Henson was born on August 8, 1866 on his parents' farm near the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, to sharecroppers who had been free people of color before the American Civil War. Along with many former slaves, Matthew's parents were subjected to attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups that terrorized southern blacks after the Civil War. To escape from racial violence, in 1867 the Henson family sold the farm and moved to Georgetown. He had an older sister S., born in 1864, and two younger sisters Eliza and S. Matthew's mother died when Matthew was seven. His father Lemuel remarried to a woman named Caroline and had additional children with her, including daughters and a son. After his father died, Matthew was sent to live with his uncle in Washington, D.C., who paid for a few years of education for Henson before dying. He attended a black public school for the next six years, during the last of which he took a summer job washing dishes in a restaurant. Matthew's early years were marked by one especially memorable event. When he was 10 years old, he went to a ceremony honoring Abraham Lincoln, the American President who had fought so hard to preserve the Union during the Civil War and had issued the proclamation that had freed slaves in the Confederate states in 1863. At the ceremony, Matthew was greatly inspired by a speech given by Frederick Douglass, the longtime leading figure in the American black community. A former slave turned abolitionist, Douglass called upon blacks to vigorously pursue educational opportunities and battle racial prejudice.