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22 Henry Highland Garnet An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (Speech to the National Convention of Colored Citizens) Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass were widely considered by their contemporaries to be the two preeminent African American orators of the abolition period. Both Douglass and Garnet were fugitive slaves from the Eastern Shore of Maryland and had endured considerable hardships. From the very beginning of his speaking career, Garnet reveled in debate and excelled at producing fiery oratory that stirred his audiences. Even allowing for nineteenth-century observers’ tendency towards exaggerated praise, it is clear that Garnet was an accomplished motivational speaker. Throughout his lifetime, he spoke on behalf of a variety of causes, including African and Haitian emigration, and his audiences often found themselves moved to act on behalf of those causes. Although by 1843 Garnet was already well known as an activist, his “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” that year fully established his national fame for radical, exhortative speeches. Born in 1815, Garnet and his family fled slavery in 1824 when he was nine years of age. Assisted by Quakers, the family relocated to New York City, where he enrolled in the African Free School. After some schooling, Garnet took employment as a deckhand, and in 1829, while he was away at sea, fugitive slave hunters broke into the family’s home. His mother and father fled, while his sister was captured. Returning to discover the sudden dissolution of his family, Garnet shipped on with a schooner bound for Cuba. On that voyage, Garnet became ill, and his right leg swelled with infection. He again returned to New York, where he came under the tutelage of Theodore Wright, the minister of First Colored Presbyterian Church, who enrolled him as a student in the new Noyes Academy in New Hampshire. Shortly after An Address to the Slaves 23 its inception, the Noyes Academy was burned down by local citizens who objected to the presence of an integrated school in their town. At this time, Garnet’s leg, which never fully healed, was amputated. Theodore Wright again encouraged Garnet to pursue his education and arranged for his enrollment in the Oneida Institute. There he completed a classical education, including instruction in Greek and Hebrew and upon graduation became a licensed Presbyterian minister, serving at the integrated First Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York. In 1843, he assumed the position of minister of Liberty Presbyterian Church, a missionary offshoot of his previous church.1 During this time, Garnet had become good friends with Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white abolitionist in western New York who was challenging William Lloyd Garrison’s leadership of the abolitionist movement. Garrison, publisher of the Liberator and the best-known abolitionist of the time, argued that slavery could be ended only by “moral suasion”—that is, an appeal to the conscience of each individual. Garrison held that the Constitution was a proslavery document and that any participation in the US political system as it then existed would validate and legitimize the system of slavery. Garrison thus preached noninvolvement with the political process. In contrast, Gerrit Smith and others had become convinced that most of those who supported slavery would never be “persuaded” and that the pernicious institution could be abolished only when it became illegal. In 1842, they formed the Liberty Party, and Henry Highland Garnet supported that branch of the abolitionist movement enthusiastically.2 Before his “Address to the Slaves,” 1843 had already been a busy year for Garnet. In March, he had addressed the Liberty Party Convention in Buffalo , New York, where he suggested that those African Americans, such as Frederick Douglass, who did not support the party were not being “true” to their race. In early August, Garnet similarly addressed the national Liberty Party Convention in New York City. Immediately thereafter, at a Colored Citizens and Their Friends Convention in the same city, Douglass publicly responded to Garnet, and from the convention floor, Garnet chided Douglass and the two became engaged in a heated argument.3 Earlier in the summer of 1843, Charles Ray, Theodore Wright, and Henry Highland Garnet had called for a national Convention of Colored Citizens to be held in Buffalo, New York. On August 13, 1843, twenty-five delegates met to discuss the course of action that free African Americans should take in support of abolition. In addition to the African American delegates, there were some white observer/ participants in...

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