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Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest

“An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”

by Allan L. Damon

Date: 1843

Author: Henry Highland Garnet

Genre: Speech

Summary Overview

Henry Highland Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” was delivered at the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, on August 16, 1843. A former slave, Garnet was pastor of the African American Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, and editor of The Clarion, a weekly newspaper that published abolitionist and church-related articles. At age twenty-eight, he was a rising figure among young African American abolitionists, who were increasingly at odds with William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison and his followers (both white and African American) had essentially abandoned politics in favor of nonviolent moral suasion in their fight against slavery. Garnet first signaled his disaffection with Garrison’s position in 1840 as one of the founding members of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated political action as the primary way to achieve emancipation. His subsequent newspaper articles and sermons had carried him well beyond mere dissatisfaction, and because he was a gifted speaker with a reputation as a firebrand, most of the seventy delegates from a dozen states came to Buffalo anticipating a stirring address.

Defining Moment

Beginning in 1830 and intermittently to the 1850s black abolitionists (many of them clergymen and teachers) met in National Negro Conventions to discuss matters of mutual interest. Black abolitionist lecturers and writers like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were in high demand after 1840. In their books and lectures they emphasized the evils of slavery within conventional Christian morality and advocated moral suasion and nonviolent resistance. All that changed when the Mexican-American War, the Compromise of 1850, and the new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 transformed the nation’s moral and political landscapes.

The Buffalo meeting was itself a reason for excitement because, after a lapse of seven years, its convening renewed a convention movement that had begun thirteen years earlier with the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Philadelphia in 1830. Five annual gatherings followed the first, but the 1836 convention divided over doctrinal matters, and no further national meetings were held until the Buffalo convention was called to order on August 15, 1843. The chairman, Samuel H. Davis, a minister and the principal of the local elementary school for black children, struck the gavel. All delegates were aware that groups in Buffalo had fiercely opposed their meeting. Some openly threatened them and their meeting place, the Vine Street American Methodist Episcopal Church, but the proceedings over the next five days took place without any outside interference. Davis, a graduate of Oberlin College, set the tone with his keynote address, “We Must Assert Our Rightful Claims and Plead Our Own Cause.” He reminded the delegates that the work of white abolitionists had thus far failed to win the slaves’ emancipation or full civil liberties for free blacks. Those goals could be reached, he said, only if African Americans themselves “make known our wrongs to the world and to our oppressors.” To leave the goals to others to achieve was a commitment to failure, Davis warned. When his turn came to speak, Henry Highland Garnet carried that message to a far more radical conclusion.

Author Biography

Henry Highland Garnet was born into slavery on a plantation near Chestertown in Kent County, Maryland, on December 23, 1815, to George and Henrietta Trusty. In 1824, following the death of their owner, the Trustys, aided by the Underground Railroad, made their way to the North, where they adopted Garnet as their new name. In 1827 they settled in New York City, and Garnet’s father worked as a shoemaker. Henry attended the African Free School until he went to sea in 1828 and later worked as an indentured field hand on Long Island, where in his second year he severely injured a knee. In 1840 the leg was amputated at the hip.

In 1831 Garnet returned to a high school for blacks in New York and in July 1835 entered Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, a school founded by abolitionists to serve both black and white students. Local townspeople, unhappy with the school’s racial mix, destroyed the building in August and attacked the house where the black students were living. Early in 1836 Garnet was admitted to the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York, from which he graduated with honors in 1840.

Garnet was named minister of the African American Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, New York, in 1840. Garnet became active in abolitionist affairs; edited The Clarion, a weekly abolitionist newspaper; and taught school. An organizer of the convention movement in New York State, he campaigned briefly for the Liberty Party.

Following his speech in Buffalo, Garnet returned to his pulpit in Troy. During the 1850s, he traveled to Europe speaking against slavery in Britain and Germany. On February 12, 1865, he became the first African American to deliver a sermon to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1881 President James Garfield appointed Garnet the U.S. minister resident and consul general to Liberia. He died two months after taking up his post in Monrovia, on February 13, 1882.

