author would permit us to copy.” Writing to Garrison in February 1859, Delany urged him to read the three chapters in the hope that he might recommend the completed novel (“written in Parts 2, pp. about 550”) to book publishers. Assuring Garrison that “its course of publication in the Magazine, is not to interfere with its publication in book form whenever I can obtain a publisher,” Delany confessed his desire to “make a penny by it.”³ The fact that Hamilton in the February issue began to print the novel in its entirety, starting with chapter 1, would suggest that Delany, around the time he wrote to Garrison, was despairing at the hope of finding a commercial publisher for a novel of black insurrectionism.

Delany wanted to “make a penny” by his novel in order to finance his Niger Exploring Expedition of 1859‐60, which sought to establish an African American colony in West Africa in the Yoruba region near Lagos. Rather than joining John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Delany departed for Africa in July 1859 and several months later signed a treaty with the Alake (king) of Abeokuta that provided him with the land he needed to establish his colony. Delany subsequently toured Great Britain in search of financial support for his project, returning to Canada early in 1861 to recruit black emigrants. Later that year he offered a complete manuscript of Blake to Thomas Hamilton for publication in the Weekly Anglo‐African; the novel ran serially in the paper from 23 November 1861 to (in all probability) late May 1862.⁴

But was this the same novel Delany gave Hamilton in late 1858? It is difficult to say, despite the fact that there are only small differences between the twenty‐five chapters Hamilton published in 1859 and republished in 1861. The numerous “authenticating” footnotes on Africa in the novel's second part, however, suggest that Delany had reconceived aspects of the novel during 1861 to bring it more into accord with his hopes to “regenerate” Africa. But Delany's African regeneration plans came under considerable pressure from the course of contemporary events. Not only was Delany's treaty with the Alake annulled in mid‐1861, but Hamilton began serializing the novel at a time when many African Americans, including the editor himself, regarded the Civil War as an opportunity for blacks to secure their rights to citizenship in the United States. The last extant chapter of the novel, chapter 74, appeared in an April 1862 issue of the paper. Because Hamilton wrote in Anglo‐African Magazine in 1859 that the novel had eighty chapters, critics have assumed that the final six chapters appeared in May 1862 issues of the paper, which have yet to be found, if they in fact exist.

Given the novel's multiple and conflicting sources, purposes, and audiences, and also its truncated ending, we need to be wary of efforts to develop a “coherent” formalist reading of it. This is not to deny that large motifs hold the novel together, such as its global perspective on slavery and its Pan‐African thematics. But I would suggest that just as important as these deliberatively developed motifs are the desires that work to hold together and define Delany's career, particularly, as one critic puts it, his quest “to be a Moses for his people.” In thinking himself a kind of Moses, similar to the “consecrated” figure of Douglass's Narrative and the deliverer of Bondage, Delany, like Douglass, tapped into the black nationalist and messianic implications of the Moses analogy, devoting himself, like the eponymous leader of Blake, to “the redemption of his race.”⁵ Delany's vision of the crucial role that could be played by an intelligent, “full‐blooded” black leader (like himself) in creating a Pan‐African community in the Americas (and beyond) is the central subject of this chapter. To assess the novel's autobiographical and political implications, I will be reading Blake in relation to Delany's ongoing debates with Douglass, his interactions with John Brown, his interest in Cuba, his efforts at African “regeneration,” and his participation in the Civil War. I take Delany's 1868 first‐person account of his purported interview with Lincoln as his ultimate effort to consecrate himself the redeemer of his race. As we shall see, by the end of the Civil War, Delany paradoxically was presenting Pan‐Africanism as a form of, indeed as central to, blacks' U.S. Americanization. The path from Delany's 1854 Cleveland emigration convention to his commission as the first black major in the U.S. Army has a number of surprising turns, all of which bear on Delany's sometimes contradictory representations of black leadership and Pan‐African community in Blake. Let us begin, then, with Delany's seemingly incongruous decision, in light of the Central and South America emigrationist mandate of “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” to “emigrate” to Canada.

REDEEMING AFRICA

“We are pleased to state to our readers, the arrival of our esteemed and talented friend, Dr. M. R. Delany, of Pittsburgh, Pa., in this town, yesterday morning, who intends making this his home.” So the editors of the Provincial Freeman, a Canadian black newspaper, welcomed Delany and his family to Chatham, Canada West, in February 1856.⁶ From within the embrace of his adopted Canadian community, Delany continued to pose a challenge to Douglass's antiemigrationist position and to his reputation as the representative black leader. Two months after Isaac Shadd announced that Delany would join the paper's “force of efficient contributors” and only a week after Mary Ann Shadd voiced her approval of Delany's call for an 1856 emigration convention in Cleveland (which Delany, because of an illness, ultimately was unable to attend), Delany delivered a scathing indictment of Douglass in the 12 July 1856 Provincial Freeman. What precipitated the attack, ironically, was Douglass's editorial in a June 1856 issue of Frederick Douglass' Paper praising the black communities of Canada. In his response to Douglass, “What Does It Mean?,” Delany expresses his fury at what he regards as Douglass's self‐serving admission that he has come to look at Canada's blacks “‘with a friendly eye,’” noting that Douglass for years has “denounced the Emigration movement, designating all those concerned with propagating the sentiments as being Colonizationists.” Now that Douglass and his “adherents” see some value in Canada's black emigrant communities, Delany mockingly states, “surely Emigration must be safe.” And yet the hypocrisy of what Delany describes as Douglass's “subtle attempt at commending Emigrationists” cannot be concealed, for behind the facade lurks “a monster the construction of whose deformity, will alarm and dismay those heretofore delighted in the exhibitions of the performer.” Feigning gratitude nonetheless for the hypocrite's recognition of the Chatham community, Delany proclaims, “For this we are very thankful, and bow uncovered with obsequious reverence!”⁷

Venting his anger at Douglass for condescending to Canadian blacks, while at the same time insisting on their independence, their significant accomplishments in encouraging black elevation, and their links to blacks unconnected with Douglass, Delany would seem to be setting forth similar truths about his own status in relation to Douglass. Delany's emotionally charged and rhetorically excessive “What Can It Mean?” could thus be read as an attempt to liberate himself from the evaluative gaze of African Americans' “representative” leader. That he should continue to be driven by such a strong desire to undermine Douglass suggests how difficult it was for Delany to conceive of himself as operating apart from his former coeditor.

Even when Delany decided two years later to consider working with John Brown, he found himself implicated with Douglass, who had his own relationship with the rebel. Though still far apart on the issue of black emigration, Douglass and Delany, on the evidence of their interactions with John Brown, would seem to have been in agreement after the Dred Scott ruling on the worth of entertaining the possibility of a slave insurrection in the United States.⁸ Early in 1858, a little more than a year after his notorious raid at Pottawatomie, Kansas, Brown arrived at Douglass's Rochester home, where he wrote a “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” which he hoped would be adopted following a rebellion of the slaves. In addition to drafting the “Constitution” while at Douglass's, Brown also wrote letters describing his insurrectionary plans to a number of black leaders, including Delany. Brown met with Henry Highland Garnet in Philadelphia in March 1858, and approximately two weeks after that he returned to Douglass's home, where he spent the night before crossing the border into Canada. There he met with Delany and obtained his promise to attend a secret convention to be held in Chatham in May. Douglass was invited to the meeting but failed to attend, perhaps because he had become skeptical about Brown's chances for leading a successful slave revolt but more likely, I think, because of the company he would have had to keep.⁹

The meeting took place on 8 May 1858 in a black schoolhouse. Twelve whites and thirty‐four blacks attended; William C. Munroe served as the presiding officer and Delany as chairman. According to the Canadian black Osborne P. Anderson, who published a book about Harpers Ferry in 1861, John Brown, “Another Moses,” talked at the meeting of the “progressive” nature of revolutionary violence against slavery. Though Anderson does not reveal the specifics of what was discussed at Chatham, he quotes from the “minutes” that “Mr. Delany and others spoke in favor of the project and the plan, and both were agreed to by general consent.” Hints of what the participants agreed to may be gleaned from the “Journal of the Provisional Constitution Held on Saturday, May 8th, 1858,” which contains the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” and rather sketchy minutes of the discussions of the forty‐eight adopted articles. Most heatedly debated by the group was Article 46, which states as follows: “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.” According to the minutes, Delany argued to keep this article in place, and it was eventually adopted with but one negative vote. Article 46 thus placed the conspiratorial plans of the group within the historical and ideological frame of the “patriotic” American Revolution.¹⁰

Following this enthusiastic meeting, Brown departed from Chatham to take up the more laborious task of fund‐raising and recruitment. When Brown became ill several months later, Delany wrote to his white associate J. H. Kagi, reasserting his commitment to the cause: “I have been anxiously looking and expecting to see something of Uncle's movements in the papers, but as yet have seen nothing. … All are in good spirits here, hoping and waiting the ‘Good time coming.’” Though Delany may well have been hopeful for Brown's enterprise, there was something disingenuous about his letter, for he had recently committed himself to a different cause: establishing an African American colony in Africa. No clear indication exists as to why Delany abandoned Brown, though it is tempting to speculate that he simply was unwilling to serve under a white “Moses.” Brown would liberate but, Delany may have wondered, would he regenerate? Increasingly convinced that there was an intimate connection between “the Moral, Social, and Political Elevation of Ourselves, and the Regeneration of Africa,” Delany solicited Henry Ward Beecher for funds on 17 June 1858, two months before he wrote Kagi, so that he could to travel to Africa and “negociate with the natives for Territory or land” and thus help to establish “an Enlightened and Christian nationality in the midst of these tractable and docile people.”¹¹ In August 1858 in Chatham, Delany hosted the third National Emigration Convention, where his primary goal was to obtain support for such a project.

In the account of the 1858 Chatham emigration convention in his 1861 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, Delany, in a blatant effort at historical revisionism, stated that support for his African emigration project would not have contradicted the mandate of the 1854 Cleveland emigration convention, despite the fact that the convention went on record against African emigration. He now disclosed that “Secret Sessions” were held at the 1854 convention, wherein the delegates made “Africa, with its rich, inexhaustible productions, and great facilities for checking the abominable Slave Trade, its most important point of dependence.”¹² As Delany elaborated in Official Report, he expected that the development of Africa as a commercial power would convince whites throughout the world of black' capabilities as producers and thus would pose a significant ideological challenge to the premises upholding U.S. slavery. Nevertheless, the delegates at the 1858 Chatham convention remained lukewarm to Delany's Africa project, withholding funding, though the General Board did grant him the authority to establish a Niger Valley Exploring Party.

Delany thus had to pursue financial support elsewhere, and he eventually found himself implicated, financially and otherwise, with Henry Highland Garnet's African Civilization Society, an organization of blacks and whites with links to the American Colonization Society. Douglass, who had once remarked, “Thank God, the alternative is not quite so desperate as that we must be slaves here, or go to the pestilential shores of Africa,” attacked Garnet's African Civilization Society in an article in the February 1859 issue of Douglass' Monthly on the grounds that it was a colonizationist society. Douglass's hostility helped to bring Delany and Garnet together as opponents of Douglass.¹³ Further linking Delany to the African Clivilization Society were the actions of Robert Campbell, Delany's Jamaican‐born colleague on the Niger Valley Exploring Party, who in 1859, without Delany's approval, successfully solicited funds from the African Civilization Society and the American Colonization Society. Making his own effort to obtain funds, Delany in April of that year assured Boston colonizationists that he would tour Liberia while in Africa. Floyd Miller neatly sums up Delany's paradoxical commitments as he boarded the bark Mendi on 24 May 1859 to begin his exploring expedition: “Now totally isolated from the emigration movement he had sustained during most of the decade, and aided by the very colonizationists he had earlier ridiculed and assailed, Delany set off for the west coast of Africa in search of a hospitable home for the Black Nationality he wished to create.”¹⁴

Delany spent nine months in Africa, arriving in West Africa in July 1859 and departing in March 1860. At his first stop in Liberia, he was welcomed by former president Roberts, whom he had once termed “a fawning servilian to the negro‐hating Colonizationists.”¹⁵ Writing in the Liberian Herald on the occasion of Delany's visit, Edward Blyden rightly referred to Delany as “this great antagonist to the American Colonization Society.” Nonetheless, in what was ultimately a celebratory article, Blyden went on to describe how hundreds came to view “this great man” when he delivered two lectures in Monrovia on the “Political Condition and Destiny of the African Race.” In the lectures, as transcribed by Blyden, Delany “advocated the emigration of the six hundred thousand free colored men of the North, to Africa, where they may join the one hundred and sixty millions of their degraded brethren, assist to elevate them, and … from such a nationality the reflex influence upon America must be felt and must be powerful, in behalf of the slaves.”¹⁶

Delany here sounds very much like Alexander Crummell, who, from a more pronounced religious perspective, similarly hoped to see Africa regenerated and redeemed under the “civilizing” auspices of (Protestant) Christianity and commercial development. During his Liberian tour Delany met with Crummell, whose well‐known essay “The Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa” was written in response to what he termed his “two pleasant interviews with Mr. Campbell and Dr. Delany.” In “Relations and Duties” Crummell called for the influx of “large amounts of capital from moneyed men of America,” “not less than 50,000 civilized men,” and, of course, “evangelization” to regenerate the continent. Such regeneration, Crummell hopefully affirmed, would bring together even such perpetually feuding personages as Douglass and Delany: “On this platform, Douglass and Delany can stand beside the foremost citizens and merchants of Liberia.”¹⁷

In “What Africa Now Requires,” the closing chapter of Official Report, Delany offered similar sentiments about the millennial possibilities of African regeneration (though he did not go so far as to imagine himself in a harmonious relationship with Douglass). Asserting that “Christianity certainly is the most advanced civilization that man ever attained to,” Delany, without noting the obvious irony that slavery exists in the “Christian” United States, underscored the need for developing in Africa an “enlightened Christian civilization” as a way of ending the slave trade. He suggested that Africa could “become regenerated” and at the same time help put an end to slavery in the United States by producing cotton in quantities large enough to undercut the Southern slaveholders' market share in Europe. Blacks' success in such an enterprise “in their own‐loved native Africa,” Delany proclaimed, would serve “to enrich themselves, and regenerate their race.”¹⁸ These hopes and plans for regeneration were central to Delany's and Campbell's negotiations with the Alake of Abeokuta in December 1859.

Meeting up with Campbell in Abeokuta, Delany began his negotiations with the Alake for land of the Egba people that could be used to establish a colony of African American emigrants. But Delany was negotiating for title to land with a group of people who worked with conceptions of property ownership radically different from his own. Miller explains: “Since the kinship group owned the land on behalf of themselves and their future descendants, neither the king, chief, nor any other individual could alienate the land.” Despite these problems, Delany went ahead in forging the treaty—a treaty that had an important antecedent in the plan appended to his 1852 Condition, “A Project for an Expedition of Adventure, to the Eastern Coast of Africa.” As Delany elucidated in that plan, which he claimed to have written in the 1830s, he regarded Africa as in effect already alienated from the native Africans precisely because of their lack of commercial expertise. Thus, in the same colonizing spirit in which he urged blacks to emigrate to Central and South America, he encouraged “a limited number of known, worthy” African Americans to journey to Africa to develop lands that he claimed were only tangentially connected to the actual people who lived there: “The land is ours—there it lies with inexhaustible resources; let us go and possess it.” These “enlightened freemen,” Delany explained, by building a transcontinental railroad for the transport of precious metals, would enable Africa to “rise up a nation, to whom all the world must pay commercial tribute.”¹⁹

Similar elitist notions guided his 1859 treaty with the Alake. According to the articles, those of the “African race in America” who came to Abeokuta would administer their own laws and would have an autonomous relation to the Egba people. In return for this autonomy, Delany promised that the emigrants would “bring with them, as an equivalent for the privileges above accorded, Intelligence, Education, a Knowledge of the Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, and other Mechanical and Industrial Occupations.” The fantasy implicitly informing Delany's vision, which, as Basil Davidson observes, imagined the construction of a black nation‐state “on entirely non‐African lines,” was that he would emerge as the principal leader of a “regenerated” and “redeemed” Africa. His well‐known remark at the end of his Official Report—“Africa for the African race, and black men to rule them”—while perhaps intended as a black nationalist rejection of white colonialism, spoke to those desires. For when Delany asserted that “by black men I mean, men of African descent who claim an identity with the race,” he both tapped into the mystical Pan‐Africanism of Psalms 68:31 and underscored the distinctions between “degraded” native‐born Africans and those “select and intelligent [African Americans] of high moral and religious character,” who, he suggested, could make even greater claims of descent from Africa's heroic past—the biblical and classical past he had celebrated in his 1853 Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry.²⁰ To the latter were granted the rights of governance.

Several months after the successful negotiation of this treaty, Delany departed for England, arriving in May 1860 for what would be an enormously successful seven‐month tour. Delany's tour nearly overlapped with the tours of Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Suspected of having conspired with John Brown, whom he praised in the November 1859 Douglass' Monthly for having “attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted to bring it to the death,” Douglass fled to England later that month, returning to the United States in March 1860 on learning of the death of his daughter Annie. Shortly before departing from England in June 1860, Stowe too wrote a piece celebrating Brown as “a witness slain in the great cause which is shaking Hungary, Austria, Italy, France.”²¹ Meanwhile, the man who had collaborated with Brown in Chatham in 1858 remained intent on pursuing financial support for his Niger project.

