The Rhetoric of Black Violence in the Antebellum Period: Henry Highland Garnet

Author(s): Steven H. Shiffrin

Source: Journal of Black Studies , Sep., 1971, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Sep., 1971), pp. 45-56
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783699

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Journal of Black Studies

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Rhetoric of Black Violence
in the Antebellum Period
Henry Highland Garnet
STEVEN H. SHIFFRIN
San Fernando Valley State College

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....
(Garnet in Woodson, 1925, 1969)

A group of students recently asked to identify the author of

that statement responded in several ways-Stokely Car-
michael; Malcolm X; Eldridge Cleaver; H. Rap Brown. One
poor soul who noticed the religious trappings of the
quotation, but missed the violent substance of the message,
identified the author as Martin Luther King. Actually, the
passage appeared in a speech more than 100 years before
Malcolm X challenged black people to use "any means
necessary."
The speech, the earliest extant speech by a black man
advocating violence in America, entitled An Address to the
Slaves of the United States, was delivered before the National
Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, New York, in
1843. The speaker, who has been called "radical" (Woodson,
1925, 1969); "militant" (Lester, 1968; Dumond, 1961), "an
apostle of revolt" (Bennett, 1961), and the "Thomas Paine"

[45]

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[46] JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

apostle of revolt" (Bennett, 1961), and the "Thomas Paine"

of the abolitionist movement (Loggins, 1931, 1964), was a
27-year-old Presbyterian minister of the Gospel: Henry
Highland Garnet (see Brewer, 1928; Bennett, 1961: 149;
Simmons, 1887[1968]: 656-661; also A. Smith, 1970).1
Despite the significance of the speech and the speaker,
Henry Highland Garnet is virtually unknown to students of
American history, most of whom have been the recipients of
studies tinged by notions of white superiority. And, as
scholars have recently begun to wring racism out of our
history, attempts to reorient historical studies face a further
barrier: the belief shared by many of our better students that
anything that happened before 1960, let alone before 1900,
cannot possibly be relevant.
But even the casual study of black rhetoric in the period of
1830-1860 reveals the same issues, controversies, and heated
discussions which currently divide black leaders. In that
period, black abolitionists fiercely debated today's questions.
Should black people work in integrated or separated organi-
zations? Should their destiny lie in the United States or in an
independent black nation? Should their reform efforts work
inside or outside the political system? Black orators debated
the whole question of nonviolence versus violence as a means
to secure liberation (for an excellent introduction to the
black abolitionists, see Litwack, 1961; also see Quarles, 1969;
for unpublished material, see Dick, 1969, 1964; Kennicott,
1967, 1970a, 1970b). The speeches and persuasive essays of
Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Charles Lenox Remond,
Henry Highland Garnet, and a host of others deserve study
for the insights they afford for rhetorical problems that are as
immediately relevant as they are historically significant (the
most useful collection of speeches is in Woodson, 1925,
1969; but see also Aptheker, 1951; Nelson, 1914).
We shall focus here on one such problem: the problem of
advocating black violence in antebellum America. Henry
Highland Garnet's "Call to Rebellion" provides a convenient
vehicle for this focus.

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Shiffrin / RHETORIC OF ANTEBELLUM BLACK VIOLENCE [47]

The extent of black revolutionary violence in the pre-

Civil War period is a persistent subject of debate among
scholars of black history. Ulrich Phillips (Aptheker, 1943:
13) claims that "Slave revolts and plots occurred very seldom
in the United States" (see also Meir and Rudwick, 1966: 61;
Phillips, 1918: 463-488). On the other hand, Herbert
Aptheker (1943) believes that slaves were constantly rebel-
ling. Irrespective of the merits of the dispute all would surely
agree with John Hope Franklin (1967: 210) that "Revolts or
conspiracies to revolt persisted down to 1865. They began
with the institution and did not end until slavery was
abolished." The most famous of the rebellions, the Nat
Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, pro-
vides the best short answer to those Southern apologists who
contend that black slaves were happy, docile, and coopera-
tive. And, yet, as Kenneth Stampp (1956) writes in his classic
work, The Peculiar Institution, the Turner revolt did much to
curtail Southern slave violence. He says:

The Turner story was not likely to encourage slaves to make new
attempts to win their freedom by fighting for it. They now
realized that they would face a united white community, well
armed and quite willing to annihilate as much of the black
population as might seem necessary.