Historical Document

Brethren and Fellow-Citizens: —Your brethren of the North, East, and West have been accustomed to meet together in National Conventions, to sympathize with each other, and to weep over your unhappy condition. In these meetings we have addressed all classes of the free, but we have never, until this time, sent a word of consolation and advice to you. We have been contented in sitting still and mourning over your sorrows, earnestly hoping that before this day your sacred liberties would have been restored. But, we have hoped in vain. Years have rolled on, and tens of thousands have been borne on streams of blood and tears, to the shores of eternity. While you have been oppressed, we have also been partakers with you; nor can we be free while you are enslaved. We, therefore, write to you as being bound with you.

Many of you are bound to us, not only by the ties of a common humanity, but we are connected by the more tender relations of parents, wives, husbands, children, brothers, and sisters, and friends. As such we most affectionately address you.

Slavery has fixed a deep gulf between you and us, and while it shuts out from you the relief and consolation which your friends would willingly render, it afflicts and persecutes you with a fierceness which we might not expect to see in the fiends of hell. But still the Almighty Father of mercies has left to us a glimmering ray of hope, which shines out like a lone star in a cloudy sky. Mankind are becoming wiser, and better—the oppressor’s power is fading, and you, every day, are becoming better informed, and more numerous. Your grievances, brethren, are many. We shall not attempt, in this short address, to present to the world all the dark catalogue of this nation’s sins, which have been committed upon an innocent people. Nor is it indeed necessary, for you feel them from day to day, and all the civilized world look upon them with amazement.

Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, the first of our injured race were brought to the shores of America. They came not with glad spirits to select their homes in the New World. They came not with their own consent, to find an unmolested enjoyment of the blessings of this fruitful soil. The first dealings they had with men calling themselves Christians, exhibited to them the worst features of corrupt and sordid hearts: and convinced them that no cruelty is too great, no villainy and no robbery too abhorrent for even enlightened men to perform, when influenced by avarice and lust. Neither did they come flying upon the wings of Liberty, to a land of freedom. But they came with broken hearts, from their beloved native land, and were doomed to unrequited toil and deep degradation. Nor did the evil of their bondage end at their emancipation by death. Succeeding generations inherited their chains, and millions have come from eternity into time, and have returned again to the world of spirits, cursed and ruined by American slavery.

The propagators of the system, or their immediate ancestors, very soon discovered its growing evil, and its tremendous wickedness, and secret promises were made to destroy it. The gross inconsistency of a people holding slaves, who had themselves “ferried o’er the wave” for freedom’s sake, was too apparent to be entirely overlooked. The voice of Freedom cried, “Emancipate your slaves.” Humanity supplicated with tears for the deliverance of the children of Africa. Wisdom urged her solemn plea. The bleeding captive pleaded his innocence, and pointed to Christianity who stood weeping at the cross. Jehovah frowned upon the nefarious institution, and thunderbolts, red with vengeance, struggled to leap forth to blast the guilty wretches who maintained it. But all was vain. Slavery had stretched its dark wings of death over the land, the Church stood silently by—the priests prophesied falsely, and the people loved to have it so. Its throne is established, and now it reigns triumphant.

Nearly three millions of your fellow-citizens are prohibited by law and public opinion (which in this country is stronger than law) from reading the Book of Life. Your intellect has been destroyed as much as possible, and every ray of light they have attempted to shut out from your minds. The oppressors themselves have become involved in the ruin. They have become weak, sensual, and rapacious—they have cursed you—they have cursed themselves—they have cursed the earth which they have trod.

The colonists threw the blame upon England. They said that the mother country entailed the evil upon them, and that they would rid themselves of it if they could. The world thought they were sincere, and the philanthropic pitied them. But time soon tested their sincerity. In a few years the colonists grew strong, and severed themselves from the British Government. Their independence was declared, and they took their station among the sovereign powers of the earth. The declaration was a glorious document. Sages admired it, and the patriotic of every nation reverenced the God-like sentiments which it contained. When the power of Government returned to their hands, did they emancipate the slaves? No; they rather added new links to our chains. Were they ignorant of the principles of Liberty? Certainly they were not. The sentiments of their revolutionary orators fell in burning eloquence upon their hearts, and with one voice they cried, Liberty or Death. Oh what a sentence was that! It ran from soul to soul like electric fire, and nerved the arm of thousands to fight in the holy cause of Freedom. Among the diversity of opinions that are entertained in regard to physical resistance, there are but a few found to gainsay that stern declaration. We are among those who do not.

