SOURCE: “African Dreams Deferred,” in The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1787‐1863, University of Illinois Press, 1975, pp. 250‐63.

[In the following excerpt, Miller explores Delany's plans to facilitate emigration of American Blacks to the African country of Yoruba.]

Although neither Martin R. Delany nor any other black emigrationist would explore West Africa again during the 1860's, the African emigration movement did not simply disappear once Delany returned to North America and the African Civilization Society's E. P. Rogers died in Liberia. Rather, both Delany and the Civilization Society's Henry Highland Garnet still hoped that British and American philanthropy might underwrite the costs of emigration of American and Canadian blacks to West Africa. Although unsuccessful in their efforts, both men labored throughout 1861 and into early 1862 to fulfill the dreams they had been nurturing for several years. However, developments both in West Africa and in the United States forced them to abandon their plans to establish a colony in Yoruba. Instead, they turned their attention to their enslaved brethren in the American South.

Delany continued to pursue his Yoruba emigration plan after he arrived in Portland, Maine, from England on Christmas, 1860. While there were no demonstrations to greet the black adventurer and entrepreneur when he disembarked from the steamship Anglo‐Saxon, and Portland's minuscule black community did not show any unusual interest in Delany's brief presence in its city, Delany could still congratulate himself upon his accomplishments. He had concluded a treaty with the Egba of Yoruba which, he believed, would allow him to return to Abeokuta with a quasi‐independent colony—the nucleus for the Black Nationality he envisioned as spreading throughout Africa. He had also made important contacts with Englishmen of wealth and humanity and, in the process, had established his independence from the white‐dominated African Civilization Society of New York. England's African Aid Society had already provided him with funds to return to Africa and had promised to assist the settlers Delany brought with him. All this, however, was behind him.¹ Now, as he made his way unheralded from Portland back to Chatham in Canada West, he could contemplate the problems he faced in raising a party to accompany him to Abeokuta.

The Chatham black community was Delany's obvious constituency. He had not lived in Pittsburgh for almost five years, and that city now offered no obvious support for his colonization schemes. Moreover, in New York, where there was considerable emigration sentiment, Garnet and his African Civilization Society were well established. Only in Chatham, his home since he had left Pittsburgh, could Delany expect to find an enthusiastic response to his nationalist‐emigrationist plans. His contacts in Chatham were still extensive, and the Reverend William King's Elgin Association in nearby Buxton could serve as a training center to help provide Delany with the black emigrants he desired. Nevertheless, raising a colony in Chatham would be difficult. The problems were rooted mainly in the criteria Delany had established for members of his party, for Delany's desire to bring only economically self‐sufficient individuals—“select and intelligent” settlers—was, if laudable, also self‐defeating. Few blacks were likely to have the material resources to pay for any significant portion of a trip to Yoruba, and even fewer possessed the experience in cotton cultivation which Delany believed necessary for his industrial colony.²

Delany's immediate task upon arriving in Chatham on December 29 was to promote his emigration scheme, while simultaneously mollifying those blacks who were convinced that he favored mass emigration. In mid‐January he appeared at Chatham Town Hall with King and the mayor to discuss his plans. After referring briefly to the general lack of knowledge about Africa—an ignorance “formerly heightened by improbable stories in School geographies”—Delany described his trip and the commercial resources of the areas he had traversed. Emphasizing the cotton prospects of West Africa, he warned his fellow British citizens of the consequences should an American crisis curtail England's cotton supply. Speaking particularly to his black listeners, he emphasized his opposition to a general emigration: “A few men of the right stamp are wanted to aid in the cotton supply, and self‐government, and the work will go on.” Delany reiterated this commitment to a “select” emigration in a public letter to James Theodore Holly and through the pages of The Weekly Anglo‐African.³

