Samuel Eli Cornish: The Christian Journalist (1796-1858)
Introduction
In 2005, the World Journalism Institute created a memorial lecture honoring Samuel Eli Cornish, the Black evangelical Presbyterian minister who founded the first African-American newspaper in the United States. The first lecture was delivered at our April 2005 conference at Morehouse College by Karima Haynes, WJI teacher, former Los Angeles Times reporter and wife of Deon Haynes of the Washington Post.
Why does an organization like WJI sustain a lecture for such a man? How can the life of an African-American part-time journalist and Christian pastor who died 150 years ago speak to us Christian journalists in the 21st century?
Samuel Cornish was born in Sussex County, Delaware in l795 to a free family.[i] In 1815 he moved to Philadelphia when he was 20 years old. There he was picked to be tutored for the gospel ministry by members of the Philadelphia Presbyterian leadership. The leader of the Presbyterian tutors was John Gloucester, an African-American minister who had come from Nashville to found the first black Presbyterian church in the United States (First African Presbyterian Church). Gloucester was privately tutored in Philadelphia by the great Presbyterian theologian Archibald Alexander (pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, who in a couple of years will begin Princeton Theological Seminary).[ii] Gloucester was gravely ill at the time with tuberculosis (which eventually killed him in 1822), so Cornish gained practical experience filling in for his mentor at First African.
Cornish was formally licensed to preach in Philadelphia in 1819, and then spent a year as a Presbyterian missionary to slaves in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In 1820 he was recruited by New York City evangelical Presbyterians to minister to poor blacks in the Bancker Street (now Duane Street) area of lower east side Manhattan. To give you an idea of the type of area in which Cornish was moving, in the late 1820s, the Bancker family took their name off the street because the neighborhood was declining so much. Anyway, in 1821 Cornish moved to New York City and set up a rough hewn church, held two or three services there on Sunday, conducted a Sunday school, gave Biblical lectures, held prayer meetings and visited families in their homes. In 1822, he was formally ordained by the New York Presbytery and he drew together 24 initial members of New Demeter Street Presbyterian Church, the first African-American (“colored”) Presbyterian church in New York City. In 1824, with loans from the New York Presbytery and financial aid from Jacob P. Lorillard, New York City tobacco merchant, Cornish built and settled into a brick home on Elm Street near Canal Street in lower Manhattan with his new wife, Jane. The house served as the church building, with Cornish formally installed as pastor of New Demeter Street.[iii] Elm Street is now Lafayette Street and there is an African-American burial ground and monument in the immediate area.
Rev. Cornish soon tested the limits of white Presbyterian support when he refused to draw sharp lines between his theology and his political concerns. Cornish thought from a Christian worldview. He began by speaking out against the American Colonization Society (ACS)[iv] and then in l827, when he was 32, Cornish took an even more decisive step. For almost 10 years the city’s white press had cooperated with the ACS by refusing to print the anti-colonization resolutions passed by black gatherings in New York City. Cornish now met with a small group of prominent black pastors,[v] and in March, 1827 the group launched Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. In three months, by July, Freedom’s Journal had over 1200 paid subscribers ($3/year) with perhaps several more thousand reading at least parts of each weekly issue. Eventually, the paper would be distributed in 11 states, Haiti and Europe.
Freedom’s Journal covered activities in the broad African-American US community. It was funded by advertisements (costing from 25 to 75 cents) from local black businessmen, as well as subscription revenue. Its pages presented a portrait of the African-American community strikingly at variance with the negative picture promulgated by the mainstream press, owned and edited by white Americans. It wasn’t that Freedom’s Journal denied the existence of a rougher element in the black community. But Cornish noted, among other verifiable facts, that whites constituted, proportionately, a larger percentage of poor house residents than blacks.[vi] As a Christian, Cornish deplored coarse conduct by unrefined and uneducated blacks (which he attributed to slavery), but he believed African-Americans should be edified, not exiled to Liberia like the ACS wanted. Freedom’s Journal exhorted its readers to eschew “loose and depraved habits” and cultivate sobriety, industry, honesty, and self-discipline. Cornish hailed education as a way to overcome economic deprivation. The paper ran inspirational biographies, published articles on the black revolution in Haiti (of which it was proud), and stated that “every thing that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our columns.” It just opposed repatriation or colonization to Africa.
Freedom’s Journal did not hesitate to criticize whites and denounce racism. The paper called for the abolition of property requirements for black voters. It denounced the colonization project and courageously condemned fellow Presbyterians for excluding blacks from some church-connected schools. Most controversially, Cornish demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. While Cornish did not advocate a slave rebellion, his call for immediate confiscation of property which was defined in terms of African-Americans, was an advanced position (one that not even the white William Lloyd Garrison would adopt until 1830).
Cornish rejected colonization because he said the colonization movement was based on the conviction that African-Americans could never win the respect of their white countrymen: “To concede so much to prejudice is to deify prejudice.” Intent on setting the facts straight, and rehabilitating the black race in the eyes of the world, Cornish presented arguments from a Christian perspective on the color of humankind in the creation account, the genealogical descent of black people in the Bible, and the ethnological status of the Biblical Egyptians.
Theodore S. Wright called freedom’s Journal a “clap of thunder” as a forum for free black thought. The discussion of racial subjects in Freedom’s Journal set the broad outlines for African-American discourse on these subjects for decades. Indeed, within 30 years there were to be over 40 black-owned and edited newspapers in the United States.Influential white Presbyterian clergymen were upset by Cornish’s denunciation of the ACS and by what they deemed his insufficient appreciation of their altruism. This created an awkward situation at a time when Cornish was visiting white congregations to solicit funds for his New Demeter Street Presbyterian Church.