Slavery! How much misery is comprehended in that single word. What mind is there that does not shrink from its direful effects? Unless the image of God be obliterated from the soul, all men cherish the love of Liberty. The nice discerning political economist does not regard the sacred right more than the untutored African who roams in the wilds of Congo. Nor has the one more right to the full enjoyment of his freedom than the other. In every man’s mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind— when they have embittered the sweet waters of life—when they have shut out the light which shines from the word of God—then, and not till then, has American slavery done its perfect work.

To such Degradation it is sinful in the Extreme for you to make voluntary Submission. The divine commandments you are in duty bound to reverence and obey. If you do not obey them, you will surely meet with the displeasure of the Almighty. He requires you to love him supremely, and your neighbor as yourself—to keep the Sabbath day holy—to search the Scriptures—and bring up your children with respect for his laws, and to worship no other God but him. But slavery sets all these at nought, and hurls defiance in the face of Jehovah. The forlorn condition in which you are placed, does not destroy your moral obligation to God. You are not certain of heaven, because you suffer yourselves to remain in a state of slavery, where you cannot obey the commandments of the Sovereign of the universe. If the ignorance of slavery is a passport to heaven, then it is a blessing, and no curse, and you should rather desire its perpetuity than its abolition. God will not receive slavery, nor ignorance, nor any other state of mind, for love and obedience to him. Your condition does not absolve you from your moral obligation. The diabolical injustice by which your liberties are cloven down, neither God; nor angels, or just men, command you to suffer for a single moment. Therefore it is your solemn and imperative duty to use every means, both moral, intellectual and physical that promises success. If a band of heathen men should attempt to enslave a race of Christians, and to place their children under the influence of some false religion, surely, Heaven would frown upon the men who would not resist such aggression, even to death. If, on the other hand, a band of Christians should attempt to enslave a race of heathen men, and to entail slavery upon them, and to keep them in heathenism in the midst of Christianity, the God of heaven would smile upon every effort which the injured might make to disenthral themselves.

Brethren, it is as wrong for your lordly oppressors to keep you in slavery, as it was for the man thief to steal our ancestors from the coast of Africa. You should therefore now use the same manner of resistance, as would have been just in our ancestors, when the bloody footprints of the first remorseless soul-thief was placed upon the shores of our fatherland. The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God as the proudest monarch that ever swayed a sceptre. Liberty is a spirit sent out from God, and like its great Author, is no respecter of persons.

Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves. It is an old and true saying that, “if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow.” You can plead your own cause, and do the work of emancipation better than any others. The nations of the old world are moving in the great cause of universal freedom, and some of them at least will, ere long, do you justice. The combined powers of Europe have placed their broad seal of disapprobation upon the African slave-trade. But in the slaveholding parts of the United States, the trade is as brisk as ever. They buy and sell you as though you were brute beasts. The North has done much—her opinion of slavery in the abstract is known. But in regard to the South, we adopt the opinion of the New York Evangelist—”We have advanced so far, that the cause apparently waits for a more effectual door to be thrown open than has been yet.” We are about to point you to that more effectual door. Look around you, and behold the bosoms of your loving wives heaving with untold agonies! Hear the cries of your poor children! Remember the stripes your fathers bore. Think of the torture and disgrace of your noble mothers. Think of your wretched sisters, loving virtue and purity, as they are driven into concubinage and are exposed to the unbridled lusts of incarnate devils. Think of the undying glory that hangs around the ancient name of Africa:—and forget not that you are native-born American citizens, and as such, you are justly entitled to all the rights that are granted to the freest. Think how many tears you have poured out upon the soil which you have cultivated with unrequited toil and enriched with your blood; and then go to your lordly enslavers and tell them plainly, that you are determined to be free. Appeal to their sense of justice, and tell them that they have no more right to oppress you, than you have to enslave them. Entreat them to remove the grievous burdens which they have imposed upon you, and to remunerate you for your labor. Promise them renewed diligence in the cultivation of the soil, if they will render to you an equivalent for your services. Point them to the increase of happiness and prosperity in the British West Indies since the Act of Emancipation. Tell them in language which they cannot misunderstand, of the exceeding sinfulness of slavery, and of a future judgment, and of the righteous retributions of an indignant God. Inform them that all you desire is freedom, and that nothing else will suffice. Do this, and for ever after cease to toil for the heartless tyrants, who give you no other reward but stripes and abuse. If they then commence the work of death, they, and not you, will be responsible for the consequences. You had far better all die—die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. If you would be free in this generation, here is your only hope. However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it all come at once—rather die freemen, than live to be the slaves. It is impossible, like the children of Israel, to make a grand exodus from the land of bondage. The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters! You cannot move en masse, to the dominions of the British Queen—nor can you pass through Florida and overrun Texas, and at last find peace in Mexico. The propagators of American slavery are spending their blood and treasure, that they may plant the black flag in the heart of Mexico and riot in the halls of the Montezumas. In the language of the Rev. Robert Hall, when addressing the volunteers of Bristol, who were rushing forth to repel the invasion of Napoleon, who threatened to lay waste the fair homes of England, “Religion is too much interested in your behalf, not to shed over you her most gracious influences.”

You will not be compelled to spend much time in order to become inured to hardships. From the first moment that you breathed the air of heaven, you have been accustomed to nothing else but hardships. The heroes of the American Revolution were never put upon harder fare than a peck of corn and a few herrings per week. You have not become enervated by the luxuries of life. Your sternest energies have been beaten out upon the anvil of severe trial. Slavery has done this to make you subservient to its own purposes; but it has done more than this, it has prepared you for any emergency. If you receive good treatment, it is what you could hardly expect; if you meet with pain, sorrow, and even death, these are the common lot of the slaves.

Fellow-men! patient sufferers! Behold your dearest rights crushed to the earth! See your sons murdered, and your wives, mothers and sisters doomed to prostitution. In the name of the merciful God, and by all that life is worth, let it no longer be a debatable question whether it is better to choose Liberty or death.

In 1822, Denmark Veazie, of South Carolina, formed a plan for the liberation of his fellow-men. In the whole history of human efforts to overthrow slavery, a more complicated and tremendous plan was never formed. He was betrayed by the treachery of his own people, and died a martyr to freedom. Many a brave hero fell, but history, faithful to her high trust, will transcribe his name on the same monument with Moses, Hampden, Tell, Bruce and Wallace, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Lafayette and Washington. That tremendous movement shook the whole empire of slavery. The guilty soul thieves were overwhelmed with fear. It is a matter of fact, that at that time, and in consequence of the threatened revolution, the slave States talked strongly of emancipation. But they blew but one blast of the trumpet of freedom, and then laid it aside. As these men became quiet, the slaveholders ceased to talk about emancipation: and now behold your condition today! Angels sigh over it, and humanity has long since exhausted her tears in weeping on your account!

The patriotic Nathaniel Turner followed Denmark Veazie. He was goaded to desperation by wrong and injustice. By despotism, his name has been recorded on the list of infamy; and future generations will remember him among the noble and brave.

Next arose the immortal Joseph Cinque, the hero of the Amistad. He was a native African, and by the help of God he emancipated a whole ship-load of his fellow-men on the high seas. And he now sings of liberty on the sunny hills of Africa and beneath his native palm-trees, where he hears the lion roar and feels himself as free as that king of the forest.

Next arose Madison Washington, that bright star of freedom, and took his station in the constellation of true heroism. He was a slave on board the brig Creole of Richmond, bound to New Orleans, that great slave mart, with a hundred and four others. Nineteen struck for liberty or death. But one life was taken, and the whole were emancipated, and the vessel was carried into Nassau, New Providence.

