In an 1843 speech at the National Negro Convention, Henry Highland Garnet, a formerly enslaved man and active abolitionist, described Nat Turner as "patriotic", saying that "future generations will remember him among the noble and brave." In 1861 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a northern writer, praised Turner in a seminal article published in "Atlantic Monthly". He described Turner as a man "who knew no book but the Bible, and that by heart who devoted himself soul and body to the cause of his race."