In September 1827, having completed his agreed-upon six months as managing editor, Cornish resigned from the Freedom’s Journal and accepted a position as agent of the African Free Schools, in which he was to visit black families and impress upon them the importance of education, if need be, in separate black schools.
Several months later, in 1828, Cornish also withdrew as pastor of New Demeter Street Presbyterian Church and became an itinerant preacher and missionary. In 1830 he returned to Philadelphia and briefly pastored his old congregation at First African Presbyterian Church where he had gotten his start over a decade earlier under John Gloucester.
Cornish was succeeded at New Demeter Street (Shiloh Presbyterian Church) by Theodore Sedgwick Wright (b. 1797). In 1825, Wright had been admitted into Princeton Theological Seminary (which Archibald Alexander ran) where he served as a Freedom’s Journal sales agent (one of anywhere from 14 to 45) in getting many students and faculty to subscribe. At Princeton, Wright studied under such prominent scholars as Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), Samuel Miller (1769-1850) and Charles Hodge (1797-1878). Alexander, Miller and Hodge were men of deep personal piety whose formal theology combined emphases of European Calvinism and the Scottish philosophic school of common-sense reasoning. On graduating in l828 (as the first African-American alumnus of a theological seminary in the United States and only the third alumnus from a US college), Wright joined the Presbytery of New York and became the pastor of First Demeter Street Presbyterian Church.
Freedom’s Journal, meanwhile, had fared poorly after Cornish left. In l828, it ceased publication after 103 issues. Noting this, Cornish started a new paper to replace Freedom’s Journal called the Rights of All, but it lasted only six months. Before its demise, however, Rights of All blasted the colonization movement as being sub-Christian.
White New York City evangelicals joined the black anti-slavery ministers in part because they felt comfortable with their conservative religious values as well as their shared belief in temperance and self-improvement. In l833 for instance, Rev. Cornish and Rev. Wright founded the Phoenix Society of New York, declaring that the condition of “people of colour” could “only be meliorated by their being improved in morals, literature and the mechanical arts.”
This unusual degree of friendship between middle class black and white evangelicals in New York City helped galvanize the anti-slavery movement. In 1833, Black evangelical ministers in New York (including Cornish)[vii] were brought together with white evangelical ministers[viii] by New York silk merchant Arthur Tappan (brother of Lewis Tappan and early funder of the Sunday school movement) to lead an integrated anti-slavery organization called the New York Anti-Slavery Society with its own publication, The Emancipator.
In 1837, with ink still in his blood, Cornish started yet another newspaper called Colored American (heavily subsidized by Arthur Tappan[ix]) which editorialized (”Our Brethren in Philadelphia”) in the first issue on a suitable name for the African American community.“Let us and our friends unite in baptizing the term ‘colored Americans’ and henceforth let us be written of, preached of, and prayed for as such. It is a true term, and one which is above reproach. Our brethren in Philadelphia are quarreling over trifles, while our enemies are robbing them of diamonds and gold…. While these sages are frightened to death at the idea of being called ‘colored,’ their friends and foes …call them nothing else but ‘negroes,’ ‘negroes,’ the ‘negroes of Pennsylvania.’ You are ‘colored Americans.’ The indians are “red Americans” and the white people are “white Americans” and you are as good as they and they are no better than you - God has made all of the same blood.”(3/15/38).[x] Cornish was more conservative in his views than many of his younger contemporaries. For example, in an 1837 Colored American editorial he was part of a minority opposing the use of demonstrations and force to resist the enforcement of the fugitive slave laws.[xi]
Ever the family man, in 1838 Cornish and his family moved to Belleville, New Jersey hoping to raise his children in an environment less prejudiced than New York City.[xii] Tragedy struck, however, when his younger son, Samuel, drowned in l838. The Colored American was in financial straits, Cornish’s salary was unpaid and he eventually resigned the editorship in the middle of 1839.[xiii] Colored American ceased publication on Christmas Day, 1841.
Around 1840, Cornish moved to Newark, where he pastored another church for a brief time.
In 1844, after his wife, Jane, died, Cornish moved his family back to New York City where he organized Emmanuel Church which he pastored until 1847. His older daughter, Sarah, died in 1846, (We don’t have a record of what happened to his son, William-b. 1826.), and his younger daughter, Jane Sophia Tappan, became ill in 1851 and died insane in 1855.
In 1855, Cornish, in very poor health himself, moved to Brooklyn, where he died in 1858 at the age of 62.
Conclusion:
Historians argue that Samuel Cornish is known primarily as an anti-slavery activist and leader. And he was.
So why does a journalism organization - the World Journalism Institute - which equips journalists who are Christian to enter the mainstream newsrooms celebrate the life and example of Samuel Eli Cornish?
Let me offer three reasons why he is important to us:
First, Cornish was a journalist who was a Christian who stood against the media culture of his day in order to report the truth to his community.
Second, Cornish was a man who loved the church and was never far from ministering to his community.
Third, Cornish was a journalist who believed that his theology informed his worldview and he boldly but lovingly acted on those Christian assumptions.
As we evaluate what we know of Samuel Eli Cornish I believe that journalists who are Christian can take appropriate inspiration in this man’s effort to combine his Christian convictions and the calling of journalism. If you are a journalist and a Christian, the legacy of Samuel Cornish belongs to all journalists, but especially Christian journalists..
[i] Early on, the number of free blacks in Delaware grew representing the vast majority of Delaware’s African American population and a significant portion of the total state population. By 1790, Kent County registered 2,570 free African Americans, compared to New Castle’s 639, and Sussex’s, 600. During the early 1800s, opposition to slavery led slaveholders to increase the numbers of those who were given their freedom. As a result of that trend, half of the black population or 13.5 percent of the total state population of 1,800 consisted of free blacks. By 1810, Delaware supported a larger proportion of free people in its African American population (76 percent) than New York (63 percent) or New Jersey (42 percent).
