The Father of Black Nationalism
Portrait of Martin Delany.
Martin Delany, though little known to the world today, is a towering figure in American history. In addition to being an abolitionist, whose life was consumed with efforts to end slavery, Delany was also an author, newspaper editor, medical practitioner, and one of the first Black officers of field rank in the Union Army. He was also among the first three Black men to enter Harvard Medical School. Overshadowed in history by Frederick Douglass, with whom he once co-edited the North Star, Delany pressed for Black soldiers, Black officers, and Black self-reliance at a time when few in power wanted to hear it.
By 1863, Martin Delany was recruiting Black men in several states to serve in the newly formed 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first Black regiment raised in the North. In February 1865, he went to Washington to urge President Abraham Lincoln to raise a corps of Black troops led by Black officers. Lincoln sent him on to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and on February 26, 1865, Delany was commissioned a major.
Martin Robison Delany was born a free man in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia) on May 6, 1812. His father, Samuel Delany, was enslaved and worked as a carpenter, but his mother, Pati Peace, was a free woman who worked as a seamstress. In 1867, Delany recounted his life story to author Frances A. Rollin for a planned biography. The book that emerged was Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany. In it, Rollin reports that all of Delany’s grandparents were Africans, a fact he was extremely proud of. Delany’s grandparents on his father’s side were pure Gola, a people who inhabited what is Liberia today. Captured in warfare, they were shipped to Virginia as slaves, but his grandfather, who was reportedly a chieftain, escaped to Canada with his wife and two sons, only to be pursued and brought back into slavery in the United States. Rollin says he later lost his life in an encounter with a slaveholder who tried to force his submission.
His grandparents on his mother’s side were reportedly Mandingo, whom Rollin says were nicknamed “the Jews of Africa.” Delany’s maternal grandfather was reportedly a prince among them. His name was Shango, and he was also captured during tribal warfare and sent to America with Graci, his betrothed. But, Rollin reports:
“Shango, at an early period of his servitude in America, regained his liberty, and returned to Africa.”
Graci, on the other hand, remained stateside after being granted the same freedom, and she lived with her daughter Pati until her death at the age of 107. Rollin adds that on his own journey to Africa, Delany sought confirmation of this family history, consulting among others the missionary Samuel Crowther. Given his deep-rooted African heritage, Delany longed to return to his ancestral homeland. He would not see the continent until 1859, when he was forty-seven.
As a young boy, Delany enjoyed the protection and nurturing of his mother, Pati. When an attempt was made to enslave Pati and her children, she took the two youngest and walked from Charles Town to Winchester in time to meet the court, consulted a lawyer, and entered suit. When the matter was settled, she returned to her children. The Delany children were taught to read and write from The New York Primer and Spelling Book, which itinerant peddlers brought to them and from which the peddlers also gave lessons in Pati’s home. Rollin writes that this was in direct violation of Virginia law, though the statute itself is not cited.
When it was discovered that the children were learning to read, Pati was issued a summons to appear in court. Rollin says she knew at once that the visit that led to it meant trouble. Pati was persecuted by white neighbors for the offense, but one banker, Randall Brown, advised her more than once to leave town. In September of 1822, Pati did just that. She packed up their belongings and, with her children in tow, gave the false impression that she was moving to Martinsburg, but instead headed for Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The free state of Pennsylvania allowed Pati to teach her children in peace, and she even sent them to school. She remained in Chambersburg for fifteen years, and it was there that her husband, Samuel, who had bought his freedom at Martinsburg for a set sum, joined the family.
While in Chambersburg, Delany continued to study, but as he grew older, his parents could not afford to continue sending him to school, so he went away on occasion to find work. The longest and most arduous of his journeys, and the one for which he sought his parents’ consent, took him 160 miles to Pittsburgh in 1831. He started out on July 29th, traveling on foot with little to no money. When he crossed the three grand ridges of the Alleghenies, he reached Bedford, where he found employment. Delany remained in the town for a month before moving on. He kept his eyes fixed on Pittsburgh, “in which city the foundation of his fame afterwards rested,” wrote his biographer, Frances A. Rollin.
“The longest and most arduous of his journeys … took him 160 miles to Pittsburgh in 1831. He started out on July 29th, traveling on foot with little to no money.”