In his quest for funds, Delany addressed numerous antislavery and manufacturing groups during the spring and summer of 1860. In lectures in London, Glasgow, and elsewhere, Delany spoke not only of the money white capitalists could make on their investments in his Niger colony but also of his authoritative knowledge, as a black, of Africans' desires for the “regenerative” forces of commerce and Christianity that would help to lift them from their “degradation.” As a result of his insistence on his “authentic” connection to Africa, Delany, as one historian remarks, became “courted for his color.” His establishment of the African Aid Society, an alternative to the white‐led African Civilization Society, further contributed to his emerging prominence in British antislavery circles.²²

But no event during Delany's British tour did more to develop his celebrity as a representative black leader than his participation in the International Statistical Congress in London in July 1860. At the opening session of the congress, a gathering of the leading scientists of the day, Lord Henry Peter Brougham pointedly introduced Delany to the assembled scientists. The Manchester Weekly Advertiser described the scene:

Lord Brougham, seeing Mr. Dallas, the American minister, present said: I hope my friend Mr. Dallas will forgive me reminding him that there is a negro gentleman present, a member of the congress. (Loud and vociferous cheering) After the cheering had subsided, Mr. Dallas made no sign; but the negro in question, who we understood to be a Dr. Delany, rose amid the cheers and said: I pray your Royal Highness will allow me to thank his lordship, who is always a most unflinching friend of the negro, for the observation he has made, and I assure your Royal Highness and his lordship that I also am a man. This unexpected incident elicited a round of cheering very extraordinary for an assemblage of sedate statisticians.

The delegate from the United States, Judge Augustus Longstreet of South Carolina, protested Brougham's comments by walking out of the congress; George M. Dallas, the American minister to Britain, remained to observe what he regarded as the humiliating spectacle of Delany becoming the center of attention. Over the course of the congress, Delany addressed the delegates on how best to control the spread of cholera, on his African project, and on his overall appreciation of the congress, remarking that the delegates' spontaneous cheers at his introduction were “intended as an expression of sympathy for the race to which he belonged, who, though they had undergone for ages the process of degeneration, he was glad to think were now being fast regenerated.”²³

In “Dallas and Delany,” a column in the September 1860 Douglass' Monthly, Douglass wrote favorably of Delany's participation at the congress. For Douglass, the incident underscored the basic irony that “Delany, in Washington, is a thing; Delany, in London, is a man.” But in building to this humanistic point about the objectification resulting from slavery's legal codes, Douglass, in his account of the incident, places a special emphasis on the role of Delany's blackness. He describes Delany's response to Lord Brougham's introduction of him as a “negro” in this way: “Delany, determined that the nail should hold fast, rose, with all his blackness, right up, as quick and as graceful as an African lion, and received the curious gaze of the scientific world. It was complete. Sermons in stones are nothing to this. Never was there a more telling rebuke to the pride, prejudice and hypocrisy of a nation.” Significantly, Douglass keeps Delany silent in his account, preferring to let his dark skin and animal‐like Africanness do the work of argumentation. As a result, there is something demeaning in Douglass's celebration. Delany, however, apparently responded positively to the column, for he had Rollin reprint most of it in her 1868 Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, where Douglass at this particular legitimating moment in the text is referred to as Delany's “friend.”²⁴ From Delany's perspective, the incident at the congress would have underscored the politics of representative identity so central to his African project and British tour: his notion that the most effective way to convince whites of black' potential was to present them with a racially “pure” black of great accomplishment—a black about whom it would have been impossible to credit “white” blood for achievements, as was not the case with Douglass.

Buoyed by the moral and financial support he obtained in Great Britain, Delany sailed from Liverpool in December 1860 and by early 1861 was working with Reverend William King of the Elgin settlement to put his emigration plans into operation. Under pressure from Anglican missionaries and the British Foreign Office, however, the Alake renounced the treaty early in 1861. Undeterred, Delany worked to recruit what King in a lecture to the African Aid Society referred to as “experienced, intelligent, practical Christian [black] men” for African emigration.²⁵ King, who viewed the Yoruba colony as an extension of his evangelical work at Elgin, had managed to sign up nearly forty blacks for the emigration project. But with the outbreak of the Civil War and the Alake's renunciation of the treaty, only two or three families remained interested.

In response to the diminishment of interest, Delany merged his organization with the formerly colonizationist African Civilization Society. Throughout 1861, when he published Official Report, and well into 1862 he continued to argue forcefully for African emigration. In a January 1861 letter to James Holly, for example, he proclaimed, “My duty and destiny are in Africa,” and in a letter to the Weekly Anglo‐African, printed in the 5 October 1861 issue, he again asserted that “my destiny is fixed in Africa, where my family and myself, by God's providence, will soon be happily situated.” In an open letter to the Weekly Anglo‐African, printed in the issue of 25 January 1862, Delany responded to the question of whether he had abandoned his Africa project with an unequivocal denial: “I simply answer,—not at all, nor never will.”²⁶

Delany held firm in his support for his projected African colony in part because he believed in its importance. But it seems equally clear that his continuing support, in the face of vastly changing realities, was an effort to retain the status of representative African American leader that he had consolidated in the final months of his British tour. In an effort to shore up his leadership position, he wrote an open letter to Dr. James McCune Smith, printed in the 11 January 1862 Weekly Anglo‐African, calling for the convening of “a great Council of the leading men among us” to “determine on a settled policy as a rule of action, by which we should be guided.” But it was Delany, not the antiemigrationists, who would have profited from such a policy statement, as antiemigrationism had become the mainstream position by 1862. With the advent of the Civil War, Douglass announced his break with the Haitian emigration movement in the May 1861 issue of Douglass' Monthly and with that issue began to run an American eagle and flag on the masthead. Similarly, as I noted at the outset, Thomas Hamilton, the publisher and editor of the Weekly Anglo‐African, embraced the Civil War as a war of emancipation. By printing in his Weekly pieces by Smith and others encouraging U.S. blacks to enlist in the Union army, Hamilton inevitably made Delany appear out of step. Given Delany's emigrationist politics, it is a remarkable fact of African American literary history that Blake should have been published in Hamilton's antiemigrationist paper.²⁷

In publishing Blake, Hamilton, who genuinely admired Delany, primarily sought to use the novel to boost the paper's sagging circulation. In his 5 October 1861 announcement of the forthcoming full serialization of the novel, he puffed Blake as “stand[ing] without a rival, not even excepting the world wide known ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin,’” and he concluded with this plea: “We would suggest, that with [Blake's] commencement, our friends make a special effort to obtain the subscriptions of their neighbors, that they may be furnished with all the early chapters, of which we do not intend to keep a large supply.” This announcement appeared only a week after the paper printed a condescendingly favorable review of Delany's Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (published, surprisingly, by Hamilton himself), in which the anonymous reviewer remarked that “the interesting little brochure before us” possesses “the power to withdraw our strained attention from eager watching for every rumor or breath from the seat of war.” Hamilton in all probability regarded Blake as an anachronistic historical novel that performed a similar diversionary function.²⁸

Yet the novel, I will argue, can be viewed both as an allegorical account of Delany's quest for leadership and community, circa 1852‐59, and as an engaged response to and intervention in events of 1859‐62 (even if he did not rewrite a word of the 1859 manuscript, which seems unlikely, given the post‐1859 footnotes on Africa). Hence Delany's desire for its full publication in 1861‐62. Whatever Hamilton may have thought about Blake, Delany saw it as making a vital intervention in what he regarded as the unresolved debate on blacks' place in the United States. Unconvinced at the time of the novel's serialization that even with a Union victory blacks would become part of the nation's “ruling element,” Delany presents in Blake a Pan‐African vision of black nationalism that means to combat and expose the limits of the U.S. nationalism espoused by blacks aligned with Douglass. Ranging throughout the Americas and even to Africa, Delany's heroic surrogate Blake attempts to restore to blacks degraded by white racist practices a sense of their glorious potential as a unified people. Delany's complex representation of the pragmatically innovative means and utopian ends of such a black nationalist program in the Americas will be the main focus of my discussion.

REDEEMING THE AMERICAS

As suggested by its full title, Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba, Delany's novel aspires to provide an uncommonly broad view of the problem of slavery in the Americas.²⁹ His sense of the interrelationships among various sites in the Americas is adumbrated in the novel's opening chapter, which depicts Northerners and Southerners, Americans and Cubans, meeting in Baltimore to discuss their plans to make over the Baltimore clipper Merchantman into a slaver. Though Blake can seem lacking in formal unity in the manner of a picaresque novel, that clipper and its group of owners work to hold the novel together. Blake is the slave of the investor from Mississippi, Stephen Franks; Blake's wife will be sold to the Cuban investor, Captain Juan Garcia; Blake will make his way to Cuba with another of the investors, Captain Richard Paul; and in part 2 of the novel he will journey to Africa on the refitted ship with Paul and two other investors (U.S. and Cuban) at the helm.

Crucial as the ship is to the novel's global perspective on slavery, there is another aspect that also works to hold the novel together: its portrayal of the heroic black leader Henry Blake, who may be regarded as a surrogate for Delany himself.³⁰ The novel builds to a coronation of Blake's leadership role, and it is with this autobiographically charged scene, which brings into focus key aspects of Delany's thematics of Pan‐African community and representative identity, that I want to begin my reading of the novel.

In a culminating series of chapters first printed in the 1862 Anglo‐African Magazine, Blake, at secret Grand Council meetings at the Havana home of the wealthy mulatto Madame Cordora, assumes the mantle of “Commander in Chief of the Army of Emancipation” before his adulating admirers.³¹ The meetings ritually celebrate what has been clear from the opening chapters of the novel: that Blake, “the Leader of the Army of Emancipation and originator of the scheme to redeem them from slavery and an almost helpless degradation” (251), has a messianic, Moses‐like ability to get blacks “intelligently united” (252) against their oppressors.

At Blake's side during the meetings is the great Cuban poet Placido, whose speeches and poems further validate Blake's leadership position. But when Placido recites a poem on the providential destiny of “Ethiopia's sons” (260), Madame Cordora pointedly queries, “Are not some of us left out in the supplication, as I am sure, although identified together, we are not all Ethiopians[?]” (260). (Of course, they are not all “sons” either.) In a historically anachronistic moment that serves to sanctify Blake's (and implicitly Delany's) claims to black leadership, the mulatto Placido, who was in fact executed by Cuban authorities in 1844 for allegedly conspiring against the state, explains to Madame Cordora that the best way for blacks to demonstrate their equality with whites is to elevate “the descendants of Africa of unmixed blood” (260). Given the existence of racism among even antislavery whites, the spectacle of racially “pure” black leaders, such as Blake, would serve the rhetorical purpose of persuading “white men” to offer their “respect” (261) to blacks. Perhaps a figure for Douglass, who here capitulates to blackness as a superior source of leadership, Placido explains (echoing the similar argument set forth by Delany in Condition): “The instant that an equality of the blacks with the whites is admitted, we [mulattos] being the descendants of the two, must be acknowledged the equals of both” (261).³² As the approving Blake looks on from the majesty of his leadership position, Placido, now echoing the “civilizationist” stance of Delany's 1861 Official Report, extends his argument to suggest the need for black leaders to help in “regenerating” Africa (261). Though Placido's concern for African regeneration may seem irrelevant to the blacks' impending insurrection in Cuba, he asserts that, from a political/rhetorical perspective, racially pure and mixed‐blood blacks are all “implied in the term [Ethiopian], and cannot exist without it” (260).

“Africa,” as Madame Cordora comes to realize, is the signifying term of black community, and it is precisely the Ethiopianism articulated by Placido and embodied by Blake that promises to forge a community from the “promiscuous mingling … of every complexion of his [African] race” (249). This historical, biological, and spiritual sense of racial unity and wholeness is central to the novel's Pan‐Africanism. Wilson Moses writes (rather critically) that nineteenth‐century Pan‐African nationalists sought “to unite the entire black racial family, assuming that the entire race has a collective destiny and message for humanity comparable to that of a nation.”³³ Yet in the context of the practice of slavery in the Americas, the rhetorical and spiritual Pan‐African nationalism espoused at Madame Cordora's makes pragmatic sense as a way of mobilizing blacks for united oppositional action. Cordora's embrace of her “blackness” should thus be viewed in not only mystical but also political terms as a sign of her solidarity with the oppressed.

In this culminating scene, then, Blake and Placido join hands in insisting on the importance of having intelligent, “civilized,” “pure‐blood” blacks in the leadership position of a hierarchically conceived “African” collectivity. There is a close connection between the collectivist, elitist Pan‐African politics expressed near the conclusion of the novel and the politics informing the presentation in part 1 of Blake's efforts to set in motion a slave conspiracy in the United States. Delany remarks early in the novel on the challenges facing Blake in his U.S. endeavors: “Light, of necessity, had to be imparted to the darkened region of the obscure intellects of the slaves, to arouse them from their benighted condition to one of moral responsibility” (101). As is true of the culminating scene in Cuba, this passage suggests that in the United States, precisely because the slaves are so “benighted,” a pressing need exists for an intelligent black to lead the slaves from slavery to freedom. Underscoring this point is the stanza from Stowe's poem “Caste and Christ” that Delany uses as an epigraph to the novel's first part: “By myself, the Lord of Ages, / I have sworn to right the wrong, / I have pledged my word, unbroken, / For the weak against the strong.” In the poem, these words represent the voice of Christ as he embraces “thou dark and weary stranger,” a black man, perhaps a slave, “bowed with toil, with mind benighted.”³⁴ Wrenched from its poetic context, the stanza guides the reader to regard Blake, somewhat in the spirit of Stowe's Dred, as a prophetic redeemer, a black Moses and a black Christ, who will be attempting to liberate the “weak” from the “strong.”

Blake's uniquely heroic and intelligent character, his potential to bring about “the redemption of his race” (199), is clear from the opening chapters of the novel, as Delany emphasizes just how different he is from the other slaves on Colonel Franks's Mississippi plantation. In a revisionary parody of the opening chapters of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Delany portrays Mammy Judy overhearing Mr. Franks telling his wife that he has sold her “beloved” (6) slave Maggie (Blake's wife) to the Northerner Judge Ballard. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eliza, on learning of her son's sale, flees with Harry, while Uncle Tom ruefully accepts his own sale as the will of God. In Blake, Delany portrays the slaves as pathetically turning to the religion of their oppressors. Informing her daughter of her imminent fate, Mammy Judy advises, “Look to de Laud, my chile!” (9). When her father, Daddy Joe, returns to find that Maggie has been sent to Baltimore and separated from her son, he too prays: “Laud, dy will be done!” (12). In his 1849 “Domestic Economy” essays, Delany urged blacks to resist resorting to prayer when “a physical, or temporal end” is desired; and, of course, he attacked Uncle Tom's Cabin for its advocacy of prayer over action.³⁵ Near the end of Blake in the scene at Madame Cordora's, Blake asserts as one of the insurrectionary group's pragmatic creeds that “no religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve” (258). In other words, religion should serve black people, not the other way around. Like Stowe's own revolutionary black hero, Dred, Blake attempts to teach this lesson to the “benighted” slaves from the moment of his introduction into the novel.

Introduced as “Henry Holland,” the name he was given when remanded into slavery, Blake is so enraged at the sale of his wife that Mammy worries for the state of his soul.³⁶ She urges him to “put yeh trus' in de Laud” (15). Blake, “the intelligent slave” (16) who, unlike the other slaves of the plantation, does not speak in dialect, asserts his readiness to act: “I have waited long enough on heavenly promises; I'll wait no longer” (16). But though he seems to be renouncing religion, it is his visionary insight into (not rejection of) a scriptural phrase that provides him with the germ of his insurrectionary plot.

In Condition Delany writes about black' religiosity: “They 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 do themselves.”³⁷ Ironically, the phrase “stand still,” regularly adduced by pro‐slavery preachers to encourage slave obedience, has its sources in the emancipatory moment in Exodus when Moses at the Red Sea convinces the fleeing Israelites not to return to slavery but rather “to stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord” (Exodus 14:13). Parroting the words of the preachers, without having any insight into their typological significance, Daddy Joe urges Blake to “‘stan still an' see de salbation’” (21). When Blake responds that he will “‘stand still’ no longer” (21), he appears suddenly to envision how these scriptural words speak to the possibility of black insurrectionary action under his Moses‐like leadership. Rather than explaining to Daddy Joe and Mammy Judy what he apprehends, however, he simply intones, in the manner of Christ (2 Corinthians 6:2), “‘Now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation’” (29). Only later, when he has more fully formulated his plan, does he reveal to several of his coconspirators that his insight into Exodus 14:13 has been the key to it all—that his idea for a slave conspiracy came to him when he realized that “the slave‐holding preacher's advice to the black man is appropriate, ‘Stand still and see the salvation’” (38).