[ii][ii] The first Black Presbyterian preacher was John Chavis, who was taught on his master’s plantation. This event occurred at the end of the eighteenth century. Soon afterwards, John Gloucester, who would later become the pastor of the first Black Presbyterian congregation, earned his freedom. Gloucester was the first missionary sent out from New Providence Presbyterian Church (Maryville, TN). He was an emancipated slave educated by Gideon Blackburn, ordained as a minister in the Presbytery of Union in 1810. He was sent to Philadelphia were he organized the First African Presbyterian Church. (Gloucester was a powerful preacher and a former Tennessee slave who had been brought to Philadelphia by his master in 1807. While white Presbyterians worked to obtain Gloucester’s release from slavery, he founded the first black Presbyterian church in the United States. It would take another dozen years for Gloucester to raise enough money to buy his family).This achievement was partially due to the efforts of Benjamin Rush, a white man who wanted to help the black community and who believed that it was cheaper to build them churches than to build them jails and the former would greatly alleviate the need for the latter (“Brotherly Love”). John Gloucestor’s congregation led to the founding of the first African Presbyterian Church in 1807. The Rev. Archibald Alexander, the pastor of Third Presbyterian Church wished to help create a separate African American Presbyterian church as early as 1806, and began training John Gloucester, the slave of former Tennessee minister Dr. Gideon Blackburn. After being set free by Blackburn and undergoing strict biblical teaching from Dr. Alexander, Gloucester founded the First African Presbyterian Church, which built its first building at Seventh and Bainbridge Streets in 1810. By touring Europe and giving lectures on the perils of American slavery, Gloucester was able to raise the necessary funds to purchase his wife out of bondage. Before his death in 1822, Gloucester had four sons; each trained for the ministry at Princeton. His oldest son, Jeremiah, founded Second African Presbyterian Church in 1824. In 1844, his second son, Stephen, founded Central Presbyterian Church, which moved to Lombard Street in 1848 after the construction of its new building near Ninth Street. It then adopted the name Lombard Street Central Presbyterian Church. Its Lombard Street building featured a stone obelisk monument in its courtyard as a memorial to its founder.
[iii] In 1824 he married Jane Livingston (d. 1844). The couple had four children: Sarah Matilda (1824–1846), William (b. 1826), Samuel (1828–1838), and Jane Sophia Tappan (1833–1855).
[iv] The War of 1812 against England ended in 1815. The war’s end ushered in an intense analysis of America’s future. Like another bomb bursting in mid-air, an anti-slavery movement erupted right after the war ended. One manifestation was the organization of manumission societies which promoted voluntary release of slaves to freedom. These societies were very numerous in the Mid-South. Each side was overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, believing the foundation was being laid for either the eventual elimination or the permanent entrenchment of slavery. The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1815 responded immediately by issuing a pronouncement that buying and selling of slaves is inconsistent with the spirit of the gospel. The Southern clergy generally in the immediate post-war era was promoting the elimination of slavery. All that the anti-slavery enthusiasts could do at that time on the subject of legal universal emancipation was to keep the subject before the public. The pro-slavery faction had the advantage of the constitution on its side. The elimination of slavery would require a constitutional amendment. This happened eventually in December 1865 through the thirteenth amendment. The only two proposals which the anti-slavery forces could offer in 1815 were voluntary manumission and repatriation of slaves in Africa.Dr. Samuel Hopkins (pastor of First Congregational Church of Newport, Rhode Island. He is recognized as the father of the anti-slavery movement in America.) in 1776 had proposed to transport as many slaves as possible to a colony in Africa. In 1816 President James Monroe, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay promoted the formation of the American Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color in the United States. The Congress purchased land in what became Liberia. In 1819 the Presbyterian General Assembly endorsed the colonization organization. Some African colonization was accomplished, hut this did nothing for the status of the increasing number of slaves in America. The slavery controversy was intensified by the dreams of American expansion. The planter class coveted for slavery all the new territories that might be created. An immediate major issue was the slavery status of additional prospective states in the Louisiana Territory. In 1818, America began committing itself to compromise on the slavery issue as the Congress began debate on the Missouri Compromise. Since 1812 Dr. Isaac Anderson had been the pastor of the dynamic New Providence Church in Maryville, TN. He had been a student under Dr. Samuel Carrick, a strong Calvinist. Since then Dr. Anderson had become a Hopkinsian under the indoctrination of his predecessor at New Providence Church, Dr. Gideon Blackburn.The slavery controversy reached a grand climax in the General Assembly of 1818. The emotion of the issue had been brewing in the General Assembly since 1815 when a young Virginia minister, George Bourne, had published in 1815 a rabid anti-slavery book. Bourne was a fiery, bitter, intransigent, and indomitable opponent of slavery. Bourne wanted to abolish slavery now. He was dubbed the “first immediatist.” Two of his beliefs were that slave-holding members should be ejected immediately from the church and that slave-holding ministers were blasphemous. Bourne was a prototype of William Lloyd Garrison who claimed he received more inspiration from Bourne’s book than any other book except the Bible. After the publication of his book, Bourne’s Virginia presbytery deposed him. The synod concurred with the presbytery. The case came to the General Assembly in 1816. The assembly remanded the case to presbytery for further study. The presbytery and synod deposed Bourne again. The case was taken up again in an early session of the General Assembly of 1818. The friends of slavery had come to the General Assembly with the fixed purpose of deposing Bourne. After a long debate the General Assembly sustained the Presbytery this time. Technically Bourne was deposed for heresy. The docket for the 1818 General Assembly also included a strong anti-slavery resolution containing the following main points: slavery is a violation of the social rights of human nature, is utterly inconsistent with the Law of God, and is irreconcilable with the principles of the gospel of Christ. It exhorted Christians to efface the blot on holy religion of slavery anywhere. It urged the instruction of slaves and the discontinuance of cruelty, particularly in the separation of families. It forbade a Presbyterian church member to sell any slave without the slave’s consent. The anti-slavery resolution was scheduled in a late session. A side agreement arose in the assembly to pass the resolution unanimously. As for the pro-slavery delegates who had led the effort to depose Bourne: those who could not conscientiously vote for the resolution left the assembly early to avoid voting; some were willing to vote for anything after Bourne was deposed; and some who objected to Bourne’s radical tactics could conscientiously vote for the resolution. The recorded vote on the resolution was unanimous in favor. However, this really just covered up a very serious rift in the assembly on the slavery issue. The real evidence of such a rift is that no Presbyterian General Assembly took up the slavery issue for nearly thirty years except for a resolution in 1819 to support returning slaves voluntarily to Africa. In effect the General Assembly had talked out of both sides of its mouth. Obviously the seeds of the later separation of the Presbyterian Church into the Old School and the New School were already planted.