Once in Pittsburgh, he worked as a laborer and barber to earn enough to live on and continue his studies. He eventually enrolled in the school of Reverend Lewis Woodson, a Black minister and educator whose school for Black students met in a church, usually identified as Bethel AME. A friend from Jefferson College, Molliston Madison Clark, who spent his vacations in Pittsburgh, helped him with his studies, and the two of them conceived a literary society for young Black men. Rollin names it the Theban Literary Society. The church was also a setting where Delany and community leaders like John B. Vashon and others held literary and political discussions. Of this, Robert S. Levine, author of Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, writes:
“From those discussions emerged the African Education Society, which proclaimed in its constitution ‘that ignorance is the sole cause of the present degradation and bondage of the people of color in these United States; that the intellectual capacity of the black man is equal to that of the white, and that he is equally susceptible of improvement.’ ”
With Clark’s help, Delany studied Latin, Greek, and the classics. By most biographers’ accounts, in 1833, the year of a cholera epidemic in Pittsburgh, Delany began learning medicine as an apprentice to abolitionist doctors, among them Dr. Andrew N. McDowell, whom he served by cupping and leeching patients, a primary technique for treating disease at the time. He treated cholera patients again in 1854, and Rollin says his skillful handling of that outbreak was still remembered when he wrote.
It was in this period that Delany also engaged in abolitionist activities. In 1834 he helped organize several societies in Pittsburgh, among them the first total abstinence society among Black residents and the Philanthropic Society, which was ostensibly a charity for the poor but in fact helped connect enslaved people with friends in the North through the Underground Railroad. Rollin says Delany was secretary of its executive board for many years, and that he served as a special policeman when mobs attacked the homes of prominent Black Pittsburghers. With the knowledge he gained as an apprentice to local physicians, Delany became a private cupper and leecher.
In August of 1841, Delany attended a convention of Black Pennsylvanians in Pittsburgh, at which delegates called for a newspaper run by Black people and devoted to their concerns. After waiting two years for such a paper to materialize, Delany took matters into his own hands. In 1843 he began publishing a four-page paper called The Mystery. The paper, which Delany wrote and edited, centered on antislavery issues and the advancement of Black Americans. In it he ran letters and editorials, announced events and meetings taking place in the area, and ran advertisements for Black Pittsburgh laborers and business owners. Rollin says the first printing sold a thousand copies in the city.
Delany married Catherine A. Richards in Pittsburgh on March 15, 1843, the year he launched his paper. Rollin describes her father and grandfather as men of influence and wealth, and says the family’s property, valued at nearly $250,000, was lost in 1847 when attorneys would not press a Black family’s claim against white families. In time, the couple had eleven children, of whom seven were living when Rollin wrote. In 1846, Delany was sued for libel by “Fiddler” Johnson, a Black man he had accused in the Mystery of helping slave catchers. A jury found him guilty. Accounts of the penalty differ: Rollin puts the fine at $200 plus costs and says the governor remitted it after lawyers petitioned, while other accounts put it at $650 and say his supporters in the newspaper business paid it. Rollin adds that a second suit against him ended in acquittal. Delany sold his interest in the Mystery soon afterward (accounts differ on the date, and on whether the lawsuit forced the sale), but he did not quit the newspaper business altogether. His success with the Mystery led to another publication. In August 1847, Frederick Douglass traveled to Pittsburgh on an antislavery tour. Accompanying him was William Lloyd Garrison, a white abolitionist, journalist, and editor who often reprinted Delany’s articles in his own paper, The Liberator.
Delany joined forces with Douglass (Garrison, though Douglass’s early mentor and a major influence on him through The Liberator, was never a partner on this paper, and the two men’s friendship would later fray), and together they launched a new four-page paper called the North Star, with its first issue dated December 3, 1847. Delany served as co-editor and as its traveling agent, lecturing to win subscribers across the Midwest and Pennsylvania. Estimates of its circulation range from two or three thousand to more than four thousand, with subscribers in the United States, Europe, and the West Indies. It became the most influential Black antislavery newspaper of the pre-Civil War period. Named for the North Star seen in the night sky, which freedom seekers used as a guide, the paper was published in Rochester, New York. The two men did not always agree: Douglass favored integration, while Delany leaned toward Black self-reliance and, by the early 1850s, emigration. Like many Black newspapers of the day, the North Star struggled financially, in part because many subscribers could not pay what they had pledged. Delany ended his connection with the paper on June 1, 1849. Rollin says that when an Ohio group asked him to edit a paper of their own, he declined, arguing that the Black community could support only one, and “let that one be the North Star, with Frederick Douglass at the head.”
Delany returned to Pittsburgh and reopened his cupping and leeching practice. He also sought formal medical training in order to advance his career, but that effort met with great opposition. Rollin says he was refused admission by the University of Pennsylvania, Jefferson, and the medical colleges at Albany and Geneva before Harvard accepted him. Of this period, Levine writes:
“Delany attended Harvard Medical School for several months but was dismissed because of his color. Outraged by Harvard’s racism and the Compromise of 1850, in 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.” (Most other accounts put the dismissal at a few weeks into the term rather than several months.)
