Contributed by Richard Blackett, author of Beating Against the Barriers and Building an Antislavery Wall and other books.

Henry Highland Garnet once observed, “I hate nothing in America but Slavery and its
associate evils. Even to me my country is lively—how much more so it must be for
those of her sons around whom she throws her arms of protection.” His contemporary
Thomas Morris Chester could not have disagreed more. God, he insisted, had set aside
a place in Africa for its descendants.

Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in May 1834, Chester was the fourth child of George,
a free black, and Marie, an escaped slave’s, children. Although they abhorred the
movement to send Blacks to Africa, their son, at age 18, set off across the Allegheny
Mountains to attend school in Pittsburgh prior to moving to Liberia. But the new colony
could not fulfil all the hopes of the ambitious young man. As a result, he was constantly
on the move. In Liberia he taught school, started a newspaper and acted as agent of the
American Colonization Society founders of the colony. But he was soon back in the
United States to attend Thetford Academy in rural Vermont and reconnected with Black
Pennsylvanians working to eliminate political and social restrictions. On a later visit, as
war threatened, Chester recruited soldiers for the famed 54th and 55th Massachusetts
regiments.

Once the Confederates were repulsed at Gettysburg, Chester left for London hoping to
enroll in one of the city’s inns of court. It is not clear why he did not, but he spent his
brief time in the capital lecturing in support of the Union at a time when many signs
pointed to the possibility that the British government might recognize the Confederacy.
Back in Harrisburg, Chester was hired by the Philadelphia Press to report on the war
from the James River front, putting him at the center of the action in the final months of
the conflict covering the bloody and protracted battles leading up to the fall of
Petersburg and Richmond. His are the most sustained reports of the contributions of
Black soldiers to the defeat of the Confederacy, the dangers they faced, their successes
and failures. He was the first reporter to enter the fallen Confederate capital writing his
first dispatch from the desk of the former Speaker of the Confederate House of
Representatives. His action did not go unchallenged. As another reporter recalled, a
paroled Confederate soldier, seeing Chester at the desk ordered him to leave. When he
refused, the irate soldier rushed Chester but was greeted by a well-placed punch in the
mouth which sent him reeling. Adjusting his shirt sleeves, Chester returned to the desk.
As he said, “I thought I would exercise my rights as a belligerent.”

Chester spent the next three months reporting on the freed people’s efforts to adjust to
a new life in the burnt-out city as well as Lincoln’s visit. On his return to Harrisburg, he
organized a three-day celebration honoring black veterans of the war, and became
involved in the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League’s campaign for the vote and against
segregated transportation.

Hoping to expand its resources, the Harrisburg chapter of the League sent Chester on a fund-raising tour of England and the Continent in 1866.These were not the best of times to raise funds in Britain. The October 1865, the Morant
Bay Rebellion in Jamaica had left many freedmen’s associations unsure of continued
public approval. The times also saw a discernable rise in antiblack sentiments. After
about eight frustrating months, Chester left England for the Continent. In February 1867,
he was introduced to the Russian court in St Petersburg by Cassius M. Clay, the
United States Minister, and was invited by the czar to participate in the annual review of
the imperial guard.

It is impossible to determine how much Chester raised for the League, or what influence
he had on the splintered freedmen’s cause in Britain. In early spring 1867, Chester
turned his attention to his earlier plan to attend law school. In his mind it was the logical
development of a plan first forged at the Allegheny Institute in Pittsburgh and continued
at Thetford Academy. With savings from his months reporting for the Press, Chester
enrolled at Middle Temple in London. He spent the next three years there relying on
periodic lectures, and his appointment as Liberia’s roving ambassador to Europe, to
meet the cost of his education, which in the first year alone totaled more than “seven
hundred dollars in gold.” In April 1870, he became the first Black American to be called
to the English bar, arguing his first case weeks later in the hallowed halls of the Old
Bailey. Moncure D. Conway, the prominent American author and clergyman, recalled
that Chester by “sharp cross-examination” managing to save his client, charged with
murder, from the gallows.

The trial on 12 December 1870 is fully reported on oldbaileyonline.org ref t18701212-73. Edward Speary had stabbed James Kennock seven times and was charged with murder. Chester’s professionalism led to the lesser charge of manslaughter and ten years in prison, not the gallows.

Chester hoped to hang out his shingles in Monrovia, but the political winds there were
unfavorable. He instead returned home to Harrisburg, buoyed by the promise of the
Fifteenth Amendment. He delivered the commencement address at his old school in
Pittsburgh headed by Henry Highland Garnet. In summer 1871, Chester went on a
lecture tour of Kentucky and Louisiana. New Orleans caught his fancy and he decided
to settle there. But Louisiana politics was nothing if not bizarre with multiple contending
parties, competing governors to say nothing of rising violence and racial pogroms.
Chester found himself mired in the morass. And in times of uncertainty, he did what he
had done so often before, he periodically drifted back to Harrisburg where he died at
age 58 in 1892.