During the first few months of 1861 Delany moved well beyond mere rhetoric by convincing several Chatham blacks to emigrate; he then informed the African Aid Society that he would leave Canada for Abeokuta in June. Working along parallel lines, King told the Society that he would send out “experienced, intelligent, practical Christian men” from his Elgin community. Evidently King's settlers were to be members of Delany's party. By late February at least nine Chatham blacks were planning to emigrate under the auspices of the African Aid Society. These included Osborn P. Anderson, the only black man from Chatham with John Brown at Harpers Ferry; Anderson's friend Minerva Caldwell; Isaac D. Shadd and his sister Amelia; J. H. Harris and his wife; and Dr. Amos Aray. Both Shadd and Harris had attended the Chatham convention in August, 1858. Aray, it will be recalled, had briefly considered accompanying Delany to Africa and for a time was listed as a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party. In addition to the nine already pledged to emigrate, Mary Ann Shadd Cary contemplated at least a temporary residence in Africa, regardless of her feelings toward African emigration at this time. In February, 1861, she wrote the American Missionary Association to inquire about a missionary appointment there. “I would delight,” she stated, “to instruct the heathen and preach to them … to teach them of a more acceptable way then bowing to idols or traffickering [sic] in their fellow men. …”⁴

Although by April another twenty to thirty Chatham blacks had expressed their desire to leave for Africa, the black community itself was ambivalent in regard to Delany's and King's emigration plans. Even those intending to emigrate acknowledged the sensibilities of those wishing to remain in Chatham. For example, at the close of a lecture by Delany on Africa and the African Aid Society in late March, Cary offered a resolution—seconded by Anderson—which, while lauding Delany personally for his accomplishments in both Africa and England, pointedly avoided endorsing emigration itself. While Delany and King had located potential emigrants, they had not achieved a community consensus supporting their efforts.⁵

In the face of such doubt and hesitation, Delany and King labored through the spring and summer of 1861. Perhaps they were not fully aware of what impact the hostilities then beginning in the United States would have upon their efforts. Delany continued to inform the African Aid Society that he would soon be ready to return to Abeokuta with a party of settlers, and in April he asked Lord Russell, the British Foreign Secretary, for free passage to Africa in June. “The last four years of my life,” Delany explained plaintively, “having been spent entirely in this undertaking, may be given to your Lordship as a reason for asking this favor.”⁶ While waiting for Russell's reply, Delany devoted himself to other concerns—chiefly to completing the report of his exploring venture and preparing it for publication. Yet as he worked in Chatham, efforts were already underway to prevent any colony of North American blacks from gaining a foothold at Abeokuta.

Since Delany and Campbell signed their treaty with the Alake of Abeokuta and his chiefs in December, 1859, the uneasy balance of power in the Egba city made conflict over the document almost inevitable. By early 1861 there were those who were attempting to repudiate the entire agreement. Henry Townsend, who, as indicated above, had been suspicious of Delany's and Campbell's activities from the very beginning, was the major force working to undermine the treaty. When Townsend learned of the treaty with the Alake, he feared that it signified threats to his authority from both the Crowthers and the black settlers who would arrive in the Abeokuta area. By early February, 1861, Townsend had convinced the Alake and the chiefs to issue a statement denying that they had ever signed a treaty with Delany and Campbell. In fact, the Alake insisted that he had simply assigned the two explorers land for farming.⁷

Even after the uproar in Abeokuta over the treaty resulted in the expulsion of Samuel Crowther, Jr., Townsend did not rest. In the spring he used his bilingual newspaper, Iwe Irohin—reorganized with Campbell's help when the former apprentice printer was in Abeokuta in 1859 and 1860—to attack the proposed Afro‐American immigration.⁸ Townsend first claimed that Delany and Campbell had operated through stealth: “this treaty … is made in secret, no one knows of it, the Alake has no copy of it and denies all knowledge of it, and his statement is confirmed by the Ogboni Chiefs who by laws are the great rulers of the country with the King.” Moreover, the provision allowing the immigrants to settle on unoccupied land violated Egba land law. “[T]here is no land,” Townsend explained, “without an owner to it in the whole country.” But the Anglican missionary saw other reasons for objecting to the proposed colony. With the Liberian experience obviously on his mind, he complained that Afro‐Americans would disrupt the local community by introducing Western racial prejudice to Abeokuta: “The introduction of a large number of free blacks filled with certain notions of freedom, republicanism, and contempt for their uncivilized fellowmen … cannot but be attended with the greatest danger to the native governments and people.” He added that black emigrants should settle in Liberia, which was, in a sense, already their country.⁹

