William Henry (Harrison) Heard was born in Elbert County, Georgia, ten miles below Elberton Court House, and three miles from Longstreet, a small town with one store and Post Office.

He was born in a log cabin. The logs were cut promiscuously from small pines, straight and crooked, and they were built like a stable or a pen of any kind. Where a log was too crooked, or left too large a hole, it was “chipped out” so as to be made to lay closer together, in the same way they built a pig pen or horse stable. The only difference, where they built a house for living was, they took the bark off the trees and chinked the cracks in winter and knocked out the chinking in summer.

My father, George W. Heard, was a slave of Thomas Heard, who was reputed to be his father. He was a blacksmith by trade, and while he weighed only one hundred and forty pounds, he could use a sledge hammer as steadily and actively as a man weighing two hundred pounds, and shoe as many mules as any blacksmith in the county.

After thirty years as a blacksmith, he took up the trades of a wheelwright and a carpenter, and worked at all three of these trades twenty years before he died.

He did not know figures at all, yet he could give a bill for lumber as accurately as a master mathematician.

He never belonged to the same man that my mother belonged to, but lived near enough to see her once or twice a week.

My mother was Pathenia Galloway; she and her children belonged to the Galloway estate (two boys: Wylie and George Galloway).

When the boys became of age and the estate was settled, my mother and her three children were placed upon the auction block and sold to the highest bidder. That man was Lindsay Smith, who lived at Rock Fence, in the flatwoods of Elbert County. He was a large farmer, and owned nearly one hundred Negroes. This was my first time sold.

After two or three years at Rock Fence a man by the name of John A. Trenchard, principal of the high school at Elberton, Georgia, wanted to buy a cook. He came to Lindsay Smith, who had a woman by the name of Harriet and her children to sell, but Prof. Trenchard saw us children, and asked for the woman who was the mother of these children, and was shown my mother. There

I attended Sunday School when I was ten years of age, in Elberton, Georgia, at the Methodist Episcopal Church South. We did not learn to read nor to write, as it was against the law for any person to teach any slave to read; and any slave caught writing suffered the penalty of having his forefinger cut from his right hand; yet there were some who could read and write.

In this Sunday School we were taught the Bible and Catechism, and committed much to memory by having the same repeated to us in the Sunday School, and then some member of the white family carried this out during the week; so that there were those of us who could repeat whole Psalms and chapter after chapter in the Shorter Catechism.

This was the education that came to a slave, and I for one had five years of this kind of training.

At the end of five years freedom came; but there were no teachers in the part of the county in which I lived and no schools for Negroes.

My father was a wheelwright and had a shop on the main road, not far from the town school, so I secured the services of a “Poor white” boy named Billee Adams and paid him ten cents a lesson and studied in Webster's Blue Back Spelling Book. I studied spelling, reading, and arithmetic all in this one book.

After six months the year 1865 ended and I was hired to a farmer by the name of William Henry Heard, from whom I received my name. The contract was five dollars per month and a recitation each night. I worked from “kin to cant,” that is: from daylight to dark. When I came in, put up my mule, and fed him, I made my way to the dining room and waited for my teacher to finish his supper, then I recited my lesson to him. I had added another study, writing, to my curriculum, and my hour for study was twelve o'clock in the day. We were given one hour for dinner and feeding our stock. Many of the hands slept this hour. I spent it in the preparation of my lessons for the night.

Boys had no pockets in their clothes in those days, so I cut the board back from my book and carried it on my head, under my cap. It was safe unless a hard rain came up, then cap, book, and all suffered.

After we laid by the crops in June, I went to Elberton Court House and attended school six weeks under a young man named George H. Washington, from Augusta, Georgia. I studied spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. At the end of this time I could spell words of five or six syllables, compose, and write a letter and understood the four rules of arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This was only a Summer school, and we all returned to the farm at the end of six weeks.

I kept up my studies with a farmer until Christmas. At Christmas I was hired to another farmer by the name of Clay Hulmes. He had attended the High School and was prepared to give me a great deal of help, but he was a “poor boy” and much prejudiced, but our contract was six dollars per month, board, and a lesson at night.

While I had three or four studies he would only have me recite one study each night. After six months I left him. I had broken the contract and my father felt bound to make me carry it out, so he sent me back. I stayed three days and broke it again, so they all decided that it was best that we stay apart.

