Martin Robison Delaney

   

Martin Robison Delaney 

 Martin Robison Delany, the youngest of five children was born on May 6, 1812 in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). His mother Patti, a seamstress, was a free born African and his father Samuel was a slave, working as a carpenter.  Martin’s mother wanted to give her children every advantage, so she started teaching them how to read (illegal under Virginia law at the time). When word of her teaching got out, Patti moved the family to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania so she could continue educating her children.  Martin’s father, still a slave could not join them.  Once he was able to buy his freedom, he joined them the following year.

     In 1831, when Martin turned nineteen, he travelled to Pittsburgh (walking the 160 miles) to enroll in the Bethel Church school for blacks and Jefferson College where he studied Latin, Greek, and the classics.  He also apprenticed under Dr. Andrew McDowell, becoming his medical assistant.  Delany soon became a part of the Underground Railroad and in 1843, he established The Mystery, an abolitionist newspaper.  The Mystery was the first black newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains.

     Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglas came calling in 1847 and convinced Delany to become co-editor of his newspaper The North Star. Although the two men would become lifelong friends, they were, at times, bitter rivals. The partnership lasted a mere 18 months before each went his separate way.  Their ideas began to become diametrically opposed.  Douglas was preaching patience and integration for freed blacks and the continuation of the anti-slavery battle of the abolitionists.  Delany, however, preached emigration.  He believed the only way that blacks could achieve equality was by emigrating to Central America, and later to Africa.  These feelings were made clear in 1852 when he published his manifesto:  The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered.

     Soon after parting ways with Douglas, Delany became one of the first blacks, along with two other men, to enroll in Harvard Medical School at the invitation of Dean Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. All three men were dismissed from the school a few weeks later because of protests filed by many white students.

     During an earlier journey down the Mississippi, Delany witnessed, firsthand, the plight of blacks in the south.  Upon returning, Delany married Catherine Richards. The couple would have eleven children. His experiences during the southern trip inspired him to write a novel, Blake, or the Huts of America.  Soon thereafter in 1856, Delany moved his family to Canada.  In 1858, he aided John Brown during the Chatham Convention. With his novel now complete, he saw its publication. First by Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 followed by the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and 1862.  Both magazines published the novel in serial form (it was not published in complete book form until 1970). Many thought the novel to be a response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe.  It was, in fact, a response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. It tells the story of an escaped slave (Blake) who plans a slave insurrection while traveling through the south. It was quite a contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

     Delany returned to the United States at the onset of hostilities. He, along with many others, proposed that blacks be recruited for service in the Union Army. Soon after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew, himself an abolitionist, “issued the Civil War’s first call for black soldiers.”   Delany began his recruiting efforts.  In fact, one of his sons, Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany enlisted in the 54^th Massachusetts regiment. The 1989 movie “Glory”, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, told the story of this unit.  Toward the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Delany was commissioned a Major 104th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, becoming the first black officer to receive a field command.

     Following the war, Delany was assigned to the Freedman’s Bureau in South Carolina.  He also entered the field of politics.  He narrowly lost an election for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, where he later served as a judge.  In 1880, he moved to Wilberforce Ohio where his wife had been working as a seamstress. He died there of tuberculosis on January 24, 1885.  Unfortunately, his private papers, given to Wilberforce University, were destroyed in a tragic fire.