[v] That included John Russworm (the first African-American to earn a US college degree) and William Hamilton (pastor of AME Zion Church) and Peter Williams, Jr. (pastor of St. Philips African Episcopal Church).
[vi] And while he conceded that the per capita number of blacks in prison was higher than whites, he argued that “the coloured man’s offense, three out of four, grows out of the circumstances of his condition, while the white man’s most generally, is premeditated and vicious.”
[vii] Such as the Presbyterians Cornish, Wright, James W.C. Pennington (a Presbyterian church, Brooklyn) (James W. C. Pennington had started as a slave in Maryland. He fled as a young man to Connecticut because slavery had been abolished here, and he eventually became a minister at the Talcott Street Church, Hartford, CT. He studied at Yale and also later during a stay at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Pennington was an abolitionist lecturer, and as a representative of the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society and Union Mission Society, he spoke throughout the Northeast and in Europe. One of Pennington’s interesting efforts was his publication of an anti-slavery newspaper called The Clarksonian. The first issue was published in 1843, and it was intended as a means to keep in touch with fellow abolitionists during his travels. The first issue begins with a long letter to Thomas Clarkson of Ipswich, England, and hence the name. Copies of this paper are very scarce, which is a shame, for it would be an excellent source for the history of the abolition movement. Pennington notes here that the most significant development in Connecticut affecting abolition since the “great Amistad case” was the Christian Convention held in June 1842, and another held in Middletown in October 1843. The aim of these conventions was to unite white people around the abolition issue without becoming sidetracked by “various frivolous disputations such as woman question, &c.” He further notes that many [white Christians] who are not avowedly abolitionists are ashamed of direct opposition.” Nevertheless, he observes, “At the outset in this cause the ministers did not take the lead as they are expected to do on every great question of morals; nor did Christians generally take a part as such.” Pennington does mention his fellow Blacks when he says, “I am still more seriously convinced of the necessity and obligation resting upon colored men to speak and write freely for themselves.” However, the point serves only as an excuse for having “laid off my modesty as a moth eaten garment” to “speak and write freely for myself.” Nothing is clear from this that he saw Blacks per se as agents of change. At a later point, Pennington responds to the question about how the anti-slavery cause is advancing by saying, “Not rapidly, but I think it is gradually laying firm hold on the conscience of the nation.” He feels that the first step is to persuade Churches and ministers to preach that slavery is sinful. Again, the engine of change is the moral arguments of the elite rather than the solidarity of ordinary Blacks. “We were married by Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, then a well-known and respected Presbyterian minister. I had no money with which to pay the marriage fee, but he seemed well pleased with our thanks.” Frederick Douglass.), and Henry Highland Garnet (Troy, NY) (Henry Highland Garnet was born into slavery near New Market, Kent County, Maryland, on December 23, 1815. His father, George Trusty, was the son of a Mandingo warrior prince, taken prisoner in combat. George and Henny (Henrietta) Trusty had one other child, a girl named Mary. George had learned the trade of shoemaking. The Trusty’s owner, William Spencer died in 1824. A few weeks later 11 members of the Trusty family received permission to attend a family funeral. They never returned. Traveling first in a covered market wagon and then on foot for several days, the family group made its way to Wilmington, Delaware. There they separated; seven went to New Jersey, and Garnet’s immediate family went to New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Garnet had his first schooling. In 1825 the Garnets moved to New York City. There, after earnest prayer, George Trusty gave new names to the family. His wife Henny became Elizabeth, his daughter Mary, Eliza. Although the original first names of George and Henry are unknown, the family name became Garnet. George Garnet found work as a shoemaker and also became a class-leader and exhorter in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Bethel, in Mott Street. Henry Highland Garnet entered the African Free School in Mott Street in 1826. There he found an extraordinary group of school mates. They included Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal priest and a leading black intellectual, who was Garnet’s neighbor and close boyhood friend; Samuel Ringgold Ward, a celebrated abolitionist and a cousin of Garnet; James McCune Smith, the first black to earn a medical degree; Ira Aldridge, the celebrated actor; and Charles Reason, the first black college professor in the United States and long-time educator in black schools. Garnet and his classmates formed their own club, Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association, and soon had occasion to demonstrate their spirit. Garrison’s abolitionism had little mass support among whites at this time, and abolition meeting in New York City easily lead to mob violence. Thus, even the school authorities feared the use of his name for a club meeting at the school. The boys retained the club’s name and moved their activities elsewhere. As a boy, Garnet was high-spirited and quite different from the sober and quiet adult he later became. In 1828 he made two voyages to Cuba as a cabin boy, and in 1829 he worked as a cook and steward on a schooner from New York to Washington, D.C. On his return from this voyage, he learned that the family had been scattered by the threat of slave catchers. His father had escaped by leaping from the upper floor of the house at 137 Leonard Street–next door to the home of Alexander Crummell. His mother had been sheltered by the family of a neighboring grocer. His sister was taken but successfully maintained a claim that she had always been a resident of New York and therefore no fugitive slave. All of the family’s furniture had been stolen or destroyed. Garnet bought a large clasp-knife to defend himself and wandered on Broadway with ideas of vengeance. Friends found him and sent him to hide at Jericho on Long Island. Since Garnet had to support himself, he was bound out to Epenetus Smith of Smithtown, Long Island, as a farm worker. While he was there he was tutored by Smith’s son Samuel. In the second year there, when he was 15, Garnet injured his knee playing sports so severely that his indentures were canceled. The leg never properly healed, and he used crutches for the rest of his life. (After 13 years of suffering and illness, the leg was finally