By this time we had a regular school in the town taught by a lady by the name of Mrs. Hankinson. I worked at my father's shop morning and evening, and attended this school for six weeks, which so prepared me that in the Fall I began teaching school myself, and with a private teacher I carried forward my studies and was able to stand an examination and teach the three months public school, which was a great help to me financially, for we were allowed one dollar per month per scholar, and with an assistant I had one hundred or more pupils, so that I had at the close of this school term over three hundred dollars in money, and that was big money in those days, and it gave me a start in the world of economics. During this teaching I took lessons from a white man by the name of James Lofton. I studied grammar, mathematics, and history. When I learned the parts of speech in Smith's Grammar and their relation to each other, it was a revelation to me. I saw opening up along the intellectual horizon things I never dreamed of. I was a man of good memory, they said, and I got much from my studies, so that I went on teaching and in the second year I received a second grade certificate, taught the Public School and was rewarded as before.

In January, 1873, I went to Mt. Carmel, South Carolina, where I had a six months public school and a regular salary of forty dollars per month. I taught here four years and continued my studies under the township school teacher of the white school, a Mrs. Ritchie, who taught me algebra and Latin.

The State of South Carolina at that time was Republican and the University of South Carolina at that time was under State control, as it is now. There were scholarships in each county, and any boy over sixteen years of age and under twenty-one years could compete for these scholarships. Abbeyville County, in which I lived, was entitled to five. I won one of these scholarships, entered the University and received twenty dollars per month. With that I supported my family and myself. I entered as a freshman, but in 1877, when the Democrats came in power, they turned out all the Colored students. I was a sophomore in the classical department at the time.

Being a member of the Legislature from Abbeyville County, I was unseated by the Democrats and refused a school in the county because of my interest in politics.

I returned to Georgia and opened a school in the African Methodist Episcopal Church at Athens. At the end of the summer School, for that was all that we had, I entered Clarke University, spent one term there and then was persuaded to enter Atlanta University. I spent one year as a Junior in the classical department. At the end of this year I had a governmental position and so I left school until I came to Philadelphia in August, 1888. I then entered the Reformed Episcopal Seminary at Forty-first and Chestnut Streets, Philadelphia, studied Theology, Hebrew, and Greek, and took the Extension Course of Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus ended the patchwork of such an education as I have been able to pick up.

I have Honorary Degree of Doctor of Divinity (D. D.) from Allen University, also from Wilberfore University, Doctor of Laws (LL. D.) from Campbell College, Jackson, Mississippi. These titles are honorary; given to me because of the position I occupy in the Church more than from learning.

At the close of the war I was but fifteen years of age, and yet I had much to do with the politics of the county in which I lived (Elbert County).

Colonel James T. Ackerman, who was the United States Attorney General under President Ulysses S. Grant, and who lived in that county, was a staunch Republican and encouraged me much along this line. In 1872 I had just reached my majority and was the County Chairman of the Republican Party, and looked after the interests of that party together with a man by the name of Nathan Thompson, who could neither read nor write. Our tickets for the election of 1872 were printed, and distributed by the State Chairman. While our Postmaster was a Republican, yet by some Democratic move our tickets were intercepted and were not allowed to reach us. We had no railroad and got mail only every other day, so that when the mail came in on Monday, or the day before the election, no tickets came in it. So in order to have tickets the next day at the polls, I wrote tickets all night, and five hundred tickets were cast at that precinct. Had we received our tickets and distributed them at each precinct the county would have gone Republican, but as it was we lost the county.

I was a candidate for the Legislature on the Republican ticket. Grant and Colfax were the candidates for President and Vice-President.

In 1876 I was in South Carlina. It was called “THE RED-SHIRT CAMPAIGN,” and will never be forgotten for its bloody deeds. Yet the Republicans stood their ground and won out in many counties. I was a candidate for the Legislature on the Republican ticket, from Abbeyville County. We carried the county by over one thousand majority. I carried my precinct, Calhoun Mills, by three hundred and fifteen.

On the night before the election we gathered all the Republican voters together in a school-house near the precinct, sang and prayed, drank coffee and ate sandwiches all night.

