Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

On Sunday, Feb. 12, 1865, Henry Highland Garnet, minister of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, entered the halls of Congress. He could not escape notice. He was, his friend Alexander Crummell later wrote in his Eulogium on Garnet’s life, “tall and majestic in stature, over six feet in height, with a large and noble head, its front both broad and expansive, his chest deep and strong, his limbs straight and perfectly moulded.” Garnet was in the House of Representatives that morning at the invitation of William Henry Channing, chaplain of Congress, to deliver a sermon. Channing’s request was hardly a surprise; after all, the Capitol had served as a church for many decades, and preachers had long spoken in its halls. What was astonishing was that Garnet was a black man, no longer relegated to the galleries but standing at the speaker’s dais.

Garnet’s sermon commemorated the House’s passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, on Jan. 31, 1865. The amendment would become law at the end of the year, on Dec. 18th, 1865, but getting there proved to be a long, drawn-out, arduous process.

In 2012, Steven Spielberg made President Lincoln’s efforts to compel House members to pass the 13th Amendment the focus of his movie “Lincoln.” Historians have been divided over the film’s merits, many complaining about its narrow focus and omissions. Some have pointed to its lack of broader context: the limits of Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation; his late support for the 13th Amendment, which had not originated with him; the military victories that made the end of the war inevitable. Others, specialists in African American history, have lamented the minimization of black figures and black agency: the fleeting attention paid to black soldiers after the beginning of the film; the omission of contraband figures, fugitive slaves who escaped to the Union Army line and slaves’ seizure of property in the South; the trivialization of figures such as Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, the White House butler William Slade, and Lydia Smith, Thaddeus Stevens’s housekeeper and companion; and, perhaps most egregious of all, the absence of Frederick Douglass.

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But even these critics neglected to mention Garnet’s unique role in the early months of 1865. It is Garnet who has left us one of the most vivid accounts of the House proceedings given by a black man. The day, he asserted, “marked the beginning of the end.” Noting that the audience was “quite a salt and pepper mixture,” he then proceeded to list a number of House members who had voted “aye” — among them “Mr. Ashley,” “Mr. McAllister,” “Mr. English and “Mr. Griswold,” before ending with the speaker. After noting the final tally, Garnet concluded with a description of the ensuing pandemonium: the enthusiasms of the ladies, the ecstasies of House members, the somersaults of little boys.

As a consequence, critics have failed to recognize Garnet’s transformation from mere observer to significant actor during these momentous events: his preaching of a celebratory sermon in the House of Representatives.

Who was Henry Highland Garnet, and why did Channing single him out? The choice might seem obvious, given that Garnet was local, serving as minister of one of Washington’s most prominent black churches. Yet in other respects, Garnet was an outsider. Born a slave in rural Maryland, Garnet escaped north as a youngster with his family, eventually settling in New York City. From the beginning, he chafed at the status that white America had forced upon him: fugitive slave, nonnative in his native land. His resistance led him to alternate between two radical ideologies: violent rebellion on American soil on one hand, immigration to Africa on the other. Both positions provoked considerable controversy within both black and white abolitionist communities, often marginalizing Garnet and leaving him bitter.

But there was no denying that Garnet was a brilliant thinker and a brilliant orator. In a speech to the 1843 National Convention of Colored Men, held in Buffalo, Garnet broke rank with many of his colleagues. Addressing his brethren slaves in the South, he called upon them to take up arms. God himself, Garnet proclaimed, required them to act, for “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 slaves. … Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour.” Convention members debated the speech hotly before narrowly rejecting it on the ground, Garnet later wrote, that “it was warlike and encouraged insurrection.” Black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass included, were not yet ready for that.

Discouraged by the consolidation of slavery and prejudice in his own country, and frustrated by abolitionists’ lack of progress, Garnet turned his sights abroad to an even more controversial topic: African emigration. In the late 1850s he founded the African Civilization Society. Its immediate goal was the evangelization, civilization and development of agriculture and commerce in the Yoruba Valley (now in Nigeria), while its larger purpose was the creation of a “grand center of Negro nationality” that would unite Africans throughout the diaspora.

Garnet’s plan further enraged black abolitionists, who complained that he was in the pocket of the white-led American Colonization Society, which had long promoted the return of free blacks (not slaves) to countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone. (Nothing came of the project, but Garnet never gave up his dream of emigrating: In late 1881, he moved to Liberia, where he died only a few months after his arrival.)

There was, however, a brief moment in the middle of his life when Garnet found himself ideologically aligned with both black leaders and white abolitionists: the Civil War era, when the nation had finally come around to his way of thinking, accepting that only violence could end slavery and ultimately grant full citizenship to black Americans.

It was violence — war and riot — that allowed Garnet to assume a leadership role during these years. He was living in New York City when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863. Black and white activists, Garnet included, had been skeptical of Lincoln’s intentions, but they now gathered by the thousands at the Cooper Institute. Garnet presided over the meeting and, after reading the proclamation aloud, praised Lincoln, who, he said, “with his eyes set on the God of Justice,” had finally fulfilled his promise of emancipation; at the same time, Garnet called on the president to allow blacks to serve in the Union Army.

A second, more local act of violence forced white New Yorkers to take up the cause of their black brethren. On July 13, 1863, the draft riots broke out in the city. Garnet and his family were targets of the mob and only narrowly escaped having their house attacked. But many innocent, helpless black New Yorkers lost their lives. Horrified, city leaders galvanized, initiating two separate actions in which Garnet was a key player.

