Martin Delany
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Martin Robinson Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an African-American abolitionist, arguably the first proponent of American black nationalism and the first African American field officer in the United States Army.
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[edit] Early years
Delany was born free in Charleston, Virginia, though his father Samuel was a slave. Delany's maternal grandparents were born in Africa and his grandfather was said to be a prince. When he was just a few years old, attempts were made to enslave the rest of his family, but his mother Pati carried her two youngest children twenty miles to the courthouse in Winchester to successfully argue for her family's freedom.
As he was growing up, Martin Delany and his siblings learned to read and write using "The New York Primer and Spelling Book" which had been given to them by a peddler. This was illegal in Virginia, where it was forbidden to teach coloured people literacy. When this was discovered in September 1822 Pati took her children to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, leaving Samuel who remained a slave. This situation changed a year later when he bought his freedom after refusing to take a beating, rejoining his family in Chambersburg.
In Chambersburg, Martin Delany continued learning, occasionally moving away to work when his family couldn't afford for his education to continue. In 1831, at the age of 19, he journeyed to Pittsburgh to become a barber and labourer but harboured ambitions to visit Africa, which he considered his spiritual home.
[edit] Pittsburgh
On arrival in Pittsburgh, Delany became a student of Rev. Lewis Woodson of the Bethel African Methodist Church on Wylie Street. Shortly after he began attending Jefferson College, where he was taught classics, Latin and Greek by Molliston M. Clark. During a cholera epidemic in 1833, he became apprentice to Dr. Andrew N. McDowell, learning cupping and leaching. He would continue to study medicine under the mentorship of Dr. McDowell and also other abolitionist doctors such as Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne and Dr. Joseph P. Gazzam of Pittsburgh.
It was in this period that he became more actively involved in political matters. He attended his first Negro Conference in 1835, conceiving a plan to set up a 'Black Israel' on the East coast of Africa and becoming involved in temperance movements and organisations looking after fugitive slaves.
While in Pittsburgh he began writing. In 1843 he began publishing The Mystery—a black-controlled newspaper. His articles and other writings were republished elsewhere, such as in William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, and a eulogy he delivered to Rev. Fayette Davis in 1847 was widely redistributed. These activities brought controversy when, in 1846, "Fiddler" Johnson, a black man accused in The Mystery of being a slave catcher, sued him. He was convicted and fined $150—a huge amount at the time, which was paid by his white supporters in the newspaper business.
He met and married Catherine A. Richards in 1843, the daughter of a well-off meat provisioner. The couple would go on to have eleven children, seven of whom would survive into adulthood.
While Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were in Pittsburgh in 1847 on an anti-slavery tour, they met with Martin Delany and, together, the men conceived the newspaper that would become the North Star. It was first published later that year in Rochester, New York. The business was handled by Douglass while Delany journeyed around lecturing, reporting, and obtaining subscriptions. During these travels, he was frequently confronted by mobs opposing his views, sometimes violently. In July 1848 his report in the North Star revealed U.S District Court Justice John McLean's instructions to the jury in the Crosswait trial, defining it as a specifically punishable offense for a citizen to thwart any attempt by white persons attempting to "repossess" an alleged runaway slave. This coverage directly influenced abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to lead a successful movement removing McLean as a candidate of the Free Soil Party for the Presidency later that summer.
[edit] Attempts to learn medicine
While living in Pittsburgh, Delany had studied the basics of medicine and maintained his own cupping and leaching practice, but in 1849 he began to study more seriously in anticipation of applying to attend medical school. In 1850 he was unsuccessful in his applications to several institutions before being ultimately accepted to Harvard University (with two other black students) after presenting letters of support from seventeen physicians. The month after his arrival, however, a group of white students submitted to the School's faculty a resolution that they deemed "the admission of blacks to the medical lectures highly detrimental to the interests, and welfare of the Institution of which we are members" and that they had "no objection to the education and elevation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in college with us." Within three weeks Delany and his fellow black students had been dismissed, despite some dissenting opinion. He returned to Pittsburgh.
This incident persuaded Delany that reasoned argument could not succeed in persuading the white ruling class to allow deserving persons of color to become leaders in society. His opinions after this point became more extreme. His book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered argued that there was no future for blacks in the United States of America and that they should look to leave and found a new nation elsewhere. This alienated most moderate abolitionists, as did his criticisms of them for not hiring coloured men in their own businesses. He published a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin which had brought attention to the cruelty of Southern slave owners but presented the slaves as passive. Blake: Or The Huts of America concerned an insurrectionist's secret travels through slave communities and has been praised by modern scholars as an accurate interpretation of black culture. The novel was serialized in the Weekly Anglo African Magazine becoming the first novel by a black man to be published in America. He also wrote criticising racial segregation among Freemasons.
