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Considered in respect to hatred to the Anglo-Saxon, a stentorian voice, a violence of gestures, and a display of physical energies when speaking, Dr. Delany may be regarded as the ablest man in Chatham, if not in America. Like the Quaker, who when going to fight pulled off his coat, and laying it down, said, "There lie thee, Quaker, till I whip this fellow," so the Doctor, when going to address an audience, lays aside every classic idea of elocution and rhetoric, and says, "Remain there till I frighten these people."[3]

Brown's and Douglass's assessments of Delany have contributed to the creation of an unfair but still widely held image of Delany as a leader and writer who was both empowered and limited by his racial pride. But as readers of this volume will see, Delany in fact shared in the inclusive integrationism of Douglass and Brown, particularly during the 1840s and the period of Reconstruction, and he consistently worked with blacks and whites alike in the pursuit of social justice. For a person who could make enemies, Delany had quite a lot of friends and associates, and there are good reasons to be particularly suspicious of Brown's and Douglass's assessments. Not surprisingly, there were telling contexts for their condescending remarks on Delany. Douglass was in conflict with Delany from the late 1840s through the 1870s, and his acerbic comments on Delany's race consciousness came at a time when Douglass was still angry at Delany for having championed black emigrationism during the 1850s and for having attacked him as overly accommodating to whites. Brown's remarks on Delany also have to be considered in the context of their political disputes. Ironically, Brown presented his caricatured picture of Delany recruiting black Canadians for African emigration at a time when he was recruiting black Canadians from the same towns to emigrate to Haiti, using precisely the same racialized argument that Delany used when promoting black emigration to the southern Americas during the mid-1850s.

An even larger context for the racial thinking that Brown and Douglass attacked in Delany must be considered here and is on display throughout this volume. When Delany asserted his black pride, and even racial superiority, he did so against the grain of a culture that regarded blackness as a mark of evil and inferiority. Whereas Brown and Douglass declared that they would be happy to see race simply vanish from the United States through intermarriage, Delany from the 1830s until his death in 1885 fought white racists' denigration of blackness by embracing it. And he did so, again and again, rhetorically: by insisting that within white culture his blackness in effect made an argument about racial identity and character that mulatto leaders, such as Brown and Douglass, simply could not make. The African American educator Anna Julia Cooper underscored this point in her remarks on Delany in 1892: "The late Martin R. Delany, who was an unadulterated black man, used to say when honors of state fell upon him, that when he entered the council of kings the black race entered with him; meaning, I suppose, that there was no discounting his race identity and attributing his achievements to some admixture of Saxon blood."[5] In this respect, Delany's race consciousness and pride, his very sense of himself as a representative black man, can be understood as his defiant response to the white racist gaze upon his black body.

Delany's rhetorical insistence on his status as representative and exemplary black man had a crucial role in his revival in the 1960s and 1970s. As historian Nell Irvin Painter has remarked, Delany remained "forgotten until his resurrection as the father of black nationalism and the epitome of proud blackness."[6] During the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of the Black Arts movement and the upsurge of interest in black studies, Delany was suddenly being celebrated for precisely what Payne, Brown, and Douglass had professed not to like about him: his prideful race consciousness and Pan-African identity. Indeed, by the 1970s Delany had been virtually reified as the Father of Black Nationalism, a radical separatist who ultimately sought to lead blacks back to their "native" Africa.[7] But this image of Delany, which is a partial one, has hurt his reputation in the larger culture, for (white) Americans tend to value what is proclaimed to be the more humane, inclusive integrationism of leaders on the order of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. Even though Delany often aligned himself with those very values, he has been defined in relation to a relatively small part of his career, and thus has suffered the typical fate of the black separatist in traditional fields of study: he has been marginalized and for the most part ignored, invoked primarily as the dark binary opposite of Douglass.[8] Although Delany was a prolific writer who was unable to conceive of political action apart from writing and who wrote in a range of genres, most anthologies of American literature fail to reprint any of his multifarious and engaging writings, and, perhaps most astonishing of all, he is not included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, the most widely used anthology in African American literary and cultural studies.[9] This neglect would have left his contemporaries, African American leaders such as Holly and Payne, and even, I would surmise, Douglass and Brown, truly mystified.

Much of the problem of assessing and evaluating Delany lies in the tricky term "black nationalist." To be sure, it makes relatively good sense to identify Delany as a black nationalist. But does the label have a single, comprehensible meaning? A scholar of nineteenth-century African American literature recently termed Delany "the tinderbox black nationalist."[10] Is "tinderbox" somehow naturally linked to "black nationalist"? Does a pride in blackness necessitate a hatred for whiteness and a separatist disdain for the United States that can only express itself in an inflamed violence? Another historian of African American culture has recently remarked that it would be "an egregious error to leave the talk of racial solidarity to persons who espouse black nationalism as their political project and predicate such actions on a rejection of America,"[11] with the implication being that black nationalism enforces a bad kind of racial solidarity and is ultimately un-American. Patriotic black Americans, according to this formulation, would never reject "their" country, no matter how often that country rejected them. It is worth keeping in mind that Delany's "rejection" of the United States during the 1850s came at a time when the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision affirmed that black Americans were forever denied the rights of citizenship.