If the Nat Turner revolt terrified the Southern slaveowner,

it equally frightened prospective revolutionaries. Indeed, if I
might be permitted a military judgment, it seems clear that
no slave uprising even had a chance of ultimate success. The
South had enacted Black Codes throughout the area, and
most seemed effectively designed to ensure maximum pro-
tection for whites and to enforce strict discipline among the
slaves (Franklin, 1967: 187-190).
Therefore, if Henry Highland Garnet were to persuasively
advocate revolutionary violence, he would have to confront
serious questions of practicality. Garnet's persuasive prob-
lems were compounded by the fact that the abolitionist

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[48] JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

movement was dominated by a religious fervor which claimed

nonviolence as an ultimate canon.2 Certainly, abolitionists
quarreled over numerous fundamental questions, but anar-
chists and absolutists within the movement agreed on
nonviolence. The appeal of nonviolence was so widespread
that James Birney, later to be the presidental candidate of
Garnet's Liberty Party, remarked in 1838 that he did not
know of a single abolitionist who would incite the slaves to
insurrection (Quarles, 1969: 226).
Garnet's audience was influenced by arguments ranging
from the solidly religious pleas of Garrisonite William
Whipper to the mixed pleas of Liberty Party leader Gerrit
Smith. Whipper, in 1837, cited the Biblical injunction,
"Whomsoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek turn unto
him the other also" (Woodson, 1925, 1969). And Whipper
concluded:

I rest my argument on the ground that whatever is Scriptural is

right, and that whatever is right is reasonable and from that
invulnerable position I mean not to stray for the sake of
expediency whatsoever [Woodson, 1925, 1969].

Gerrit Smith mixed secular and religious arguments in a

speech to the New York Anti-Slavery convention one year
before Garnet's call to rebellion. Smith asserted that:

Woeful as is slavery and desirable as is liberty, we entreat you to

endure the former-rather than take a violent and bloody hold of
the latter. Such, manifestly was the view of Paul to the slaves at
the time . . . the great majority of abolitionists . .. [will] dissuade
you from such resistance not on the high ground of absolute
morality, but on the comparatively low one of expediency.

Indeed, even Garnet had contributed to the atmosphere so

hostile to his message. Historians have erroneously conveyed
the impression that Garnet entertained a lifelong commit-
ment to revolutionary violence. Yet a speech delivered by
Garnet before the Massachusetts Liberty Party State Con-

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Shiffrin / RHETORIC OF ANTEBELLUM BLACK VIOLENCE [491

vention in January of 1842 has apparently escaped the notice

of Garnet's biographers.
In that speech Garnet said:

I cannot harbor the thought for a moment that ... [the slaves']
deliverance will be brought about by violence. No; our country
will not be so deaf to the cries of the oppressed; so regardless of
the commands of God.... No, the time for a last stern struggle
has not yet come.

But not one and a half years later, slave rebellion was an
idea whose time had come-for Henry Highland Garnet.
No conclusive evidence is available to tell us why Garnet
changed his mind. It is probable, though, that the Supreme
Court decision of Prigg v. Pennsylvania3 was the proverbial
straw that broke Garnet's faith in nonviolence. That decision
made it easier for slaveholders to recover fugitive slaves, and
Garnet was a fugitive slave. Less than three months after
Garnet's plea for nonviolence, he coauthored a resolution in
response to the Prigg decision which concurred "with the
sentiment of Patrick Henry and solemnly . .. [declared] that
we will have Liberty, or we will have death."
Nevertheless, when Garnet hobbled on his wooden leg to
the rostrum of the National Convention of Colored Citizens
to deliver what Benjamin Quarles (1969) has called "the most
forthright call for a slave uprising ever heard in antebellum
America," he faced an audience conditioned by rhetoric and
circumstance to believe that rebellions were probably im-
moral and surely inexpedient, indeed even foolhardy.4
These questions of morality and expediency haunt every
advocate of revolutionary violence. How, then, did Garnet
confront these questions in 1843?
I submit that Garnet met the moral objection in a most
powerful way. He argued not that slaves were religiously
permitted to revolt, but that they were religiously required to
do so. "To such degradation," he said, "it is sinful in the
extreme for you to make voluntary submission" (Woodson,