amputated at the hip in December 1840.) Garnet returned to his family, which had reestablished itself in New York. He then continued his schooling, and in 1831 he entered the newly established high school for blacks, rejoining Alexander Crummell as a fellow student. The leg injury may have sobered Garnet, who became more studious and turned his thoughts to serious consideration of religion. Sometime between 1833 and 1835 he joined the Sunday school of the First Colored Presbyterian Church, located at the corner of William and Frankfort streets. There Garnet became the protégé of minister and noted abolitionist Theodore Sedgewick Wright, the first black graduate of Princeton’s Theological Seminary, who brought about Garnet’s conversion and then encouraged him to enter the ministry. Wright baptized Garnet, and Garnet later preached Wright’s funeral sermon. Garnet married Julia Ward Williams (1811–1870) in 1841, the year he was ordained an elder. Julia Williams was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but came to Boston at an early age. She studied at Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, which was suppressed by law, and also at Noyes Academy. She taught school in Boston for several years. After her marriage she was head of the Female Industrial School while the family lived in Jamaica. When she was back in New York, she ran a store at 174 West Thirtieth Street, and in Washington, in the 1860s, she worked with freedmen. The couple had three children: James Crummell (1844-1851); Mary Highland (born c.1845), and a second son (born 1850). Some sources say this son died; however, a 20-year old Henry Garnet is listed as living with his father in the Pittsburgh city directory of 1870–71. There was also an adopted daughter Stella Weims, a fugitive slave. Henry Highland Garnet was noted for his ability to establish rapport with children and for his respect for his wife. In his eulogy Alexander Crummell remarked, “I was both struck and charmed with the same gallantry displayed to the wife after marriage that he had shown her before.” Julia Garnet died in 1870, and about 1879 he married Susan Smith Thompkins (1831–1911), a noted New York teacher and school principal. In 1835 Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Thomas S. Sidney, classmates from New York, made the difficult journey to the newly-established Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. Founded by abolitionists, Noyes was open to both blacks and whites and to men and women. (There Garnet met Julia Williams.) The students from New York were in New Hampshire by July 4, when they delivered fiery orations at an abolitionist meeting. A vocal minority of local townspeople were determined to close down the school and drive away the 14 blacks enrolled. In August they attached teams of oxen to the schoolhouse, dragged it away, and burned it. The mob also surrounded the house where Garnet and some of the other blacks were living, and someone fired into the room he was occupying. That evening the mob gathered again but Garnet fired a shot which discouraged them. Although Garnet was ill with a fever, he and the two friends set out for New York. They crossed the mountains to Albany and came down the Hudson. On the steamboat blacks were forced to travel on the open foredeck. Garnet was now very sick, and his friends spread their coats under him and shielded him from the sun with an umbrella. On his arrival in New York, Garnet spent nearly two months in bed. Fortunately, there was another institution which opened its doors to black students, and this time the local townspeople did not rise up physically to reject them. In early 1836 Garnet joined Crummell and Sidney at Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. Garnet began in the preparatory department while his fellow students were listed as sophomores. In May 1840 Garnet attended the meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York and delivered a well-received maiden speech. In September, he graduated from Oneida with honors and settled in Troy, New York. Even though Garnet was not yet ordained, he had been called as minister to the newly established Liberty Street Presbyterian Church at Troy, New York. Garnet studied theology with the noted minister and abolitionist, Nathaniel S. S. Beman, taught school, and worked toward the full establishment of the church whose congregation was black. In 1842 Garnet was licensed to preach and in the following year ordained a minister. He thus became the first pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church in Troy, where he remained until 1848. Teaching and the ministry hardly filled all of Garnet’s time. He assisted in editing The National Watchman, an abolitionist paper published in Troy during the latter part of 1842, and later edited The Clarion, which combined abolitionist and religious themes. Closely interwoven with Garnet’s church work was his work in the Temperance Movement, in which he took a leading part. By 1843 he received a stipend of $100 a year from the American Home Missionary Society for his work for abolition and temperance. When the society expressed its objections to ministers engaging in politics on Sundays, Garnet withdrew his services. His work for temperance was widely recognized. In 1848 one of the two Daughters of Temperance unions in Philadelphia was named for him. State politics also brought Garnet into prominence. There were black state conventions from 1836 to 1850 (unfortunately only the minutes of the 1844 convention survive today). Garnet worked for the extension of black male voting rights in New York, but a property holding qualification was imposed upon blacks. He presented several petitions to the legislature on this subject. However, the state property qualification remained the law until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white abolitionist, decided to increase the number of black voters by giving some of his land to black farmers in 1846. Garnet was one of his agents in delegating land; most of his choices were still farming several years later. In 1839 the Liberty Party came into existence with abolition as one of its major planks. Although its vote in the 1840 elections was minuscule, the party set its sights on the 1844 election. Garnet became an early and enthusiastic supporter of this reform party. He delivered a major address at the party’s 1842 meeting in Boston. He was also able to secure the endorsement of the revived National Convention of Colored Men, held in Albany in August 1843 for the party. Garnet gave a convincing demonstration of his oratorical powers soon afterwards when he turned around a New York City meeting convened to disavow the convention’s action. Much to the organizers’ disappointment the meeting ended by endorsing the Liberty Party. The year 1844 marked a peak for the party. Then the Free Soil Party and later the Republican Party began to attract reform-minded voters. Garnet was late and unenthusiastic in supporting the Republicans. Garnet’s turn towards