Black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet, who lived on Long Island, helped shape the country's views on slavery

One summer evening in 1829, after returning to New York City from a voyage to Cuba as a cabin boy, Henry Highland Garnet — then just 13 — learned his family home had been deserted and its furnishings ruined.

Slave catchers had come knocking on the door to take the family back into bondage in Maryland, where the family had escaped from years ago, according to a historical account. His father recognized one catcher and fled, leaping 20 feet from a bedroom window, according to an account from Garnet's friend, abolitionist Alexander Crummell. His mother escaped to a nearby grocery. His sister was captured, though later freed. 

Upon hearing the news, Garnet grabbed a large knife and roamed Broadway in Manhattan in frustration over the slave catchers who had broken the family’s sense of peace. For his safety, loved ones shuttled him to Long Island. There, the teen found refuge with Quakers in Jericho, formed lifelong bonds and suffered a leg injury that would plague him for life.

That moment, when his home was invaded and the ground seemed to shift under his feet, would form the foundation of Garnet’s role as an important abolitionist who helped move the needle on how the nation should disentangle itself from slavery, historians say.

A powerful orator, Garnet helped shift the landscape on the abolition of slavery from trying to convince enslavers of the wrongs of the practice to one that called for resistance from those in captivity.

"I was born among the cherished institutions of slavery," he said in an 1865 speech to Congress, the first Black person to do so. "My earliest recollections of parents, friends, and the home of my childhood are clouded with its wrongs."

He preached a sermon called "Let the Monster Perish," in which he declared: "Slavery is snatching man from the high place to which he was lifted by the hand of God, and dragging him down to the level of the brute creation."

"Let the gigantic monster perish," he later said. "Yes, perish now and perish forever!"

A fugitive slave himself, he was a minister in a church that was primarily made up of people who fled slavery, and he adopted a young girl who was trailed by slave catchers. He supported Black troops during the Civil War. He was also a missionary in Jamaica and died as an American ambassador in Liberia.

Anna Mae Duane, director of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, said Garnet should be remembered "as one of the fathers of Black liberation," someone "who shaped the country's move toward abolition."

"Garnet reminds us that there never is just one answer, that controversy ... and even sometimes the bitter disagreements within a community is part of ... how you figure out a freedom struggle," she said.

Long Island a 'place of safety'

Before he would make his mark as an abolitionist, he was brought to Jericho at night in 1829 for his safety after the slave catchers showed up at his family's home, according to Kathleen Velsor’s "The Underground Railroad on Long Island: Friends in Freedom."

There, he lived with a Quaker minister named Thomas Willis, historians said. Quakers were against slavery as part of their religious practice.

Within two weeks, Garnet moved to Smithtown, where he labored as an indentured servant at a sawmill and an apprentice under Epenetus Smith for two years, according to Velsor’s book and other experts. 

"So, for him, I think [Long Island] was a place of safety and some connections," said Duane. But it also was "a place of loss because he lost that sense of, you know, connection to his family, at least temporarily."

Garnet also injured his leg during that time. Some experts say it was at the mill, while others say the injury occurred while he was playing sports. Either way, it would impact him for the rest of his life, and the leg was ultimately amputated.

Smith’s son Samuel tutored Garnet. Samuel Smith was impressed by the teen and the two became lifelong friends, according to Joel Schor’s biography of Garnet.

"His perceptions were quick, and the ingenuousness of his nature soon won the hearts of the entire family," Smith wrote, according to the biography.

Before the tutoring, Garnet attended the New York African Free School, where he was schoolmates of Black luminaries such as Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge and James McCune Smith — the first African American to get a medical doctorate. The school sought to provide newly freed children a strong education but tried to instill in them that the United States would not give them opportunities and that they should move to Africa — an idea that was rejected by parents at the time, Duane said.

Crummell, who attended the New York African Free School and was a longtime friend of Garnet, described his injury on Long Island and the temporary breakup of his family as watershed moments that refined Garnet.

"So the anguish of this family calamity gave birth to a giant soul!" Crummell recalled in a eulogy for Garnet. "From this terrible ordeal Henry Garnet came forth like gold thoroughly refined from fire!"

Calling for 'resistance' from the oppressed

After leaving Long Island, Garnet continued his studies at the Noyes Academy and the Oneida Institute, according to Duane’s "Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation."

He threw himself into biblical studies and history, particularly the Greek antiquities, according to the book. He married Julia Williams, a teacher and fellow abolitionist, in 1841, and they had three children, plus their adopted daughter. Following the death of his first wife, he married Sarah J. Garnet, who was active in the suffrage movement.  

Garnet became an orator against slavery, telling the American Anti-Slavery Society: "In consideration of the toils of our fathers in both wars, we claim the right of American citizenship."

Years later, in one of his most consequential moments, he delivered "An Address to the Slaves of the United States," in which he called for enslaved people to rebel should they not be freed by their enslavers.

"Let your motto be resistance! Resistance! Resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance," he told speakers at a convention in 1843, 22 years before slavery was abolished in the U.S. Constitution. 

The speech bucked against the approach of moral suasion against slavery at the time that was popular among abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass.

Douglass, who was in attendance, said the speech displayed "too much physical force" and that he wanted to continue to pursue "the moral means a little longer," according to Duane’s book.

So incendiary was the speech that the entire text was not added to conference records, in part because of how fears of an uprising could lead to an intense backlash. Yet the speech was published years later, in 1848.

The ideas of the speech would find greater grounding among Douglass and a number of other abolitionists in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Moving to Africa

Although his address to enslaved people gained recognition, Garnet’s ideas that Black people should leave the nation and immigrate to Liberia received significant pushback. Many Black Americans believed that America was their home and didn't want to leave, according to historical accounts.

But by the 1850s, more Black Americans found moving to Liberia to be more palatable, seeing their prospects in the United States as dim, according to Richard Blackett, emeritus Andrew Jackson professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

"Many Black figures, even including Frederick Douglass, took seriously the idea of leaving America, because America seemed to have been just spiraling out into sort of madness," he said.

He added: "As far as Black people were concerned, slavery seemed to be more fully established. Laws were being passed, restricting the rights of Blacks in Northern states."

Garnet wanted Black people to have the choice to move outside of the United States should they want to, and he believed that a strong Africa could help Black Americans.

At the end of his life, in 1882, Garnet was free and in Liberia. There, the man born enslaved served as an American ambassador to Liberia — a role he would hold for just a few months before his death.

In Liberia, he was buried "like a prince," receiving a stately funeral, his friend Crummell wrote. His body was laid to rest steps from the Atlantic Ocean, "its perpetual surges beating at his feet."

He added: "Farewell! Friend of my youth, Statesman, Poet, Orator, Clergyman, Philanthropist! And yet not farewell, for never can we forget thee!"

By Tiffany Cusaac-Smith

tiffany.cusaac-smith@newsday.com@T_Cusaac

Tiffany Cusaac-Smith is a general assignment reporter for Newsday. She previously worked at USA TODAY and is an alum of Howard University.