Delany's rejection of the United States, which was never a full rejection and was always couched in terms of sorrow (and anger), occurred at particular historical moments when particular formations of American nationality (such as the antebellum formation that regarded blacks as little more than property) made rejection seem the most politically useful way to strengthen African American community and force dramatic changes in U.S. culture (Delany thought that whites would come to realize their dependence on black labor once blacks began to leave the country). Delany sometimes talked of emigration as a form of providentialism, what God required of blacks to bring about the regeneration of the race. But at other times he presented emigration as a short-term, small-scale effort that could ultimately improve blacks' condition in the United States. It is worth underscoring that Delany's emigration projects and commitments tended not to last for very long. For Delany, emigrationism was a way to sustain black community when that community was being degraded and splintered by white racist culture. In many respects, his form of black nationalism resembled the black nationalism of Brown, Douglass, Payne, and Holly. The historian Sterling Stuckey has argued that what links various expressions of black nationalism in the United States is a consciousness among African Americans "of a shared experience at the hands of white people" and of "the need for black people to rely primarily on themselves in vital areas of life."[12] Rather than representing a single position—a race consciousness that is always aggressively separatist—black nationalism can embrace a range of sometimes competing and conflicting options—uplift, separatism, emigrationism, patriotism, racial anger, integrationism, and so on—and has to be constructed and reconstructed in response to different exigencies and contexts. Delany's special genius lay in his ceaseless and imaginative work at such construction and reconstruction.

In an influential revisionary overview of Delany's career, Paul Gilroy observes, "Delany is a figure of extraordinary complexity whose political trajectory through abolitionisms and emigrationisms, from Republicans to Democrats, dissolves any simple attempts to fix him as consistently either conservative or radical."[13] In fact, Delany can be refreshingly inconsistent in his beliefs and actions, arguing at one moment for a black nationalism linked to U.S. nationalism, at other moments for a Pan-Africanism that dissolves the importance of the bounded nation. Like Douglass, Delany advocates a politics of racial integrationism when that politics seems possible and useful; at other moments, when that politics seems an impossibility (or destined to keep blacks in a subordinate position), he advocates creative modes of resistance, including separatism. Delany can be somber, dogged, angry; he can also be lighthearted, comical, convivial. Whatever label one wants to put on him, it will not stick for very long, though "black nationalist" will do once it is agreed that Delany was capable of changing the meaning of that term with his every action.

Delany was committed to action. "We must make an issue, create an event, and establish for ourselves a position," Delany declared at the 1854 National Emigration Convention.[14] Throughout his career, Delany sought to "make an issue, create an event" and to do so in solidarity with black people of the United States. The extraordinary persistence and creativity of his efforts to bring about social change make him one of the most fascinating African American leaders and writers of the nineteenth century and arguably one of the three or four most influential. That he would make different issues and different events at different historical moments speaks to the improvisatory, pragmatic nature of his career; and it is precisely that sometimes conflict-ridden and "inconsistent" career that is on display in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader.

This volume invites readers to discover, or rediscover, Delany. It prints nearly 100 Delany documents, approximately three-fourths of which have not been reprinted since their initial nineteenth-century publications. Most readers familiar with Delany know him through his emigrationist writings of the 1850s. Selections from those writings are included in this edition, but Delany's Central and South American emigrationism is presented not as the "essential" Delany but rather as one of six discrete career moments that are highlighted in this volume, somewhat arbitrary divisions made in an effort to provide readers with a relatively clear picture of Delany's moves through various abolitionisms, emigrationisms, and other antiracist and antislavery activities. As to be expected, the emigrationist Delany sometimes overlapped with the integrationist Delany, and vice versa. But the fact is that Delany did make impassioned commitments at particular historical moments, and those commitments changed as the historical circumstances changed. In order to help the reader take the full measure of those commitments and changes, and to assess their sometimes contingent, improvisatory nature, I have provided, in addition to the major documents one would expect to find in a Delany reader, relatively minor works (such as letters and newspaper accounts) that provide clues, or guideposts, to Delany's evolving thought. I have also provided full introductions for each section and contextual headnotes for most of the selections. This documentary reader thus aspires to be both a Delany reader and a documentary life.