activism marked his break with leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who rejected politics in favor of moral reform. Garnet’s impatience with Garrison’s position was expressed publicly as early as 1840 when he was one of the eight black founding members of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society which formalized the split in the ranks of abolitionists. Garnet gave further proof of his disaffection in 1843. The August 1843 National Negro Convention in Albany, New York, gathered more than 70 delegates in the first such convention since the early 1830s. Garnet was a prominent member; in particular he was chairman of the nine-member business committee, which was charged with organizing the issues for discussion. He electrified the convention with “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America,” in which he urged slaves to take action to gain their own freedom: You had far better all die–die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. … 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. The audience was profoundly moved: some wept, others sat with clenched fists. Frederick Douglass, who was not ready to abandon Garrisonian moral suasion, joined with others in opposition to Garnet’s position. Douglass spoke for more than an hour against adopting the speech. The rules were suspended to allow Garnet to reply for an hour and a half in a speech, which James McCune Smith said was Garnet’s greatest. Unfortunately neither Douglass’s speech nor Garnet’s reply survive today. The original address was referred to the business committee for moderation and eventually failed to be adopted by one vote. Garnet’s call for action echoes that of David Walker’s Appeal of 1829, and Garnet underlined the similarity in 1848, when he first published his speech together with the Appeal to support the Free Soil Party’s campaign for the presidency. Part of the money for the publication is said to have come from abolitionist John Brown. Just as Garnet was in the vanguard of the blacks who began to seek remedies in political action and even revolution, he also led the way in proposing emigration as a solution for black plight in the United States as proposed by the American Colonization Society. Since 1817 most American blacks condemned the American Colonization Society and were suspicious of the society’s aims and of its creation, the nation of Liberia, which became independent in 1847. Garnet, however, was coming to favor black emigration to any area where there might be hope of being treated justly and with dignity. Bitter personal experience soon underlined his position: in the summer of that year he was choked, beaten, and thrown off a train in New York State. Garnet moved from Troy to Geneva in 1848. Then in 1850 he went to Great Britain at the invitation of the Free Labor Movement, an organization opposing the use of products produced by slave labor. The following year he was joined by his family. There he remained for two and a half years, undertaking a very rigorous schedule of engagements. Both James McCune Smith and Frederick Douglass felt he was doing especially well because he was the first American black of completely African descent to appear there to speak in support of abolition. Douglass did not relax his general hostility to Garnet, however, and gave little attention to Garnet’s activities abroad. In the latter part of 1852, the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland sent Garnet to Jamaica as a missionary. He did effective work there until a severe prolonged illness caused his doctors to order him north. In 1855 he was called to Shiloh Church on Prince Street, where he became the successor of his mentor, Theodore S. Wright. It is reported that the church was in parlous condition, but Garnet soon had it flourishing again. His reputation as an orator and spokesperson grew, and his sermons were often printed in their entirety. Although the support for emigration was growing in the black community, Garnet had to face sharp criticism for his position in favor of it, particularly from Frederick Douglass. Douglass commented sharply on a request for American blacks to go to Jamaica made by Garnet before his return. Criticism grew when Garnet founded the African Civilization Society in 1859. He explained the society’s aims in an 1860 speech, reprinted in Ofari’s book “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” “We believe that Africa is to be redeemed by Christian civilization and that the great work is to be chiefly achieved by the free and voluntary emigration of enterprising colored people.” Alexander Crummell, Garnet’s boyhood friend and fellow student who had established himself in Liberia after earning a degree from Cambridge University in England endorsed the goal, as did the influential West-Indian born educator Edward Wilmot Blyden. Garnet made a trip to England as president of the society in 1861. In conjunction with this trip he established a civil rights breakthrough by insisting that his passport contain the word Negro. Before this time the handful of passports issued to blacks had managed to skirt the issue of whether blacks were or were not citizens of the United States by labeling the bearer with some term such as dark. Although Garnet’s and Martin Delany‘s efforts at colonization at this time were running in parallel and not coordinated, the pair agreed on aims. Garnet proposed a visit to Africa to follow up Delany’s 1859 efforts there, but the plan fell through with the outbreak of the Civil War. A side-effect of Garnet’s support of emigration and his trip to England in 1861 was an attempt of the board of trustees of Shiloh Church to force him out as pastor. The controversy ended in 1862 when the congregation accepted the resignation of the entire board by a wide majority. With the outbreak of the war, Garnet joined other blacks in urging the formation of black units. When this goal was realized during the beginning of 1863, he traveled to recruit blacks and served as chaplain to the black troops of New York State, who were assembled on Ryker’s island for training. He led the work of charitable organizations which worked to overcome the unfavorable conditions initially facing the men due to wide-scale corruption and anti-black sentiments in the city. Garnet’s prominence made him one of the prime targets of a white working-class mob during the July 1863 draft riots in New York City when blacks and leading abolitionists were assailed. The rioters appeared on Thirtieth Street, where Garnet resided, calling for him by name. Fortunately his daughter had torn off the brass door plate with an axe, so the house escaped plundering, and several white neighbors helped conceal him and his family. In the aftermath of the insurrection, Garnet headed the distribution of charitable contributions collected by a committee of white merchants. In March 1864 Garnet became pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church of Washington. D.C. There he delivered a sermon in the chamber