AMY POST TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND MARTIN R. DELANY

Rochester, [N.Y.] 22 Aug[ust 1848].

DEAR FRIENDS DOUGLASS & 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. —

Permit me, through the medium of your paper, to say to the Anti-Slavery friends everywhere, that we are at work in Rochester for the cause of the oppressed. We meet once a week to sew, knit, read, and talk for the cause,¹Organized in a number of towns and cities in western New York, ladies’ sewing circles helped broaden the base of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. The circles adopted the fundraising and charity methods used by churches. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle held a fundraising bazaar at the town’s Minerva Hall on 20 and 21 December 1848. The group advertised for donations and volunteers to staff tables, asking residents to “devote what they can spare, either of money or of the fruits of their labor,” to help raise money to fight slavery. NS, 10 November 1848; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 150, 172–73. and prepare for our Bazaar, which is to come off the 20th of December next.

The pleasure of meeting once a week with the free and cheerful spirits of such men and women as are engaged in this holy and unselfish cause, is sufficient recompense for the loss in our labors at home, without looking for a deeper and more enduring compensation, which always follows right action. Indeed, I can scarcely wait from one Thursday to another, without seeing the devoted few who are in the habit of meeting on that day at the Anti-Slavery Rooms, so strongly have the ties of friendship become cemented. Oh, the blessedness of Anti-slavery !—it not only makes friends at home, but the veriest friends of strangers. Even the broad Atlantic forms no barrier to this expansive work of reciprocal righteousness; for we see a noble band of trans-Atlantic women, warm friends of our beloved and devoted Frederick Douglass, not only sympathizing, but co-operating with us in carrying out our intended plan for supplying articles for the Rochester Bazaar;²Douglass’s supporters in England, including the sisters Julia and Eliza Griffiths, Mary Howitt, Eliza Nicholson, and Anna Richardson, coordinated efforts to solicit donations worth over £82 from a number of British women for the Rochester Bazaar of 1848. Miss Cash of Coventry, Miss Ellis of Bristol, and Miss Dixon of Sunderland sent boxes of donated goods, in addition to the one sent by the Griffiths sisters. Another box contained donations from the Hoyland, Moore, and Peacock families of Manchester. That box also contained donations from the Jennings family of County Cork and the McIntyre family of Belfast, Ireland. Two additional boxes of British donations from Carlisle arrived too late for the bazaar. NS, 12 January 1849. verily, their names have become dear to us. The friends, too, in our own villages of Henrietta, Darien, and Port Byron, are at work,³Some of those aiding the bazaar from the surrounding region included C. G. Hamblin of Port Bryon and Hannah MacIntyre of Darien. In the Henrietta area the Latting, Maltby, Robinson, Kirby, Hazelton, and Campbell families supplied donations or offered help for the bazaar, while Mr. Ellis read an antislavery poem. NS, 12 January 1849. and I trust, in many other places from whom we have not yet heard. Let each of us seek to aid in some way, and the gathering together of our substance and handiwork in December, will be highly beneficial to the cause. Sisters, remember the silent yet watchful throbbings of each bondman’s heart. They should touch responsively every soul, and lead us to re-dedicate ourselves to the work of their complete emancipation.

Yours faithfully,

A. P.

PLIr: NS, 1 September 1848.