ABSTRACT
The Reverend Dr Henry Highland Garnet is the most famous African American one never learned about during Black History Month’. Yet, Garnet was regarded by those who heard him speak as being ‘equal in ability to Frederick Douglass especially excelling in logic and terse statement’. Subsequent scholars have judged him to be ‘an intellectual catalyst for Douglass’. Yet, much like his second cousin, Samuel Ringgold Ward, he remains on the sidelines of abolitionist history, with his visits to Ireland being largely forgotten. In 1841, Garnet was ordained a Presbyterian minister and became a pastor in Troy in New York. Like his second cousin, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Garnet chose a religious prism for condemning slavery, but, unlike Ward, Garnet chose the Presbyterian Church. As controversies raged in America over the passing of a more stringent Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Garnet followed the path of several black abolitionists by travelling to Europe.
