On one of the 19th century’s most impressive Renaissance Men—and
his influential conversation with the president.
One of my founding and ongoing goals for this blog has been to highlight
aspects of American history, including impressive and unique individuals, that
we should collectively remember a lot better than we do. And I’m not sure any
American fits that description better than Martin
Delany. Taken at random, even a few of his individual accomplishments would
stand out even if they were singular: one of the first three African Americans
admitted to Harvard Medical School (although he was later forced to leave due
to racist opposition from his fellow students), and one of the few doctors who
remained in Pittsburg to treat patients during both the 1833 and 1854 cholera
epidemics; a journalist and editor who published one
of the first African American controlled newspapers in America, The Mystery; a political activist
and one
of the founders of black nationalism, as well as an author whose serial novel
Blake; or, the Huts of
America (1859, 1862) represented one of the most complex and important literary
responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and
the first commissioned African American field officer during the Civil War.
It’s the latter accomplishment on which I want to focus here, and more
exactly both the long-term and proximate causes of Delany’s commission: his
multi-year effort to gain an audience with President Lincoln to argue not only
for African American troops (prior to the
creation of the USCT units) but also and more importantly for African
American officers to lead them; and his eventual February 1865 meeting with
Lincoln, which resulted both in his successful argument for that plan and also
his own commission as a Major, the first commissioned African American field officer
in the Union Army. The details of both the effort and the meeting, including
Delany’s own extended description of his conversation with Lincoln for his 1883 authorized
biography, are captured at this
excellent site, part of The Lincoln Institute project within The Lehrman Institute. Much has been made, and for understandable
reasons, of Spielberg’s choice to leave Frederick Douglass out of his
recent Lincoln—but I gotta say, I
especially wish he had included
Delany. The film spans January through April of 1865, so the dates would
even line up!
What makes Delany’s meeting with Lincoln even more complex and compelling is
that it represents one side of the double-edged mission of his life’s work. For
much of his adult life, including his
final public actions a few years before his 1885 death, Delany worked in
support of the establishment and strengthening of separate African
American nations in Africa, such as Liberia; he had, he often argued,
become comvinced that white America would never give equality to African Americans,
and that African colonization was thus the only practical option. Yet
throughout the many decades of his advocacy for those efforts, Delany also
worked tirelessly to improve the lives and communities of his fellow Americans—all
of them, from cholera victims to Civil War soldiers to black
farmers struggling in the postbellum South, and many many other groups and
causes besides. Colonization has become, in many historical accounts, a
caricature rather than a concept, just a more subtle form of racism; but while
it certainly served that purpose for some supporters, as Delany proves it also could
and often did exist alongside the most nuanced and impressive American and
African American minds and perspectives. Yet at the same time, I can’t imagine
a more American life than Delany’s—nor a more ideal American moment than his
meeting with President Lincoln.
Next conversation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these figures and this moment? Other Black
History Month connections you’d share?
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