of the House of Representatives on February 12, 1865, the first black to do so, and also one of the first blacks allowed to enter the Capitol. He moved his residence to Washington and became the editor of the Southern Department of the Anglo-African. As an assignment Garnet undertook a four month trip to the South at the end of the war, which included a visit to his birthplace. Garnet accepted the presidency of Avery College in Pittsburgh in 1868, but returned to Shiloh Church in New York in 1870. Alexander Crummell reported that Garnet went into a physical and mental decline about 1876 and that “sorrow and discouragement fell upon his soul, and at times the wounded spirit sighed for release.” In this mood, in spite of the discouragement of his friends, Garnet actively lobbied for the position of minister to Liberia, which he obtained. Crummell recorded Garnet as saying: Please the Lord I can only safely cross the ocean, land on the coast of Africa, look around upon its green fields, tread the soil of my ancestors, live if but a few weeks; then I shall be glad to lie down and be buried beneath its sod. Garnet’s wish was granted. He preached his farewell sermon at Shiloh on November 6, 1881. He landed in Monrovia on December 28 and died on February, 12, 1882. He was given a state funeral by the Liberian government, and Edward Blyden preached the funeral sermon. When Alexander Crummell delivered his eulogy of Garnet in Washington, D.C., Frederick Douglass, his former opponent, and Henry McNeil Turner, Garnet’s intellectual heir as leader of the emigration and black nationalist movement in the later nineteenth century, were platform guests. Henry Highland Garnet was six-feet tall and a handsome man. Crummell, whose standards were high, said that he was no thorough scholar due to his constant illnesses but that he was outstanding for sheer intelligence and flair. Speaking from his own experience, James McCune Smith said that few persons who faced him in debate on the platform cared to do so a second time. His friends testified to his wit and humor, which made him popular, even among children. Garnet was an important figure among black abolitionists. He was independent in forming his own views and bold in expressing them. At an early date he helped articulate many of the themes of black nationalism. He wished to build up black-controlled institutions, and in the early 1840s he was calling unsuccessfully for the establishment of a black printing company and a black college. He consistently supported black efforts of self-improvement, and included emigration as one of these efforts. It was his conviction that blacks must take their control of destiny that led him in 1843 to call upon slaves to take action and end slavery.),[vii] and Episcopalian Peter Williams.
[viii] Such as Presbyterians William Goodell (New York abolitionist William Goodell (1792-187 
helped organize both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty party. Goodell wrote extensively and edited a long list of antislavery and reform newspapers, including the Genius of Temperance, the Emancipator, the Friend of Man, the American Jubilee, the Radical Abolitionist, and Principia. Upon moving to Honeoye, New York, in 1843, he founded a nonsectarian church based on temperance and antislavery principle. Convinced that even those churches which remained neutral on the slavery issue were anti-Christian, Goodell argued that successful reforms must “begin at the house of God.” He therefore urged abolitionists to withdraw from existing churches in his doctrine of “Come-Outerism.” Goodell shared common ground with both camps of American abolitionism. Although he differed with the Garrisonians over the value of political abolitionism, the proslavery character of the Constitution, and various theological matters, Goodell shared old organization views on nonviolence and the necessity of attacking slavery on religious grounds.), Joshua Leavitt (Joshua Leavitt, reformer, 1794-1873. He was graduated at Yale in 1814, admitted to the bar in 1819, and began to practise in Putney, Vermont, in 1821. In 1823 he abandoned his profession for the study of theology, and was graduated at Yale divinity school in 1825. He settled the same year at Stratford, Connecticut, where he had charge of a Congregational church until 1828. In 1819, while a student of law, in Heath, Mr. Leavitt organized one of the first Sabbath schools in western Massachusetts, embracing not; only the children, but the entire congregation, all of whom were arranged in classes for religious instruction. He also became interested in the improvement of the public schools. Before he entered the theological seminary he prepared a new reading book, called “Easy Lessons in Reading” (1823), which met with all extensive sale. He subsequently issued a “Series of Readers” (1847), but these were not as popular. When the American temperance society was formed he became its first secretary, and was one of its traveling agents, in many places delivering the first temperance lecture the people had heard. In 1828 he removed to New York city as secretary of the American seamen’s friend society and editor of the “Sailor’s Magazine.” he established chapels in Canton, the Sandwich islands, Havre, New Orleans, and other domestic and foreign ports. He also aided in founding the first city temperance society, and became its secretary. He became in 1831 editor and proprietor of the newly established “Evangelist,” which under his management soon grew to be the organ of the more liberal religious movements, and was outspoken on the subjects of temperance and slavery. Mr. Leavitt bore a conspicuous part in the early antislavery conflict. His denunciation of slavery cost his paper its circulation in the south and a large proportion of it in the north, well-nigh compelling its suspension. To offset this loss he undertook the difficult feat of reporting in full the revival lectures of Charles G. Finney, which, though not a short-hand reporter, he accomplished successfully. The financial crisis of 1837 compelled him, while erecting a new building, to sell out the “Evangelist.” In 1833 he aided in organizing the New York anti-slavery society, and was a member of its executive committee, as well as of that of the National anti-slavery society in which it was merged. He was one of the abolitionists who were obliged to fly for a time from the city to escape mob violence. In 1837 he became editor of the “Emancipator,” which he afterward moved to Boston, and he also published in that city “The Chronicle,” the earliest daily anti-slavery paper. In the convention that, net at Albany in 1840 and organized the Liberal party, Mr. Leavitt took an active part, and he was also chairman of the national committee from 1844 till 1847. In 1848 Mr. Leavitt became office editor of the New York “Independent,” and was connected editorially with it until his death. Mr. Leavitt was an earnest and powerful speaker. In 1855 Wabash college conferred on him the degree of D.D. Dr. Leavitt’s correspondence