Garnet was well aware that the goals of abolition were inextricably linked to the military action needed to preserve the Union. If Lincoln had not yet acceded to his demand to allow the recruitment of black soldiers, the Union League Club would. Recently founded by prominent Unionists in the city, the club rose to the task and raised three regiments — the 20th, 26th, and 31st United States Colored Troops. Garnet became their honorary chaplain, and helped bring order to their camps on Rikers Island. When the first regiment left Riker’s for battle in March 1864, Garnet participated in the flag ceremony held in Union Square, sitting on the platform alongside other black leaders, members of the Union League Club and city dignitaries.

At the same time, a group of prominent New York City merchants set up a relief committee for blacks left destitute by the riots, and appealed to black leaders for help. During a meeting of the committee, Garnet delivered a speech that foreshadowed his 1865 sermon, effectively wedding preacher with activist. Intermingling biblical and secular discourse, he compared the merchants’ charity to that of New Testament figures – before reminding them that they had not yet fulfilled their obligation to provide both jobs and protection to black New Yorkers.

So Garnet was ready when Channing’s invitation came. That Sunday morning, he stood at the speaker’s dais before a crowded chamber. According to William J. Wilson, like Garnet a transplanted New Yorker, and a member of his church, the galleries were “filled to overflowing,” bringing together “white and colored — all mingled and all seemingly comfortable.” Standing nearby was the church choir, who “warbled forth sweet and touching melody.” On either side of Garnet hung full-length portraits of George Washington and General Lafayette, two great heroes of freedom and independence. But, as another commentator noted acerbically, this room was also “the high place where his [Garnet’s] chains were forged.”

The text for Garnet’s sermon was Matthew 23:4. It recounts the scene when, at the beginning of Passion Week, Jesus enters the temple and rails against the scribes and Pharisees for their hypocrisy and lack of righteousness. Positioning himself as Jesus and American statesmen as the scribes and Pharisees, Garnet unfolded a biblical narrative centered on what he called “this fearful national sin.” Following Matthew’s language, slaveholders are those who “bind heavy burdens … and lay them on men’s shoulders” while hardening their hearts against them.

But significantly, Garnet then widened his perspective to reference secular law. America’s founders, he argued, based the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution on both “the Magna Carta of human rights” and the “lightnings of Sinai.”

To build his case against America’s national sin, Garnet first asked, and then answered, the question: “What is slavery?” After recollecting his earliest childhood memories under slavery, he then turned to generalize, first emphasizing how the slave system had transformed humans into brutes, then addressing the inhumanity of the Atlantic slave trade that had robbed Africa of its people, destroying families and societies in the process.

Then he dove into a history of antislavery thinkers, in which he juxtaposed religious and secular figures: Plato and Augustine, Patrick Henry and Jonathan Edwards, Moses and Isaiah and others. Garnet was making a crucial point: To his audience in front of him, as well as to legislators across the nation, he was asserting the interdependence of secular and sacred realms, of republican and divine ideals and laws.

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Drawing to a close, Garnet turned to the future: “When and where will the demands of the reformers of this and coming ages end?” To this, he had a ready answer: “emancipate, enfranchise, educate.” Unlike the rhetoric of his 1843 speech, in which he had demanded that his brethren slaves “arise, arise,” Garnet’s use of the imperative here is of a transactional nature, commanding white America to help black America achieve full citizenship by fulfilling the “three E’s.” Emancipation required white America to free black slaves from a bondage similar to that of the ancient Israelites in Egypt. Enfranchisement demanded that white America grant black male suffrage not out of necessity but “at the dictation of justice,” the larger consequence of which would be “a Constitution that shall be reverenced by all.” And education meant not only that of blacks, but of whites as well: Ever attentive to the mandates of religion, Garnet insisted that Christian churches must now abide by the principles of the gospel; and ever attentive to the importance of representation, he called on national literature and arts to eschew caricature and cast a more “faithful and just light on the character and social habits of our race.”

Applause was not in order – this was a sermon, after all, not a political address – but, according to Wilson, an “uncontrollable emotion” ran through the audience. Garnet’s speech was a personal triumph. It was likewise a triumph for all black Americans who were proud to be represented by such a brilliant orator. And it was a triumph for those white progressives who had fought for abolition alongside their black comrades, and who would continue to fight for black civil rights throughout the Reconstruction era.

The future looked bright. The 13th Amendment would become law by the end of the year and serve as a building block for the 1866 civil rights bill, as well as the 14th and 15th Amendments. Yet, as he ended his sermon, Garnet read from an anonymous poem taken from an 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly that applied the Exodus story to “this latter century of time,” and sought to summon forth a Joshua, the leader who brought the Israelites to the Promised Land:

And call some Joshua, in the Spirit’s power,

To poise our sun of strength at point of noon!

We are still waiting for our Joshua.

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Sources: Alexander Crummell, “Eulogium on Henry Highland Garnet, D. D.,” in “Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses”; Henry Highland Garnet “An Address to the Slaves of the United States, Buffalo, N.Y., 1843,” in Herbert Aptheker, ed., “A Documentary History of the Negro People of the United States”; Henry Highland Garnet; “A Memorial Discourse by Henry Highland Garnet, delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington D.C., on Sabbath, Feb. 12, 1865, with an introduction by James McCune Smith; National Anti-Slavery Standard, Jan. 10, 1863; Carla L. Peterson, “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City; Weekly Anglo-African. April 15, 1865.

Carla Peterson, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of “Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City.”