Both Townsend's charges and the Alake's denial of having signed the treaty were quickly answered—although not by Delany and Campbell, neither of whom at this time could have known of the developments at Abeokuta. Rather, the Reverend Crowther immediately wrote to Henry Venn in England, saying that while Delany and Campbell had agreed with his suggestion not to settle in a separate colony, still “the Alake and his seven leading war chiefs did sign the treaty and perfectly knew what they were about. …” Crowther pointed directly to Townsend as the culprit in stirring up the Alake, and he also sharply denounced the European missionary for portraying himself and his son as “false witnesses to what was never done, or done ignorantly.”¹⁰

Despite Crowther's statement, Henry Grant Foote, the consul at Lagos, was generally sympathetic to Townsend. The consul's report to England implicitly supported their position that no treaty had been signed. The African Aid Society now felt it obligatory to substantiate the treaty's validity. Fortunately for the Society's purposes, Samuel Crowther, Jr., had come to London after his expulsion from Abeokuta. Apparently at the behest of the African Aid Society, he wrote a lengthy defense of the legitimacy of the treaty and asserted that Delany and Campbell had agreed to settle in common with the Egba. Crowther later charged that Townsend had engineered the Alake's repudiation of the treaty.¹¹

With Crowther no longer at Abeokuta, Townsend reigned supreme among the Egba. But his triumph proved to be short lived, for his attack on the Crowther family aroused many of the Sierra Leonian merchant class to outright opposition, and eventually the Church Missionary Society recalled Townsend to England to review his policies. Still, he had succeeded in calling into question the validity of the Delany‐Campbell treaty. As a consequence, the British Foreign Office, which had decided in late April not to assist Delany or other New World blacks until they reached Africa, began to reconsider whether the government should cooperate in any way with the African Aid Society's efforts to establish a Yoruba colony. The Foreign Office was still undecided when Foote died at Lagos in May. His successor, William McCoskry, was a trader whose long‐standing antagonisms toward the Egba motivated him to support the Crowthers and the treaty. “The meaning of each clause of the Treaty,” McCoskry stated, “was explained to the Alake and Chiefs by the Rev. S. Crowther before they signed … [and] there was no secresy [sic] in the matter; and … it was not until a powerful opposition influence had been brought to bear upon the Alake and the Chiefs that the Treaty was denied.”¹²

If McCoskry's defense of the treaty helped further confuse the British Foreign Office, it also provided some backing for the efforts of Lord Churchill and the African Aid Society. Both King and Delany had already sent lists of emigrants to the Society, and plans were moving ahead in Canada West for a party to be sent out in the near future. Churchill forwarded the names of prospective Canadian emigrants to the Foreign Office, which, in turn, passed the lists along to McCoskry at Lagos. Although the Foreign Office asked the consul “to afford these emigrants the benefit of your advice and assistance in the event of their proceeding to Lagos,” Lord Russell hoped no sizable party of settlers would travel there. As his aid explained to Churchill, Russell believed “it would be unwise to attempt to procure for the American emigrants territorial rights or privileges which might hereafter lead to disputes, and rouse the jealousy of the Chiefs and people of Abbeokuta. …” Russell further maintained that “before any considerable number of emigrant negroes are sent to Lagos, precise information should be procured as to the terms on which such emigrants will be received in Abbeokuta.”¹³

Although the Foreign Office was obviously equivocating, the African Aid Society decided to continue with its plans, apparently believing that, regardless of the government's position, McCoskry would cooperate with any group of black colonists arriving in Lagos. It was early September when Churchill informed the consul that the Society would advance money only to those settlers who could provide their passage to Lagos (which Delany, ironically, could not do), and that McCoskry should loan each settler a small sum primarily to pay for the costs of landing at Lagos and proceeding to Abeokuta. Any excess sums could be used by the emigrants to help them upon their arrival at Abeokuta. Soon after Churchill sent McCoskry instructions, the African Aid Society's secretary, Ferdinand Fitzgerald, informed King of the organization's procedures and assured the Canadian minister that McCoskry would provide assistance and protection at Lagos.¹⁴