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[501 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

1925, 1969). The fiery preacher argued that God required

man to keep the Sabbath holy, to search the Scriptures, to
raise children with respect for His laws; but slavery made it
impossible to obey these commands. Garnet continued, "The
forlorn condition in which you are placed does not destroy
your obligation to God. You are not certain of heaven
because you allow yourselves to remain in a state of slavery"
(Woodson, 1925, 1969). God's commands had to be obeyed,
and that is why the slaves were urged by Garnet to use "every
means both moral, intellectual, and physical that promises
success" (Woodson, 1925, 1969). Garnet's argument had
transformed physical violence from cardinal sin to divinely
ordained responsibility. The values of a religous movement
were suddenly turned upside down.
Moral objections were met by the militant minister in a
second and equally fundamental way. Through a series of
analogies, he appealed to the almost universally accepted
right of self-defense.
If a band of heathens captured a band of Christians, God
would smile on their efforts to free themselves; why not,
then, the slaves? If a black man could physically resist a
kidnaper in Africa, why should he cease resisting when he
reached the shores of America? To cap the self-defense
appeal, Garnet urged that slaves go to their masters, describe
the evils of slavery, and ask to be set free. If the slave owners
refused, the slaves should refuse to work. He concluded, "If
they then commence work of death, they, and not you, will
be responsible for the consequences" (Woodson, 1925,
1969).
Moral objections to violence, then, were countered by
divine commands and the right of self-defense. These basic
appeals were supplemented by appeals to love of family,
manliness, courage and traditions. One passage particularly
carries the intensity of Garnet's message.

You act as though your daughters were born to pamper the lusts
of your masters and overseers. And worse than all, you tamely

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Shiffrin / RHETORIC OF ANTEBELLUM BLACK VIOLENCE [511

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 [Woodson,
1925, 1969].

I submit that these appeals launched by this Presbyterian

firebrand, at the very least, provided grounds for neutralizing
moral objections to violence. If violence could be proved to
be an expedient means of eliminating slavery, an audience
precommitted to slavery's immediate abolition and faced
with no viable alternative to its elimination, had been offered
a tempting moral mandate for revolution.
How, then, did the speaker meet the practical objections
to his proposal? Garnet claimed first that practicality was
irrelevant for the reason that "You had far better all die-die
immediately, than live slaves" (Woodson, 1925, 1969).
Death was considered a superior alternative because
current conditions were intolerable (a nineteenth-century
analogue to the better dead than red theme). Indeed, if the
slaves died in battles, they would be remembered as "martyrs
to freedom" such as Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and others.
Death was a superior alternative because even a lost revolt
would spur attempts to foster emancipation. And, of course,
death was superior because slaves had a moral mandate from
their Maker to obey His commands. Garnet had again turned
the arguments of abolitionists such as William Whipper upside
down. From the invulnerable ground of morality. Garnet
thought, he need not stray for the sake of expediency.
But the churchman also claimed that victory would be
won. An appeal to black pride formed the basis of his
argument:

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,

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[521 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

[sic) 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 tyrant would meet with plagues more
terrible than those of Pharaoh [Woodson, 1925, 1969].

If the white man could succeed, Garnet seemed to say,

why couldn't the black man? And as Garnet continually
reminded them, "you are four millions." There was strength
in numbers. They could succeed, and there was no other
alternative for their generation.
Garnet's strategy, then, called for a people willing to die
and absolutely unwilling to cooperate. It seems likely that if
four million slaves had adopted a united willingness to resist
and maintained such willingness in the face of torture and
death, the institution of slavery would have been in serious
danger.
The expediency of such a course, however, depended
upon the absolute unity of four million slaves whose
communications were strictly regulated by slaveholders. To
convince thousands of slaves that death was superior to life
would have required a sustained rhetorical effort. To con-
vince four million might have necessitated divine intervention
even had Southern slaveholders permitted one who advocated
such measures to live longer than a day.
Garnet's proposal did not and could not meet the test of
workability. A strategy requiring instant, simultaneous, uni-
versal courage was far more likely to be suggested by
Northern black conventions than adopted by Southern
slaves. '
But this Northern national black convention rallying to the
cry of impracticality refused to endorse the address. The
address failed by only a single vote.6 Almost half the
convention supported the address. What factors account for
such a high vote in favor of Garnet's speech?
We have considered how the preacher's speech attempted
to answer moral and pragmatic objections to his proposed