As a documentary life, this edition includes a number of texts that were not actually written by Delany, such as newspaper accounts of his speeches. Some selections are included in clusters of documents that show Delany in debate with others, particularly Douglass, and some reveal as much about the cultural contexts in which Delany worked as about Delany himself (note, for example, the racist tone of such pieces as "The Moral and Social Aspect of Africa," "The Colored Citizens of Xenia," and "Politics on Edisto Island"). Like many black activists of the nineteenth century, Delany worked in various genres (letters, essays, speeches, fiction) and published in a wide range of forums (newspapers, books, pamphlets) for a wide range of audiences (northern, southern, international; black, white, interracial). Many of the selections in this documentary reader thus call attention to the mediating cultural filters through which much of the available information about Delany's career is known, making us acutely aware of the performative nature of his career, the ways in which he skillfully shaped discourses and personae for different rhetorical occasions. Given the importance of performance and cultural filters to the documents in this collection, it is a challenge simply to try to piece together a coherent portrait of a writer whose improvisatory and strategic politics and rhetoric can suggest both great shifts and overarching continuities. The six-part structure of this book, as noted above, should be taken as a provisional and somewhat arbitrary effort to develop one sort of coherent narrative of Delany's complex public career.

Part 1 profiles the beginnings of Delany's career, which to a significant extent was defined and shaped by his experiences in Pittsburgh during the 1830s and 1840s. We do not know much about Delany's life with his mother and siblings in Chambersburg once they arrived there in 1822 (his father would join them in 1823 after he purchased his freedom). What we do know is that Delany came to regard the small town of Chambersburg as limiting and that in 1831, at the age of nineteen, he left his family and journeyed to Pittsburgh, which he hoped would offer better educational and vocational opportunities. He found what he was looking for: a strong black community with great leaders and teachers, and even supportive whites who helped him to begin a medical education. As the eight documents in Part 1 show, Pittsburgh was crucial to the development of Delany's sense of black pride and community, and his sense of purpose. Inspired by Pittsburgh's black leaders, Delany sought to become a leader himself. Among his most notable achievements was the founding and editing of the African American newspaper the Mystery (six of the eight documents in Part 1 are related to Delany's newspaper work of 1843-47). At this early phase in his career, Delany focused most of his attention on city and state politics, and on the black educational and fraternal groups that were emerging in Pittsburgh. Of particular importance to Delany was his association with the St. Cyprian Freemasons, a black Freemasonry lodge that he helped to establish in 1847. As his 1847 Eulogy on the Life and Character of the Rev. Fayette Davis and his Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry make clear, Masonry legitimated Delany's conviction of blacks' equality (and even superiority) to whites. In its celebration of hierarchy and transnational community, black Freemasonry also provided him with a near-mystical sense of his potential as a black leader beyond the confines of Pittsburgh.

Delany assumed a more national stage when he relinquished control of the Mystery in late 1847 and joined Frederick Douglass as coeditor of the North Star. Delany's eighteen months as coeditor of this new African American newspaper are the focus of Part 2. The eleven selections in this section actually consist of thirty-five documents, the bulk of which make up the major text of Part 2, "Western Tour for the North Star"—twenty-three letters that Delany wrote Douglass while working as subscription agent, lecturer, and coeditor. Delany's letters to Douglass from his "Western Tour" of the free black communities of the Midwest constitute one of the great (and hitherto little known) African American travel narratives of the nineteenth century. The letters also point to significant changes in Delany's politics of black elevation. While editing the Mystery, Delany focused on local black groups and, as was consistent with his Masonry, asserted his black pride in terms of African genealogies and histories. These genealogies and histories, as emblematized in the black Masonic lodge, had separatist implications, even if Delany at the time was not arguing specifically for black emigration. While working with Douglass, however, Delany was much more the Garrisonian and U.S. black nationalist, asserting the importance of moral suasion and cross-racial abolitionist work and regularly praising blacks who worked within capitalist culture to gain wealth and station in the United States.

Delany elaborated the importance of black elevation in some of his essays for the North Star, eight of which are published in this section. For example, he states in his "Domestic Economy" essay of 1849: "We must have farmers, mechanics, and shopkeepers generally among us. By these occupations we make money—these are the true sources of wealth. Give us wealth, and we can obtain all the rest." But even as Delany took positions similar to Douglass's, he remained less optimistic about the possibilities of a sudden millennial flowering of amicable relations between whites and blacks. Readers of "Western Tour" and his essays in the North Star will also note that Delany never fully adopted a moral-suasionist position. Unlike Douglass, he regularly advocated black violence as a legitimate response to white violence. Delany became increasingly frustrated with Douglass's equanimity (and claims to black leadership), and his hostility toward Douglass, implied in his act of leaving the coeditorship in June 1849, became apparent in their 1850 letter exchange on Samuel R. Ward, though a full break between these two great leaders did not occur until 1853, when they debated the merits of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Central to that debate on Stowe was Delany's shift in thinking about antislavery, for by the early 1850s he turned against the politics of moral suasion and black elevation in the United States that had been central to his coeditorship of the North Star and was advocating black emigration to Central and South America or the Caribbean. Part 3 presents some of Delany's best-known writings on the topic, including selections from his 1852 Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and the complete text of his 1854 "Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent." There are approximately fifteen additional documents in this section, which show how Delany's emigrationism emerged, in part, as a response to Frederick Douglass and his allies. The selections follow Delany from his initial hesitations about black emigration, to his epistolary debate with Douglass on Uncle Tom's Cabin, to his efforts to argue for and organize the Cleveland emigration convention of 1854. Delany saw Douglass's promotion of Uncle Tom's Cabin as primae facie evidence that blacks were failing to think and act for themselves. He was particularly disturbed that Douglass would celebrate a novel by a white woman that seemed to advocate the colonization of free blacks to Africa, even as he ignored the black-authored Condition, which argued that blacks should take the initiative in developing their own emigration movements. Delany organized and ran an 1854 emigration convention that was specifically directed against the more integrationist (and patient) mandate of Douglass's 1853 Colored National Convention. The selections in Part 3 also follow Delany through the aftermath of the Cleveland convention, as Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, in 1856 and there continued his emigrationist efforts (and attacks on Douglass).

