at Kent County, Maryland, the son of George Trusty — an enslaved field hand and lay preacher of the Trusty plantation — and Henrietta Trusty. The family escaped on the second of September 1824 — when Garnet was nine — under cover of a Trusty-household funeral, and arrived at Wilmington, Delaware within the week.

The Trusty family changed their surname to Garnet at the close of the escape and settled at New York in 1825 in the small free-Black community of lower Manhattan. Garnet was raised in the household of his father, who became a shoemaker at the Mulberry Street corner of New York.

He was placed at twelve at the African Free School Number One at New York under the principal Charles C. Andrews — the principal Black school of New York of the antebellum period. The school placed him as a classmate of Alexander Crummell, Samuel Ringgold Ward, James McCune Smith, and Ira Aldridge, all of whom became among the principal Black-American intellectual figures of the antebellum period.

He was apprenticed at thirteen to the Cuban-born shipwright Pedro Aragón at the Brooklyn Naval Yard and served as a cabin boy on three round-trip voyages between New York and the Caribbean ports across 1829 to 1831. The shipwright apprenticeship ended in 1831 when Garnet was thrown from a horse and broke his leg — an injury that became infected and required the amputation of the leg at the knee in 1840.

He took the bachelor’s in classics at the Oneida Theological Institute at Whitesboro, New York in 1840 — among the first Black bachelor’s graduates of the institution.

He was ordained an evangelical Presbyterian minister at the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church at Troy, New York in 1843.

He delivered on the sixteenth of August 1843 — at the National Convention of Coloured Citizens at Buffalo, New York — his principal antislavery address: An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America. The Garnet Address was the first formal call for armed slave insurrection delivered to a national Black-American audience and the principal antebellum theological-and-political document of the insurrectionary wing of the Black-American antislavery movement.

He pastored after 1856 the Shiloh Presbyterian Church at New York and from 1864 to 1881 the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church at Washington, D.C.

He delivered on the twelfth of February 1865 a memorial address from the floor of the United States House of Representatives — on the recently ratified Thirteenth Amendment — the first African American to address the United States House of Representatives.

He was nominated by President James Garfield on the thirtieth of June 1881 as United States Minister Resident to the Republic of Liberia and was confirmed by the Senate on the twentieth of July 1881. He presented his credentials at Monrovia on the twenty-eighth of December 1881.

He died at Monrovia, Liberia on the thirteenth of February 1882 of complications of asthma, at sixty-six — having served the Liberia Legation for less than two months.

He is honored here as the first Black address to the House of Representatives.