Noble men! Those who have fallen in freedom’s conflict, their memories will be cherished by the true-hearted and the God-fearing in all future generations; those who are living, their names are surrounded by a halo of glory.

Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are four millions!

It is in your power so to torment the God-cursed slaveholders, that they will be glad to let you go free. If the scale was turned, and black men were the masters and white men the slaves, every destructive agent and element would be employed to lay the oppressor low. Danger and death would hang over their heads day and night. Yes, the tyrants would meet with plagues more terrible than those of Pharaoh. But you are a patient people. You act as though you were made for the special use of these devils. You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely submit while your lords tear your wives from your embraces and defile them before your eyes. In the name of God, we ask, are you men? Where is the blood of your fathers? Has it all run out of your veins? Awake, awake; millions of voices are calling you! Your dead fathers speak to you from their graves. Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust.

Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency. Brethren, adieu! Trust in the living God. Labor for the peace of the human race, and remember that you are four millions.

Glossary

Book of Life: the Bible

British West Indies since the Act of Emancipation: a reference to Great Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act

Children of Israel…Pharaohs: reference to the Old Testament Israelites and their bondage under ancient Egypt

concubinage: the condition of being forced to submit to sexual relations

Denmark Veazie: usually spelled “Vesey”; the leader of a planned slave rebellion in South Carolina in 1822

“ferried o’er the wave”: a quotation from William Cowper’s 1785 poem “The Task”

Florida…Mexico: a reference to the disputes that arose over slavery as the nation expanded

Hampton…Washington: John Hampden, a leading opponent of King Charles I, who died of wounds sustained in 1643 in the second year of the English Civil War; William Tell, the legendary marksman, leader of a rebellion against the Hapsburg rulers in the fourteenth century; Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, who fought for Scotland against the English in the fourteenth century; Toussaint-Louverture, who successfully freed Haiti from French rule in the 1790s, outlawed slavery, and established native government; the Marquis de Lafayette, famous for his military role in the American and the French revolutions; George Washington, who led the Continental army to victory and America to independence in 1783

Jehovah: God, a name commonly used in the biblical Old Testament

Liberty or Death: an allusion to Patrick Henry’s revolutionary statement, “Give me liberty, or give me death”

Montezumas: Aztec emperors in Mexico

Nathaniel Turner: Nat Turner, the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831

Robert Hall: a British Baptist minister of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Document Analysis

The opening three paragraphs set the tone for the rest of the speech. Garnet uses the word brethren dualistically, directing it to both the immediate audience and the absent slaves, who are his real audience. Garnet spells out the connection between free person and slave and, in the third, how the institution of slavery has kept them apart. He also discusses ways the perpetual horrors of slavery reach from generation to generation. He criticizes the silence on slavery from American Christianity—apart from the Quakers—and the means by which both north and south deny education to free and enslaved black Americans.

In paragraph 7, Garnet celebrates the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, but he laments the missed opportunity to abolish slavery and the inclusion of protections for slaveholders in the Constitution. He invokes the human need for freedom and equates the slave’s failure to openly oppose slavery, even at the risk of death, as a violation of the Ten Commandments and argues that the slaves must themselves bring an end to slavery, asserting that resistance in the name of freedom is right and just and will be blessed by God.

In paragraph 11 Garnet reminds the slaves that they are native-born American citizens. He instructs them to remind their owners that their birthright is freedom, even at the cost of whippings or death. Garnet turns in paragraphs 12 and 13 to the strengths that the slaves possess. He compares them to the American rebels in the Revolution, who endured hardship, and reminds them that hardship is what they have known. Given the abuses to their loved ones, there is no longer a debate over what they must do. To encourage them further, Garnet offers them as exemplars of resistance, in paragraphs 14 through 18, thirteen “noble men” who chose to fight for liberty at the risk of or price of death. Garnet discusses a number of heroes of resistance to slavery, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, connecting them to historical heroes such as a Moses, William Wallace of Scotland, and the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution as well As Toussaint-Louverture, who fought to free Haiti from French rule in the 1790s.