A central text of Part 3 is "Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent," Delany's bold call for African Americans to emigrate to Central and South America or the Caribbean. Somewhat in the mode of David Walker's Appeal (1829), he sets forth the history of antiblack racism in U.S. law and custom, arguing that unless the free blacks are part of "the ruling element of the body politic," they are lacking in the full participatory rights of citizenship. He maintains that African Americans would have the best chance of achieving those rights by emigrating to a place where people of color are in the majority both in terms of population and political power. Elaborating his own version of Manifest Destiny to argue for the importance of African Americans remaining in the Americas, as opposed, say, to emigrating to Africa, he proclaims that the "finger of God" beneficently directed the forcible taking of Africans to the Americas, where blacks have a providential destiny to emerge as the ruling element. This belief informs his novel Blake, selections of which are included in Part 3.

In 1857 or early 1858, however, Delany abruptly shifted in his emigrationist thinking, deciding that Africa, and not Central and South America, or the Caribbean, was the best site for African American emigration. This shift, which was inspired by a sense of his genealogical connection to Africa, inaugurated a new phase in his career. The twelve documents in Part 4 focus on Delany's efforts from 1858 to the early 1860s to develop what he termed a black nationality in Africa. For Delany, this nationality would emerge under the leadership of talented African Americans; his was an elitist project that meant to contest the racial paternalism that informed the agenda of the American Colonization Society (ACS), a white reformist organization that sought to ship the free blacks to Liberia. In his writings on Liberia in the North Star (see Part 2), Delany complained that the ACS kept a paternalistic control over the black emigrants and their putative leaders. Delany aspired to send to Africa African American leaders who would operate independently of the ACS to "regenerate" the black Africans that he regarded as lacking in the progressive knowledge afforded by Western civilization. "Africa for the African race, and black men to rule them," Delany proclaimed in Official Report on the Niger Valley Exploring Party. To that end, he hoped to establish a cotton-producing settlement overseen by African Americans on land purchased from the ruler of Abeokuta. Such a settlement, he believed, would help to make Africa into an economic power by inspiring cotton production throughout the continent. And if that were to happen, he maintained, the South's cotton monopoly would be broken and slavery would soon come to an end.

The documents in Part 4 chart Delany's abrupt move from contempt for Liberia to a willingness to work with Liberia, his efforts at fund-raising, and his apparent success in achieving his goals when he signed a treaty in late 1859 that granted him the land that he needed to begin his settlement. The documents also situate his African plans in the larger context of his varied activities and interests at the time. Prior to committing himself to his African project, he met with John Brown and gave serious consideration to working with him to bring about a slave revolution in the United States. Once he determined to travel to Africa, Delany communicated with Henry Ward Beecher and other white leaders in an effort to gain financial support for his project. Most spectacularly, he made a British lecturing and fund-raising tour during 1860 that brought him celebrity when he participated at the International Statistical Congress at London and acquitted himself as a black scientist. He also interacted with a number of black leaders, many of whom resisted the idea that Africa was the best locale for black emigration. Taking a position similar to Delany's in "Political Destiny" on the importance of blacks remaining in the Americas, James T. Holly and William Wells Brown claimed that Haiti made better sense for African American emigration. Delany contested those leaders, in letters included in this section, but following the collapse of his treaty with the Alake in 1861 and the outbreak of the Civil War, Delany, like most African Americans of the time, embraced the Civil War as a war of emancipation and abandoned his emigrationism.