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Shiffrin / RHETORIC OF ANTEBELLUM BLACK VIOLENCE [531

course of resistance. In doing so, we have imposed a structure

on the speech which is not actually present. Garnet did not
say, "Let me consider objections to my proposed course of
action." The speech was not a neatly partitioned schoolboy
exercise, organized for the benefit of his opponents. The
central proposition of the speech as structured by Garnet was
not that his proposal was moral and expedient but rather that
slavery was evil enough to require resistance on religious
grounds, evil enough to die fighting against. To disagree with
Garnet's conclusion, an audience which had met to decry
slavery would have to say that slavery was not that evil. In
short, a group of people who prided themselves on being
militant activists against slavery would for the first time have
to view themselves as moderates. The liberal in the late 1 960s
who felt with a sense of guilt that he was becoming
conservative in his old age would be able to understand the
sociopsychological pressures working in favor of Garnet
(Frankel, 1970: 1274).
Equally important, Garnet spoke to an audience who,
living in freedom, might view slavery as more intolerable than
those who actually lived in it. Moreover, the audience had
only to recommend that others suffer agony and possible
defeat, rather than to face it themselves.
This is not to minimize the fact that many in the audience
would rather have died than live in slavery. Many, including
Garnet, had risked their lives to escape. The greater the
audience's hate and fear of slavery, the more hopeless the
situation seemed, the more likely Garnet's address would be
favorably received.
And, indeed, as conditions changed, more blacks adopted
Garnet's position. Frederick Douglass and Charles Lenox
Remond, both of whom spoke against Garnet's address at the
convention, turned to his position a few years later. By the
middle 1 850s, the chorus of black voices advocating violence
and black nationalism rose to an even louder crescendo than
we hear today.7 Garnet's speech became increasingly popular

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[54] JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

as years passed and conditions worsened. It was a speech

signalling the rise of great militancy throughout the aboli-
tionist cause and reflecting the increased polarization of
values which was to ultimately divide this country in civil
war.
The historical significance of the speech is equalled by its
immediate relevance. Today's black militants probably un-
knowingly have utilized the same argumentative strategies
employed by Garnet. Free of the theological trappings, black
audiences are told that because of the evil of racism, they are
not only morally permitted but morally required to use "any
means necessary." If a black man can violently defend
freedom in Asia, he is asked why he should not do so here.
Violence is defended as self-defense against white aggression.
Appeals to love of family, manliness, courage, and tradition
are persistently invoked. Conditions are considered so evil
that death is preferable to continued slavery. Though the
need for black people to get together is constantly stressed, a
significant deviation from Garnet's line of argument is the
modern militant's contention that even relatively small
guerilla warfare groups can achieve success. An increasingly
interdependent economy and new military theory provide
the new radical with a contemporary rhetorical twist on an
old, argumentative theme.
The central thrust of contemporary black advocacy re-
mains the same as Garnet's. Racism and exploitation are evil
enough to require violent resistance on moral grounds, evil
enough to die fighting against.
Analysis of today's black advocacy will rest on different
empirical foundations, but the basic categories of argument
persist. Garnet's speech illustrates the importance of scholars
turning back to the speeches of the black abolitionists. Their
speeches and rhetorical problems are historically significant
and immediately relevant.

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Shiffrin / RHETORIC OF ANTEBELLUM BLACK VIOLENCE [55]

