Rochester 12 — Jan. 1848

My Dear 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. —We must go to press again much to my regret without a single line from your pen, or the ability to tell our readers where you are or what your are doing. I wish you attached as much importance to writing as we do to hearing from you—Do my Dear fellow—do write let us know what you are doing and how you are getting on.

We hope to give our readers a good shot this week—I have said a few words to our brethren who are interested in getting up what they dignify with the title of a national press. I hope what I have said will meet your approval. Subscribers come in slowly—and I am doing all I can by lectures and letters to keep our heads above the water.

Ohio does not respond in any thing like the numbers which I had a right to expect. Do all you can for us in Pittsburgh. Our list does not yet reach more than seven hundred Subscribers, and our expences are all of fifty five dollars per week, send on subscribers and money.

Nell is doing his Duty nobly—and the men are at work manfully.

In haste

Yours Always

Frederick Douglass

Rochester 12 Jan /48

My Dear Friend Charles Joiner—Will you let me share mystery in the art of manifold letter printing.