Part 5 presents twenty documents from the 1863 to 1877 period that display Delany's efforts on behalf of the Union army and the nation's subsequent project of Reconstruction. Delany held off committing to the war until early 1863, when he became convinced that a Union victory would lead to fundamental constitutional changes that would guarantee blacks citizenship and equal rights—the changes brought about by the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Several of the documents in this section show Delany making the case for black rights and equality (see, for example, his letter to President Andrew Johnson of 25 July 1866). But he did most of his Reconstruction work on the local level. An official at South Carolina's Freedmen's Bureau and active from the late 1860s through the late 1870s in South Carolina state politics, Delany attempted to blend his vociferous calls for black pride and self-determination with pragmatic efforts to improve relations between blacks and whites of South Carolina. At times he could sound more cautious, more accommodationist, than his rival Frederick Douglass, whom he chastised, in a letter of 22 February 1866, for asking too much for the freedmen, too quickly, and too aggressively. He also chastised those blacks who called on the Republican Party to nominate a black vice presidential candidate in 1867. He believed that without the cooperation and encouragement of southern whites, the freed black people of the South would find it impossible to rise in the culture. Thus, shortly after the war's end, he proposed an alliance among white southern landholders, white northern capitalists, and black southern laborers. As he expounded in "Triple Alliance" (1865): "Capital, land, and labor require a copartnership. The capital can be obtained in the North; the land is in the South, owned by the old planters; and the blacks have the labor. Let, then, the North supply the capital (which no doubt it will do on demand, when known to be desired on this basis), the South the land (which is ready and waiting), and the blacks will readily bring the labor."

Delany's notion of a "triple alliance," which necessitated that blacks work with, and not alienate, whites, undergirded his politics of Reconstruction. Thus in 1875 he attempted to explain to northern whites why blacks needed to work with the former slaveowners (see "The South and Its Foes") and in 1876 he supported a former slaveholder for the governorship of South Carolina. But even as Delany was willing to make concessions to northern and southern whites, he regularly asserted an uncompromising pride in blackness, and he made rather aggressive demands on the culture, particularly when speaking to black audiences. In an 1865 speech at Charleston's Zion Church, he invoked the black conspirator Denmark Vesey as a model for black South Carolinians,[15] and in a letter debate with Frederick Douglass in 1871, he demanded full representation for African Americans in the Republican Party. The main issue for Delany during this period was black citizenship, which he fought to make into something more than nominal rights. Echoing language he had used in Condition and "Political Destiny," he proclaimed in University Pamphlets: "It must be understood that no people can be free who do not themselves constitute an essential part of the ruling element of the country in which they live."

With the failure of Reconstruction, marked by the withdrawal of federal troops from the southern states in 1877, Delany once again concluded that the white majority was never going to allow blacks to become an essential part the ruling element. In a career characterized by an improvisatory politics of black nationalism and uplift, Delany in the late 1870s reconsidered the possibility of African emigration, but with a difference. Whereas his Niger project of 1858-62, the focus of Part 4, was first and foremost an African American-led venture that Delany hoped would regenerate the continent, Delany's interest in Africa circa 1877-80 far more modestly worked with existing structures in an effort to bring some African Americans to Liberia during a time of black "exodus" from the South. The final section of the reader, Part 6, brings together four late Delany documents on Africa and race. Despite his former hostility to Liberia and the American Colonization Society, beginning in 1877 he chose to link himself with the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steam Ship Company, which, with the help of Liberian government officials and the American Colonization Society, sought to take African Americans emigrants from southern cities to Liberia. Delany's work with the Liberian Exodus Company had a good deal to do with his changing views on race, for he came to see the failure of Reconstruction as a divine sign that blacks and whites were perhaps not intended to live together. In his last major publication, Principia of Ethnology, Delany elaborated theories of racial difference, based on his reading of ethnographic "science" and the Bible, in which the separation of the races fulfilled the will of God. And yet even as he argued in Principia that racial separatism upheld God's "designs and purposes," he initiated a friendly correspondence with William Coppinger, the white secretary of the American Colonization Society. He shared with Coppinger his frustrations and his African aspirations and in the concluding document in this volume, requested his help in obtaining a civil service job that would help to finance his own emigration to Africa. Delany's goal of seeking a civil service job in Washington, D.C., however, also suggests his continued desire to remain part of a nation that would see fit to honor him.

To a certain extent the six sections in this volume work as discrete units. But there are, of course, a number of overarching interests, themes, and concerns in Delany's politics and writings that brought coherence to his career. Though he could be inconsistent, or subject to dramatic shifts, he was always focused on strategies for achieving social justice for African Americans. And he regularly meditated on such large issues as the role of religion in the lives of blacks and whites, the value of work, the meaning of citizenship, and the nature of a good education. It would be useful to conclude this introduction with brief discussions of three particularly important (and volatile) issues in Delany's writings from 1840 to 1880: race, nation, and leadership.

