its aptness of statement, its indignant protest against slavery, its eloquence. It deserves to be printed and preserved as a document of like character as Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence.

"Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this and the days of slavery are numbered. You can not be more oppressed than you have been. You can not 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 slaveholder 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 his oppressor low."

"Rather die freemen than live to be slaves," the keynote of the address was more than a mild protest against the pro-slavery prosecutions to which freemen of color were subjected throughout the North seventy years ago.

Garnet was born December 23, 1815, at New Market, Kent County, Maryland. At the early age of ten the family left by the Underground Railroad for the North and stopped in New York City. Here he availed himself of the meager educational advantages which the metropolis gave colored youth. Aspiring for higher education, he went first in vain to New Hampshire as indicated and subsequently to Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, New York, of which Beriah Green, a very capable educator, was principal. In 1840 he graduated and shortly afterward entered the Presbyterian Ministry, founded a Presbyterian Church at Troy, New York, meanwhile editing a weekly newspaper called The Clarion.

The school attended by Garnet included among other boys, Ira Aldridge, who became the great actor, Patrick H. Reason, the splendid engraver, who twenty-five years afterwards engraved

the massive coffin plate of Daniel Webster, his brother, Prof. Charles L. Reason, Rev. Alexander Crummell, Dr. James McCune Smith and Samuel Ringgold Ward, "the ablest thinker on his legs."

Garnet was a natural born orator. He had keen wit, was fond of the poets, possessed a lively imagination, was quick at repartee and was endowed with a sympathetic voice that alike reached the child of tender years, the man in his prime and those past the meridian. He was also combative. Few were the men at that time who would dare to meet him in debate before an audience. On the platform in behalf of the slave, or in the pulpit as a champion of Christianity, his voice once heard echoed and reëchoed throughout the chambers of memory, carrying its message and fulfilling its mission.

In the darkest hour of the anti-slavery struggle, from 1855 to 1864, and after the Civil War, he was in charge of Shiloh Presbyterian Church in New York City, where his voice was heard not only by his congregation but his sermons and addresses reported in the press of that city, found their way throughout the country. For a time he was pastor of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D. C., a position now filled by Rev. F. J. Grimké. Here Members of Congress and other distinguished men in the war time listened to his voice. After the adoption by Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, at the request of Representatives, the Chaplain of the House of Representatives, Rev. William H. Channing, extended to Dr. Garnet an invitation to preach in the House of Representatives a sermon in memorial of the triumph of the Union Army and the deliverance of the country from chattel slavery. The contrast was the more remarkable that no colored person was permitted to have access to the Capitol grounds. Dr. Garnet rose to the occasion. A memorial volume was published with a biographical sketch by Dr. James A. McCune Smith of New York, the foremost literary Negro of that period.

From the National Capital he went to Avery College, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, as its president, but although he was a great admirer of youth, the position of college president was not to his taste and he returned to his old pulpit in New York.

The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment which removed the restriction against the use of the elective franchise, gave to the Negro in the North a potential political influence, and power to men who could sway the multitude by their eloquence and oratory. Henry Highland Garnet in addition to being the magnetic pulpit orator became in emergencies the popular political leader. In 1872 Frederick Douglass was chosen elector in the Presidential canvass that reëlected Ulysses S. Grant as President, and in 1880 when James A. Garfield was chosen, the Empire State was honored in the nomination and confirmation of Henry Highland Garnet, as Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia. He was now sixty-six years old and his personal friends advised against the acceptance of the new position, which required residence in a treacherous and unhealthy climate, but worn out by long, unrequited service in behalf of his people, broken in health, with his domestic circle no longer the ideal home of his prime, Garnet gladly accepted the honor. The author recalls this language from Garnet's lips expressed during a dinner tendered him during his last visit to the Capital: "Oh, Alexander," addressing his host, Dr. Crummell, "if I can just reach the land of my forefathers and with my feet press her soil, I shall be content to die." This was a prophecy shortly fulfilled. Dr. Garnet reached Monrovia late in the year 1881, and before two months had passed away, his proud spirit was released. He was given a public funeral, honors befitting his high station were given his remains. Edward W. Blyden who had known him for two decades, delivered the eulogy.