“It is impossible,” Henry Highland Garnet exclaims in 1843, “like the children of Israel, to make a grand exodus from the land of bondage. The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters!” This evocative metaphor captures the dire circumstances that 19th century enslaved individuals faced, landlocked between disaster and despair, trauma and tragedy, and chaos and calamity. This paper will explore Garnet’s call to freedom in his “Address to the Slaves of the United States” by focusing on how his radical reorientation of faith and morality might offer a path for understanding freedom when oppression seems insurmountable.
What if Garnet understood freedom as something other than the absence of physical chains but as a moral reorientation that might help individuals redefine their relationship to self and society? Garnet’s speech invites modern readers to reimagine one’s agential powers under tyrannical forces by turning freedom into both a personal responsibility and a collective action. In this sense, freedom becomes a radical reimagining of the self that demands moral reform alongside physical liberation.
This paper will consider how Garnet’s critique of slavery redefines freedom as a moral responsibility by emphasizing reorientation as central to liberation and ethical solidarity. Drawing on contemporary scholars of freedom and ethics, I will consider how Garnet’s prophetic reorientation produces an ethical framework for reclaiming freedom in the face of historical oppression. Ultimately, this paper seeks to consider the following question through Garnet as my guide: How can reorientation of the self inform our contemporary understanding of freedom, especially when the forces of oppression seem all-encompassing?
In his 1843 "Address to the Slaves of the United States," Henry Highland Garnet declares, “The Pharaohs are on both sides of the blood-red waters!” This metaphor captures the tragic circumstances of enslaved individuals caught between oppression and the desire for freedom. This paper explores Garnet’s call for freedom as a moral reorientation. Garnet presents freedom as individual responsibility and collective action that requires moral reform in addition to physical liberation. By analyzing Garnet’s critique of slavery, this paper considers how his prophetic vision offers an ethical framework for reclaiming freedom in the face of oppression. It ultimately asks: How can moral reorientation shape our understanding of freedom in the context of persistent and pervasive injustice?