In Principia, Delany theorizes that there are three principle races in the world (white, yellow, and black), that God intended the races to remain apart, and that blacks are the superior race, having "a prophetic destiny…in a higher scale of morals and religion than has yet been attained." For many, Principia is the essential Delany text on race and a text that shows the limitations of his racialist thinking, placing him in a camp, as Frederick Douglass suggests, similar to that of the white supremacist. But as readers of this volume will see, there is no essential statement on race by Delany, or at least no text that need be given absolute precedence over any other. True, in 1879 he argues for racial separatism, but in his 1875 "South and Its Foes," he states that the "two races must dwell together," and in his 1876 endorsement of the Democrat Wade Hampton, he states that his great hope is "to bring about a union of the two races, white and black, (by black I mean all colored people,) in one common interest in the State." What had Delany discovered between the mid-1870s and 1879 that had suddenly convinced him that God intended for the races to be apart? Perhaps nothing more than the end of Reconstruction in 1877, which Delany regarded in 1879 as a sign that God may have intended the end of Reconstruction for the reasons elaborated in Principia. Delany's statement of 1879 is his "final" statement only because he became too ill, and died, before he could write about race in yet another context.

Indeed, Delany wrote about race throughout his career, beginning in the early 1840s, when we have his first extant publications, to the moment in 1879 when he published Principia. In his various, extensive writings one discerns a wavering, or shifting, between calls for interracial harmony, on the one hand, and racial separatism, on the other; a prideful sense of black superiority, on the one hand, and a racial egalitarianism, on the other. In his 1845 "Prospectus" to the Mystery, written two years after he had married the daughter of a white woman and a black man, he states that he advocates "no distinctive principles of race"; and in his columns for the Mystery, and Masonic writings, he principally emphasizes ideals of racial egalitarianism. This is true even for Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry, which chides white Masons for refusing to deal with black Masons on equal terms. In his "Western Tour for the North Star," he extols interracial harmony, celebrating how in one Ohio town "[i]t is no unfrequent occurrence for the colored residents to receive the civilities of their white neighbors to attend parties and weddings, and vice versa." Even when he adopts his emigrationist politics of the 1850s and early 1860s, he talks of how the elevation of the "pure" black can help to establish "beyond contradiction, the general equality of men" (Condition). That said, he makes claims during this period about black superiority, and his emigrationism conveys his belief at that time in the value of black separatism (especially given the evils of white racist practices). He states, for example, in his 1854 "Political Destiny": "We have then inherent traits, attributes—so to speak—and native characteristics, peculiar to our race—whether pure or mixed blood—and all that is required of us is to cultivate these and develop them in their purity, to make them desirable and emulated by the rest of the world." Only ten years later, however, Delany is once again proclaiming that blacks and whites should live together in a climate of egalitarianism.

And yet amidst the wavering there is a consistency in his thinking: a conviction that in white racist culture, blackness will always be demeaned or belittled by whites and that it is therefore incumbent upon African Americans, for political and psychological reasons, to make claims for the equality of blackness by asserting nothing less than that equality, and sometimes more. As mentioned above, Delany believed that the "pure" black could make the best argument about the equality (or superiority) of blackness, simply because white racists could not say about that person, as they could, for example, about Douglass or William Wells Brown, that the achievements could be "explained" by the "white" blood in that person's body. Again and again Delany advances a rhetoric of superiority to increase the possibility of achieving equality. Delany is very clear about the uses of such rhetoric in his 1865 speech in Xenia, Ohio, which he delivered to the black citizenry shortly after becoming the first black major of the Union army. He tells his auditors that they "must declare themselves to be the equals of white men, if not their superiors. In no other way could they attain to their proper position in the body politic." Even in the race-conscious "Political Destiny," Delany implies a belief that racial identity is more a matter of politics than biology, for when he declares that in a world consisting of whites and peoples of color, "every individual will be called upon for his identity with one or the other," he is basically saying that race is more a matter of political choice than of essence, a willingness to side with the oppressed rather than the oppressor.[16]

Readers of this volume will no doubt come to various conclusions about Delany's views on race and interracial relations. It would be a mistake, however, to make quick judgments about his beliefs based on one or two texts. Although Delany can seem conflicted (and sometimes even confused) about his views, it should be emphasized that he is never conflicted or apologetic about his unabashed embrace of his blackness.

Delany's views on nation are also subject to shifts and changes. Some of his writings challenge the value of the nation-state and make the case for an African diasporan politics. And yet Delany, like Douglass, was attracted to the United States and its ideologies of equality and freedom. For example, when he secretly met with John Brown and Canadian blacks in 1858 to plot a slave insurrection in the United States, he thought about that insurrection in terms of a U.S. nationalism. According to the transcript of that meeting, Delany was the main proponent of Article 46, which was adopted by the group: "The foregoing articles shall not be construed so as in any way to encourage the overthrow of any State Government or of the General Government of the United States, and look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to amend and repeal. And our Flag shall be the same that our Fathers fought under in the Revolution."[17] Like Douglass in his great speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" (1852), Delany conceived of even his most radical politics as an effort to complete what he regarded as the unfinished American Revolution. Delany's commitment to the egalitarian ideology of the American Revolution, and to the United States itself, informed his work during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when it would be hard to find a more determined U.S. nationalist. But there are traces of this nationalism even in his emigrationist writings, such as Condition, when he proclaims in the midst of his call for black emigration: "We love our country, dearly love her, but she don't love us—she despises us, and bids us begone, driving us from her embraces."

