The book is a copy of the speech or sermon that Henry Highland Garnet delivered to Congress in 1865, on President Lincoln's invitation. He was the first African American to address Congress.

The Introduction by James McCune Smith is the earliest documentation on Henry Highland Garnet's life up to that time. Smith was Garnet's boyhood friend and became a medical doctor.

Garnet was one of the most important abolitionists in American. He was born a slave in Kent County, Maryland, escaped with his family on the Underground Railroad at age 9, and was educated and lived in New York.