With U.S. Civil War public figure Garrison Frazier and nineteen other African-American ministers and church officials, Harris met with Military Division of the Mississippi Union Army Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on January 12, 1865, at Sherman's Green-Meldrim House headquarters in Savannah, Georgia.
[3] Harris enlisted in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War where he served as a drummer with the Republican Blues drum and bugle corps.
Since Savannah, Georgia's city limits began at West Broad Street (now Martin Luther King Jr.
As citizens fled the city of Savannah out of fear, officers of First Bryan refused to close the church's doors.
Harris consulted with Dr. William Pollard, an officer of First Bryan Baptist Church, who approached Sherman's army as it came down Bay Road.
General Sherman summoned Dr. Pollard and gave him the assignment of contacting all African-Americans in Savannah to request that they gather in Greene Square on January 1, 1865, for the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.
On January 12, 1865, Harris joined twenty African-American Baptist and Methodist ministers who met with Military Division of the Mississippi Union Army Major-General William Tecumseh Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton in the historic "Savannah Colloquy" or the "Forty acres and a mule" meeting.
He attended the meeting with several fellow First Bryan Baptist Church pastors including Reverends Garrison Frazier and Ulysses Houston.
Butler, James Ross, John McIntosh, and others helped to bring Georgia State Industrial College to Savannah in 1891.