When he began to champion black emigrationism in the early 1850s, Delany claimed to have jettisoned his commitments to the U.S. nation. But he stopped short of adopting what could be termed a politics of postnationalism. In his great (and neglected) essay "True Patriotism" (1848), Delany suggests the possibility of adopting such a politics when he declares, "Patriotism consists not in a mere professed love of country…but a pure and unsophisticated interest felt and manifested for man." During the 1850s and early 1860s, however, he thought in terms of an alternative nationhood, calling for the development of a black nationality in a large geographic area that could support a rapidly increasing population and provide the necessary resources for economic growth. Crucial to his vision of an emergent black nationality, whether in Central and South America or in Africa, was his hope that educated and talented African American leaders would bring it into being. In this light it could be argued that Delany never really disentangled himself from U.S. nationalism, for there was something imperialistic about his ventures, at least in the way he articulated them (his Central and South America projects were never put into practice). In Condition he states that Central and South America could be regarded as a single nation of peoples of color, who "are precisely the same people as ourselves," and in "Political Destiny" he similarly states that the different countries of Central and South America, and the Caribbean, "are in fact but one country—relatively considered—a part of this, the Western Continent." Delany can seem deliberately unconcerned about the fact that different countries have different histories and cultural practices that may make them resistant to the development of a single black nationality overseen by African Americans. He had similar hopes and blind spots about the different countries of Africa coming together as a unified black nationality. As with his Central and South American projects, he believed that a regenerated black nationality in Africa was most likely to occur if talented African Americans were in charge. He states his goals in Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party: "I have but one object in view—the Moral, Social, and Political Elevation of Ourselves, and the Regeneration of Africa."[18] Ironically, what makes African American leaders ("ourselves") so suitable as leaders was precisely their Americanness—their connection to a nation that Delany conceives of (ideally) as progressive, Christian, civilized, egalitarian. When in 1863 he thought those ideals had a chance of being realized in the United States, he relinquished emigrationism, at least for a while.

Delany may have shifted in his views on race and nation, but he remained fairly consistent in arguing for the importance of black male leadership to black elevation, and thus in many respects anticipated W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of the "Talented Tenth."[19] In his writings on the topic, Delany sometimes emphasizes his own special qualities of leadership and at other times presents himself in relation to his generational cohort of leaders. In his 1848 "Western Tour for the North Star" he expresses his delight in joining hands with Henry Highland Garnet, Charles L. Remond, and Frederick Douglass as leaders engaged in a group effort to bring about social reform. Twenty years later, in a letter to the young black leader R. L. Perry, he similarly refers to himself in relation to the cohort of "Pennington, Garnet, Purvis, Vashon, and others."[20] And yet there are numerous moments in his career, and in his writings, when Delany can seem a cohort of one, energized by a conception of himself as the heroic black leader who alone can regenerate the race. His romantic conception (or fantasy) of heroic black leadership is expressed most powerfully in his novel, Blake, which focuses on the efforts of a single black leader to bring about a hemispheric slave revolution in the Americas. Although Blake does work with others, including the Cuban poet Placido, the novel suggests that nothing much can happen without the efforts of Blake. If there is a clue, or key, to Delany's conception of black leadership, it may well be contained in that self-mythologizing novel, particularly in the chapters excerpted in this volume in which Blake attempts to teach the plantation slaves a new way of thinking about slavery and religion.

In Condition Delany writes about blacks' religiosity: "[T]hey carry it too far. Their hope is largely developed, and consequently, they usually stand still—hope in God, and really expect Him to do that for them, which it is necessary they should themselves."[21] One of the slaves in an early chapter of Blake exemplifies this tendency when he urges Blake to renounce his rebelliousness and "stan still an' see de salbation."[22] Ironically, the phrase "stand still," regularly adduced by proslavery preachers to encourage slave obedience, has its sources in the emancipatory moment in Exodus when Moses convinces the fleeing Israelites at the Red Sea not to return to slavery but rather "to stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord" (Exodus 14:13). When Blake responds to the Uncle Tom-like slave that he will "'stand still' no longer,"[23] he appears suddenly to envision how those scriptural words speak to the possibility of black insurrectionary action under his Moses-like leadership, and how the very meaning of those words has hitherto been perverted by the white enslavers to serve their instrumentalist ends: "They use the Scriptures to make you submit, by preaching to you the texts of 'obedience to your masters' and 'standing still to see the salvation,' and we must now begin to understand the Bible so as to make it of interest to us."

