Martin Robison Delany: An Extraordinary, Sometimes Contradictory, Figure“Africa for Africans”
Martin Robison Delany was one of the key African American figures both before and after the Civil War. Unfortunately, he is little-known today.
Delany was born 6 May 1812, in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), to Pati and Samuel Delany.
Because of Virginia’s slave laws, enacted in 1662, known as partus sequitur ventrem, Black children were considered born with their mother’s social status. His mother was free, while his father was enslaved. Under Virginia law, that meant Martin Robison Delany was born free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partus_sequitur_ventrem
While his status as a free man gave him certain advantages, it didn’t shield him the prevalent prejudice of the era of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Martin Robison Delany (6 May 1812– 24 January 1885) Public Domain
Delany was an extraordinary, and sometimes contradictory, figure.
He was an abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer, and writer. Delany was an early and influential proponent of Black nationalism and is credited with coining the Pan-African slogan of “Africa for Africans.” He became the highest ranking Black office in the U.S. Army during the Civil war.
Delany grew up in Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his mother moved he and his siblings to the free state of Pennsylvania after they were discovered in Virginia learning to read, which was illegal for Black people.
He trained as a physician’s assistant and during the Pittsburgh cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854, he treated patients, while many doctors and residents fled the city in fear.
In 1832, Delany apprenticed with Dr. Andrew N. McDowell, and he continued studying medicine under the mentorship of Dr. McDowell and other abolitionist doctors, such as Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne and Dr. Joseph P. Gazzam of Pittsburgh.
Delany was one of the first three Black men (the others were Daniel Laing, Jr. and Isaac H. Snowden), admitted to Harvard Medical School In 1850. All three were thrown out of Harvard after a few weeks due to protests by white students.
He would eventually establish his own independent medical practice.
In 1843, Delany met and married Catherine A. Richards, the daughter of a successful food merchant in Pittsburgh. The couple would eventually have eleven children with seven surviving into adulthood.
Delany played a central role in numerous civic and anti-slavery groups in Pittsburgh during the late 1830s and early 1840s. He was involved with temperance, literary, and moral reform societies working for the advancement of African Americans. He also took part in resistance to anti-Black violence and discrimination in Pittsburgh. He even traveled in the South to see slavery firsthand.
In 1835, Delany attended the National Negro Convention, which had taken place annually in Philadelphia since 1831. It was during this time he conceived a plan to establish a ‘Black Israel’ on the east coast of Africa.
He later met Frederick Douglass, during one of his anti-slavery speaking tours.
In 1847, he worked with Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, developing and publishing the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Delany had already been involved in writing and publishing when he met Douglass.
By 1843, Delany began publishing The Mystery, a Black-controlled newspaper, while his articles writing was often reprinted in other publications, such the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.
Delany also wrote an anti-slavery novel, though it was not published in book form until 85 years after his death.
In 1859 and 1862, Delany published parts of his novel, Blake; or the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba in serialized form, a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The novel portrayed an insurrectionist travelling through slave communities and included Cuba as the source of illegal international slave trade to the United States.
While Delany praised Stowe for showing the cruelty of Southern slave owners, he believed she portrayed slaves as being too passive.
From January to July 1859, the first half of Part One of the novel was serialized in The Anglo-African Magazine. The remainder of Part One and Part Two was serialized from 1861 to 1862 in the Weekly Anglo African Magazine. His novel did not have the impact it might have since it was not published in book form until 1970, and its final chapters are missing.
Disillusioned by his experience with Harvard, Delany became convinced that Black people had no future in the United States. He became interested in the possibility of Black Americans resettling in Africa.
Both sets of Delany’s grandparents were born in west Africa and he began to advocate for African American emigration to Africa.
Delany led the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 1854 along with his friend and abolitionist poet James Monroe Whitfield, and several other Black activists.
Delany advanced his emigration argument in, “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent”. The 1854 convention approved a resolution stating: “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.”
He visited Liberia in May 1859, a United States colony founded by the American Colonization Society, that was conceived as a place where African Americans could emigrate.
He traveled in the area around Liberia for about nine months, signing a treaty with eight indigenous chiefs in the Abeokuta region, today’s Nigeria, that would permit settlers to live on “unused land” in return for applying their skills for the community’s good.* Delany’s treaty later dissolved due to warfare in the region, opposition by white missionaries, and the outbreak of the Civil War.
*Gates Jr, Henry Louis, Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Steven J. Niven. Dictionary of African Biography. Vol. 6. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012. pp. 177-179
As 1860 ended, Delany returned to the United States. The next year, he began planning settlement of Abeokuta, and gathered a group of potential settlers and funding. However, when Delany decided to remain in the United States to work for the emancipation of slaves, the pioneer plans fell apart.