Throughout this maneuvering in London, Lagos, and Abeokuta, little was heard from Canada—other than assurances that Delany would lead a party to Abeokuta. As of August, however, only two or three families were willing to accompany Delany, who was obviously finding it difficult to locate pioneers for his industrial colony.¹⁵ His lack of success is not surprising. With the onset of the Civil War in the United States, Canadian blacks must have thought it more profitable to consider the plight of their brethren still enslaved in the southern states than to contemplate uplifting backward heathens in a strange land across the Atlantic. And by then the repudiation of the treaty by the Alake of Abeokuta, along with Townsend's opposition, must have discouraged would‐be emigrants by raising the possibility of a hostile reception at Abeokuta. Moreover, the Ijaye War was continuing in the interior, and few Canadian blacks could have welcomed the thought of entering war‐torn Yoruba. Finally, the blacks' lack of personal resources must have loomed as an insurmountable obstacle, for the African Aid Society was willing to advance only meagre amounts of money. Delany's emphasis on self‐reliance had ultimately become meaningless, because it was impossible for most North American blacks to raise enough money to carry them to Lagos. Only a relatively wealthy man such as Jonathan J. Myers or an individual with white religious affiliations could obtain the resources for a trans‐Atlantic trip. In fact, even Henry Highland Garnet's white‐backed African Civilization Society was struggling.

In the spring of 1861 the Civilization Society had many more prospective emigrants than their financial resources could support. In March, Garnet claimed that more than a hundred blacks were willing to carry on the late E. P. Rogers's mission to establish a settlement in Yoruba. Garnet himself would lead the party, which the African Aid Society's Lord Churchill described as including “all skillful, carefully selected Christian men and women, cotton and sugar cane growers, and mechanics.” Yet aware that Churchill's rhetoric would not carry his party across the Atlantic, Garnet began to search for financial assistance. At a March meeting on behalf of the Society, a resolution was passed recommending “the raising of at least ten thousand dollars, for the purpose of sending out the proposed company. …” Garnet, Corresponding Secretary A. A. Constantine, and Delany's exploring companion Robert Campbell all appeared at another fund‐raising meeting a few weeks later in Brooklyn. Besides disavowing a general emigration, Garnet announced that he was ready to lead a company of twenty‐five already selected emigrants, and that $10,000 would be necessary to transport the settlers and begin the colony.¹⁶

Despite the magnitude of Garnet's projection, the white leaders of the Civilization Society insisted that the Yoruba party should be supported by American and not British donors. At the Society's anniversary meeting in May, the Reverend Joseph P. Thompson forewarned his listeners of the British threat and assured them that “the Anglo‐Africans who go from America, though offered British aid and British protection, prefer to keep up the name and associations of their native land, though she has turned them out of doors, and trampled them as children of the bond‐woman.” American philanthropy would preserve the integrity of the colony—or so Thompson argued. Of course, Thompson was proclaiming a patriotism that many of the emigrants did not share—especially Garnet, who only six weeks earlier had admitted that he loved the United States only as much as the Gospel required and no more. At the end of August, Garnet renounced the anglophobia stressed by the white leaders of the Civilization Society and sailed for England and another attempt to tap the pockets of British philanthropy.¹⁷

Convinced of the impossibility of obtaining funds in the United States for a Yoruba colony, Garnet devoted almost three months in England to the advocacy of his cause. In mid‐October he appeared at a meeting of the African Aid Society in Birmingham, with Lord Churchill and Robert Campbell—then en route to Africa—on the platform. Garnet introduced a resolution supporting the emigration of blacks from Canada (not the United States) to Africa to advance Christianity and civilization; he also praised England's recent acquisition of Lagos. In seconding the black clergyman's resolution, Campbell said that he had just shipped from London to Africa 250 pounds of cotton machinery for use at Abeokuta to process cotton before shipment to England. Garnet spoke to at least one other African Aid Society meeting (with William Howard Day beside him) before leaving England for the United States in late December.¹⁸ Evidently his mission had accomplished little.