It was a book-length treatise that criticized the United States for failing to grant equal rights to Black Americans, and which ended with Delany calling for Black people to emigrate and establish a new nation elsewhere, such as in the West Indies, or Central and South America. He would later shift his focus to West Africa for such an enterprise. Two years after the book, Delany helped to organize a National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 1854, which drew over a hundred delegates. (Delany’s own report puts attendance at nearly sixteen hundred people.) Delany took the chair to open the proceedings as temporary chairman, and by the convention’s close he had been elected president of the National Board of Commissioners it created. Delany later wrote that the convention’s closed sessions had already made Africa its most important point of dependence.
In February 1856, Delany moved his family to Chatham, Canada West (now Ontario), where he resumed his medical practice, much of it among refugees from American slavery. In August 1858, at a third emigration convention in Chatham, he stepped down as president of the board, and the board then commissioned him to lead the Niger Valley Exploring Party. Its instrument of appointment said the board opposed emigration “as such,” while leaving the commissioners free to negotiate for territory. Delany sailed from New York on May 24, 1859, aboard the barque Mendi, and landed in Liberia in July. He reached Abeokuta, in what is now Nigeria, on November 5, where he met for the first time in Africa his colleague Robert Campbell, a Jamaican-born teacher from Philadelphia who had gone out by way of England. On December 27, 1859, the two signed a treaty with the Alake and chiefs of the Egba giving Black American settlers the right to live on Egba land not otherwise occupied. The king and his council ratified it the following evening.
Delany and Campbell left Lagos on April 10, 1860, and reached Liverpool on May 12. Delany stayed in England through the summer. Rollin counts him among the members of the International Statistical Congress, which met in London in July 1860, where Lord Brougham drew the American minister’s attention to “a negro present, a member of the Congress.” That same month, English supporters formed the African Aid Society, which by its own notice had assisted Delany and Campbell with funds to continue their work and to lay their reports before Black Americans. Delany was back in Chatham by the end of 1860. In 1861, working with the Reverend William King of the Elgin settlement, he tried to put the emigration plan into operation, but under pressure from Anglican missionaries, the Alake withdrew from the treaty, and the outbreak of the Civil War drew away the settlers’ interest. His Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party was published in 1861.
Rollin writes that Delany, anxious to help put down the rebellion but unable at first to find a way, was forced to remain an “unwilling looker-on.” In his book, The Negro’s Civil War, author James M. McPherson says of the recruiting effort that followed:
“In January 1863 the War Department authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to raise a regiment of Negro soldiers in his state. Massachusetts’ Negro population was too small to fill up a regiment, so Andrew called upon the wealthy abolitionist George L. Stearns to form a committee of ‘prominent citizens’ to raise money for the recruitment of men for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment from all over the North. Stearns hired several Negro leaders as recruiting agents.”
Among them was Martin Delany. His son, Toussaint L’Ouverture Delany, named for the leader of the Haitian Revolution, also signed on to fight with the first colored regiment formed in the North, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. By the time of his commission, Delany was living in Wilberforce, Ohio.
Rollin has Delany in Washington on February 6, 1865, seeking an interview with Lincoln and Stanton. Historians describe his proposal as an all-Black corps led by Black officers. In a note dated February 8, Lincoln wrote to Stanton, “Do not fail to have an interview with this most extraordinary and intelligent black man.” On February 26, Delany was commissioned a major, and he was appointed to the 104th United States Colored Troops. The commission made Delany one of the highest-ranking Black officers of the war, though Alexander T. Augusta, an Army surgeon who had been a major since 1863, was brevetted a lieutenant colonel on March 13, 1865. The Civil War ended before Delany led troops in combat.
Delany was then posted to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he recruited and later worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau, the government agency that helped former slaves adjust to post-slavery life. Around this time, Delany, ever the Black advocate, alarmed some white officers. A lieutenant who heard his July 1865 lecture to freedpeople on St. Helena Island reported it with disgust, and Delany argued that the freed had a right to the land they worked. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 had set aside coastal land for freed families, but President Andrew Johnson later reversed it. Delany remained in South Carolina, where his family joined him. They lived there for a considerable portion of his remaining life, during which he was politically active in the state. In 1874, Delany ran for lieutenant governor as an Independent Republican but lost. He also served briefly as a trial justice in Charleston. In his late sixties he took up emigration once more, this time to Liberia, with the Liberian Exodus Joint-Stock Steamship Company. Delany died at Wilberforce, Ohio, on January 24, 1885.
Indeed, Martin Delany was many things, but foremost he was proud of his race, regardless of their struggles, and despite the oppression they endured in a country that failed to see them as citizens. His love for his people was evident in his espousal of Black nationalism, which was his driving force. His zeal for the Black cause, coupled with his brutal criticism of the United States and many of its institutions, has tarnished his legacy, leaving others like Frederick Douglass leagues ahead of him in terms of historical prominence. But Martin Delany, say what you will of him, left a sizable footprint in the sands of history.
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