Hanover, O., March 27th, 1848.

Dear Douglass:—Since I last wrote to you, I have held meetings in New Garden, Hanover, and in the neighboring country.

I should have mentioned in my last letter that I was refused the Friend's meeting-house in Columbiana, and, consequently, held my meeting in the private house of our friend Lot Holmes, whose doors were thrown open, and rather over a hundred persons, male and female, crowded in the two parlors, who faithfully gave ear to testimony against the crying sin of American slavery. How can these misnamed "Friends" reconcile themselves to their course in this respect? I cannot conceive that there is much Christianity, where there is no humanity. The slave groans and suffers, while their dry meeting-houses stand with closed doors, as stubborn monuments of their deaf indifference. In every other place, previous to my arrival here, I have had the doors of meeting-houses, churches, and school-houses readily thrown open to me.

In Palestine, my horse was kept at the tavern of a Mr. Robinson, who rendered me many other kind services, and who refused pay because I was laboring in the cause of downtrodden humanity. Mr. Robinson is a Democrat, and non-professing Abolitionist.—The course of this gentleman was fair, manly, and humane, and worthy of commendation.

In this place, (Hanover,) I was refused the Methodist and Disciples' Churches, after the promise of both, on the ground of infidelity. It was enough for them to know that I was a Moral Suasion Abolitionist to ensure opposition. But the people of Hanover, at least a great many of them, desired to hear the subject of slavery discussed, and were quite disappointed when the doors of these Christian (?) churches were closed against me.—Among these were many Presbyterians, who at the crisis of the matter, opened their house, by far the largest and finest in the place, and the slave, despite all the opposition of the conservatives, had two most respectable and attentive hearings of the most respectable men and women of the place, old and young. Mr. Sloan, a staunch friend of the slave, of the Liberty Party, was foremost in granting the Presbyterian Church; though I am credibly informed that several professed Liberty men, one in particular, were foremost in endeavoring to prevent a meeting.

I have no doubt but there are many—very many, who only require a fair and impartial investigation of the subject, in order to become firm friends to humanity. The incessant pouring down of the equinoxial rains, having rendered the roads impassable, has necessitated me to tarry by the way some four days.

Yesterday, a wagon load of us, male and female, some eight persons altogether, went some distance into the country, where we held a most effective Anti-Slavery meeting in a private farm-house, where were collected quite a crowd of intelligent people, of all sexes and ages, to sympathize with the suffering slave. Coming back, we were completely drenched in the rain, when some one observing the fact—"What is that," answered one of the females, "to the sufferings of the downtrodden bondsmen?" Sure enough, what was it compared with theirs?

I have, up to the present, been treated like a man, without exception, at every hotel at which I stopped since travelling in this State (Ohio.) At New Garden, the proprietor of the hotel, Mr. Ayer, while I stopped, kept my horse, and otherwise treated me with kind favors, and refused to take pay. The friends of the slave are many in this place, and like all other places where I have visited in this State, I myself staid among them. I shared, in this instance, the hospitality of our friend Pickens.

There is some hope of my leaving here today for Augusta, where I am to hold a meeting to-morrow evening. From there I proceed to Carrolton, Leesburg, Cadiz, New Athens, Georgetown, Lloydsville, Concord, Zanesville, with all important places and settlements, to Columbus, thence to Cincinnati, from whence I shall be able to give you another description of my course. In and about this neighborhood there are several colored families, all of the most respectable and praiseworthy kind. They are generally farmers. Of them I shall have occasion hereafter to say much more.

Yours, in behalf of our oppressed countrymen,

M. R. D.Delany, 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.