By the time Garnet returned to New York, Delany had made his peace with the African Civilization Society. His motives for merging with the organization are obscure; probably the disadvantages of remaining a man with a reputation but without followers prompted him to seek an alliance with the New York organization. In early November, after moving to New York, he attended a special conference designed “to effect and complete a oneness and harmony of sentiment and action, that their white friends, as aiders and assistants, may have a true and definite point as a datum before them.” A committee which included Delany, Robert Hamilton of The Weekly Anglo‐African, and several others was appointed “to draw up a basis as a fundamental principle by which the African Civilization Society shall be governed, and its objects and designs defined.” Three days later, the merger was completed at another meeting of the Society at which Delany presented a supplement to the African Civilization Society's Constitution. The supplement consisted of three articles, two of which embodied Delany's major concerns. First, the Society disavowed mass emigration and stated that it “will aid only such persons as may be practically qualified and suited to promote the development of Christianity, morality, education, mechanical arts, agriculture, commerce, and general improvement. …” Second, the Society announced that its advocacy of emigration rested upon a belief in “Self Reliance and Self Government [and] … the principle of an African Nationality, the African race being the ruling element of the nation, controlling and directing their own affairs.”¹⁹

In actuality, the Civilization Society had altered few of its basic objectives. Admittedly, Delany's supplementary articles placed his personal stamp upon the Society, for he was much more interested in the development of an African Nationality than in the Christian regeneration of Africa. In addition, his emphasis upon self‐reliance undoubtedly represented an attempt to purge the organization of white influence. Nevertheless, until at least 1864 the Civilization Society retained the Philadelphia merchant Benjamin Coates and several other whites as vice‐presidents, and a substantial number of whites were listed as references, should potential donors have doubts about the integrity of the organization.²⁰ Moreover, in rejecting general emigration, the Civilization Society was simply reiterating a previous position.

Whatever advantages each side gained from the merger, Delany and the missionary‐nationalists of the African Civilization Society continued to advocate African emigration to a black community increasingly concerned with issues developing from the war with the Confederacy. Delany maintained he would soon return to Africa, and in January, 1862, he explicitly denied that he had abandoned the African movement. Not only was he still planning to emigrate, but “all those who originally intended to go to Africa, are making vigorous preparations for the consummation of our designs. …” Two months later in speaking on “The Commercial Advantages of Africa” to a largely white audience in Providence, Rhode Island, he again said he and his family would soon move to Africa to cultivate cotton on a 700‐acre farm which he had already selected. Even as late as March of the following year he appeared in Chicago in an African chief's wedding dress for two lectures on Africa. Of course, Delany was not the only member of the African Civilization Society to continue his efforts on behalf of African emigration. In the fall of 1863 Garnet and several other black members of the Society asked James Mitchell, the federal government's commissioner of emigration, for $5,000 to carry out the Civilization Society's objectives, but the government was unwilling or unable to comply with this request.²¹

As the war progressed, emigration became less important. To some extent, the nationalist‐emigrationists turned to such collective racial efforts within the United States as conventions to determine, in Delany's words, “a general policy” on major political and social issues. Delany and Garnet also devoted their energies to the plight of the southern slave during the conflict. Before a New York war rally, Delany argued that “if Great Britain or other power undertakes to raise the blockade to assist the South, at the expense of the liberty of the blacks, then let our war be ‘insurrection’ and let the government not interfere.” Emancipation was also Garnet's concern. Speaking in May, 1862, alongside his former archenemies James McCune Smith and George T. Downing, the Presbyterian minister maintained that the most important goal for blacks was the abolition of slavery. With the Lincoln administration proposing colonization in Central America, Garnet announced that “all the negro asks is freedom, and then we will go to Hayti, Africa, or Central America, without the aid of the Government.” Totally committed to victory for the Union and to the emancipation of all southern slaves, both Delany and Garnet were recruiting black soldiers for the Army by 1864, if not before.²²

As both Delany and Garnet devoted themselves to military recruiting and to the larger issues engendered by the war itself, the African Civilization Society as a whole followed suit by shifting the focus of its concern from Africa to the South. At the Society's fourth anniversary meeting in New York in May, 1863, the Reverend George W. Levere spoke to this point: “We have, indeed, been hindered from planting our standard on African soil, but happily our constitution is universal in its language and spirit; therefore, when the African door was shut, we turned our attention toward the Contrabands or Freedom of the South.” Shortly thereafter the Reverend Ennals J. Adams, a black Congregational minister active in the Civilization Society but at the time a missionary in Africa for the American Missionary Association, also saw a new missionary field opening up. “[W]hen I read some of your reports of visits to the ‘contrabands’ in Virginia,” Adams wrote from Good Hope station on Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone, “and consider what a great work is to be done in America, the result of the war, my heart bounds back across the broad, deep, blue ocean to my native land, and mingles with my oppressed brethren.” From 1863 through at least 1867 the Civilization Society established schools for freedmen in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere; fittingly, E. P. Rogers's widow taught at one of the Society's schools.²³ Clearly, then, many of those who had combined nationalism and emigrationism into a coherent ideology were having second thoughts as war raged in both Yoruba and the United States, and as the anticipated emancipation of the southern slave gave rise to new hopes and new dreams.