with Richard Cobden, and his “Memoir on Wheat,” setting forth the unlimited capacity of our western territory for the growth and exportation of that cereal, were instrumental in procuring the repeal of the English corn laws. During a visit to Europe he also became much interested in Sir Rowland Hill’s system of cheap postage. In 1847 he founded the Cheap Postage Society of Boston. and in 1848-’9 he labored in Washington in its behalf, for the establishment of a two-cent rate. In 1869 he received a gold medal from the Cobden club of England for an essay on our commercial relations with Great Britain. in which he took an advanced position in favor of free-trade. Besides the works already mentioned, he published a hymn-book for revivals, entitled the “Christian Lyre” (1831).),[viii] George Bourne (George Bourne (1780-1845), clergyman and abolitionist, moved from England to Baltimore in 1804. After six tumultuous years as a journalist and local politician, he moved to the Harrisonburg area of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, where he became the pastor of a Presbyterian church. Bourne’s exposure to the plantation system in Virginia caused him to become violently opposed to slavery. His controversial stance on the issue led to his expulsion from the church. Bourne left Virginia, and after living briefly in several different New England states, he settled in New York City in 1829. He continued work on abolitionist causes for the rest of his life; he was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a frequent contributor to the Liberator.), Henry Ludlow (Henry G. Ludlow was a outspoken abolitionist minister at a time when anti-slavery enthusiasm was not popular, even in the urban North where he preached. Rev. Ludlow was one of the more radical and emotional of the abolitionists; one source has him “[going] so far as to appeal to all Northern negroes for support, and to defend intermarriage between whites and blacks” another says that “[i]n his pulpit ministrations he would frequently weep copiously in his appeals to his people - indeed tears were said to be an invariable accompaniment of his sermons.” His position of prominence in the New York abolitionist movement made him a frequent target of the (often equally emotionally charged) opposition. One of the churches where he preached was partially demolished in 1834 in a night of anti-abolitionist rioting, and on another occasion he complains in a letter to his brother that he was “mobbed and egged… in broad day light… in the presence of approving & assenting justices of the peace and other officers of the town set to preserve the Constitutional rights of its Citizens.” Only months before his birth, Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote, “my father, mother, and sister were driven from their house in New York by a furious mob. When they came cautiously back, their home was quiet as a fortress the day after it has been blown up. The front-parlor was full of paving-stones; the carpets were cut to pieces; the pictures, the furniture, and the chandelier lay in one common wreck; and the walls were covered with inscriptions of mingled insult and glory. Over the mantel-piece had been charcoaled ‘Rascal’; over the pier-table, ‘Abolitionist.’”) and Samuel Cox.
[ix] An interesting story is told concerning Arthur Tappan and Cornish. Tappan was a pew holder in Samuel Cox’s Laight Street Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. One Sunday morning on his way to church, Tappan encountered Cornish on the street. As Cox’s church was nearby – 2 miles closer to Cornish’s home than where Cornish usually worshipped – Tappan invited him in and the two sat together in Tappan’s pew. This led to a tremendous row with some church members threatening to resign and the elders insisting that Tappan not repeat the offense. Rev. Cox, however, chided his congregation for its intolerance. Arguing that as Christ was probably of a dark Syrian skin hue, Jesus might well have been rejected along with Samuel. Cox denounced “nigger pews” and called for an integrated congregation. He was instantly subjected to citywide attack.
[x] His associate on the paper was Philip A. Bell, later a noted California newspaper editor who started the Weekly Advocate in 1827.
[xi] This controversial opinion led to his estrangement from the activist wing of the anti-slavery movement. New York Committee of Vigilance and David Ruggles, an organization dedicated to helping fugitive slaves
[xii] Cornish was refused a cup of tea in a restaurant patronized by the editors of the American Bible Society, the Track Society and the workers who put out the New Evangelist on the excuse that the restaurant’s “customers would not put up with” with drinking with a negro. (Sorjourner Truth, Painter).
[xiii] The most important African-American newspaper between 1839-1842 was the Colored American, published from New York City at 9 Spruce Street but circulating in free black communities up and down the northern seaboard. It was launched in 1836, by Samuel Cornish, Philip Bell, and Charles Bennett Ray. The paper was a weekly, running between four and six pages. Pronouncing its editorial mission as “the moral, social and political elevation of the free colored people; and the peaceful emancipation of the slaves,” the Colored American gave prominent coverage to abolitionist activity and to civil rights issues in the north. In the presidential campaign of 1840, it declared in favor of Liberty Party candidate James Birney, though the paper was not a partisan organ. By 1839, Ray had taken over as the paper’s sole owner and editor. Ray was an African-American Massachusetts native who had briefly attended Wesleyan University, worked as a boot maker in New York City, and been ordained as a minister in 1837. He was a prominent figure in the American Anti-Slavery Society, a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad, and a member of New York’s Vigilance Committee. He also supported missionary and temperance causes, as well as educational programs within New York’s African American community. Like other antebellum newspapers, the Colored American employed agents in various cities to drum up subscribers. And it used abolitionist organizations to market itself; in 1837 the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society urged its members to support the paper, and at the organization’s next annual meeting lists circulated soliciting subscribers. Even so, the paper frequently teetered on the brink of financial collapse. Its primary readership — the northern free black community — was chronically hard-pressed for cash, though at several crisis points determined fund drives raised critical donations from African-American churches and local abolitionist societies. These efforts, supplemented by occasional cash infusions from prominent white allies, enabled the paper to survive through 1841 (the last issue was published on Christmas day), recording the voice of a small and scattered but vitally active free African-American community.
