Martin Robison Delany was a physician, newspaper editor, explorer, novelist, and soldier who concluded, earlier and more bluntly than most of his contemporaries, that Black Americans could not count on white goodwill for their freedom. His 1852 argument for emigration and self-government made him a founding figure of Black nationalism, and in 1865 he became the first Black man commissioned as a field officer in the U.S. Army.
At a Glance
- Born
- 6 May 1812, Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia)
- Died
- 24 January 1885, Greene County, Ohio (sources give Wilberforce or nearby Xenia)
- Birth name
- Martin Robison Delany
- Known for
- The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852); co-editor of The North Star; Niger Valley Exploring Party (1859–60); first Black field officer in the U.S. Army (1865)
- Fields
- Abolition · Medicine · Military · Journalism
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Delany was born free on 6 May 1812 in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia). Under Virginia law a child took the status of the mother: his father, Samuel, a carpenter, was enslaved and later purchased his freedom, while his mother, Pati, a seamstress, was free. Family tradition held that both parents descended from African royalty, a claim Delany repeated with pride but which cannot be documented.
When authorities learned that Pati Delany was teaching her children to read and write, which Virginia law forbade, she moved the family to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In 1831, at nineteen, Delany walked about 160 miles west to Pittsburgh, where he studied Latin, Greek, and the classics and began apprenticing in medicine with abolitionist physicians. He practiced as a cupper, leecher, and doctor in Pittsburgh’s Black community and became active in its antislavery, temperance, and self-improvement societies. In 1843 he married Catherine Richards; the couple had eleven children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.
Life and Work
In 1843 Delany founded The Mystery, a Black-owned weekly in Pittsburgh, and edited it until 1847. That year he joined Frederick Douglass as co-editor of The North Star in Rochester, New York, traveling widely in the free states to lecture and gather subscribers until 1849. In November 1850 he was admitted to Harvard Medical School, one of the first three Black students accepted there, but white students petitioned against their presence, and after a few weeks the faculty forced them to withdraw.
The Harvard episode and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 hardened Delany’s conclusions. In 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, which argued that Black Americans formed a nation within a nation, denied citizenship in the land of their birth, and should consider building a self-governing homeland elsewhere in the Americas or in Africa. The book broke sharply with Douglass and with mainstream abolitionism. In August 1854 he led the National Emigration Convention of Colored People in Cleveland, Ohio.
In 1856 Delany moved his family to Chatham, Canada West (now Ontario), a center of Black refugee settlement, where he practiced medicine and aided people escaping slavery. In May 1858 he took part in the convention John Brown held at Chatham to plan an armed campaign against slavery, though he did not join the Harpers Ferry raid. Instead, as commissioner of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, he sailed for West Africa in 1859. In December 1859 he and Robert Campbell signed a treaty with the Alake and chiefs of Abeokuta, in present-day Nigeria, granting land for a settlement of African Americans; the agreement collapsed under pressure from British missionaries and officials. His Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party appeared in 1861, and his novel Blake; or, The Huts of America, about a revolutionary plot among the enslaved, was serialized between 1859 and 1862.
The Civil War changed his course. Delany returned to the United States, recruited Black soldiers for the Union, and in early 1865 met President Abraham Lincoln to propose an army of Black troops led by Black officers. In February 1865 he was commissioned a major, the first Black field officer in the U.S. Army, and was sent to South Carolina to recruit formerly enslaved men for the 104th and other regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. After the war he served with the Freedmen’s Bureau on Hilton Head Island, advising freedpeople on labor contracts and landholding.
Delany remained in South Carolina after Reconstruction politics took hold. In 1874 he ran for lieutenant governor on an independent Republican ticket and lost. In 1876, disillusioned with the Republican administration, he campaigned for the Democrat Wade Hampton III in an election marked by the violent suppression of Black Republican voters by Red Shirt militias, a decision that alienated many Black South Carolinians. He later served as a trial justice in Charleston. In 1879 he published Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, which rejected theories of Black inferiority and emphasized the African origins of Egyptian and Ethiopian civilization.
Legacy
Delany returned to Ohio, where his family had settled near Wilberforce University, and died there on 24 January 1885; sources differ on whether he died at Wilberforce or in nearby Xenia. Frances Rollin, writing under the name Frank A. Rollin, had published a biography based on his own accounts, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, in 1868.
Twentieth-century scholars and activists revived Delany as the father of Black nationalism, tracing a line from his 1852 book and his Niger Valley expedition to Marcus Garvey and later Pan-Africanists. Historians also stress his contradictions: an emigrationist who became a U.S. Army officer, a critic of white paternalism who backed a Democrat in 1876. Blake, first published in book form in 1970, is now read as one of the earliest novels by a Black American and a radical answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Delany argued that Black Americans formed a nation within a nation, and his shifting strategies, from emigration to Union service, show how activists adapted to changing chances for freedom. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 6 May 1812 Born free in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia).
- 1831 Walks to Pittsburgh; begins studying medicine and the classics.
- 1843 Founds The Mystery in Pittsburgh; marries Catherine Richards.
- 1847 – 1849 Co-edits The North Star with Frederick Douglass.
- November 1850 Admitted to Harvard Medical School; forced out weeks later after white students protest.
- 1852 Publishes The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.
- August 1854 Leads the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.
- December 1859 Signs a settlement treaty with the Alake of Abeokuta in West Africa.
- February 1865 Commissioned a major, the first Black field officer in the U.S. Army.
- 24 January 1885 Dies in Ohio.
Sources and Further Reading
- Encyclopedia Virginia, “Martin R. Delany (1812–1885).” Link
- Colored Conventions Project, “Delving into Martin Delany.” Link
- Martin R. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (New York, 1861). Link
- Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1868; 1883 printing linked). Link
- Robert S. Levine, ed., Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
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