Notes

1. Daily Eastern Argus (Portland, Maine), December 27, 1860, p. 2; manuscript appeal and enclosures of Lord Alfred Churchill for the African Aid Society, February 25, 1861, Anti‐Slavery Papers, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; copy of letter from Churchill to William McCoskry, London, n.d. [but probably between September 1‐7, 1861], William King Papers (microfilm), Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa.

2. Delany's description of the ideal emigrants is in the Chatham Tri‐Weekly Planet, January 21, 1861, p. 3.

3. Ibid., January 4, 1861, p. 2; January 18, 1861, p. 3; January 21, 1861, p. 3; The Weekly Anglo‐African, January 26, 1861, p. 2. Delany's remarks have been changed from past to present tense.

4. Churchill to King, London, March 9, 1861; two lists of names, dated February 26 and April 27, 1861, written on both sides of the same sheet of paper, King Papers. Also see the February 27, 1861, entry in the manuscript diary of John Brown, Jr., January 1‐July 29, 1861, John Brown, Jr., Papers, Ohio Historical Society. For Cary's query, see her letter to George Whipple, Chatham, February 26, 1861, “Canada File,” American Missionary Association Papers, Amistad Research Center and Race Relations Department, Dillard University. As was indicated in Chapter 7, Cary in the fall of 1861 was denouncing African colonization as part of her campaign against the Haitian emigration movement.

5. See note 4; Chatham Tri‐Weekly Planet, March 29, 1861, p. 3.

6. F. Fitzgerald, Secretary of the African Aid Society, to Thomas Hodgkin, London, August 21, 1861, Thomas Hodgkin Papers, microfilm in possession of Dr. Edward Kass, Channing Laboratory, Boston; Delany to Lord John Russell, Chatham, C.W., April 2, 1861, FO 84/1159, Public Records Office, London.

7. J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert Smith, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 101, 103; J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841‐1891: The Making of a New Elite (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), p. 192; Slave Trade Correspondence (Consular), Parliamentary Papers, LXI (1862), 4‐5.

8. Ajayi, Christian Missions, p. 192; Fred I. A. Omu, “The Anglo‐African, 1863‐65,” Nigeria Magazine, no. 90 (September, 1966), 208. Townsend considered his newspaper a potential weapon against Delany and Campbell long before he attacked the treaty in the Iwe Irohin. As he wrote Henry Venn while Delany and Campbell were still in Africa: “In connection with the Printing Press I must bring to your notice the need of using it to influence the public mind. This is the more necessary as ere long we shall have another class of men to deal with. Free Blacks from America full of bitterness against all white men.” Townsend to Venn, Abeokuta, February 5, 1860, Church Missionary Society Papers, CA 2/085A, microfilm of original papers at the Church Missionary Society Archives, London, available at the University of Wisconsin Library; hereafter cited as CMS Papers.

9. Iwe Irohin, March 25, April 5, 1861. See also Rev. Samuel Crowther to Venn, Abeokuta, April 6, 1861, CMS Papers, CA 3/04A; Fred I. A. Omu, “The ‘Iwe Irohin’, 1859‐1867,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, IV (December, 1967), 41‐42.

10. Crowther to Venn, Abeokuta, April 6, 1861, CMS Papers, CA 3/04A.

11. Slave Trade Correspondence (Consular), Parliamentary Papers, LXI (1862), 6‐9.

12. Ajayi, Christian Missions, p. 193; Ajayi and Smith, Yoruba Warfare, pp. 101, 103, 105; Cyril Edgar Griffith, “Martin R. Delany and the African Dream, 1812‐1885” (Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1973), p. 132; Slave Trade Correspondence (Consular), Parliamentary Papers, LXI (1862), 12.

