Shining City Audio, a John Meacham and C-13 original studio.

February 10th, 1865, remembering Henry Highland Garnett Sorman in the U.S. House of Representatives.

I'm John Meacham and this is Reflections of History.

Today is a violation of our usual temporal rule.

The Sorman we're commemorating in this episode was actually delivered on February 12th,

so we are discussing it two days before the actual date, but it's worth it.

At 11 o'clock on the morning of Sunday, February 12th, 1865,

the reverent Henry Highland Garnett, who had escaped slavery in Maryland and now served as pastor of Washington's 15th Street Presbyterian Church,

became the first black man to speak in the chamber of the House of Representatives.

Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, one of Garnett's congregants, recalled of the invitation which Abraham Lincoln reportedly approved,

told the whole story of the transformation America had undergone during the Civil War.

Never before had the powers of the nation gathered to hear what Thompson described as words of plain and stinging truth from the lips of a slave born Negro.

Garnett Sorman came at the instigation of the reverend William Henry Channing, a unitarian and a few of William Ellery Channing,

the New England minister who had influenced theodore Parker, who in turn influenced Lincoln.

The younger Channing was chosen chaplain of the House of Representatives for the 38th Congress,

which sat from December 1863 to March 1865. He was elected he was told,

because he best represented the anti-slavery policy of the Republican Party in Washington.

As Chaplain Channing had pledged that quote,

a woman's voice should give utterance to the conscience of the mother's wives, sisters, and daughters of the heroes who are risking life,

and all they held dearest in behalf of the liberties and equal laws of the Republic,

and Channing subsequently invited the Quaker Rachel Howland to preach.

Now in the wake of the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery,

...