Recuperating the revolutionary implications of the slaveholders' "Stand still and see the salvation" to serve his own instrumentalist ends, Blake organizes a slave conspiracy by word of mouth, with the intelligent slaves of the various southern slave plantations entrusted to spread the word. In effect, he takes it upon himself to create a sort of black Masonic network in the slave South with himself as grand master. Delany's Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry is relevant here, for in that text Delany describes Moses as an African and a fugitive slave who recognized that wisdom must be "handed down only through the priesthood to the recipients of their favors." As Delany goes on to explain, it is the leader's job to inculcate among the enslaved "a manly determination to be free." It would not be much of an exaggeration to suggest that what guides Delany's sense of himself as a leader in nineteenth-century culture (and informs his conception of Blake) is a conviction that he is a Moses-like leader on a mission to free "his" people. This may seem megalomaniacal, or delusional, or simply typical (Douglass had similar fantasies of Mosaic leadership). Whatever it was, it worked: Delany's conception of himself as a nineteenth-century black Moses compelled him onward. As a leader, he talked back to white culture, in much the same way that Blake appropriated and parodied the slave preachers' "Stand still and see the salvation."

A few words on Delany's gendered language of leadership.[24] It is tempting to want to chide Delany for his patriarchal politics, for the way he seems to have exploited his wife (who took on the child-rearing and domestic responsibilities while Delany remained on the road or in South Carolina) and emphasized connections between manhood and freedom ("manly determination to be free"). Unsurprisingly, Delany operated within the conventional gender discourses of the time in which fully enfranchised citizenship was defined in relation to manhood. What is surprising, and worthy of emphasis, is the extent to which he challenged patriarchal ideology.[25] He regularly wrote of the importance of education to women, urging women to take their places as political and economic leaders. His early essay "Young Women" (1844) cautioned black women against aspiring simply to be the servants of whites, and in Condition he offers a mandate: "Let our young women have an education; let their minds be well informed; well stored with useful information and practical proficiency, rather than the light superficial acquirements, popularly and fashionably called accomplishments." The result of such an education, he maintains, would be this: "In a word, instead of our young women, transcribing in their blank books, recipes for Cooking; we desire to see them making the transfer of Invoices to Merchandise." Though the formal title of his 1854 convention, the National Emigration of Colored Men, sounds gender exclusive, Delany encouraged his wife and other women to attend the convention, and as a result more than 25 percent of the voting delegates were women. After that convention he worked with Mary Ann Shadd Cary both in Canada and in the United States, and he portrayed women as having a central role in the hemispheric black revolution that he imagined in his novel Blake. When he traveled to Africa and saw women at council meetings offering advice to the chiefs, he "thought the hint might be taken in countries a long way from Africa" ("The Moral and Social Aspect of Africa"). Although he believed that women had a central role in regenerating the race as mothers, the mothers he imagined were to be educated, worldly, and political.

As this brief discussion of Delany and gender might suggest, Delany's writings are of interest not simply in and of themselves but also for the ways they engaged key debates and discourses of the nineteenth century, in this instance, the debate on women's rights and education. As readers of this volume will see, Delany engaged numerous other issues of the time, particularly those centering on race and nation. This documentary reader should therefore prove useful for readers interested in thinking about minority discourses in relation to the dominant discourses of nineteenth-century U.S. culture. Delany's writings participated in broad questionings by minority writers about the location of the nation, the function of borders and territory, the question of difference and otherness, the tension between integrative and resistant narratives, the problematics of racial and national identity, the matter of U.S. imperialism and empire, and numerous other issues. Like many minority writers of the period, Delany both contested and attempted to appropriate (or lay claim to) the dominant culture. His writings have an unusually broad sweep, for Delany responded to a number of the most significant national debates and conflicts of the nineteenth century. In this respect, one could regard this book less as a monument to a single individual than as a contribution to the ongoing project of accenting neglected minority voices and perspectives on nineteenth-century U.S. culture.

That said, there remains something quite magnificent about Delany's unceasing efforts, as a writer and activist, to challenge the culture, address the big issues, and demand equality for African Americans. Delany's friends and enemies alike agreed that he was an uncommonly intelligent and proud person who was devoted to improving the situation of black people in the United States. Though he was known for what we might today term a strong ego, he was actually rather selfless in his devotion to the cause of black elevation. He certainly did not reap any material rewards from his years of service and political action. As James T. Holly noted, "Dr. Delany could never descend to the artifices of the selfish trickster, of the mere money-getter or fortune hunter," and thus he "struggled heroically with honest poverty all his life long!"[26] In the final years of his life, when he attempted to find a civil service job that would recognize his work during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he experienced what he had predicted in 1848 would be the fate of the person espousing "True Patriotism": "contempt and neglect are the certain and most bitter fruits of his reward." But in that same essay of 1848, Delany also offered a glimmer of hope for that patriot:

[T]he American colored patriot lives but to be despised, feared and hated, accordingly as his talents may place him in the community—moving amidst the masses, he passes unobserved, and at last goes down to the grave in obscurity, without a tear to condole his loss, or a breast to have in sympathy. But the time shall yet come, when the name of the despised, neglected American patriot, in spite of American prejudice, shall rise superior to the spirit that would degrade it, and take its place on the records of merit and fame.