Delany moved his family to Chatham, Ontario, Canada, in 1856. They stayed nearly three years. While there he took part in Underground Railroad activities, helping resettle refugee slaves in Canada. He was a member of the Chatham Vigilance Committee, seeking to prevent former slaves from being returned to the United States.
When the Civil War began he returned to the United States from Canada.
Major Martin R. Delaney, the only black officer who received the rank of major during the Civil War. This distinction recognized Delany’s stature as a black leader. Public Domain
He became a recruiter for the United States Colored Troops when the unit was formed in 1863. In February 1865 he was commissioned as a major in the Union Army, becoming the first and highest ranking African American officer.
When the war ended, Delany moved to South Carolina, worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau and became active in politics. He made an unsuccessful bid for South Carolina lieutenant governor as a member of the Independent Republican Party of South Carolina.
Delany established a land and brokerage business in 1871. He worked to help Black cotton farmers improve their business and negotiating skills. He supported the Freedman’s Bank. He spoke in support of the Colored Conventions Movement.
Delany also argued against carpetbaggers. He also sometimes opposed Black candidates for office. He opposed the vice presidential candidacy of Jonathan Jasper Wright and John Mercer Langston due to inexperience. He opposed the candidacy of another Black man as Charleston’s mayor.
In a baffling move, Delany switched party affiliation, and campaigned for Democrat Wade Hampton III, who won the 1876 election for South Carolina governor. He was only prominent Black person to support Hampton.
Hampton was a member of one of the antebellum South’s richest families, owning thousands of acres of cotton land and thousands of slaves in South Carolina and Mississippi before the Civil War. During the Civil War, Hampton was a lieutenant general (three-star) in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
Wade Hampton III during the Civil War. Hampton was a leader of the Redeemers, white Southerners who violently and successfully fought to restore white supremacy in South Carolina after the Civil War. Public Domain.
In 1877, Hampton was a leader of the Redeemers, white Southerners who violently and successfully fought to restore white supremacy in South Carolina. His 1876 gubernatorial campaign included extensive violence by white-supremacist paramilitary groups who disrupted elections and suppressed the Black vote and more than 150 Black people were killed in election-related violence.
Despite the ultra-violence and voter suppression, Hampton won the election by fewer than 1,100 votes.
It’s difficult to understand Delany’s motivations for supporting Hampton.
Black Charlestonians began planning again for emigration to Africa after white supremacists regained power in South Carolina, and the violent suppression of Black voting.
In 1877, the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company was founded with a fund of $6,000. Delany was chairman of the finance committee. A year later, the company purchased a ship, the Azor, for the voyage led by Harrison N. Bouey. He served as president of the board to organize the voyage.*
* Gates Jr, Henry Louis, Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Steven J. Niven. Dictionary of African Biography. Vol. 6. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012. pp. 177-179
However, Delany did not make the trip to Africa. Which was a fortunate for him, since the voyage became a disaster, with 23 or 206 immigrants dying en route and harsh conditions being found upon arrival. Despite this, a second voyage was planned, but did not take place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberian_exodus
Delany withdrew from the project in 1880 due to personal financial pressure. His wife was working as a seamstress to make ends meet. He began practicing medicine again in Charleston. Two of his seven surviving children were then students at Wilberforce University in Ohio, one of three historically Black universities established before Civil War, and they needed tuition money.
On 24 January 1885 he died of tuberculosis in Wilberforce, Ohio, age 72. He is buried Massies Creek Cemetery in Cedarville, Ohio.
Sources:
Blowers, Diana (February 22, 1995). “Delany made his mark as a doctor, writer, Black nationalist, officer”. Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio). p. 25 – via newspapers.com.
https://www.newspapers.com/article/dayton-daily-news-article-on-martin-robi/34782234/
Biography of Martin Robison Delany, biography.com
https://www.biography.com/activists/martin-robison-delany
“Building Bridges: African-American Civil War major’s name lives on”. The Journal (Martinsburg, WV).
Delany, Martin Robison (1852). The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (EPUB). Philadelphia, PA: Martin R. Delany.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17154
“Martin Delany | Pennsylvania Center for the Book”. pabook.libraries.psu.edu.
https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/delany_martin_robison
“Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885), BlackPast.org, https://Blackpast.org/african-american-history/delany-major-martin-robison-1812-1885/
“National Emigration Convention of Colored People” The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University. March 4, 1998. https://case.edu/ech/articles/n/national-emigration-convention-colored-people