In paragraph 16, Garnet praises Joseph Cinqué, a captive African, who on July 2, 1839, led fifty-two fellow Africans in gaining control of the slave ship La Amistad, Eventually intercepted by the US Navy, Federal officers then took the Africans to New London, Connecticut, to be sold, in clear violation of the Constitution’s ban on importing slaves. Abolitionists quickly came to the blacks’ aid. In a dramatic appearance before the Supreme Court, the former president John Quincy Adams argued the abolitionists’ position that the Africans had been illegally enslaved, that they were justified in using force to gain their freedom, and that the court should return them to their homeland. On March 9, 1841 (a little over two years before Garnet’s speech), the court ruled in favor of the abolitionists and the Africans were set free.

The heroism of Madison Washington, whom Garnet introduces in paragraph 17, followed close on the Court’s decision in that case. On the night of November 7, 1841, Washington led a slave revolt on board the Creole, a coastal slave ship, carrying him and 134 other slaves from Virginia to New Orleans, where they were to be sold. Washington and eighteen of his fellow slaves overpowered the ship’s crew and forced the captain to take them to Nassau in the Bahamas, a British colony. Despite protests from the American government, the British declared the slaves to be free persons. Washington and his partners were briefly imprisoned but ultimately freed.

What Garnet has said to this point is preparation for his call for a slave rebellion that, through violence, would destroy the evils of slavery and bring freedom to African Americans at long last. “Brethren, arise, arise!” Garnet says in paragraph 19, reminding the nation’s slaves that they number four million (the number in 1848 was closer to 3.2 million) and that if they join together, they can wipe out a dying institution. They have, he adds, nothing to lose but the restrictions that already were limiting their lives and making their wives and children subject to every cruelty; they cannot be made to suffer more than they already have.

Paragraph 20 is a forceful reminder that the slaves have within their hands the power to awaken the fear that overtook southern whites during the Vesey conspiracy and Nat Turner’s Rebellion. In an Old Testament reference well known to his audience, Garnet invokes the ten plagues that Moses promised that God would inflict on Egypt unless the pharaoh freed the Israelites from bondage. What holds slavery together, Garnet says, is the passivity of the slaves, their patience and inaction in the face of daily cruelty and humiliation. It is time for them to awaken. In his conclusion, Garnet reiterates that resistance is the only plausible solution to the slaves’ plight.

Essential Themes

In “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” Henry Highland Garnet presents his audience with a series of carefully connected themes, woven together in forceful images and powerful language. He begins with a direct appeal to those in bondage to recognize their close ties to those who are free, their common memory of past and present injustices, and their mutual connection to past generations of slaves. He points to heroic rebels as examples of what the slaves themselves must do to secure their freedom, and he urges them to see the strengths that lie in their numbers and their shared consciousness of their condition. He highlights their masters’ dependency on slavery and the slave owners’ deep-seated fear of a slave insurrection. He tells them in ringing terms that violence is their only recourse if they wish to be free. “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” was like a thunderclap to the assembled delegates at the Buffalo convention. The first major abolitionist speech directed to the nation’s slaves since David Walker’s “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” its call for armed resistance shocked both the convention audience and the nation at large.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

1 

Stuckey, Sterling. “A Last Stern Struggle: Henry Highland Garnet and Liberation Theory.” In Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, eds. Leon Litwack and August Meier. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

2 

“‘To the Public.’ January 1, 1831.” In William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from the Liberator, ed. William E. Cain. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1997.

3 

Hutchinson, Earl Ofari. Let Your Motto Be Resistance: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

4 

Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.

5 

Schor, Joel. Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Publishing, 1977.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Damon, Allan L. "“An Address To The Slaves Of The United States Of America”." Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest, edited by Aaron Gulyas, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=DDProtest_0028.
APA 7th
Damon, A. L. (2017). “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”. In A. Gulyas (Ed.), Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Damon, Allan L. "“An Address To The Slaves Of The United States Of America”." Edited by Aaron Gulyas. Defining Documents in American History: Dissent and Protest. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2017. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.