As soon becomes clear, Blake's ingenious (and elitist) conspiratorial plan is to organize a slave insurrection by word of mouth, with the particularly intelligent slaves entrusted to spread the word. (Given Douglass's and other black abolitionists' insistence on the importance of literacy to slave liberation, it is noteworthy that Blake's conspiracy depends on oral forms of communication.) Blake explains his plan to his followers Charles and Andy soon after escaping from Franks's plantation: “All you have to do, is to find one good man or woman—I dont [sic] care which, so that they prove to be the right person—on a single plantation, and hold a seclusion and impart the secret to them, and make them the organizers for their own plantation, and they in like manner impart it to some other next to them, and so on. In this way it will spread like smallpox among them” (41). Though he never reveals his “secret,” his war song suggests the nature of the plot: “Insurrection shall be my theme! / … One simultaneous war cry / Shall burst upon the midnight air!” (44). At an agreed on time and date, the slaves shall rise in unison to kill the masters.³⁸

In effect, Blake has taken it on himself to spread the “germs” of insurrection by creating a sort of black Masonic network in the slave South, with himself as grand master. Several aspects of Delany's presentation of black Freemasonry in his 1853 Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry are especially relevant to the presentation of Blake as a Moseslike leader in part 1 of the novel. In Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry Delany describes Moses as a fugitive slave who obtained “all his wisdom and ability” in Egypt, “a colony of Ethiopia.” An “African” and a fugitive slave, Moses, like “the wise men of Egypt and Ethiopia,” 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.” In doing so, the leader performs a religious function, teaching the principal tenet of Delany's black Freemasonry (and of the transcendentalism of the time): “Man the Likeness of God.” Delany sums up his vision of black leadership as presented in Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry: “What can be more God‐like than this, to … give man a proper sense of his own importance, and consequently his duty to his fellows, by which alone, he fulfills the high mission for which he is sent on his temporary pilgrimage.”³⁹

That Blake may be regarded as a Mosaic leader on a “high mission” is made clear when he affirms (or discovers) his religiosity just after “christening” his travels by killing his first overseer. Following the killing, he journeys into “the wilderness, determining to renew his faith and dependence upon Divine aid, … [and] he opened his heart to God, as a tenement of the Holy Spirit” (69). His crossing of the Red River into Louisiana soon after his wilderness experience thus evokes the scriptural parallel of the crossing of the Red Sea, which had already been evoked in his allusion to Exodus 14:13. That parallel is reinforced when Blake explicitly compares himself to Moses: “Could I but climb where Moses stood, / And view the landscape o'er” (69). It is only after this interlude, with his “faith … now fully established” (70), that Blake begins to spread his liberationist message.⁴⁰

Unlike Dred, who similarly kills an overseer before proceeding to the “wilderness” of the Dismal Swamp, Blake assumes a much greater mobility in Southern slave culture. Rather than roaming within the confines of the swamps, he travels from plantation to plantation (and even to an American Indian camp in Arkansas). Sundquist writes that Delany's intent in detailing Blake's travels is to show the “sources in African American slave culture of a readiness for organized political resistance that can be called into action by proper black leadership.”⁴¹ But this is to romanticize the extent to which Blake (Delany) links himself with slave culture. If anything, Delany believes, as the American Indian chief Culver notes as well (86), that the degradations of slavery have virtually obliterated black sources of resistance and that there is therefore an especially crucial need for a “boss” (41) who can mobilize even “the most stupid among the slaves” (39). To be sure, Mammy Judy, Daddy Joe, and their friends on Franks's plantation eventually adopt Blake's rebellious plan and help him to escape. But so rare are Blake's encounters with intelligent and resistant blacks that when he finally meets a slave on a Texas plantation exhibiting both intelligence and a fierce desire for liberty, he is nearly beside himself with happiness: he “fell upon Sampson's neck with tears of joy in meeting unexpectedly one of his race so intelligent in that region of the country”(85).

While embracing Sampson, Blake offers only token recognition of Sampson's wife, described as “a neat, intelligent, handsome little woman” (83). It should be noted in this regard, in what may be taken as a further influence of Delany's Masonic fraternalism, that although Blake early on affirms his desire to work with male and female leaders, he mostly seeks out black males for assistance in organizing his plot. After interviewing a woman on a Louisiana plantation, for example, he states, “I must see your husband a little, then go” (73). At the next plantation he asks the young woman he interviews, “Is there among your men, a real clever good trusty man?” (78). Significantly, when Blake first learns that something dreadful had happened to Maggie, he concludes that this could mean only one thing—that she has had sexual relations with her master: “My God! Has she disgraced herself?” (15). Here and elsewhere it can seem that Blake believes black women slaves' one large task is to remain sexually inviolate. Delany writes in Condition: “No people are ever elevated above the condition of their females; hence, the condition of the mother determines the condition of the child.”⁴² In Blake the male's plot is predicated on the importance of elevating the female—that is, freeing her from the deprecations of her male owner—as a way of elevating the race. Hence, in the novel, women for the most part (though not entirely) are presented as the grateful beneficiaries of, rather than full participants in, the unfolding conspiracy.

Because he encounters so few Sampsons on his travels, Blake, even as he spreads the word of his plot, advises the slaves to wait before taking action. Incongruously, he encourages them first to lift themselves from what he terms “their benighted condition” (101). He remains vague, however, as to how this should be done, beyond suggesting that the slaves need to conceive of themselves as free before taking insurrectionary action. Yet in New Orleans, Blake finds a number of slaves responsive to his plan and ready to act, and in a scene that looks forward to the meeting at Madame Cordora's in part 2 of the novel (and perhaps draws on Delany's Chatham meeting with John Brown), he secretly convenes with fifteen black leaders of nearby plantations “for the portentious [sic] purpose of a final decision on the hour to strike the first blow” (102). Though they evidently wish to proceed with the insurrection posthaste, Blake discerns that someone in the group is intoxicated and abruptly calls everything off. He then pontificates on blacks' limitations: “You are not yet ready for a strike. … You have barely taken the first step in the matter” (105). As if to demonstrate the truth of Blake's contentions, a drunken black subsequently betrays the plan by yelling “Insurrection! Death to every white!” (106). The result of this intemperate display is a reactionary white reign of terror that works further to destroy blacks' “self‐respect and manhood” (108).

This lack of “self‐respect and manhood” among U.S. blacks is one of the large themes of the novel's first part. In an effort to underscore the full extent of blacks' degraded status, Delany, as he earlier did in the North Star, satirizes those mulattoes who, ashamed of their blackness, view their white blood as a sign of their superiority. In South Carolina, Blake is snubbed by members of the “Brown Society,” a mulatto group that, according to the narrator, was “created by the influence of the whites, for the purpose of preventing pure‐blooded Negroes from entering the social circle” (109). Though the scene could be read as an attack on any sort of racialist pride, Delany emphasizes the “miserable stupidity and ignorance” (110) of those blacks who reject their “African” or “Ethiopian” blood.⁴³

Delany's damning portrayal of self‐loathing mulattoes thus makes highly curious and problematic his equally critical portrayal of the revolutionary “pure‐blood” blacks that Blake encounters in the Dismal Swamp. The narrator describes the scene: “In this fearful abode for years of some of Virginia and North Carolina's boldest black rebels, the names of Nat Turner, Denmark Veezie [sic], and General Gabriel were held by them in sacred reverence … With delight they recounted the many exploits of whom they conceived to be the greatest men who ever lived …, some of the narrators claiming to have been patriots in the American Revolution” (113). In presenting the blacks of the swamp as a Revolutionary community, Delany aligns himself with W. C. Nell, Stowe, and other antislavery writers. And yet, in the spirit of the “civilizationist” goals of his plan to “redeem” Africa from its “benighted” condition, Delany keeps his hero Blake at a distance from “African” revolutionaries who are presented as somewhat ignorant in preferring conjure to action. Just as Sandy's offering of a root to Douglass to fend off Covey is described as a “superstition … very common among the more ignorant slaves,” so Delany criticizes as a hindrance to significant action the conjurer Gamby Gholar's offering to Blake of “a forked breastbone of a small bird, which … he called ‘the charm bone of a treefrog’” (113). Delany suggests as well that the conjurors are self‐interested liars whose overriding concern is less for the blacks' liberation than for maintaining their power over credulous slaves.⁴⁴ And yet as critical as he is of the conjurors, he ultimately portrays them as smart enough to recognize Blake as a leader more worthy, and implicitly more in the tradition of Gabriel Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, than themselves. The scene in the Dismal Swamp therefore culminates in a coronation scene, anticipating the more momentous one at Madame Cordora's, in which the conjurors anoint Blake their “Head” (115).

The emphasis of the final chapters of part 1 is on Blake's role as “Head” in leading the relatively ignorant slaves of Franks's plantation to Canada. As if talking to children, Blake explains to the fugitive slaves how to find the North Star and use a compass. When Blake uses the word “intermediate” as part of his explanation, Mammy Judy laments, “'E gone into big talk g'in! Sho!” (133), whereupon he patiently (pedantically) explains, “Intermediate means between, mammy” (134).⁴⁵ In addition to teaching the slaves the basics of astronomy and the English language, Blake, in the closing chapters of the novel's first part, also attempts to instruct them on the moral exigency and benefits of using violence against the masters. Though Andy and Charles fulminate against the enslavers, with Charles going so far as to assert that “ole Frank's head would be nothin' for me to chop off” (127‐28), they admit that they would be unable to perform such a deed. In an effort to “redeem” these slaves, whom he regards as lacking in both courage and political consciousness, Blake boasts to them that while on his tour he had killed whites, and he thanks God for giving him the opportunity to act. Quoting from Garnet's 1843 “Address to the Slaves,” Blake instructs his followers, “‘Rather to die as freemen, than live as slaves!’” (128).⁴⁶

Despite his bold rhetoric, Blake and the formerly enslaved blacks eventually escape by exhibiting a “temperate revolutionism.” Unlike the drunken New Orleans black who betrayed the plot, Blake and his compatriots remain in control of their bodies and eventually “elevate” themselves to Canada. When offered alcohol in Indiana, Blake speaks for the group in asserting, “We don't drink, sir” (144). As in Douglass's Bondage, the intemperate in Blake are the enslavers and their racist sympathizers, who are presented as literally and metaphorically intoxicated. After drunken whites incarcerate the blacks in a tavern's stables, Blake finds a butcher knife and cuts them free while the whites “revelled with intoxication” (150). In a scene that reverses the terms of the holiday drinking scenes of Douglass's and other slave narratives, Blake then forces the white sentinel to drink himself into a stupor before leading the fugitive slaves to Canada.

But theirs is a tentative, limited freedom. Though Blake has enough money to buy fifty acres for Mammy Judy, Daddy Joe, his son, and others, and though several of the black fugitives joyously take advantage of their newfound opportunity to marry, we have reached simply the halfway point of the novel. Delany thus works against the typological figuring in Uncle Tom's Cabin of Canada as heaven, presenting a more critical reading of the northern nation, based on having resided in Chatham, as a place where “privileges were denied [blacks] which are common to the slave in every Southern state—[such as] the right of going into the gallery of a public building” (153). More important, at the midpoint of the novel there is a sense that Blake's larger mission remains unfulfilled. Not only does Blake have the personal desire to free his wife from slavery in Cuba, but his larger project of uniting and empowering blacks is still to be accomplished. Part 1 ends, then, with Blake making his plans to journey to Cuba in quest of both his wife and what I term his Masonic, Pan‐African vision of a regenerated and redeemed black community. As suggested by the series of Blake's border crossings—from the United States to Canada, back to the United States, and then on to Cuba—the black community has no fixed boundaries, though its “political destiny” would appear to be in “America.”

.....

With Blake's arrival in Cuba at the opening of part 2, Delany makes explicit the interconnections between the United States and Cuba that had been implicit in the relationship between U.S. and Cuban businesspeople/enslavers in the novel's first chapter. Everywhere Blake travels in his effort “to witness all that he could pertaining to Cuban slavery” (169), he views U.S. influences in Cuba, with the corollary implication, given the centrality of Cuba to the slave trade, that he had viewed Cuban influences everywhere he had traveled in the United States. Direct discussion of these interrelationships is mostly avoided in the novel's first part, with the important exception of a revealing conversation between the Northerner Judge Ballard and the callous Mississippi enslaver Major Armsted. During a visit to the South, Ballard declares that “Cuba must cease to be a Spanish colony, and become American territory” (62), and he goes on to complain of the close physical contact he observed between Cuba's white masters and black slaves during a recent tour of the island, declaring that he refused to smoke cigars proffered by “black fingers” (62). Mocking Ballard's fastidiousness, Armsted points out that Cuba's blacks, in the very process of making Ballard's treasured cigars, “frequently in closing up the wrapper, … draw it through their lips to give it tenacity” (63). Armsted's striking image of Cuban slaves “smoking” the cigars of the masters figures the possibility of a violent reversal of power relations between the races. As is clear throughout the novel, the specter of black revolutionism haunts the imaginations of white Southerners and Northerners alike and helps to give rise to desires, like Ballard's, to make Cuba “American.”

Blake's insurrectionary plotting occurs in this context of racial anxiety and imperialistic desire, and in limning the connection between whites' racial fears and will to power in the novel's second part, Delany means to intervene in contemporaneous debates on U.S. expansionism and slavery. For the Judge Ballard‐like belief that, as Russel prophesied in Stowe's Dred, the United States would soon “annex Cuba” was shared by many in the United States during the antebellum period. In an 1849 issue of the North Star, Delany warned that “there is a deep‐concerned scheme for the annexation of Cuba to the United States,” and two years later Douglass observed that “our voracious eagle is whetting his talons for the capture of Cuba.”⁴⁷ Northern businesspeople craved sugar‐rich Cuba for its natural resources, while Southern pro‐slavery advocates wanted to make Cuba part of an expanding slave empire. Both of these groups supported the efforts of the anti‐Spanish, pro‐slavery Cuban filibusterer Narciso López, who led three separate military expeditions against Cuba before being captured and executed in 1851.⁴⁸ In 1854 President Franklin Pierce, in quest of a national consensus in favor of the Kansas‐Nebraska bill, renounced filibusterism. Yet he continued to pursue diplomatic efforts to purchase Cuba from Spain, charging his foreign ministers to articulate a statement of his policy. The result was the notorious Ostend Report of October 1854, a summa of “Africanization” fears and a crucial discursive context for Delany's representation of Blake's Pan‐African revolutionism.

Presented in the form of a letter to Secretary of State William L. Marcy, the Ostend Report, signed by James Buchanan, J. Y. Mason, and Pierre Soulé, asserted that “Cuba belongs naturally to that great family of States of which the Union is the Providential Nursery.” In fact, the ministers stated, oblivious to the perspectives of Afro‐Cubans, the two nations “look upon each other as if they were one people and had but one destiny.” The ministers therefore proposed offering Spain over $100 million for the island nation. The report could have ended there, but the ministers went on to proclaim that should Spain refuse to sell, the United States had the right, “by every law human and Divine,” to take Cuba from Spain, “if we possess the power; and this upon the very same principle that would justify an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor, if there were no other means of preventing the flames from destroying his own home.” That “burning house,” as the ministers made clear in their concluding paragraphs, was the specter of a large‐scale black rebellion against the Creole and Peninsular powers. Fearing that Spanish “liberalization” policies could bring about the “Africanization” of Cuba—the emergence of a black republic “almost in sight of our shores,” as the Louisiana state legislature warned in 1854‐the ministers declared: “We should … be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its attendant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to our neighboring shores, seriously to endanger or actually to consume the fair fabric of our Union.”⁴⁹

With its patriotic appeals and fearful imagery of racial conflagration, the Ostend Report only further stoked desires among pro‐slavery spokespeople to pursue Cuban annexation. But because of continued antislavery resistance in the North, that pursuit had to be developed through unofficial channels. Talked out of his filibustering plans by Pierce, General John A. Quitman, a former governor of Mississippi and an admirer of López, threw his support to the notorious William Walker, eventually joining with him in his successful invasion of Nicaragua in 1855. Delany, in “Political Aspect of the Colored People of the United States” (1855), referred to the “despicable puerile attempt by the buccaneer Walker, to overthrow the government of Lower California and Nicaragua.” But what at first might have seemed “puerile” eventually took on a more insidious cast, as Walker hoped to use his base in Nicaragua to invade Cuba and create a federation of five Central American republics with himself as military leader. Using rhetoric similar to that deployed by Delany to advance his African project, Walker, as he explained in his 1860 The War in Nicaragua, sought to import “an American element into Nicaraguan society” to “regenerate Central America.” To this end, he relegalized slavery there. President Buchanan's decision to extend a “paternal hand to General Walker, and his band of Filibusters and Pirates who have invaded and effected a lodgment in Nicaragua,” Frederick Douglass asserted soon after Buchanan recognized Walker's government, revealed “the foreign policy of a slave power.” Concerned about Walker's designs on Cuba, Spain joined with Costa Rica in 1857 to overthrow Walker, and at around the same time, Buchanan renewed U.S. efforts to acquire Cuba. In the March 1859 Douglass' Monthly, Douglass again decried Buchanan's imperialistic machinations: “Surely this talk about the acquisition of Cuba, is nothing other than a talk about stealing Cuba.”⁵⁰

In the context of debate in the United States on Cuba, which, historian Robert May argues, remained “a central, if not the central, issue in American politics” during 1859 and 1860, Blake's revolutionary conspiracy, particularly as it unfolds in part 2 of the novel, can be regarded as a pragmatically conceived defense of blacks' rights to become part of the “ruling element” in Cuba and throughout the Americas.⁵¹ Inspired as much by William Walker as John Brown, Delany has his black revolutionary hero attempt to fight off white annexation through black “annexation” and oppose white filibusterism through black filibusterism, all to bring about precisely what the authors of the Ostend Report so feared: a revolutionary transformation of Cuba that would “endanger” the white power structure in the Americas.

Yet we might ask the same questions about Blake's revolutionary project that we asked about Delany's Central and South American emigration plans of the mid‐1850s: What is the relationship of the indigenous peoples to the emerging black nation(s) that Blake hopes to bring forth? Or, to put things another way, what makes Blake in Cuba less of a filibusterer—or less of an imperialist—than Walker in Nicaragua? In his 1860 War in Nicaragua Walker finesses the question of imperialism when he asserts that his decision to reintroduce slavery into Nicaragua was “in the fullest sense of the word, the act of the sovereignty of Nicaragua.”⁵² Eliding issues of race, Walker breaks down the distinction between his own will and that of the Nicaraguan people by figuring himself as the corporeal and spiritual embodiment of the nation.

In Blake, Delany somewhat differently attempts to resolve the problem of imperialism inherent in Blake's building of a black nation by connecting the revolutionary hero to the region through his personal history and black body. In doing so, Delany more explicitly brings to the center of the novel the problem of conjoining race and nation that had interested him since the 1852 publication of Condition. For if we read Blake in relation to Delany's political hopes and actions of the mid‐ to late 1850s, we can view the novel as an effort to revise his 1852 and 1854 emigrationist texts by linking black nationhood not to some mystical notion of blacks' Manifest Destiny in the Americas but instead to the fact of blacks' historical ties to the region, thereby imaginatively implicating himself, through his heroic surrogate, in the history of Cuba, the Caribbean, and Africa. It is crucial to note in this respect that soon after Blake helps his wife purchase her freedom, he journeys to the Havana residence of Placido, Cuba's renowned mulatto poet, where he reveals to Maggie and Placido (and the reader) that he is in fact Placido's long‐missing cousin Carolus Henrico Blacus.⁵³ Not only that, Blake makes the even larger claim that “I am the lost boy of Cuba” (193; emphasis mine). What is it that makes Blake not simply another foreign intruder but the embodiment of Cuba? Oddly enough, it is the fact of his implication in mastery.

Critics have yet to take the full measure of Blake's problematic family history and the relationship of that history to the novel's political vision. As initially recounted by Placido, Blake, elliptically referred to in part 1 as “educated in the West Indies, and decoyed away when young” (17), is in fact “the son of a wealthy black tobacco, cigar, and snuff manufacturer, who left school and went to sea” (193). In light of the earlier discussion between Ballard and Armsted on Cuban cigar making, it seems reasonable to conclude, then, that Blake is the son of a man who has been dependent on slave labor. Though Delany doesn't explicitly address this aspect of the father's past, he does make clear that it is precisely because of Blake's status as a native‐born member of Cuba's black elite that he has the right to think of himself as “the lost boy of Cuba.” In the account of Blake's family past, which is withheld for nearly two‐thirds of the novel, Delany also suggests that because Blake (like Delany) was not raised a slave, his enslavement is particularly “unfair” and arbitrary. After participating in the African slave trade with the crew of what he initially believed was a Spanish man‐of‐war, Blake, as he recounts to Placido, protested to the captain when he found the ship stopping at Key West instead of going directly to Cuba and was immediately sold to “one Colonel Franks, of Mississippi. … He seized me under loud and solemn protest” (194). Given that Blake had not offered “loud and solemn protest” at the African slave trade itself, it would appear that his education on slavery begins only after his own enslavement. Viewed in this way, his “fall” into slavery was a fortunate one, especially for the slaves he now seeks to liberate and elevate through revolutionary action.⁵⁴

What I want to take up here is the role played by Placido in validating Blake's status as exemplary black revolutionary leader. The poet's validating role is significant because many African Americans of the 1840s and 1850s regarded Placido as the exemplary black revolutionary leader of the time. He achieved this reputation soon after he was executed in 1844 by Cuba's governmental authorities for supposedly being one of the leaders of what came to be known as the conspiracy of La Escalera—a conspiracy of slaves, free blacks, Creoles, and “foreigners” to overthrow white Spanish rule. In a speech of 1848 Garnet proclaimed that Placido was “a true Poet, and of course a Patriot. His noble soul was moved with pity as he saw his fellow men in chains. Born to feel, and to act, he made a bold attempt to effect a revolution, and failing in it, he fell a martyr to his principles.” Delany himself, in his 1852 Condition, apotheosized “the nobel mulatto, Placido, the gentleman, scholar, poet, and intended chief Engineer of the Army of Liberty and Freedom in Cuba,” asserting that Cuba's blacks “only want intelligent leaders of their own color, when they are ready, at any moment to charge to the conflict—to liberty or death.”⁵⁵

Of course, in Blake Delany presents his eponymous hero, unlike Placido, as an intelligent leader who is also blacks' “own color.” In his characterization of the relationship between the “mulatto” Placido and the “black” Blake, Delany both honors and undermines Placido's status as black hero, ultimately installing in his place the heroic Blake. As I noted earlier, it seems clear that something similar to the racial dynamic troubling Delany's relationship with Douglass is enacted in Delany's portrayal of Placido, for the narrator in rather hostile fashion repeatedly refers to Placido's “yellow” (193) skin. (In Bondage Freeland's mother calls Douglass a “yellow devil.”) As mentioned, at the climactic meeting at Madame Cordora's it is Placido himself who maintains that the most effective leader of a black revolution would have to be a “pure‐blooded” black. Resurrected from the grave in a novel that, like William Wells Brown's Clotel, anachronistically conflates historical periods, making black memory the essential register of history, Placido is used most audaciously by Delany to legitimate Blake's leadership when he portrays Placido reading a poem at the celebration of Blake's ascension to leadership. The seven‐stanza poem calling for the slaves to fight “for Justice, Liberty, or death!” (196) first appeared in somewhat different form at the end of Delany's 1849 North Star essay “Annexation of Cuba.” By attributing to Placido his own poetry, Delany makes him into a kind of ventriloquist's dummy who both summons and authorizes Delany's vision of himself as the quintessential black deliverer.⁵⁶

Placido plays a less obvious legitimating role when he escorts Blake and Maggie to the home of Blake's father (who is never apprised that Blake is his son). For the light it casts on Delany's elite politics of black male leadership, the final paragraph of the two‐paragraph chapter on Placido, Blake, and Maggie is worth quoting in full:

Here everything around was strange to Maggie, who found herself transferred from wretchedness as a slave on the hacienda of Emanuel Garcia, to that of the happiness of a lady in the elegant mansion of one of the wealthiest and most refined black merchants in the West Indies. Everything was kindness and affection, and but for the thought of the absence of her husband for a time, she would have been the happiest of women. But now she had reconciled herself to his course, for since meeting with the poet, she was satisfied that he was not alone in the important scheme for the redemption of his race.

(199)

At this point, with much of the plot still to unfold, Maggie virtually drops out of the novel. This does not mean that women will have no place in Blake's plotting, for Delany eventually portrays a black African woman fully up to the task of revolution. The role Maggie plays at this particular moment, I would suggest, is of a surrogate for the reader, in the sense that her reconciliation to Blake's “grand design upon Cuba” (191) can be taken as Delany's effort to guide a resistant reader to a similar reconciliation. What is noteworthy is how Maggie's reconciliation comes about: through her recognition of Blake's family ties to “one of the wealthiest and most refined black merchants in the West Indies” and through her recognition that the great Placido, equally aristocratic, embraces the plan.

That plan, as soon becomes clear, has Africa at its center; the 1861‐62 periodical printing of the novel thus speaks to Delany's own personal investment in Africa circa 1858‐62, conveying a much more sympathetic relationship to Africanness than the 1859 periodical printing of the novel's first part (and even the 1861 Official Report). Soon after Blake's arrival in Cuba, for example, he links himself with a slave family whose history embodies the geopolitics of the slave trade. Kidnapped from Africa ten years earlier, the Oba family, renamed Grande by their Cuban enslavers, “proved to be native African, having learned English on the coast, French Creole at New Orleans, and Spanish at Cuba” (172).⁵⁷ In contrast to the novel's first part, where Blake mocks the use of conjure by the “African” revolutionaries of the Dismal Swamp, he now embraces the African religious practices of the Obas to the point that, after bloodhounds pass their hut, he requests information from them on the art of conjure (173).

A similar desire to tap into African sources of black resistance motivates Blake's plan, which he reveals to the approving Placido, to join an African slaver and foment a mutinous rebellion. Hoping that such a rebellion would enable him and his revolutionary black compatriots to obtain a vessel laden with munitions with which they could “make a strike” (198) on Cuba, Blake signs on as a sailing master with the Spanish slaver Vulture, the refitted U.S.‐Cuban Merchantman of the novel's first chapter. By setting the proposed mutiny on this specific ship, Delany participates in a symbolic “mutinous” undoing of the slave power, punningly setting the stage for Africa's “native Krumen” (198) to overthrow white crewmen. The comedy of the crossing to Africa centers on the Cuban and U.S. captains' efforts to make sense of the blacks' increasingly obvious subversive activities. As in Melville's theatricalized slave rebellion in “Benito Cereno,” the blacks aboard the Vulture, under the directorship of Blake, “acted well their part” (205), expressing their hostility toward the whites by chanting parodic versions of Cuban and U.S. national anthems while appearing to be “merry when they work” (208).⁵⁸

In the chapters set in Africa, Delany, in the notes and in the text, incorporates some of his own African experiences of 1859‐60.⁵⁹ For example, his Stowe‐like account of the decision of “the great factor, a noted Portuguese, Ludo Draco” (211) to renounce the slave trade may have been inspired by a story he heard during his visit; Delany remarks in a footnote that the opposition to the slave trade of Draco's wife, Zorina, “a handsome native African” (212), is similar to that “exhibited by the sister of the native wife of a once‐noted slave trader on the Coast, whom the writer met in Africa—a very respectable, intelligent, Christian young woman” (212). Even more resistant to the slave trade is Draco's daughter Angelina, home from a Lisbon convent, who rebels against her father when, incredibly enough, she realizes for the first time that he is a slave trader: in the manner of Little Eva she begins to die of grief after hearing the wails of the slaves aboard the Vulture. In his note on Angelina, who “spring[s] up in the bed” (220) when her father promises to renounce the slave trade (though not before selling eighteen hundred slaves to the owners of the Vulture), Delany refers to the “young mulatto daughter of a slave trader on the coast [who] peremptorily refused to leave her people and go with him to Portugal to finish an education” (215).

With his emphasis on the moral and social efficacy of Zorina's and Angelina's “respectable, intelligent, Christian” characters, Delany displays a consistency with his African project, which saw education and Christian morals as central to a regenerative, hierarchically conceived, and “civilized” black nationalism. In the horrific accounts of the middle passage that follow, Delany continues to honor such values, showing how those who are most responsive to Blake's mutinous plot are the African “elites” to be found among the slaves. He focuses his attention on two slaves in particular, one female and one male. The first, Abyssa, a cloth vendor from Soudan, who “had been converted to Christianity” (224), immediately recognizes Blake as a compatriot: “She saw that he was a civilized man, and desired that he should observe her. The look was reciprocated, and as he passed close by where she sat, to get a better observation of her, he startled as his ears caught the whisper in good English— / ‘Arm of the Lord, awake!’” (224). The second, Mendi (the name of the ship Delany took to Africa and of the African blacks who rebelled on the Amistad), is a “native chief” (239), who, unlike the “mere slave,” the narrator remarks, was “a powerful accession to their forces” (239).

Evidence of Mendi's leadership capacity becomes clear when, soon after the Vulture evades a British ship by dumping into the sea over six hundred dead and dying Africans, he convinces the remaining blacks in the hold to rebel. In an apocalyptic moment that points to the possible influence of Stowe's Dred on Delany's conception of prophetic black revolutionism, the American midshipman Spencer views Mendi, as lightening illuminates the hold, with his “face upturned to Heaven, falling upon his knees with hands extended in supplication to Jehovah, with great piercing eyes sparkling from under the heavy black brow, … a sight which struck terror to the heart of the young American” (234). As is true for Dred, Mendi's “storm of silent vengeance” (235) is typologically imaged as Jehovah‐like wrath. And as is also true for Dred, the promise of large‐scale black revolt remains unfulfilled. Impelled by the storm to protect their investment (and their lives), the white officers put an end to the incipient mutiny by securing the hatches until the Vulture returns safely to Cuba.

.....

Through all the mutinous action, Blake, “strangely passive to occurring events below” (236), assumes a spectatorial role appropriate more to an evaluator of talent than a fellow revolutionary. The “strangely passive” relation to events he exhibits during the return from Africa in many respects comes to characterize his relation to plot in part 2 of the novel. Portraying Blake as watching more than doing, Delany may be giving expression to his own fears, similar to Douglass's, that uncontrolled revolutionism could erupt as a form of intemperance. Such intemperate revolutionism, as Blake himself insists when rejecting insurrectionist actions in New Orleans, would do little to bring about blacks' elevation. James Holly, in his 1857 book on the revolution in San Domingue, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self‐Government, and Civilized Progress, argued that it was the “judicious self‐control” of the revolutionary blacks under the leadership of Toussaint and Dessalines that ensured Haiti's subsequent emergence as a civilized black nation with “thrifty commercial trade.” Consistent with his own commitment to what Holly terms “a strong, powerful, enlightened, and progressive negro nationality, equal to the demands of the nineteenth century,” Delany presents Blake as less interested in fomenting an immediate revolution than in finding leaders who can help him to develop in Cuba what Delany hoped to develop in Africa: a “progressive negro nationality.”⁶⁰ It is significant, then, that the immediate result of Blake's African trip is not a John Brown‐like guerrilla action but the acquisition of leaders like Mendi and Abyssa.

Delany stresses the centrality of leadership to the liberation of the black masses when Placido announces upon Blake's return from Africa that he has been chosen “General‐in‐Chief of the army of the emancipation of the oppressed men and women of Cuba!” (241). Placido pedagogically elaborates the broad principles of the group's commitment to uplift:

You must remember that there's a great difference between Franks' slaves and General Blake and wife. As the former, you were irresponsible, the latter responsible; that was a life of trouble and sorrow, this of care and pleasure. One shuns adventure, the other seeks it; the slaves feel an issue, and the freeman makes it. A slave must have somebody to care for him; a freeman must care for himself and others. The position of a man carries his wife with him; so when he is degraded, she is also, because she cannot rise above his level; but when he is elevated, so is she also; hence, the wife of Henry the slave was Maggie the slave; but the wife of Mr. Henry Blake will be Mrs. Maggie Blake; and the wife of General Blake will be Mrs. General Blake. What objections have you to this, cousin?

(242)

Paul Gilroy remarks that Delany saw a “necessary relationship between nationality, citizenship, and masculinity.”⁶¹ But what needs to be emphasized about this particular speech as much as the gender subordination that is being enforced on Maggie (though not on all women) is Delany's underscoring of the connection between black elevation and black revolution. As in Delany's North Star writings and Douglass's Bondage, there is a strong suggestion that bondage and freedom are states of mind as well as actual material and social conditions. Slaves are irresponsible, freemen are responsible; slaves are dependent, freeman are independent. Like Blake in New Orleans, then, Placido is warning that a black revolution would fail if it should occur before blacks attain the consciousness of freemen.

The challenge facing Blake and the revolutionary leaders is to mobilize and channel collective energies toward the interrelated goals of black liberation and elevation. They do so, as Sundquist brilliantly demonstrates, by participating in festivals that ironize and invert the ongoing national festivals of the Spanish authorities.⁶² Hence Blake assumes his position as general‐in‐chief on the occasion of “the celebration of the nativity of the Infanta Isabella, by a grand national fete at the palace of the Captain General” (240); hence the Afro‐Cubans and their allies take a “general holiday” (244) at the time of the Spanish nationalistic festivities at Moro Castle. As the free blacks stream into Havana for their holiday, in what seems to be a rehearsal for revolution, a new sense of unity exists among them. The narrator proclaims: “Never before had the African race been so united as on that occasion, the free Negroes and mixed free people being in unison and sympathy with each other” (245).

In a footnote to his account of the holiday, Delany writes, “The term ‘African race’ includes the mixed as well as the pure bloods” (247). And in many ways it includes more than that, for the narrator describes at this festive gala day the emergence of a strikingly inclusive, pan‐ethnic “racial” unity among the “masses of the Negroes, mulattoes and quadroons, Indians and even Chinamen” (245). In “Political Destiny,” Delany declared that “the great issue, sooner or later, upon which must be disputed the world's destiny, will be a question of black and white, and every individual will be called upon for his identity with one or the other.” Working against essentialist or “romantic” notions of race, Delany suggests at the end of Blake, as he suggests in the earlier attacks on the “Brown Societies,” that “blackness” is as much a matter of politics as biology.⁶³

Nevertheless, the large emphasis of the description of the festivals in the novel's closing chapters is to suggest the ways in which they serve simultaneously utopian and pragmatic ends in helping to create from within the “webbed network” of the “black Atlantic world” a Pan‐African collectivity that both challenges the dominant slave powers and promises to elevate oppressed black peoples throughout the world.⁶⁴ In this respect, important similarities exist between the seemingly quite different projects of Blake's insurrectionism and Delany's African regeneration project. As becomes clear at the coronation of Blake's leadership at Madame Cordora's, the goal of Blake's plotting, similar to the goal of Delany's Niger plan, is to “redeem” oppressed blacks from their “almost helpless degradation” (251). Blake's conspiracy, like Delany's proposed African community, is to be guided by intelligent and charismatic black leaders committed to a liberationist Christianity; Blake's envisioned black community, like Delany's, would emerge as a global commercial power. As Blake and his cohorts move closer to putting their insurrectionist plan into effect, Delany suggests another link between his own African project and Blake's plotting: both would lead to the recovery of land “intended” for blacks. In Africa, where colonial rule usurped lands from the natives, Delany's vision of rightful ownership was highly problematic, for as I have noted, Delany's plan called for African American emigrants to “reclaim” Africa for (and from) its “degraded” native blacks. Delany's view of land and nation is just as problematic in Blake, despite the fact that he presents Blake as a native Cuban, for by the end of the novel Delany espouses the providential notions set forth in Condition and “Political Destiny”: that blacks' destiny lies in the Americas, a notion that, while posing a significant challenge to U.S. Manifest Destiny, shares its colonizing and imperialistic assumptions.

In the second‐to‐last chapter in which Blake appears, Delany elaborates on the providential Pan‐African vision guiding Blake's insurrectionist plottings in Cuba. According to Blake and his coconspirators, the impending insurrection can be justified “on the fundamental basis of original priority … that the western world had been originally peopled and possessed by the Indians—a colored race—and a part of the continent in Central America by a pure black race. This they urged gave them an indisputable right with every admixture of blood, to an equal, if not superior, claim to an inheritance of the Western Hemisphere” (287). Grouping the “Indians” with blacks as a unified “colored race” allows Blake and his compatriots to ignore the distinctive claims of the native inhabitants, thereby enabling an untroubled assertion of “black” Manifest Destiny in the Western Hemisphere. Blake and his group make their strongest claims on the southern regions of the hemisphere, arguing in racialist terms that the “colored races … were by nature adapted to the tropical regions of this part of the world” (287). By contrast, the whites of the region (like those of Africa), in addition to not being racially suited for survival in the tropics, “were there by intrusion, idle consumers subsisting by imposition” (287).

Such assertions of racial destiny and rights, as I have said, make the mulatto Madame Cordora uneasy about the actual inclusiveness of Blake's politics, about whether his notions of blackness are really meant to serve the political ends of creating a diasporic collectivity among all shades and classes of oppressed peoples. Recalling Delany's inclusive definition of the “African race” as those of “mixed as well as the pure bloods” who are “in unison and sympathy with each other,” I would suggest that the novel ends up having it both ways (as novels often will), pragmatically insisting on the value of a pan‐ethnic community of the oppressed, on the one hand, while mystically imagining the glorious advent of a racialized black community, on the other. That mystical sense of black community, which could be understood in relation to Delany's Freemasonry and his typological reading of Exodus, is underscored when Blake asserts to Madame Cordora the Ethiopianism of Psalms 68:31, which Delany also quotes in his Official Report (and Douglass quotes at the end of Bondage), that “‘Ethiopia shall yet stretch forth her hands unto God; Princes shall come out of Egypt’” (285). Such a passage could be read as the ultimate legitimation of Blake's (Delany's) Moses‐like status as redemptive black leader.

Yet when all is said and done, Blake's goals by the end of the novel seem relatively limited, particularly as elaborated in chapter 70, the last chapter of the novel in which he actually appears (the extant version has 74 chapters). On the day of Special Indulgence, another holiday giving festive license to the blacks, Blake declares apocalyptically: “I am for war—war upon the whites” (290). But he then offers religious and political qualifications of his martial desires. In what seems to contradict the attitude toward religion that he has been preaching throughout—that blacks must act on their own in the physical world—Blake, as is consistent with the need for providential intervention implicit in his original watchcry of “Stand still and see the salvation,” takes on the guise of Stowe's Dred in wanting an authorizing sign from God before unleashing violence. In the midst of a group prayer, he declares, “We are more and more sensible that without thy divine aid, we can do nothing” (292).

Blake's second qualification is even more striking, to the point of nearly undermining the entire rationale of his secret plotting. He again asserts his desire for war, but this time he brings Spain into the equation: “I now declare war against our oppressors, provided Spain does not redress our grievances!” (292). Astonishingly, the possibility of insurrection is put into the hands of the colonial power. But what could Spain possibly do to address blacks' grievances, and why does Blake offer this last olive branch to the oppressors? The answer, I think, lies in the way Delany revises the 1844 conspiracy of La Escalera through the lens of the “Africanization” scare and filibustering of the 1850s.

The conspiracy that came to be named after the tool of torture employed by the Spanish rulers—a ladder on which suspects were bound and tortured—had its origins in November 1843, when a slave rebellion occurred on a plantation in Matanzas. Captain‐General Leopoldo O'Donnell used fears about possible slave conspiracies to crack down not only on the slaves but also on what he regarded as the threatening network of slaves, free blacks, Creoles, and foreigners who were plotting to wrest power from Spain.⁶⁵ In Blake, conspiratorial fears arise among the Spanish when a female slave reveals to government authorities the existence of an impending plot in which “all at once at de same time, each [black] is to seize a white and slaughter 'im” (271). While the revelation of the plot exacerbates the concerns of Lady Alcora, who has a nightmare of “being in the interior of Africa surrounded entirely by Negroes” (266), Captain‐General Alcora works strenuously to have all accounts of impending black insurrection contradicted, for he realizes that it is in the interests of Matanzas's “American party” (298) to stoke fears of black insurrectionism as a way of deflecting attention away from U.S. plottings to acquire Cuba. Regarding the greatest threat to Cuba as coming from pro‐slavery U.S. annexationists, Alcora refuses to act against the blacks, thus increasing fears among U.S. and Creole slaveholders that the “Africanization” of the island is in progress. The conspiratorial fears that so seize the white imagination thus owe as much to the politics of Alcora as to the plottings of Blake.

As noted, fears of the Africanization of Cuba were especially pronounced in the United States during the 1850s and contributed to increased efforts to purchase or invade the island.⁶⁶ In the final chapters of the novel, Delany portrays the captain‐general's suspicions of U.S. annexationists and filibusterers as exactly on the mark, as the focus shifts from Blake's impending conspiracy to an apparent conspiracy among U.S. whites to foment reactionary moves by the government against blacks (304). Because increasing conflicts between the Spanish authorities and blacks would make Cuba especially vulnerable to a filibustering invasion, the captain‐general declares martial law not against plotting blacks but against what he somewhat naïvely regards as the more threatening U.S. whites. To make clear just how crucial the 1850s context is to his representation of Alcora's position here, Delany takes note of the 1851 “execution of Lopez on the garrote with many of his followers” (306). In certain respects, then, Delany, by imposing the 1850s political context on La Escalera, links himself more closely to Spain than to the slaveholding Creoles or, certainly, the U.S. annexationists. Such a linkage would imply that perhaps what his surrogate Blake most wants from Spain is that it allow blacks, through emancipation and social reforms, to become (as Blake's father once had been) part of Cuba's ruling element; he wants precisely the “Africanizing” liberalizations that U.S. annexationists feared would lead to black revolutionism but that he regards as crucial to efforts to fend off U.S. annexation.

Yet the prospect of black revolution on the island remains very real. Delany suggests as much by supplying near the end of the extant novel, as Melville supplied in the deposition near the end of “Benito Cereno,” a white account of black revolutionism that, because of the blindness at the center of the account, demands of the reader a greater ability to see. According to the journalist, whose 1849 report (the narrator states) has been lifted from a U.S. periodical, the annual celebration on the sixth of January of King's Day, “El Dia de los Reyes” (299)—an occasion in which blacks are allowed publicly to “assemble according to their tribes” (299), put on the “Congo Dance” (299), “use their own language and their own songs” (301), and honor their tribal kings—performs at least two key functions for the Spanish authorities: it allows them to “threaten” the Creoles and Americans with the prospect of “Africanization,” and it also provides them with a safety valve for the release of blacks' revolutionary energies. The Spanish Captain‐General Roncall extends the festivities for three days in light of López's known plans for a filibustering invasion. (The novel thus collapses 1844, 1849, and 1851 with the 1850s generally.) What King's Day reveals to the reporter is how terrifying it would be if the blacks should be emancipated as part of a liberalization movement, though he concludes his account by scoffing at the possibility that blacks could be their own agents of liberation: “It would be easy on King's Day for the Negroes to free themselves, or at least to make the streets of Havana run with blood, if they only knew their power; Heaven be praised that they do not” (301).⁶⁷

What the journalist of course fails to see is that King's Day, with its syncretic festivities and ritual inversions, signals the imminent irruption of a conspiratorial black revolution of the sort that Blake seems to have been setting in motion over the course of the novel. But just as Blake keeps his distance from the mutinous outbreak aboard the Vulture, so he keeps his distance from the various festive inversions at the novel's close. Instead Delany foregrounds the important role played by the militant black revolutionary Gofer Gondolier, the knife‐toting palace caterer suspected by the captain‐general of wanting to “establish a Negro government” (270). When confronted by two Irish patrols, it is Gofer, not Placido and Blake, who strikes them down (275). When Ambrosina Cordora, the daughter of Madame Cordora (Montego), is brutally assaulted by a white man who tears off her clothes and publicly whips her, it is Gondolier and Montego who seek immediate revenge. And it is Gondolier, not Blake, who offers the biblically vengeful, David Walker‐like final words of the extant novel: “Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (313).

In his 1849 North Star writings on Cuba, Delany looks forward to “that eventual moment, which as certain as the heavens must and will come, when the oppressed and bondmen of every origin, grade and hue under the despotism of the white race, shall determine to strike the fateful blow and remove the yoke from every neck.” He imagines the possibility of a “day of deliverance” in the Americas: a “simultaneous rebellion of all the slaves in the Southern States, and throughout that island [Cuba].” In 1853 Douglass similarly imagines the possibility of a black nationalist uprising among the slaves of the Americas, warning that “Americans should remember that there are already on this Continent, and in the adjacent islands, all of 12,370,000 negroes, who only wait for the life‐giving and organizing power of intelligence to mould them into one body and into a powerful nation.” At the end of the novel, presumably because of Blake's marshaling offstage “intelligence,” the time for such Pan‐African revolutionism appears to be at hand.⁶⁸

REDEEMING THE NATION

For many readers, Gondolier's expression of black rage against white oppressors seems an appropriate ending to Blake, as it keeps in perpetual suspension the threat of black insurrection, making the creation of white paranoia itself the potent end product of Blake's plotting.⁶⁹ Thus, despite the fact that the reputedly eighty‐chapter novel ends with chapter 74, the novel can be said to have achieved a satisfying sense of completion with its vision of united blacks poised for insurrectionary violence against white enslavers. Yet it may well have been the case that rather than keeping in suspension the possibility of a bloody war between the races, or even representing its outbreak, Delany actually ended the novel with a series of relatively nonviolent scenes that enabled Blake to emerge at the helm of a regenerated society in which blackness is seen not as an exclusive or essential good but as equally worthy (or unworthy) as whiteness. The ascent to leadership of a “pure‐blooded” black, as Blake and Placido suggest at the coronation scene at Madame Cordora's, would serve as a daily refutation of whites' racist beliefs in black inferiority. Occurring in such close proximity to the United States, Blake's ascent would therefore provide U.S. whites with an image not of black homicidal fury but of responsible black leadership. The hopeful suggestion of such a possible ending, then, would have been that the elevation of Delany's heroic surrogate would contribute to the emancipation and elevation of blacks in the United States.

My counterintuitive speculation about the possible existence of such an ending to Blake has been prompted in part by Delany's conception of his politics of blackness and nationhood circa 1863‐68 as articulated in Frances Rollin's 1868 Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany. Central to the portrayal of Delany's representative identity in Rollin's text is the depiction of his relationship to Douglass, who continued to play a critical role in Delany's efforts to conceive of blacks' place in the United States. Before considering Delany's perspective on Douglass during the early 1860s and its possible implications for imagining a “patriotic” ending to Blake, I want first to consider Douglass's perspective on Delany during this time.

Though in 1859 Douglass attacked Garnet's and Delany's respective African emigration plans as simply the latest form of black colonization—efforts by black and white racists to remove U.S. blacks from their rightful place in the nation to the “pestilential shores of Africa”—Douglass's suspicions in 1860 and early 1861 of what he termed the “pro‐slavery truckling” of Lincoln eventually led him to regard emigration to Haiti as “highly advantageous to many families, and of much service to the Haytian Republic.” So disturbed was Douglass by Lincoln's 1860 inaugural address, which he took as an announcement of “complete loyalty to slavery in the slave States,” that in the May 1861 Douglass' Monthly he announced his plans to travel to Haiti so that he might “experience the feeling of being under a Government which has been administered by a race denounced as mentally and morally incapable of self government.” But in the midst of the announcement he declared an abrupt change of plans, describing the outbreak of the Civil War as having “made a tremendous revolution in all things pertaining to the possible future of the colored people of the United States.” Like Thomas Hamilton, he very quickly came to view the Civil War as a war of emancipation. As he remarked in July 1861, “To fight against slaveholders without fighting against slavery, is but a half‐hearted business, and paralyzes the hands engaged in it.”⁷⁰

Douglass argued from late 1861 until the end of the war that the Union's best hope for victory against the slaveholders was to enlist blacks into the military so that they themselves could do battle against those who sought their “perpetual enslavement.”⁷¹ But even as he called for black participation in the war, Lincoln was exploring the possibility of colonizing blacks to the tropics of Central and South America. Sensing that colonization lay behind the administration's plans, Douglass in the January 1862 issue of his monthly answered the question of “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?” with a series of rhetorical questions meant to insist on blacks' rights to U.S. citizenship: “But would you let them all stay here?—Why not? What better is here than there? Will they occupy much more room as freemen than as slaves?” But as it became increasingly clear that Lincoln regarded “there” as better than “here,” Douglass began regularly to attack Lincoln for betraying the promise of the Civil War. Writing in response to Lincoln's putative remarks that colonization was “the duty and the interest of the colored people,” Douglass proclaimed: “Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day. … Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred.”⁷²

As Douglass would have known full well, Lincoln's colonization plan of 1862 bore some similarity to Delany's emigration plan of 1854. That it did was hardly coincidental, for it is a grand irony of U.S. political history that the House committee impaneled to explore the possibility of black colonization appended as a supporting document to its July 1862 Report of the Select Committee on Emancipation and Colonization Delany's address to the Cleveland emigration convention, “The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent.” The congressional report, which in the manner of Douglass equated Delany's voluntaristic emigrationist program with forced colonizationism, called for the appropriation of $20 million to help settle emancipated slaves outside the borders of the United States.⁷³ To oppose this colonizationist mandate, Douglass had to challenge the leadership of its black progenitors, particularly Delany, who now championed black emigration not to Central and South America but to Africa. And he would once again have to address the relation of Africa to African Americans. That is precisely what he did in July and August 1862 issues of Douglass' Monthly, in essays on Alexander Crummell and Martin Delany.

In his review of Crummell's The Future of Africa, Douglass conveyed his concerns that the book may “stir up a general African spirit among the colored people of the United States” by seeming to validate “the old offensive assumption of colonizationists, that the black man is doomed to unalterable degradation in the United States.” Published as Lincoln sought to remove blacks from the United States, Crummell's book, Douglass feared, could give quarter to the enemy by equating voluntary emigration with forcible colonization. But what Douglass most objected to was Crummell's contention that the future of the race was in Africa. In the strongest possible terms Douglass maintained that talented U.S. blacks could devote themselves to Africa by remaining in the United States to fight for the cause of African Americans: “No intelligent born American black man, is under the necessity of crossing the ocean to prove his devotion to the people of Africa. He can if he will, do that a little nearer home, and with as high advantage to the world, as if he were to fix his habitation in the very centre of Africa.”⁷⁴

Douglass expressed similar objections to Delany's 1862 speeches to blacks urging them to fulfill their “African” identity by emigrating to Africa. In an essay on Delany's lectures in Rochester, printed one month after his review of Crummell, Douglass despairs that the “most fashionable churches of this city were flung open to [Delany], and the most intelligent audiences assembled to hear him.” In providing Delany with a platform for his African emigration program, Douglass maintains, Rochester's blacks only further encouraged racist colonizationists, for the “black man however shunned and detested when his face is turned towards America, becomes at once an object of interest and regard when his face and his steps are turned towards Africa.” As he had in the past, Douglass contests Delany's racialist valorization of “the pure black uncorrupted by Caucasian blood,” and as in his account of Delany's participation in the International Statistical Congress, he takes advantage of Delany's trumpeting of his own blackness to suggest that a back‐to‐Africa program is appropriate mainly for Delany. He thus concludes his account of Delany in this way: “He himself, is one of the very best arguments that Africa has to offer. Fine looking, broad chested, full of life and energy, shining like polished black Italian marble, and possessing a voice which when exerted to its full capacity might cause a whole troop of African Tigers to stand and tremble, he is just the man for the great mission of African civilization to which he is devoting his life and powers.”⁷⁵ Douglass's celebration of Delany as a black African and not as a black American archly performs a rhetorical act of “colonization” or “emigration” that rids the nation of a leader whose politics Douglass deems harmful to the cause of black elevation in the United States.

Two months after this column appeared in Douglass' Monthly, Delany sent Douglass a friendly letter on the need for blacks to represent their own interests, signing it, “For self‐regeneration and the redemption of Africa, I am dear sir, most sincerely your old friend and co‐laborer, M. R. Delany.” But however much Delany was committed to the “regeneration and the redemption of Africa,” within six months he became as ardent as Douglass in his embrace of the Civil War. Just before Delany's conversion to the war effort in early 1863, Douglass began recruiting free blacks to fight in the newly formed Fifty‐fourth Massachusetts Volunteers. Delany soon joined the effort, and in March of that year his son Toussaint L'Ouverture Delany signed up for duty in the Fifty‐fourth, along with two of Douglass's sons. It was only after Toussaint survived the regiment's bloody attack on Fort Wagner in July 1863 that Delany seemed to have completely committed himself to the war against the South. He applied for the post of surgeon in black regiments, contracted with the state of Connecticut to recruit troops for its black divisions, and, in a letter of December 1863 to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, volunteered “to recruit Colored Troops in any of the Southern or sceded [sic] states.”⁷⁶

But what was the relationship of Delany's support for the Civil War to his African regeneration project, his vision of Pan‐African insurrectionism in Blake, his interactions with Douglass, and his ongoing efforts to fashion himself as the representative black leader of the period? Delany suggestively pointed to the significance of these interrelationships in the account of his life he provided Frances Rollin in the fall and winter of 1867‐68 for her Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany.

At the time he shared his life history with Rollin, Delany was an officer at the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina. Wishing to present himself as a model U.S. citizen, Delany has virtually nothing to say about his meetings with John Brown, his insurrectionary novel Blake, or his Niger project (in a single sentence, he refers to “his expedition into Central Africa”). What appears in the biography instead, in the account of Delany circa 1859‐63, is a complete misrepresentation of the facts—a misrepresentation that nonetheless suggests how Delany made sense of them in the wake of having committed himself to the war effort in 1863. Rollin writes of Delany's response when news of “the secession of South Carolina reached Great Britain”: “With almost prophetic vision he saw the great work apportioned for his race in the impending struggle. Therefore he turned his thoughts homeward to prepare himself for his portion of it.” The “great work apportioned for his race,” in Rollin's telling, turns out not to have been promoting African emigration, which Delany in fact continued to do during 1861 and 1862, but rather, like Douglass, to have been encouraging Northerners to regard the Civil War as a war of emancipation. Instead of urging blacks to journey to Africa or even to support a limited project of selective emigration, as Douglass had suggested was the intent of Delany's 1862 Rochester lectures, Delany, according to Rollin, was in fact attempting to make money for the Union side by selling his Africa book, Official Report, to “the most refined and influential of society.”⁷⁷

More important, Rollin maintains that Delany lectured on Africa during 1861‐2 because he believed that was the best way to bring “forward the claims of his race to the war.” In this conception of things, the more African African Americans regard themselves as being, the less degraded they will feel, the more respect they will gain from whites, and the greater the possibility of their U.S. Americanization. It is noteworthy in this regard that in Rollin's book Delany for the first time publicly offers his family genealogy as traced back to Africa. Delany's purposes in offering this genealogy have regularly been misinterpreted as a sign of his continuing commitment to a back‐to‐Africa program. But in claiming to be able to trace his family lineage to “native Africans‐on the father's side, pure Golah, on the mother's Mandingo”—and in further asserting that his father's father was a “chieftain” and his mother's father was “an African prince” who was “heir to the kingdom which was then the most powerful of Central Africa,” Delany wants to suggest not that he should return to Africa but that he is a sort of John Adams natural aristocrat who rightly belongs in a leadership role in the United States. Near the end of the war, Lincoln himself ratified Delany's claims to leadership by commissioning him the first black major in the Union army.⁷⁸

Douglass had wanted a similar commission. In July 1863 he met with Lincoln to call for equal treatment of blacks in the army, and he was led to believe, both by Lincoln and Stanton, that he would soon be named an officer. So buoyed was he by his meeting that, as William S. McFeely notes, he suspended the publication of Douglass' Monthly because he expected to receive orders “to take up his commission as the first black officer in the United States Army.” But the offer never came, perhaps (as Benjamin Quarles and McFeely speculate) because Lincoln thought it best to move slowly on a commission that risked racial polarization. One year later Douglass again met with Lincoln, this time to propose a plan of having Northern blacks infiltrate behind Southern lines and encourage slave flight and rebellion. As Douglass's subsequent letter to Lincoln of 29 August 1864 suggests, he expected to be named the “General ag[en]t” to help carry out the plan.⁷⁹ Again, an offer never came. Instead, when Lincoln was at last prepared to commission the first black major in February 1865, he chose Delany.

In the Rollin biography, Delany attempts to show why he was the obvious choice for this commission. In a stunning act of historical revisionism (and distortion) that trumps Douglass's “colonizing” Africanization of his “co‐laborer,” Delany presents himself as the African American who was most responsible for convincing Douglass to support the Civil War as a war of emancipation. Delany tells of how in 1862 he visited Douglass in Rochester to make the case for the war and Lincoln, saying that before leaving he “had the satisfaction of hearing Mr. Douglass express himself more favorably editorially in his able journal.” Because of “this change of opinion in my great‐hearted friend,” Delany states, there came in 1863 “a special official request for Mr. Douglass to visit Washington.” According to Rollin, a grateful Douglass developed an even greater admiration for his former coeditor and friend, to the point that when “an accomplished European lady” attacked Delany for his support of Lincoln, Douglass came to his defense, proclaiming, “Madam, you do not know the gentleman with whom you are conversing; if there be one man among us to whose opinion I would yield on the subject of government generally, that man is the gentleman now before you.” In Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, it is that “gentleman,” not Douglass, who first develops a plan to infiltrate Southern lines with black troops. Rollin tells of how Delany presented “his plans to his always noble‐hearted friend, Frederick Douglass, [who] gave [Delany] encouragement, adding that he was no soldier himself.”⁸⁰ And she writes that it was Delany, not Douglass, who, during a private meeting with Lincoln, proposed the specifics of how to carry out such a mission.

In an account that would have to be dismissed as fiction were there not the “corroborating” fact that (as Rollin notes) Lincoln wrote to Stanton of his admiration for Delany shortly before Delany received his commission as major, Rollin includes in her book Delany's testimony, in his “own language,” of his “private council at Washington” with Abraham Lincoln. According to Delany, he told Lincoln he sought council with him not to ask for any special favors but to “propose something to you, which I think will be beneficial to the nation in this critical hour of her peril.” He then reveals his plan to end the war:

I propose, sir, an army of blacks, commanded entirely by black officers, except such whites as may volunteer to serve; this army to penetrate through the heart of the South, and make conquests, with the banner of Emancipation unfurled, proclaiming freedom as they go, sustaining and protecting it by arming the emancipated, taking them as fresh troops, and leaving a few veterans among the new freedmen, when occasion requires, keeping this banner unfurled until every slave is free, according to the letter of your proclamation. I would also take from those already in the service all that are competent for commission officers, and establish at once in the South a camp of instructions. By this we could have in about three months an army of forty thousand blacks in motion, the presence of which anywhere would itself be a power irresistible. You should have an army of blacks, President Lincoln, commanded entirely by blacks, the sight of which is required to give confidence to the slaves, and retain them to the Union, stop foreign intervention, and speedily bring the war to a close.

According to the Rollin/Delany text, Lincoln exultantly proclaims in response: “This … is the very thing I have been looking and hoping for; but nobody offered it. I have thought it over and over again. I have talked about it; I hoped and prayed for it. … When I issued my Emancipation Proclamation, I had this thing in contemplation.” As Delany and Rollin would have it, it took Martin Delany to bring to fruition Lincoln's emancipatory vision. Delany's fashioning of his representative identity as black leader, which I have been arguing centrally informs both Blake and his African regeneration project, is at last simultaneously fulfilled and consecrated when, as if inspired, Lincoln, “suddenly turning” toward Delany, beseeches him (and not Douglass), “Will you take command?”⁸¹

From Rollin's perspective, it is precisely Lincoln's recognition that Delany (and not Douglass) is the proper person to take command that promises at last to bring about black elevation in the United States. In a letter included in Rollin's biography, Lincoln refers to Delany as “this most extraordinary and intelligent black man,” thereby suggesting the importance of both talent and race in his decision to commission Delany a major. Delany's acceptance of the commission allows him finally to reclaim in the United States what Rollin refers to as his “lost and regal [African] inheritance”; ironically, in Rollin's account it is precisely Delany's princely Africanness that legitimates his U.S. Americanness.⁸²

Rollin underscores this point by concluding her biography with an assessment that once again plays off the mulatto Douglass against the racialized “identity” of Delany, declaring approvingly that “few, if any, … have so entirely consecrated themselves to the idea of race as [Delany's] career shows. His religion, his writings, every step in life, is based upon this idea. His creed begins and ends with it—that the colored race can only obtain their true status as men, by relying on their identity. … This he claims as the foundation of his manhood. Upon this point, Mr. Frederick Douglass once wittily remarked, ‘Delany stands so straight that he leans a little backward.’” Delany's willingness to “lean a little backward,” so Rollin avers, “has triumphantly demonstrated negro capability for greatness in every sphere wherein he has acted.” The example of Delany's inspired leadership, she states, echoing the goals so central to his African project, to his heroic surrogate Blake, to his Reconstruction work in South Carolina, indeed, to his entire career, shall inspire blacks to begin “their onward march towards that higher civilization.”⁸³ Whereas Blake's Masonic and Pan‐African vision would seem to conceive of a black diasporic community that confutes the very idea of the bordered nation, the suggestion in Rollin, which no doubt echoes Delany's own perspective on the promise of Reconstruction, is that if blacks wish to “stand still and see the salvation,” they should do so, under the aegis of the black major, in the United States. At least that is how things stood with Delany in 1868.

Notes

1. When Floyd J. Miller brought out the first book publication of Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon, 1970), he altered our understanding of the development of the African American novel. Some critics refer to Blake as the third African American novel, after William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) and Frank Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857). But Brown's revised version of Clotel, Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon, appeared in serial form in 1860‐61, and Harriet Wilson's autobiographical Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs's novelized Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) appeared before the serial publication of Blake in 1861‐62.

   The 1970 edition of Blake generated several fine readings of the novel. For a pioneering discussion, see Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776‐1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972), pp. 193‐211. Eric J. Sundquist's notable reading examines the novel in relation to Melville's “Benito Cereno” (To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], chap. 2). A number of critics have found Delany's novel to be aesthetically deficient. For example, Blyden Jackson refers to Delany's “wretchedness as a writer,” concluding that “Blake lacks art, not mind” (A History of Afro‐American Literature, 2 vols. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989], 1:370,373). Wilson Jeremiah Moses condescendingly refers to the novel as “a typical exhortation to revolt by a free black pamphleteer” (The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850‐1925 [1978; rpt., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], p. 151). For a good (and more appreciative) later reading, see John Ernest, Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth‐Century African‐American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass, and Harper (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), pp. 109‐39.

2. See Yellin, Intricate Knot, p. 197, and Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 183, 193‐94. On William King, see William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, “Uncle Tom and Clayton,” Ontario History 50 (1958): 61‐73; and William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), pp. 84‐108. It is an irony of literary/cultural history that by 1861 Delany would be tying his hopes for the creation of an African American colony in Africa to the Elgin community that Stowe so greatly admired.

3. Anglo‐African Magazine, January 1859, p. 20; M. R. Delany to William Lloyd Garrison, letter of 19 February 1859, William Lloyd Garrison Papers, Boston Public Library.

4. Miller incorrectly gives the date of the publication of the first chapter of Blake as 26 November 1861 (Blake, ix).

5. Jackson, History of Afro‐American Literature, 1:366; Delany, Blake, p. 199.

6. Provincial Freeman, 23 February 1856, p. 163. In his 1852 Condition Delany had cautioned blacks against Canadian emigration because he feared U.S. “annexation” was “the inevitable and not far distant destiny of the Canadas” (The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States [1852; rpt., New York: Arno, 1968], p. 175). By 1854, however, he had come to regard Canada's blacks as “united and powerful” (“Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” in Rollin, p. 367), and he had run his “Call” for the Cleveland emigration convention in the Provincial Freeman. (In the same issue that first ran his “Call,” Delany complained in a letter to the editors that Douglass had sought to make him appear “ridiculous” by deliberately letting stand the errors in the “Call” printed in Frederick Douglass' Paper [see Martin R. Delany to the editors of the Provincial Freeman, letter of 29 March 1854, in Provincial Freeman, 15 April 1854, p. 3].) Though the editors Isaac Shadd and Mary Ann Shadd printed the “Call,” in subsequent issues they raised questions about the assumptions undergirding Delany's plan for North American blacks to become part of the “ruling element” of Central and South America. “Know you not that men are there before you?” they demanded (“A Word about, and to Emigrationists,” Provincial Freeman, 15 April 1854, p. 3). Yet despite the skepticism voiced in this and other editorials, Mary Ann Shadd modified her stance shortly after Delany's 1856 arrival in Chatham, and in a July 1856 editorial she endorsed Delany's call for an August 1856 emigration convention (“The Emigration Convention,” Provincial Freeman, 5 July 1856, p. 46). Delany's “The Cleveland Convention” appeared in the 7 June 1854 issue of Provincial Freeman, p. 30.

7. Provincial Freeman, 10 May 1856, p. 14; Martin R. Delany, “What Does It Mean?,” Provincial Freeman, 12 July 1856, p. 50. For Douglass's earlier views on the blacks of Canada, see, for example, “The Elgin Settlements at Buxton, Canada West,” FDP, 25 August 1854, p. 2. By 1855, perhaps because of his increasingly friendly interactions with the Shadds, Delany had come to resent Douglass's resistance to Canadian emigration, and in an essay printed in an October 1855 issue of Provincial Freeman, he mockingly attacked “the ‘leading and great men’” of the African American community for their “studied opposition” to Canada as a “point of emigration by the colored people of the United States.” See Martin R. Delany, “Political Aspect of the Colored People of the United States: Given in a Paper, Read before the First Annual Meeting of the National Board of Commissioners, Assembled in Council in the City of Pittsburgh, on the 24th day of August, 1855, according to Art. IV of the Constitution,” Provincial Freeman, 13 October 1855, p. 97.

8. Proclaiming as a historical truism the Byronic sentiment, “‘Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow,’” Douglass, in one of his most militant antebellum lectures, “The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies” (1857), argued for a direct link between slave insurrection and liberation (Papers, 3:202). Douglass delivered this speech before a predominately black audience. Given his renewed militancy, it is not surprising that he came close to collaborating with Delany on the planning stages of Brown's mission.

   When Douglass first met John Brown in 1848, he described him as “a white gentleman, [who] is in sympathy a black man” (Douglass to William C. Nell, letter of 5 February 1848, NS, 11 February 1848, p. 2). During the 1850s Douglass printed several of Brown's antislavery writings in FDP, praising him as “an active and self‐sacrificing abolitionist” (FDP, 6 July 1855, p. 2). Even after Brown's murderous raid at Pottawatomie, Kansas, on 24 May 1856, Douglass continued to praise him in his paper. For an excellent discussion of Douglass and Brown, see Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

9. In addition to Delany, among the blacks Brown had convinced to meet with him in Canada were Delany's close friend William C. Munroe and Isaac Shadd and Thomas Cary, the brother and husband, respectively, of one of Douglass's harshest critics of the 1850s, Mary Ann Shadd Cary.

10. Osborne P. Anderson, A Voice from Harper's Ferry: A Narrative of Events at Harper's Ferry, with Incidents Prior and Subsequent to Its Capture by Captain Brown and His Men (Boston, 1861), pp. 2, 8; “Journal of the Provisional Constitution Held on Saturday, May 8th, 1858,” in “The John Brown Insurrection: The Brown Papers,” in Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts from January 1, 1836, to April 15, 1869 11 (1893): 288 (see also 272). The “Journal” was confiscated by Virginia authorities after Brown's raid. According to Daniel C. Littlefield, the Chatham document reveals that “Brown acted out of a firm commitment to American political values and Christian morality” (“Blacks, John Brown, and a Theory of Manhood,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, ed. Paul Finkelman [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995], p. 78). On the Chatham convention, see also Quarles, Allies for Freedom, pp. 42‐54; and Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 267‐70.

    According to Delany, as recorded by Rollin, “the idea of Harpers Ferry was never mentioned” at the Chatham convention (88). But Delany offered Rollin his account of the convention at a time when he would have been loathe to reveal his past insurrectionist activities. The evidence suggests that Brown had called the Chatham convention with the intention of gaining the support of black leaders for a plan to organize and lead a rebellion of the slaves of the United States.

11. Delany to J. H. Kagi, letter of 16 August 1858, in “John Brown Insurrection,” pp. 291‐92; Delany to M. H. Freeman, Weekly Anglo‐African, 1 February 1862, p. 2; M. R. Delany, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861), rpt. in Search for a Place: Black Separatism and Africa, 1860, ed. Howard H. Bell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 38; Delany to Henry Ward Beecher, letter of 17 June 1858, cited in Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787‐1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 178. See also Ann Greenwood Wilmoth, “Pittsburgh and the Blacks: A Short History, 1780‐1875” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1975), pp. 52‐56.

12. Delany, Official Report, p. 33. Delany explains that the reason why the delegates (and Delany himself) selected Central and South America at the 1854 emigration convention as the most suitable places for emigration was that “Africa was held in reserve, until by the help of an All‐wise Providence we could effect what has just been accomplished with signal success” (36).

    In Official Report Delany states that his reading of the white evangelical T. J. Bowen's Central Africa: Adventures and Missionary Labors (1857) had further convinced him of the need for African regeneration (36). Downplaying the influence of Bowen and other white evangelicals, Sterling Stuckey argues that Delany “broke with the view of African barbarism in modern history by arguing for the existence of luminous aspects of Africanity from which Americans were already benefiting” (Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 229).

13. Frederick Douglass, “A Nation in the Midst of a Nation: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 11 May 1853” (1853), in Papers, 2:437; Douglass, “African Civilization Society,” Douglass' Monthly, February 1859, p. 19. One of the principal backers of the African Civilization Society was Benjamin Coates, a Philadelphia white who had supported Liberian colonization and had argued in his pamphlet, Cotton Cultivation in Africa (1858), that black emigrants to Africa should help the natives to grow cotton in order to undermine the South's economic power and rationale for slavery. Delany would argue for a similar program in his Official Report. My discussion of Delany's African project draws on the following texts: Bell, Search for a Place; Howard Holman Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830‐1861 (1953; rpt., New York: Arno, 1969); Earl Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance”: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston: Beacon, 1972); Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The Beginnings of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1971), chap. 12; Nell Irvin Painter, “Martin R. Delany: Elitism and Black Nationalism,” in Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Leon Litwack and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 156‐62; Cyril E. Griffith, The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan‐African Thought (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975); and especially Miller, Black Nationality, chap. 6.

14. Miller, Black Nationality, p. 198. In his Official Report, Delany chides but then forgives Campbell for requesting funds from the American Colonization Society (43‐44).

    Indicative of Delany's conflicting commitments is the fact that aboard the blackchartered Mendi taking him to Africa were thirty‐three “emigrants sent out by the American Colonization Society” (200). Wilson Jeremiah Moses remarks: “The suspicions of Frederick Douglass and other antiemigrationists thus seemed to have been confirmed. If the African Civilization Society was not an adjunct of the American Colonization Society, its emissary to Africa was certainly a fellow traveler” (Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent [1989; rpt., Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992], p. 128). In Delany's defense, post‐independence Liberia of the 1850s was considerably different from Liberia of the 1830s and 1840s.

15. Martin R. Delany, “Liberia,” NS, 2 March 1849, p. 2. Similarly, in his 1855 introduction to William Nesbit's blistering attack on Liberia, Four Months in Liberia: Or African Colonization Exposed, Delany called Liberia “pernicious, because it was originated in the South, by slave‐holders, propagated by their aiders and abettors, North and South” (Four Months in Liberia: Or African Colonization Exposed [Pittsburgh: Shryock, 1855], p. 3). In Four Years in Liberia (1857), Samuel Williams, who also greeted Delany in Liberia, directly refuted Nesbit and Delany, whom he termed “a most inveterate hater of colonization” (Four Years in Liberia: A Sketch of the Life of the Rev. Samuel Williams, with Remarks on the Missions, Manners, and Customs of the Natives of Western Africa, Together with an Answer to Nesbit's Book [Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1857], p. 65). Facsimile reproductions of Nesbit and Williams may be found in Two Black Views of Liberia, ed. Edwin S. Redkey (New York: Arno, 1969).

16. E. W. B[lyden]., “Martin R. Delany in Liberia,” Liberian Herald, rpt. in Weekly Anglo‐African, 1 October 1859, pp. 1‐2.

17. Alexander Crummell, “The Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa,” in The Future of Africa: Being Addresses, Sermons, Etc., Delivered in the Republic of Liberia (New York: Scribner, 1862), pp. 216, 243, 255, 259, 245. On Delany's visit with Crummell, see Moses, Alexander Crummell, pp. 127‐33. Henry Highland Garnet evinced similar sentiments in his “Speech Delivered at Cooper's Institute, New York City, 1860,” proclaiming: “We believe that Africa is to be redeemed by Christian civilization and that the great work is to be chiefly achieved by the free and voluntary emigration of enterprising colored people” (Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” p. 183). On Crummell's sometimes patronizing views of Africa, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 1.

18. Delany, Official Report, pp. 108‐9, 115, 111, 118‐19. On his meeting with Crummell, see p. 51.

19. Miller, Black Nationality, p. 214; Delany, Condition, pp. 210, 214, 213, 214.

20. Delany, Official Report, p. 121; Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation‐State (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 43; Delany, Official Report, p. 77. For a critical view of the “masculinist ideology” (212) informing Delany's emigration movement, see Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African‐American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830‐1880) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 212‐16. On the hazards of African diasporic thinking, see also Kenneth W. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition: Theorizing the Diaspora,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 392‐406.

21. Frederick Douglass, “Capt. John Brown Not Insane,” Douglass' Monthly, November 1859, in Writings, 2:460; Harriet Beecher Stowe, New York Independent, 16 February 1860, p. 1. Douglass's widely reprinted letter of 31 October 1859, in which he refuted claims that he conspired with Brown, may be found in Blacks on John Brown, ed. Benjamin Quarles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 8‐10.

22. Richard Blackett, “In Search of International Support for African Colonization: Martin R. Delany's Visit to England, 1860,” Canadian Journal of History 10 (1975): 315. In a December 1860 open letter to the people of Glasgow, Delany stated that his colony “shall not only bring the staples of commerce to British markets, but regeneration to a people who form even now an important element in the social system” (Glasgow Examiner, 8 December 1860, cited in Blackett, “International Support for African Colonization,” p. 321). For a contemporaneous discussion of Delany's efforts to publicize his Africa project, see “Dr. Delany and Prof. Campbell in London,” Weekly Anglo‐African, 30 June 1860, p. 2. My account of Delany's British tour is indebted to Miller, Black Nationality, pp. 215‐28; and especially Blackett, “International Support for African Colonization.”

23. Manchester Weekly Advertiser, 21 July 1860, cited in Blackett, “International Support for African Colonization,” p. 317; Morning Post, 23 July 1860, cited in Blackett, “International Support for African Colonization,” p. 321. See also Ullman, Martin R. Delany, pp. 238‐46. Given the highly publicized nature of this event, the incident at the congress helped to make Delany, not Douglass, the center of attention of British abolitionists, at least for the remainder of 1860. As a sign of his fame, one month after this incident he was elected chairman of the annual Peace and Temperance Festival in Buckinghamshire, where he delivered a temperance lecture to a crowd estimated at three thousand (Blackett, “International Support for African Colonization,” p. 320).

24. Frederick Douglass, “Dallas and Delany,” Douglass' Monthly, September 1860, p. 322; Rollin, p. 122. Douglass had favorably noted Delany's writings in a column titled “The Anglo‐African Magazine,” Douglass' Monthly, February 1859, p. 20.

25. Cited in Miller, Black Nationality, p. 252. On William King, see also Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830‐1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), pp. 269‐75. In addition to working with King, Delany made peace with Garnet and the African Civilization Society; he was named its vice president in November 1861 (Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” pp. 93‐97).

26. Martin R. Delany to James Theodore Holly, letter of 15 January 1861, in Planet (Chatham, Canada West, 21 January 1861), rpt. in BAP, 2:437; “Letter from Dr. Delany,” Weekly Anglo‐African, 5 October 1861, p. 2; “Dr. Delany on Africa,” Weekly Anglo‐African, 25 January 1862, p. 2. Delany also wrote an open letter to M. H. Freeman of Avery College, printed in the Weekly Anglo‐African of 1 February 1862, in which he attacked Haitian emigration and affirmed his commitment to “the regeneration of the African race” (2). Indicative of his commitment, during early 1862 Delany went on a lecture tour to raise funds for his African project, at times speaking to groups while wearing traditional African dress. On these tours, see Weekly Anglo‐African, 1 March 1862, p. 2; and Miller, Black Nationality, pp. 260‐62.

27. Delany to Dr. James McCune Smith, Weekly Anglo‐African, 11 January 1862, p. 2; Frederick Douglass, “A Trip to Hayti,” Douglass' Monthly, May 1861, p. 449.

28. Weekly Anglo‐African, 12 October 1861, p. 2; Weekly Anglo‐African, 5 October 1861, p. 3. For a sampling of Thomas Hamilton's writings on the Civil War, see the following editorials in Weekly Anglo‐African: “What Shall Be Done with the Freedmen?,” 30 November 1861, p. 2; “The Emancipation Message,” 29 March 1862, p. 2; “Emancipation,” 6 April 1862, p. 2.

29. Miller inexplicably failed to reprint the novel's full title in his paperback edition. In his prefatory remarks on the initial publication of chapters from Blake in the January 1859 issue of Anglo‐African Magazine, Thomas Hamilton provided his readers with an overview of the novel he read in manuscript: “It not only shows the combined political and commercial interests that unite the North and South, but gives in the most familiar manner the formidable understanding among the slaves throughout the United States and Cuba. The scene is laid in Mississippi, the plot extending into Cuba; the Hero being an educated West India black, who deprived of his liberty by fraud when young, and brought to the United States, in maturer age, at the instance of his wife being sold from him, sought revenge, through the medium of a deep laid secret organization” (Anglo‐African Magazine, January 1859, p. 20). Hamilton's overview constitutes an excellent short plot summary of Delany's complex novel and, as is true of the novel's full title, points to its large reach.

    With more recent theorists of American literary study proposing Havana as “an alternative capital of the Americas” (José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], p. 15), Delany's novel should assume an increasingly central place in efforts to remap the boundaries of American literary study. In addition to Saldívar, see Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America, ed. Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, ed. Gustavo Perez Firmat (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); and Earl E. Fitz, Rediscovering the New World: Inter‐American Literature in a Comparative Context (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991). (None of these provocative texts discusses Delany.) See also Carolyn Porter, “What We Know That We Don't Know: Remapping American Literary Studies,” American Literary History 6 (1994): esp. 497‐520.

30. Peterson writes that “Delany's protagonist [Blake] is a fictional projection of the author, recast as a picaresque hero who contemplates the possibilities of black revolution” (“Doers of the Word,” pp. 169‐70). See also Kristin Herzog, Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century American Fiction (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), p. 146.

31. Delany, Blake, p. 256. Future parenthetical references in the text are to Miller's 1970 edition of the novel.

32. What Delany, through Placido, is responding to, of course, is the tendency of U.S. whites to regard the liberationist desires of blacks of mixed blood as having their sources in “white” blood; he is responding, in short, to St. Clare's (and implicitly Stowe's) belief in Uncle Tom's Cabin that “if ever the San Domingo hour comes, Anglo Saxon blood will lead on the day” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Elizabeth Ammons [New York: W. W. Norton, 1994] p. 234). Delany writes in Condition, “The equality of the African with the European race, establishes the equality of every person intermediate between the two races” (87).

33. Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 17. Pan‐African racial collectivity may prove to be difficult to achieve—witness the conflicts between Delany, Douglass, and Garnet—and, Moses warns, such assumptions may help to promote “an authoritarian collectivism, a belief that all black people could and should act unanimously under the leadership of one powerful man or group of men” (11). In the second half of the novel, with only partial success, Delany attempts to negotiate his way past such gender assumptions. For a provocative discussion quite critical of Delany's gender politics in the novel, see Robert Reid‐Pharr, “Violent Ambiguity: Martin Delany, Bourgeois Sadomasochism, and the Production of a Black National Masculinity,” in Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 73‐94.

34. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Caste and Christ,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (1853; rpt., Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969), p. 5. Delany uses the poem's final stanza as an epigraph to part 2 of the novel: “Hear the word!—who fight for freedom! / Shout it in the battle's van! / Hope! for bleeding human nature! / Christ the God, is Christ the man!” (6). Paul Gilroy incorrectly states that Blake “took its epigraph from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], p. 27).

35. Martin R. Delany, “Domestic Economy,” NS, 13 April 1849, p. 2. Similarly, in Condition he instructs that an overreliance on prayer “is a mistake, and one that is doing the colored people especially, incalculable injury” (39).

36. Guided by the book's title and to avoid unnecessary confusion, I will use the name “Blake” throughout the discussion. Delany begins calling “Henry Holland” “Blake” near the opening of part 2.

37. Delany, Condition, pp. 37‐38.

38. In this sense the novel takes a very different narrative approach from Melville's “Benito Cereno,” which much more aggressively attempts to implicate readers as the victims of plot (see Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989], chap. 4). That said, Delany's letter to Garrison of 19 February 1859 (see n. 3 to this chap.) would suggest that he conceived of himself as writing for white readers as well.

39. M. R. Delany, The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry; Its Introduction into the United States, and Legitimacy among Colored Men: A Treatise Delivered before St. Cyprian Lodge, No. 13, June 24th, A.D. 1853—A.L. 5853 (1853; rpt., Xenia, Ohio, 1904), pp. 16, 39, 17, 24, 16, 18. Delany asserts that Masonic privileges are simply an impossibility for the enslaved: “The mind and desires of the recipient must be free; and at the time of his endowment with these privileges, his person must be unencumbered with all earthly trammels or fetters” (24). In “Doers of the Word,” Peterson focuses on the relationship of the novel's Masonry to capitalism (170‐71), thus neglecting its Pan‐African dimension. On Masonry in the novel, see also Ernest, Nineteenth‐Century African‐American Literature, pp. 128‐29.

    Delany implicitly suggests the Masonic character of Blake later in part 1 by describing him as a kind of astronomer (Blake, p. 124). As Martin Bernal has noted, nineteenth‐century Africanists regularly argued that astronomy was invented by the Egyptians; astronomical and astrological figures were thus central to antebellum black Freemasonry (Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987], p. 226). Delany published two essays on astronomy in the Anglo‐African Magazine at the time of the novel's initial serialization: “Comets,” Anglo‐African Magazine, February 1859, pp. 59‐60; and “The Attraction of Planets,” Anglo‐African Magazine, January 1859, pp. 17‐20.

40. On the importance of Moses to slave religion, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro‐American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Albert J. Raboteau, “African‐Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” in African‐American Christianity: Essays in History, ed. Paul E. Johnson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 1‐17; and Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formulations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. chap. 2.

41. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, p. 193. Blake's travels can seem a parody version of Frederick Law Olmsted's A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States (1856; rpt., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968).

42. Delany, Condition, p. 199. For a critical account of Delany's gender politics in relation to Maggie's role in the novel, see Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” pp. 170‐71.

43. The narrator remarks on the Brown Society: a “man with the prowess of Memnon or a woman with the purity of the ‘black doves’ of Ethiopia and charms of the ‘black virgin of Solomon,’ avails them nothing, if the blood of the oppressor, engendered by wrong, predominates not in their veins” (110). Blake encounters a similar fallen, or false, consciousness in Richmond, where “some of the light mixed bloods of Richmond hold against the blacks and pure‐blooded Negroes the strongest prejudice and hatred, all engendered by the teachings of their Negro‐fearing master fathers” (116). On a similar theme, see Delany, “Southern Customs—Madame Chevalier,” NS, 22 June 1849, p. 2.

44. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 119. In the context of recent historical work on African survivals in slave culture, critics want to find something more affirmative in Delany's portrayal of the conjurors in the Dismal Swamp. In To Wake the Nations, for example, Sundquist refers to Delany's “striking conjunction of revolution, conjure, and maroon life” (194) and asserts that the conjurors' “maroon life is … made a sacred preserve (a hush harbor, as it were) of the revolutionary ethos” (194). His remarks would be more appropriate to Stowe's representation of Dred's maroon community. In the cave of the “High Conjurors” (114), for example, Gamby Gholar's associate Maudy Ghamus, who invokes the deeds of Gabriel Prosser, Vesey, and Turner, reveals himself as anything but the heir of those great revolutionaries. When “a large sluggish, lazily‐moving serpent … so entirely tame and petted that it wagged its tail” (114) approaches Blake, Maudy theatrically shouts in warning: “Go back, my chile! 'e in terrible rage! 'e got seben loog toof, any on 'em kill yeh like flash!” (114). Though Blake is too educated to be frightened by Maudy's display, Delany's point comes across quite clearly: this is precisely how the conjurors intimidate the more ignorant slaves of the nearby community. As Blake later instructs his followers Andy and Charles: “Now you see, boys, … how much conjuration and such foolishness and stupidity is worth to the slaves in the South. All that it does, is to put money into the pockets of the pretended conjurer” (136).

45. Andy's amazed response to Blake's definition works with (rather than against) minstrel humor and reveals once again why the slaves are so in need of intelligent black leaders: “Wy, ole feller, you is way up in de hoobanahs! Wy, you is conjure sho'nuff” (134). This is not the first time that Delany uses minstrel humor to make his point about the slaves' degradation. In a scene that, were it to appear in a white‐authored novel, would be cited as evidence of the author's irredeemable racism, Daddy Joe finds that the crunchiness of the mush he had blessed—“Sumpen heah mighty crisp, ah tells yeh. … Sumpen heah mighty crisp in dis mush an' milk!—Mighty crisp!” (50)—comes from the “large black house roaches” (51) that had made their way into his bowl. At the revelation of this fact, there is “an outburst of tittering and snickering among the young people” (51). In his excellent study of minstrelsy, Eric C. Lott ignores this scene when arguing that Delany made “guerrilla appropriations” of minstrel stereotypes, such as those disseminated in Stephen Foster plantation songs, in order to write “black agency back into history” (Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 236). Lott's remarks are more persuasive for part 2 of the novel.

46. See Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life. By Henry Highland Garnet. And Also Garnet's “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848), p. 94. Ironically, in one of the few moments in the novel that privileges leadership other than Blake's, Delany paraphrases the words of the man with whom he was competing for funds to finance his African expedition.

47. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, 2 vols. (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), 2:243; Martin R. Delany, “Annexation of Cuba,” NS, 27 April 1849, p. 2; Frederick Douglass, “Cuba and the United States,” FDP, 4 September 1851, p. 2. The pseudonymous Demoticus Philalethes remarked in his popular 1856 “travelogue” that Cuba is “inevitably bound to become one of the States of our Confederacy” (Yankee Travels through the Island of Cuba; or, The Men and Government, the Laws and Customs of Cuba, as Seen by American Eyes [New York: D. Appleton, 1856], p. ii).

48. The execution of López outraged many Americans. Douglass cynically remarked on U.S. whites' support for López: “The true explanation of the present tone of the press, in regard to this occurrence is, that the ruling power of this nation which is slavery, wants a pretext for the Conquest of Cuba” (“Cuba and the United States,” p. 2). Adding to desires to take control of Cuba from Spain was the Spanish seizure in Havana Bay of the American steamer Black Warrior in February 1854. (The steamer was released shortly thereafter.)

49. “The Ostend Report,” in The Works of James Buchanan: Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, ed. John Bassett Moore (1908‐11; rpt., New York: Antiquarian, 1960), 9:261, 262, 265, 266. The Louisiana legislature's 1854 declaration on “Africanization” is cited in Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 122‐23. In his inaugural address of 1852, Pierce publicly announced his desire to purchase Cuba, asserting that he would “not be controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion” (Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, p. 109). As a writer for New York's Democratic Review put it in 1852, “This continent is for white people, and not only the continent but the island adjacent, and the negro must be kept in slavery in Cuba and Hayti under white republican masters” (cited in Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States [New York: International Publishers, 1963], 2:83). When Spain appointed the antislavery Marquis Juan de la Pezuela captain‐general of Cuba in 1853, concerns arose among many U.S. whites about his liberalizing policies, such as the legalization of marriages between blacks and nonblacks.

    My discussion of U.S.‐Cuba relations and the Cuban political scene of the 1840s and 1850s is indebted to C. Stanley Urban, “The Africanization of Cuba Scare,” Hispanic American Historical Review 37 (1957): 29‐45; Robert May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854‐1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Foner, History of Cuba; Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 1848‐1855 (1948; rpt., New York: Octagon, 1977); Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny; and David M. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

50. Delany, “Political Aspect,” p. 98; William Walker, The War in Nicaragua (Mobile: S. H. Goetzel, 1860), pp. 118, 265; Frederick Douglass, “Aggressions of the Slave Power: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 22 May 1856,” in Papers, 3:116‐17; Douglass, “Acquisition of Cuba,” Douglass' Monthly, March 1859, p. 37. For Walker's discussion of the role played by Cuban Creoles in his invasion, see War in Nicaragua, esp. pp. 249‐50, where he describes the celebration of a mass for the failed Cuban filibusterer Narciso López. Also useful is William O. Scroggs, “William Walker's Designs on Cuba,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 1 (1914): 198‐211; and Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, pt. 3.

51. May, Caribbean Empire, p. 175. In his annual message of 6 December 1858, Buchanan asked Congress for money with which to make yet another offer to Spain to purchase Cuba. When the South formed its Confederacy, Jefferson Davis declared an intention to acquire Cuba; Lincoln's rejection of the Crittendon Compromise helped to put a (temporary) halt to annexation efforts.

52. William Walker, War in Nicaragua, p. 134.

53. As Delany notes several times in his writings on Cuba, one of the few positive aspects of slavery in Cuba is that slaves have the legal right to self‐purchase; see Martin R. Delany, “The Redemption of Cuba,” NS, 20 July 1849, p. 2; and Delany, “Political Destiny,” p. 350.

54. In making his surrogate a former slave, Delany is arguably (and probably unintentionally) conceding a point to Douglass: that the experience of slavery does help make Blake a better and more representative leader of America's blacks.

55. Henry Highland Garnet, “The Past and the Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race” (1848), in Ofari, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance,” p. 171; Delany, Condition, p. 203. Consistent with his racialist view of Placido's limits as a mulatto, Delany goes on to celebrate the more obscure, “equally noble black, Charles Blair” (203), who was also executed by Cuban authorities. In an 1849 reflection on Placido, however, Delany was unconcerned about making such racial distinctions, asserting simply that “blood of the murdered Placido and his brave compatriots still cries aloud for justice, and vengeance must sooner or later overtake their guilty oppressors” (“Redemption of Cuba,” p. 3). Placido was celebrated by African Americans despite the fact that he was a mulatto, that his poetry was embraced by many of Cuba's white aristocrats, and that, as Vera Kutzinski argues, he “did not care to identify himself as a ‘Negro writer’” (Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993], p. 84). See also Robert L. Paquette's excellent Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Frederick S. Stimson, Cuba's Romantic Poet: The Story of Plácido (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964). The free black William Allen hailed placido's insurrectionism: “Placido's plan in detail evinced no lack of ability to originate and execute, nor of the sagacity which should mark a revolutionary leader” (“Placido,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Griffiths, pp. 260, 262). This is the same volume of Autographs that included Stowe's “Caste and Christ.”

56. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. William L. Andrews (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 179; Delany, “Annexation of Cuba,” p. 2. Sundquist suggests that Delany's portrayal of Placido conveys his “belief in the ideological function of literature” (To Wake the Nations, p. 208). But by quoting from one of his own poems instead of one of Placido's, Delany may be pointing to the limits of Placido's poetics and leadership. In an exchange that reflects on Placido's anachronistic status in a book set in the 1850s, Blake declares, “You, Placido, are the man for the times!” And Placido responds, given that he is no longer of “the times,” “Don't flatter, Henry; I'm not” (196). As Sundquist notes (203), for Blake's and Placido's poetry, Delany also drew on his friend James M. Whitfield's America and Other Poems (Buffalo: James S. Leavitt, 1853).

57. Precisely what Sundquist terms “the interlocked histories” of Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean are what Delany represents in this family and foregrounds in the plotting and racial politics of the novel's second part (To Wake the Nations, p. 199). On the syncretic slave cultures of the Caribbean, see Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

58. Unlike in “Benito Cereno,” where Melville links his (white) readers with Delano so as to make them the victims of Babo's and Melville's plotting, Delany links his (black) readers to plot and offers the pleasures (available as well to sympathetic rereaders of “Benito Cereno”) of observing white racists duped by the more knowing slaves. When the white captains find a fragment of a note from Placido to Blake that reads, “Faithfully yours to the end of the war” (202), one of the captains assumes the note is from Blake's wife; others are simply confused. The most knowledgeable of the captains, the Cuban Garcia, suspects that a plot may be in the works, but when the U.S. captain Royer begins to fear for their lives, Garcia counsels him against “overzealousness” (208). On the black' parodies of the music of the masters, see Lott, Love and Theft, p. 236.

59. In his 1861 Pilgrimage, Robert Campbell, who accompanied Delany on his Niger expedition, reported that in 1860 at Freetown, Sierra Leone, he and Delany “saw a large slaver, brought in a few days before by H.M.S.S. ‘Triton.’ Her officers and crew, consisting of over thirty persons, were there set at liberty, to be disposed of by the Spanish consul as distressed seamen. … These villains, of course, return to Havana or the United States, procure a new ship, and again pursue the wicked purpose which their previous experience enables them to accomplish with all the more impunity” (A Pilgrimage to My Motherland: An Account of a Journey among the Egbas and Yorubas of Central Africa in 1859‐60 [1861], rpt., with Delany's Official Report, in Search for a Place, ed. Bell, pp. 240‐41). In Blake, the narrator similarly observes that slavers “frequently prepare the vessels to carry 2000 [slaves], which was the case with a slaver taken by the British cruiser, brig ‘Triton,’ which the writer saw at Sierra Leone, in April 1860” (213 n). In Official Report Delany attacks Spain and other Catholic slave powers for “persisting in holding Cuba for the wealth accruing from African Slaves stolen from their native land” (Official Report, pp. 103‐4). In Blake Delany has the slave factor Draco urge the U.S. and Cuban captains to develop an “American agency in Cuba … to make the trade a most lucrative one” (214).

60. James Holly, A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self‐Government, and Civilized Progress, as Demonstrated by Historical Events of the Haytian Revolution; and the Subsequent Acts of That People since Their National Independence (1857), rpt. in Black Separatism and the Caribbean, 1860, ed. Howard H. Bell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 30, 59; Holly, “Thoughts on Hayti,” Anglo‐African Magazine 1 (1859): 365.

61. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 25.

62. For an excellent reading of the festival occasions in the concluding chapters of Blake, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 209‐20. Until the end of the novel, when Delany presents revolutionary black masses at the King's Day festival, he mostly ignores indigenous sources of resistance among Afro‐Cuban slaves. For a more sympathetic account, see José L. Franco, “Maroons and Slave Rebellions in the Spanish Territories,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 41‐48. On the larger revolutionary context, see Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro‐American Slave Revolts in the Making of the New World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

63. Delany, “Political Destiny,” p. 335. Delany asserts a politicized conception of blackness in a subsequent marriage scene calculated to offer a Pan‐African image of the solidarity among free and enslaved, “pure” and mixed, blacks: the black militants Gofer Gondolier and Abyssa Soudan choose to marry at the same time as the mulatto Creoles Madame Cordora and General Juan Montego (276).

64. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, p. 29. On the subversive uses of black festivals, see Geneviéve Fabre, “Festive Moments in Antebellum African American Culture,” in The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 52‐63. Also useful is Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987); and William Luis, Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), esp. pp. 1‐119.

65. While some of the Creoles suspected of participating in La Escalera were sympathetic to the antislavery movement, others strongly supported slavery. Similarly, the “foreigners” linked to La Escalera were widely divided in their politics. The British were antislavery, while retaining an imperial ambition to gain additional colonies in the region, and of course the U.S. foreigners included pro‐slavery and antislavery annexationists. In short, it would be imprecise simply to describe the political situation in terms of blacks versus whites. As Ann‐Marie Karlsson neatly puts it, “Drawing on La Escalera for his representation of the Cuban conspiracy, Delany complicates his plot by revising the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized to suggest a break‐up in the binary sense of political antagonism” (“Literary Plots, Historical Conspiracies” [paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, Nashville, Tenn., October 1994], p. 7). On tensions between the Creoles and Peninsular Spaniards, free and enslaved blacks, whites and blacks, see esp. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, pp. 92‐107.

66. In an attempt to quell annexationist desires, Richard Henry Dana Jr. belittled the possibility of “Africanization,” remarking in his widely read 1859 Cuban travel narrative, which was critical of slavery in Cuba and the United States, that “a successful insurrection of slaves in Cuba is impossible” (To Cuba and Back, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966], pp. 127‐28). In her popular 1860 Cuban travel narrative, Julia Ward Howe, on the other hand, prophesied that the “enslaved race …, gradually conquering the finer arts of its master, will rise up to meet the hand of deliverance” (A Trip to Cuba [Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860], p. 234.

67. Delany probably made up or embellished this journalistic account. In one of the best‐known descriptions of the King's Day festivities, John G. F. Wurdemann confessed to how unnerving he found a ceremony which gave “almost unlimited liberty to the negroes” and which seems “like the summons to a general insurrection” (Notes on Cuba [1844; rpt., New York: Arno, 1971], pp. 83, 84; Wurdemann's book was first published in Boston). Paquette writes that King's Day “provided much more than entertainment. Amid the celebration, people of color traded information, communicated ancestral beliefs, and offered emotional support to one another” (Sugar Is Made with Blood, p. 109).

68. Delany, “Redemption of Cuba,” p. 3; Delany, “Annexation of Cuba,” p. 2; Douglass, “A Nation in the Midst of a Nation,” FDP, 27 March 1853, p. 1. Germain J. Bienvenu argues that Blake's final warnings on “woe” to whites “are directed at only a specific group of whites (those who have disgraced Ambrosina) and that these portentous words are uttered by the crazy carver Gofer Gondolier” (“The People of Delany's Blake,” CLA Journal 36 [1993]: 408). In fact, Gondolier is presented as admirably militant, shrewd in his antiauthoritarian duplicity, and fully worthy of marrying the African revolutionary Abyssa. Moreover, his final words speak as well to his anger at a recent attack on Placido and to his overall hatred of the white slave power.

69. Sundquist remarks, for example, that the “surprising eclipse of the novel's revolutionary import augmented its threat” (To Wake the Nations, p. 220); Karlsson takes that argument one step further by speculating that the ending is “inconclusive by design rather than by accident” (“Literary Plots,” p. 8).

70. Douglass, “A Nation in the Midst of a Nation,” in Papers, 2:437; Frederick Douglass, “The Late Election,” Douglass' Monthly, December 1860, p. 370; Douglass, “Emigration to Hayti,” Douglass' Monthly, January 1861, p. 386; Douglass, “Trip to Hayti,” pp. 449, 450; Douglass, “Notes on the War,” Douglass' Monthly, July 1861, p. 481.

71. Douglass wrote in August 1861, “By the simple process of calling upon the blacks of the South to rally under the Star Spangled Banner, and to work and fight for freedom under it—precisely as they are now working and fighting for slavery under the hateful flag of rebellion—we could in a few months emancipate the great body of the slaves, and thus break the back bone of the rebellion” (“The War against Slavery,” Douglass' Monthly, August 1861, p. 498).

72. Frederick Douglass, “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?,” Douglass' Monthly, January 1862, p. 579; Douglass, “The President and His Speeches,” Douglass' Monthly, September 1862, p. 707 (and see also Douglass's related article, “The Spirit of Colonization,” pp. 705‐6).

73. On the House of Representatives' Report of the Select Committee on Emancipation and Colonization (Washington, D.C., 1862), see Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (1953; rpt., New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), pp. 145‐47; and Ullman, Martin R. Delany, pp. 269‐77. In an anticipation of Lincoln's plan, Frank Blair, congressman from Missouri, proposed in the late 1850s that blacks be sent to what he referred to as “the vacant regions of Central and South America.” Both Delany's friend James Whitfield and the prominent Haitian emigrationist James Holly supported the plan, and as Delany stated in a letter to Blair of 24 February 1858, he was “strongly requested by Messrs. Holly and Whitfield, of New Haven and Buffalo, to communicate with you on the subject.” He sent him a copy of “Political Destiny.” See Frank P. Blair, The Destiny of the Races of this Continent: An Address Delivered before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 26th of January, 1859 (Washington, D.C.: Buell and Blanchard, 1859), pp. 23, 34. (Delany's letter to Blair is appended to Blair's text.)

74. Frederick Douglass, review of The Future of Africa, by Alexander Crummell, in Douglass' Monthly, July 1862, p. 674.

75. Frederick Douglass, “Dr. M. R. Delany,” Douglass' Monthly, August 1862, p. 595.

76. Delany to Douglass, letter of 7 August 1862, in Douglass' Monthly, September 1862, p. 719 (Delany included with his letter a column clipped from the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser on Lincoln's willingness to meet with black representatives from Haiti); Delany to Edwin Stanton, letter of 15 December 1863, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861‐1867. Ser. 2, The Black Military Experience, ed. Ira Berlin et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 102. See also Delany's letter of 7 December 1863 to Mary Ann Shadd Cary on his recruitment efforts in Chicago, in BAP, 2:520‐22. In Martin R. Delany, Ullman mistakenly writes that Delany committed himself to the recruitment effort in 1862, after Stanton became secretary of war (see p. 283). In fact, Stanton assumed the post in January 1863. Following Ullman, Painter also incorrectly gives as 1862 the year Delany began recruiting for the black regiments of Massachusetts (“Martin R. Delany,” p. 162).

    According to the roster list supplied in Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty‐Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863‐1865 (1894; rpt., New York: Arno, 1969), Lewis Douglass, who enlisted 25 March 1865, was a noncommissioned staff officer, sergeant major; Toussaint L'O. Delaney [sic], who enlisted 27 March 1863, served in Company D; and Charles R. Douglass, who enlisted 18 April 1863, served in Company F (see pp. 339, 355, 364).

77. Rollin, pp. 96, 128‐29, 134. See also the letter of 2 June 1862 from William H. Johnson of Albany, New York, printed in the 19 June 1862 Pine and Palm, which reported: “Delany has been lecturing here with good effect. His subject has been Africa. He has very ably set forth the advantages to be derived by us, as a people, in emigrating” (rpt. in A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African‐American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861‐1865, ed. Edwin S. Redkey [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], p. 21). As reported in the Liberator, Delany was lecturing on the “Moral and Social Aspects of Africa” and the “Commercial Advantages of Africa” well into 1863; see “Lecture by Dr. Delaney [sic] Liberator, 1 May 1863, p. 1.

78. Rollin, pp. 134, 15, 16, 17. On black officers in the Union army, see Berlin et al., Freedom, chap. 6. According to the editors of this volume, “Scarcely a hundred blacks served as commissioned officers, roughly two‐thirds serving as Louisiana Native Guard officers and another quarter as chaplains and surgeons” (310).

79. William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 230 (see also pp. 228‐35); Douglass to Abraham Lincoln, letter of 29 August 1864, in Writings, 3:406. (Douglass sent the letter to Lincoln ten days after their meeting.) When Douglass learned of the impending emancipation, he renewed his calls for blacks' military participation in the war. Soon after, he initiated what amounted to a two‐year quest to be named a commissioned officer in the army, arguing that such an appointment would demonstrate to whites and blacks throughout the nation that the Union was committed to antiracist policies. See Frederick Douglass, “Emancipation Proclaimed,” Douglass' Monthly, October 1862, pp. 721‐22; Douglass, “Do Not Forget Truth and Justice,” Douglass' Monthly, April 1863, p. 818. On Lincoln's hesitations in commissioning Douglass, see Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1948), chap. 12. For an excellent discussion of Douglass, Lincoln, and the Civil War, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 3‐7.

80. Rollin, pp. 139, 140, 157. According to Rollin, Delany conceived of the black troops as a “corps d'Afrique,” a division of blacks modeled on the “African warriors” who fought for the French in the Algerine war. As Nell Irvin Painter incisively remarks, Delany's proposed plan for a black insurrectionary war of emancipation “was the grand gesture Delany had wished for in The Condition of the Colored People, a realization of Henry Blake's insurrection, an action that would command the respect of the rest of the world” (“Martin R. Delany,” p. 163).

81. Rollin, pp. 166, 162, 166, 168‐69, 170. McFeely implicitly denies the existence of the meeting between Lincoln and Delany, as he states that Lincoln “had only two private conversations with Douglass—and none with other black leaders, except for the famous meeting with creole de couleur gentlemen from New Orleans just before the president's death” (Frederick Douglass, p. 235). For a representative statement on the pride African Americans took in Delany's commission, see the letter in the 1865 Weekly Anglo‐African from “Jack Halliards,” which rejoiced that in “the form of that spotless African and well tried veteran in the cause of right, Martin R. Delany, we have a regularly commissioned Major in the U.S. Army” (rpt. in Redkey, Grand Army of Black Men, pp. 278‐79). In his introduction to Blake, Miller notes that “portraits of Delany in full regalia were sold through The Weekly Anglo‐African for twenty‐five cents” (xvi).

    After Lincoln's assassination, Delany was among the first African Americans to propose a memorial. See Delany's open letter of 20 April 1865 to African Americans, rpt. in Redkey, Grand Army of Black Men, p. 222; and Rollin, p. 207.

82. Rollin, pp. 171, 18. Lincoln's remarks on Delany to Edwin M. Stanton, letter of 8 February 1865, may also be found in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler et al. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:272.

83. Rollin, pp. 300, 301. Douglass had remarked on Delany's racial pride, “He stands so straight that he leans back a little” (“Dr. M. R. Delany,” p. 595).

Abbreviations used in the notes