During this time, he worked for a brief period as principal of a colored school before going into practice as a physician. During another cholera outbreak in 1854, most doctors abandoned the city, but Delany remained and, with a small group of nurses, cared for the victims.
In August 1854 he led the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, where he again advanced his emigrationist argument in his manifesto "Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent". A resolution was approved by those present, including a significant minority of women, that "as men and equals, we demand every political right, privilege and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States, and we will either attain to these, or accept nothing." This is considered the foundation of black nationalism.
[edit] Travels overseas
In May 1859 Delany departed from New York Harbor for Liberia, arriving two months later, with the aim of investigating the possibility of a new black nation in the region. He traveled in the region for nine months, signing an agreement with eight chiefs in the Abeokuta region that settlers would be permitted to live on unused land in return for using their skills for the community's good. The treaty was later dissolved due to warfare in the region, subversive opposition by white missionaries and the advent of the Civil War in America.
In April 1860 he sailed to England, where he was honored by the International Statistical Congress, causing one American delegate to walk out. At the end of 1860, he arrived home again having completed his travels. The next year, he began planning to begin the settlement of Abbeokuta and put in place passengers and funding. The plans fell through, however, when Delany decided to remain in America and work for the emancipation of other slaves.
[edit] The Army
In 1863 after Abraham Lincoln had called for a military draft, Delany began recruiting black men to the army. His efforts in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and later Cleveland and Ohio raised thousands of enlistees, many of which joined the newly formed United States Colored Troops. He wrote to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, requesting that he make efforts "to command all of the effective black men as Agents of the United States," but the request was ignored.
In early 1865 he was granted an audience with Lincoln and proposed a corps of black men, led by black officers who, when marched into the South would serve to win over Southern blacks. A similar appeal had been rejected after it was made by Frederick Douglass, but Lincoln was impressed by Delany, describing him as "a most extraordinary and intelligent man."
A few weeks later, Delany was commissioned as the first black line field officer in the U.S. Army. After the war, he remained with the Army for a time, serving under General Rufus Saxton in the 52nd U.S. Colored Troops. He was later transferred to the Freedman's Bureau, serving on Hilton Head, where he shocked white officers with his oratory and his strong call for the right of freed blacks to own land. Later in 1865, he was mustered out of the Freedman's Bureau and shortly afterwards left the army.
[edit] Later life
Following the war, Delany continued to be politically active. He worked to help black cotton farmers improve their business and negotiating skills to get a better price for their produce. He also argued against blacks, when he saw fit, however. He opposed the vice presidential candidacy of J.J. Wright because he was too inexperienced, and also opposed the candidacy of a black man for the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina.
He unsuccessfully sought various positions for himself such as the role of Minister Resident and Consul General in Liberia and lieutenant governor of South Carolina. He did, however, come to serve as a Trial Justice in Charleston. In 1875 charges of "defrauding a church" were brought against him. He was convicted of this forced to resign and spend time in prison. He was pardoned by the governor but refused the return of his old job. In response, Delany supported the Democratic candidate Wade Hampton. Partly as a result of swing votes from blacks encouraged by Delany, Hampton was elected and reappointed Delany as Trial Justice.
In the later 1870s, the gains of the Reconstruction period began to be pushed back by the more conservative elements and Delany was again removed from his post. In reaction to this, Charleston based blacks restarted discussions aimed at emigrating to Africa. In 1877 The 'Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company' was formed with Martin Delany as chairman of the finance committee. A year later, the company purchased a ship - the Azor - for the voyage and Delany served as president of the board organising the voyage. In 1880, however, he withdrew from the project in order to serve his family—two of his children were attending Wilberforce College and required money for tuition fees, and his wife had been previously working as a seamstress to make ends meet. He began practicing medicine in Charleston. On 24 January 1885, he died of consumption.
[edit] Writings
His novel Blake: or, the Huts of America advocated black separatism. In passing the novel contained several reworkings of Stephen Foster's sentimental "Plantation Songs", a black reappropriation of minstrel-show material. For example, where Foster's "Old Uncle Ned" mourned the passing of a slave—
- Den lay down de shubble and de hoe
- Hang up de fiddle and de bow:
- No more hard work for pool old Ned
- He's gone whar de good darkeys go. [1]
—Delany turns this into a song of rebellion about the death of a master:
- Hang up the shovel and thee hoe-o-o-o!
- I don't care whether I work or no!
- Old master's gone to the slaveholders rest—
- He's gone where they all ought to go!
[edit] References
- Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2. p.236.
[edit] External links
- Mr. Lincoln and Freedom: Martin Delany
- West Virginia University library
- Works by Martin Delany at Project Gutenberg
- This article contains material written by James Surkamp and released into the public domain. The original material can be found at the Martin Delany homepage.