NOTES

1. That Garnet's is the earliest speech extant by a black man advocating

violence in America, of course, does not mean he was the first to advocate such
violence. The record of slave revolts is eloquent evidence to the contrary. Indeed,
Garnet was heavily influenced by David Walker's Appeal. Garnet's speech and
Walker's essay were published in one volume in 1848. Brewer, Loggins, Woodson,
and others have contended that John Brown financed the publication. For a
recent discussion of the speech, see Mann (1970). Regrettably, Mann only briefly
examines the rhetorical climate in which the speech was given, and there operates
on the curious hypothesis that the speech was a reaction to the "gradualism of
William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. But Garrison and his followers
had abandoned gradualism more than a decade prior to Garnet's speech. See, for
example, Hawkins (1964), especially the very beginning of the introduction.
2. See Curry (1965) for a useful anthology much of which speaks to the place
of religion in the movement. The literature on the question is voluminous
but Thomas (n.d.) provides a well-balanced view.
3. Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: 41 US 5 39.
4. Of course, Garnet was not asking the delegates at the convention to revolt.
He was asking the convention to endorse the Address to the Slaves, which would
thus be addressed by the convention to the slaves. Garnet's speech, therefore, was
delivered as if it were addressed to a group of slaves, rather than to the convention
proper. This was not an unusual practice for the many conventions of the period.
For an excellent study of the Negro convention movement, see Bell (1953).
5. It is interesting in this connection that advocacy of black violence in the
antebellum North was directed against the institution of slavery and not against
the repressive conditions which faced the free black in the North. Surely some of
the factors which accounted for this include the fear of a genocidal reaction by
white society and optimism about the possibilities for change. In the South,
genocidal reaction was improbable for economic reasons and the possibilities for
change demonstrably inconceivable.
6. The vote was 19 to 18.
7. An excellent discussion of the rise of black militancy as the decades passed
is contained in Quarles (1969: 223-249).

REFERENCES

APTHEKER, H. [ed.I (1951) A Documentary History of the Negro

United States. New York: Citadel.
---(1943) American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
BELL, H. W. (1953) "A survey of the Negro convention movement 1830-1861."
Ph.D. dissertation. Northwestern University.

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
[561 JOURNAL OF BLACK STUDIES / SEPTEMBER 1971

BENNETT, L. (1961) Pioneers in Protest. Chicago: Johnston.

BREWER, W. M. (1928) "Henry Highland Garnet." J. of Negro History 13:
26-52.

CURRY, R. 0. led.] (1965) The Abolitionists: Reformers or Fanatics. New

York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
DICK, R. C. (1969) "Rhetoric of the Negro ante-bellum protest movement."
Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University.
--- (1964) "Negro oratory in the anti-slavery societies: 1830-1860." Western
Speech 28 (Winter): 5-14.
DUMOND, D. L. (1961) Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America. Ann
Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
FRANKEL, C. (1970) "The continuing class of liberalism." National Rev.
FRANKLIN, J. H. (1967) From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
HAWKINS, H. (1964) The Abolitionists: Immediatism and the Question of
Means. Boston: D. C. Heath.
KENNICOTT, P. C. (1970a) "Black persuaders in the antislavery movement."
Speech Monographs 36 (March): 15-24.
--- (1970b) "Black persuaders in the antislavery movement." J. of Black
Studies I (September): 5-20.
---(1967) "Negro antislavery speakers in America." Ph.D. dissertation. Florida
State University.
LESTER, J. (1968) Look Out, Whitey. New York: Dial.
LITWACK, L. F. (1961) North of Slavery. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
LOGGINS, V. (1931, 1964) The Negro Author. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenniket.
MANN, K. E. (1970) "Ninteenth century black militant: Henry Highland Garnet's
address to the slaves." Southern Speech J. 36 (Fall): 11-21.
MEIR, A. and E. RUDWICK (1966) From Plantation to Ghetto. New York: Hill
& Wang.
NELSON, A. D. (1914) Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence. New York: Bookery.
PHILLIPS, U. (1942) Article in H. Aphtheker, American Negro Slave Revolts.
New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
- - - (1918) American Negro Slavery. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.
QUARLES, B. (1969) Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
SIMMONS, W. J. (1887, 1968) Men of Mark. New York: Arno.
SMITH, A. L. (1970) "Black revolutionary in sheep's vestments." Central States
Speech J. 21 (Summer): 93-98.
SMITH, G. (1842) "Speech." Emancipator and Free American (February, March,
April).
STAMPP, K. (1956) The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.
New York: Vintage.
THOMAS, J. L. (n.d.) The Liberator: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison.
Boston: Little, Brown.
WOODSON, C. G. [ed.] (1925, 1969) Negro Orators and their Orations. N
York: Russell & Russell.

This content downloaded from

195.43.22.135 on Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:49:23 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms