HORATIO W. FOSTER¹A mulatto barber in Lowell, Massachusetts, Horatio W. Foster (1816–?) was an active Garrisonian abolitionist in the 1840s. He served as the North Star's Lowell agent until 1851, when he moved to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. There, he supported Douglass’s efforts to establish a black industrial college. FDP, 28 April 1854; 1850 US. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Lowell, 328; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:386–87n. TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND MARTIN R. DELANY

Lowell, [Mass.] 18 February 1848.

FRIENDS DOUGLASS AND DELANYDelany, Martin Robison

Born to a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown, in western Virginia, Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) was an editor, physician, and leading advocate of black emigration. In 1822 Delany's mother moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, where his father later joined them, and the young Delany attended a local school. In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh where he worked as a barber, attended a school run by a black Methodist minister, and studied medicine, upgrading his occupation from “cupper and leecher“ to physician. Between 1843 and 1847, Delany was editor of the Mystery, a black Pittsburgh newspaper. For the next two years he served as co-editor of Doug1ass’s North Star and lectured and traveled extensively to gain new subscriptions for that paper. In 1850-51 Delany attended Harvard Medical College but, owing to protests from white students, was denied admission to the final term needed to complete his medical degree. The following year he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (Philadelphia, 1852), in which he argued that emigration was the only remedy for the oppressed state of black Americans. When many black abolitionists, including Douglass, rejected Delany's position, he organized a series of National Emigration Conventions that met in 1854, 1856, and 1858. These assemblies created a permanent National Board of Commissioners, of which Delany was president and chief propagandist. In 1856 Delany moved to Chatham, Canada West, and three years later explored the Niger river valley in Africa looking for possible emigration sites. His novel Blake was serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African from November 1861 through May 1862. During the Civil War, Delany served the North first as a recruiter and examining surgeon and eventually as a major of the 104th U.S. Colored Troops. From 1865 to 1868 Delany was a Freedmen's Bureau officer in South Carolina and later was active in that state's politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor on the Independent Republican ticket in 1874. Ullman, Martin R. Delany, 52-103, 115-21, 140-71, 211-46; Dorothy Sterling, The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812—1885 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971); Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 74-75, 176-77; Miller, Search for a Black Nationality, 115-33, 171-83; Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston, 1970), ix; DAB, 5: 219-20. :—

I fully concur with friend David Ruggles, of Northampton, in what he says of the North Star, in his letter to you a short time since; and the last sentence I would reiterate—“Let him who would be a slave refuse to support your paper.”²On 1 January 1848 David Ruggles sent a letter to Douglass and Martin R. Delany, which was published in the North Star on 25 January 1848 and contained the quotation that Foster uses to conclude this letter. Ruggles’s letter appears in this volume. NS, 28 January 1848. There is much meaning in that sentence. Who that has lived in our country, and has felt the cruel shafts of prejudice, and been shut out from society, and been denied the privileges of education, and felt his manhood insulted every hour, because of his color, does not feel himself enslaved? The peculiar auspices under which your press has been established, and the high-souled and magnanimous purpose of our friends, both in this country and Europe, to establish it for the elevation of the colored men of the North, and the freedom of the slave at the South, supersedes all necessity for the establishment of any similar press, by our colored friends in this country; and all of them who have a spark of genius or of freedom to fire their souls, cannot help, I think, reciprocating such a favor. Of those whose rights have never been fully obtained, but may be by the assertion of them, through this press of trans-Atlantic beneficence, who will not subscribe for the North Star?

I have for a long time subscribed for the Liberator, and shall continue to do so, so long as it continues to sustain the high moral principle it always has sustained. But my conscience would condemn me, if I were not giving equal support to the North Star.

The prejudices of the American people can never be dissipated by docility or appeals to their sympathy, but by absolute merit alone of the colored people. It is business qualification, professional skill, enterprise, perseverance, and high moral principle, which will command the respect of our enemies. The enterprise of a colored man is less appreciated than that of a white man; but it is nevertheless true, that such enterprise wherever found, will force itself upon their recognition.

In haste, I must conclude, by saying of the North Star, “Let him who would be a slave refuse to sustain it.”

Yours for the progress of human Freedom,

H. W. FOSTERFoster, Horatio W.

A mulatto barber in Lowell, Massachusetts, Horatio W. Foster (1816–60) was an active Garrisonian abolitionist in the 1840s. Born in Boston, both of Foster’s parents were very active in civil rights causes, including education. In Lowell, he worked as a hairdresser and served as the North Star's agent until 1851, when he moved to Providence, Rhode Island. There, he supported Douglass’s efforts to establish a Black industrial college. FDP, 28 April 1854; 1850 U. S. Census, Massachusetts, Middlesex County, Lowell, 328; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3:386–87n; “Horatio W. Foster (1816–1860),” Lowell Stories: Black History, University of Massachusetts Lowell Library, libguides.uml.edu; Brown’s Providence Directory, 18556 (Providence, R.I.: H. H. Brown, 1855), 126. .

P.S. Enclosed are the names of some subscribers. I shall ere long send you
more.

PLSr: NS, 3 March 1848.