Just at daylight we marched to the polls and stood in line until we had voted five hundred Republican votes. I was Deputy United States Marshal and had the conflict of my life, but we were three to one. Every man armed with some kind of weapon and each stood by his post. We counted our votes and left the polls about three o'clock in the morning when the Democrats undertook to capture our returns; but we were too strong for them; however, they did capture them after we had left.

On Saturday I returned to the precinct to get affidavits from the managers of the election. I was captured by the Democrats, my hands tied behind me, and carried into Elbert County, where they made a fire in an old school-house. We remained there all night. I was tied to two of these men, so if they fell asleep I could not get away.

The next morning I was carried to Ruckersville, where they all drank whisky. The South Carolina mob tried to get these Georgians to do away with me; but they did not have the courage, or they were too proud of me as a Georgian to do so.

At the fall of night they carried me to Ed Starke's, with whom I had had trouble on election day in 1872, and tried to get him to do their deed, but his father said: “There can be no killing on my place.” So after supper, about eight o'clock at night, they took me down to Broad River, had a Colored man to put me across and released me.

I was thirty miles from the railroad, in Wilkes County, but, I knew my territory so that I walked that thirty miles and was at Washington-Wilkes the next morning at daylight.

I hid around until the train blew, then I went aboard and lay down as a sick man. When the conductor came around for tickets I played off that I was too sick to have bought a ticket. I had five dollars in my pockets and I paid my way to Augusta, Georgia, went across the river to Hamburg, South Carolina, and stated to the captain of the troops stationed there who I was and what position I held. He sent me to Columbia, where I made an affidavit of the vote of my precinct, which gave the State to Hayes and Wheeler, as we had a Republican majority of three hundred and fifteen. I took my seat as a member of the Legislature from Abbeyville County, and sat during that session; but at the end of the session the Democrats contested our seats and unseated us. The troops were removed and the State turned over to the Democrats.

In 1880 I was appointed railway postal clerk by the direction of Congressman Emory Speare, an independent Democrat, for whom I had canvassed, and whose election I had helped to secure. I (in my route) ran from Lula to Athens, Georgia, from Atlanta to Macon, Georgia, and from Atlanta, Georgia, to Charlotte, North Carolina, for two years. I resigned this position to enter the ministry. After this I took no great interest in politics until February, 1895, when by the assistance of Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, I was appointed by President Grover Cleveland United States Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia, West Coast Africa, which position I held for four years.

At the same time I preached regularly and built the church at Monrovia, Liberia, from the funds received from the government, and not from the Church.

The Eliza Turner Memorial Chapel stands there today as a crowning effort and a token of my interest in the Church.

Travel with me became a great charm and fact. I had not left the State in which I was born until I was twenty-three years of age. I then went to South Carolina, where I taught school, and remained within the bounds of this State for four years.

After that I returned to Georgia and taught school four years more without leaving the State; but in 1883 I was appointed to Aiken, South Carolina, and remained there two years.

At the end of two years I went to Charleston, South Carolina, and after the earthquake in 1886, the damage done to my church compelled me to go North. I visited Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Boston. This opened up a new world to me. During that summer I went to Wilberforce, Ohio, and saw my Church and Race as I had not seen it before.

In 1888 I came to Philadelphia to live and have remained here up to the present day, yet I served Wilmington, Delaware, and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was appointed from Harrisburg United States Minister to Liberia, February, 1895.

This gave me an opportunity to cross the ocean. I had dreaded all my life this great body of water, and I entered upon its bosom with much timidity. I took the “Norramandie” steamship for Southampton in March, 1895, and arrived at Southampton at midnight, eight days after, took the train to London, arriving there at two o'clock in the morning, and drove to the Hotel Finsbury, on Finsbury Pavement. I was soon directed to my room, where I spent a few hours.

The word “Conversion” is used interchangeably with “Regeneration.” Many of us use this word without thinking of the depth to which the meaning takes us.

I was nine years at the altar, every year seeking CONVERSION. I had been told by many ministers during these nine years that all I had to do was to believe on the Lord. This word, BELIEVE, to me meant only to accredit things; but when I sought the Lord I accredited Him as the Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient God; but I could not conceive that He was MY FATHER, and, therefore, the relationship of a father was to be had by FAITH. So I had sought the Lord all these years without faith in Him as a Father, and myself as His child. But year after year I became more and more confident that He loved me, that He gave His Son to die for me, and that the NEW BIRTH fully established this relation, and that when I could reach that New Birth by faith in Christ as The Redeemer of the world, and of man in particular, that my relation as Son was not only established, but rejoiced in; so that at a protracted meeting in Athens, Georgia, April and May, 1879, I attended the meeting and was at the altar every night for five weeks.