13. Slave Trade Correspondence (Consular), Parliamentary Papers, LXI (1862), 13‐14. Copies of the Foreign Office's letter to Churchill and of McCoskry's (see preceding paragraph) were forwarded to King by the African Aid Society. Fitzgerald to King, London, August 8, 1861, King Papers.

14. Copy of a letter from Churchill to McCoskry, London, n.d. [but probably between September 1‐7, 1861]; Fitzgerald to King, London, September 7, 1861, King Papers.

15. Fitzgerald to Hodgkin, London, August 21, 1861, Hodgkin Papers.

16. Chatham Tri‐Weekly Planet, April 8, 1861, p. 2; The Weekly Anglo‐African, March 23, 1861, p. 3; April 13, 1861, p. 2; Constitution of the African Civilization Society together with the Testimony of Forty Distinguished Citizens of New York and Brooklyn to the Importance of the Objects Contemplated by Its Friends … (New Haven: T. J. Stafford, 1861), pp. 7‐8. At the African Civilization Society's March meeting, the resolution adopted also provided that all money raised would be held by the organization's treasurer, Robert Lindley Murray, to be expended with the consent of an advisory committee consisting of several leading white ministers, including Henry Ward Beecher and Stephen H. Tyng, and Isaac T. Smith, the banker active in the New York Colonization Society.

17. Constitution of the African Civilization Society, p. 37; The Weekly Anglo‐African, April 13, 1861, p. 2; September 7, 1861, p. 3. The Civilization Society did not even come close to the goal of $10,000; in the fall of 1861 an observer reported the Society's yearly receipts as $862.44. Willis Boyd, “Negro Colonization in the National Crisis, 1860‐1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1954), p. 211.

18. The Weekly Anglo‐African, November 16, 1861, p. 4; Anti‐Slavery Reporter, n.s. X (January 1, 1862), 1.

19. Constitution of the African Civilization Society, pp. 3‐5.

20. An Appeal in Behalf of the Education of the Freedmen and their Children ([New York?]: n.p., [1864?]), p. 4. Sterling Stuckey, in The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 23, claims that in joining the Civilization Society, Delany “proceeded to lead a movement to purge that organization of its white officers. …” However, the Constitution of the African Civilization Society, which included the supplementary articles, was published in late 1861, and the list of officers on p. 6 included a significant number of whites.

21. The Weekly Anglo‐African, January 25, 1862, p. 2; The Pine and Palm, April 3, 1862, p. 3; Chicago Daily Tribune, March 20, 1863, p. 3; African Civilization Society to James Mitchell, New York, September 12, 1863, Documents Relating to the Suppression of the Slave Trade (microfilm, reel 8), National Archives.

22. The Weekly Anglo‐African, January 11, 1862, p. 2 (page incorrectly dated January 4); January 25, 1862, p. 2; The Pine and Palm, May 22, 1862, p. 2. Delany's and Garnet's speeches have been changed from past to present tense. Garnet was active at the black National Convention of 1864 at Syracuse; see Howard H. Bell, “Negro Emancipation in Historical Retrospect: The Nation—The Condition and Prospects of the Negro as Reflected in the National Convention of 1864,” Journal of Human Relations, XI (Winter, 1963), 221‐231. On Garnet's military recruiting, see Richard K. MacMaster, “Henry Highland Garnet and the African Civilization Society,” Journal of Presbyterian History, XLVIII (Summer, 1970), III. On Delany's activities in this regard, see Chicago Daily Tribune, March 20, 1863, p. 3; April 15, 1863, p. 4. Also see Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861‐1865 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1956), pp. 105‐111.

23. The Anglo‐African (formerly The Weekly Anglo‐African), January 3, 1863, p. 4; May 30, 1863, p. 4; February 13, 1864, p. 2; February 20, 1864, p. 3; September 3, 1864, p. 3; The American Missionary, VIII (February, 1864), 26. For information on the later activities of the African Civilization Society, see The Anglo‐African for 1864‐65; the Annual Reports of the Society, 1866‐68; The People's Journal (Brooklyn, N.Y.), [1867‐68].