Henry Highland Garnet

vii, 96 pages ; 22 cm

The book is a copy of the speech or sermon that Henry Highland Garnet delivered to Congress in 1865, on President Lincoln's invitation. He was the first African American to address Congress. The Introduction by James McCune Smith is the earliest documentation on Henry Highland Garnet's life up to that time. Smith was Garnet's boyhood friend and became a medical doctor. Garnet was one of the most important abolitionists in American. He was born a slave in Kent County, Maryland, escaped with his family on the Underground Railroad at age 9, and was educated and lived in New York.

"In 1829 David Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote one of America's most provocative political documents of the nineteenth century. Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Decrying the savage and unchristian treatment blacks suffered in the United States, Walker challenged his "afflicted and slumbering brethern" to rise up and cast off their chains. Walker worked tirelessly to circulate his book via underground networks in the South, and he was so successful that Southern lawmakers responded with new laws cracking down on "incendiary" anti-slavery material." From the bookjacket.