One night before the services began, I reached the conclusion that open confession of my sins and acknowledgement of Christ as My Saviour was the thing to do. But I lacked Faith to do this, because I had felt nothing to assure me that I was saved. So I carried out the idea by getting up in seat and undertaking to make this confession and acknowledgement.

After some time standing on my feet, being unable to speak, FAITH CAME, my mouth flew open and I shouted for joy, and then I openly acknowledged that I was a sinner and that Christ was my Saviour, and that I was willing and ready to surrender ALL to Him.

When I did this the burden of guilt left me, and I felt that I was forgiven and the only thing I had to do was to live in fellowship with Him. And this I have tried to do all these years. Therefore I believe that I have turned my face in the right direction, and am walking in the direction prescribed in the Scriptures. And, so long as I walk therein, I am converted, or regenerated, a Son of God, a Brother of Christ, and an Heir of Heaven.

I had been a member of every General Conference, at every session from 1888, at Indianapolis, Indiana, to this General Conference at Norfolk, Virginia, in 1908, twenty years.

When I was a candidate myself for the Bishopric, I had no support from “the Bench.” There were two or three who did not oppose my election, but gave me no support. It was known that Bishops Turner, Gaines, Grant and Smith did all they could for my defeat, but I was elected by a a large majority. No man running against me received over fifty-two votes. I received three hundred and seventy-six votes, and was elected one of the Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and assigned to West Africa.

In January, 1909, with Mrs. Heard and eight missionaries, I sailed for the West Coast of Africa. We spent a few days in Liverpool and London, England, and then started for the West Coast. After eighteen days' sailing we landed at Sierra Leone, where I held my first conference. This was indeed a great conference for a Mission field.

We left Sierra Leone for Liberia. Here we held our second conference, and our missionaries were all put to work in this field. This brought new life, and after four years' hard work the two conferences were in fine condition, meeting all the obligations incumbent upon them.

Had the war not come, and Bishop Ross been permitted to succeed me, the work would have been far in advance of what it is today.

When I was a boy seventeen years of age, the Rev. William J. White, a Baptist preacher of Augusta, Georgia, came to Elberton, my home, as an agent of the Freedmens Bureau, and made a political speech. He was the first colored man I had ever seen who was well educated, and who could use the King's English readily, accurately and convincingly. He very much influenced me and I determined from that night to be a MAN, and to fill an important place in life's arena.

It was just the dawn of political awakening for the Negro. The Democrats that night tarred his horse all over with pitch, but the next morning he was up, had his horse attended to, hitched him to his buggy and went on his errand. I knew him for many years afterwards. He edited a paper called, “The Georgia Baptist.” He was always outspoken for Orthodox Religion and for the Republican Party.

In January, 1867, I had an opportunity to go to Augusta, Georgia, and there for the first time I heard Bishop H. M. Turner speak. He spoke on “The Negro in All Ages.”

He spoke for two hours. I was so impressed with the pictures and historic facts he presented of the Race in the past ages, and of the men of the present, that my life is largely what it is because of the impressions made at this meeting.

I returned to my home in Elberton, and began my future work. The Rev. Aaron Harris was presiding Elder of the C. M. E. Church (Colored Methodist Episcopal Church), at Elberton, and had me as secretary of the Official Board and Quarterly Conference in the C. M. E. Church before I was a Christian.

Bishop Vanderhorst, of that Church, came to Elberton and preached. I was greatly impressed by his sermon, and being secretary of the Official Board and Quarterly Conference, I determined to be a Christian, and fill important places in the Church and in social life.

At Athens, Georgia, I taught in the A. M. E. Church. The Rev. Richard Harper, a medical graduate, was the pastor. He was a good preacher and his sermons greatly influenced me.

After he was removed from Athens the Rev. Lawrence Thomas took charge of the Church. His sermons, lectures and life impressed me to emulate and imitate, if possible, his life.

Bishop Gaines, also, though not so well educated, influenced me to greater activity in the ministry.