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This Day in History
Feb 10
Civil War
Davis learns he is Confederate president, 1861
On this day in 1861, Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi who served as U.S. secretary of war in the 1850s, receives word he has…
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Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth was a prominent abolitionist and women's rights activist whose legacy of feminism and racial equality still resonates today.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, her most celebrated work, in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
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Slave Rebellions
From the earliest days of the peculiar institution, resistance was a constant feature of American slavery.
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American Anti-Slavery Society
(1833–70), promoter, with its state and local auxiliaries, of the cause of immediate abolition of slavery in the United States.
(born 1815, New Market, Maryland, U.S.—died February 13, 1882, Liberia) leading African American abolitionist and clergyman.
Born a slave, Garnet escaped in 1824 and made his way to New York. There he pursued an education and eventually became a Presbyterian minister. Garnet became associated with the American Anti-Slavery Society, and his career in the late 1830s and early '40s joined preaching with agitation for emancipation. A nationally known figure, he shocked his listeners at the 1843 national convention of free people of colour when he called upon slaves to murder their masters. The convention refused to endorse Garnet's radicalism, and he gradually turned more to religion as Frederick Douglass assumed the role of premier black abolitionist.
During the next two decades, Garnet served as pastor in a number of Presbyterian pulpits. While at his post in Washington, D.C., in 1864, he aided the war-related displaced and distressed. Later, he assisted government workers in developing programs to help former slaves.
In 1881 Garnet was appointed minister to Liberia. In his younger, more radical days, he had vigorously opposed plans to solve America's slavery problem by sending blacks back to Africa. Toward the end of his life, however, he favoured U.S. blacks' emigration back to Africa. Within two months of his arrival in the African nation, though, he died.
Copyright © 1994-2009 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.
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10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America: Antietam (PDF)
Teacher's Guide to the program dramatically exploring the events, meaning, and significance of the watershed battle at Antietam.
