Blake or The Huts of America Read online

  CONTENTS

  A Note on This Edition

  Introduction by Floyd J. Miller

  Notes to Introduction

  PART I

  Chapter 1 The Project

  Chapter 2 Colonel Franks at Home

  Chapter 3 The Fate of Maggie

  Chapter 4 Departure of Maggie

  Chapter 5 A Vacancy

  Chapter 6 Henry’s Return

  Chapter 7 Master and Slave

  Chapter 8 The Sale

  Chapter 9 The Runaway

  Chapter 10 Merry Making

  Chapter 11 A Shadow

  Chapter 12 The Discovery

  Chapter 13 Perplexity

  Chapter 14 Gad and Gossip

  Chapter 15 Interchange of Opinion

  Chapter 16 Solicitude and Amusement

  Chapter 17 Henry at Large

  Chapter 18 Fleeting Shadows

  Chapter 19 Come What Will

  Chapter 20 Advent Among the Indians

  Chapter 21 What Not

  Chapter 22 New Orleans

  Chapter 23 The Rebel Blacks

  Chapter 24 A Flying Cloud

  Chapter 25 Like Father, Like Son

  Chapter 26 Return to Mississippi

  Chapter 27 A Night of Anxiety

  Chapter 28 Studying Head Work

  Chapter 29 The Fugitives

  Chapter 30 The Pursuit

  Chapter 31 The Attack, Resistance, Arrest

  Chapter 32 The Escape

  Chapter 33 Happy Greeting

  Chapter 34 A Novel Adventure

  PART II

  Chapter 35 Cornelia Woodward

  Chapter 36 Henry at the Hacienda

  Chapter 37 A Glimmer of Hope

  Chapter 38 Impatience

  Chapter 39 The Discovery

  Chapter 40 The Confrontment

  Chapter 41 Obscurity

  Chapter 42 The Interview-Blake

  Chapter 43 Meeting and Greeting

  Chapter 44 Seeking Employment

  Chapter 45 Coastward Bound

  Chapter 46 Trans-Atlantic

  Chapter 47 Significant

  Chapter 48 Making the Coast

  Chapter 49 The Slave Factory

  Chapter 50 Before Leaving

  Chapter 51 Homeward Bound

  Chapter 52 The Middle Passage

  Chapter 53 Middle Passage–Chase Continued

  Chapter 54 Storm During Middle Passage

  Chapter 55 The Captives

  Chapter 56 The Seeleys

  Chapter 57 Anticipation

  Chapter 58 Gala Day

  Chapter 59 National Fete

  Chapter 60 Great Gathering at Madame Cordora’s

  Chapter 61 The Grand Council

  Chapter 62 Fearful Misgivings

  Chapter 63 The Captain General and Lady

  Chapter 64 The Confrontment

  Chapter 65 What of the Negroes?

  Chapter 66 Chit-Chat

  Chapter 67 False Alarm

  Chapter 68 Sunday Morning

  Chapter 69 Entertainment at Carolus Blacus

  Chapter 70 Momentous Step

  Chapter 71 Fearful Apprehensions

  Chapter 72 King’s Day

  Chapter 73 Increased Alarm

  Chapter 74 American Tryanny–Oppression of the Negroes

  Notes to Text

  A NOTE ON THIS EDITION

  This is the first publication of Blake; or the Huts of America in book form. Approximately eighty chapters comprise the complete novel, which appeared serially in The Weekly Anglo-African from November 26, 1861, until late May, 1862. Chapters 1-23 and 29-31 of this edition have long been known to specialists because of their publication in The Anglo-African Magazine between January and July, 1859. The 1859 volume of this magazine has recently been reprinted by Arno Press. Chapters 24-28 and 32-74 of this edition were found in The Weekly Anglo-African and are republished here for the first time. The complete novel contains perhaps six chapters that have not yet been uncovered; these undoubtedly appeared in the first four issues of The Weekly Anglo-African of May, 1862. Beacon Press would appreciate any information pertaining to their location.

  This edition follows the original except for minor changes which have been made for the sake of clarity: typographical errors and obvious misspellings have been corrected, and the punctuation has been modernized. In addition, the numbering of the chapters has been altered: chapters in Parts I and II are here numbered consecutively to eliminate unnecessary complexity and to avoid the confusion existing in Part I of the original, where two sections labeled “Chapter 28” appear. Finally, the editor’s notes appear at the end of this book; all notes in the text are by Martin R. Delany.

  F.J.M.

  Introduction

  BY FLOYD J. MILLER

  “I beg to call your attention to the Story of ‘Blake or the Huts of America’ now being published in the ‘Anglo-African Magazine’ ” Martin R. Delany wrote the noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison from a New York boardinghouse in February 1859. In the midst of a lengthy and frustrating attempt to raise money for a proposed African exploring venture (on which he would leave May 24, bound for Liberia), Delany added this plea in his letter to Garrison: “I am anxious to get a good publishing house to take it, as I know I could make a penny by it, and the chances for a Negro in this department are so small, that unless some disinterested competent persons would indirectly aid in such a step, I almost despair of any chance.”[1]

  Any efforts Garrison may have made clearly did not succeed, for Blake was never printed in book form. Twenty-six chapters were printed in The Anglo-African Magazine from January to July, 1859. Although the magazine continued to appear monthly until March, 1860, no further installments of Delany’s novel were printed. Whether Delany lost confidence in the magazine, or, as is more likely, he did not wish to see his work published while he was out of the country, is not known. Whatever the reasons, the entire novel was not printed until the fall of 1861 when The Weekly Anglo-African, edited by Robert Hamilton, whose brother had published the magazine, ran a complete version of Blake in consecutive weekly installments from November 26, 1861, until most probably May 24, 1862.[2] Beset by constant financial difficulties, Hamilton apparently looked upon Blake as a circulation-builder. As Delany’s nationalistic orientation was congenial to the newspaper’s attitudes and Hamilton had previously run William Wells Brown’s Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon (an updated and more militant version of Brown’s Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter which had originally been published in England in 1853), Hamilton was not afraid to experiment with that rare commodity–fiction by a black author.[3]

  If one views Clotel and Miralda as a single novel, then Delany’s Blake becomes the third novel written by an Afro-American. (Frank Webb’s The Garies and their Friends was published in England in 1857.[4]) Its fragmentary appearance in 1859, however, marked the first novelistic offering of a black writer to be published in the United States. Regardless of chronological primacy, however, Delany’s novel is clearly the most important black novel of this period and, for the social historian, one of the most significant and revealing novels ever written by an Afro-American. Avoiding the sentimentality of the “tragic mulatto” theme which intrigued both Brown and Webb, Delany focused sharply on the political and social milieu of the 1850s: slavery as an institution, Cuba as the prime interest of Southern expansionists, the “practicality” of militant slave revolution, and, most importantly, the psychological liberation possible through collective action.

  Despite its relevance, Blake was gener
ally ignored. There was apparently little, if any, commentary on Delany’s work. This was partly because the complete novel was printed in 1861 and 1862: the Civil War had begun; little attention was given to the question of annexing Cuba; and the possibility of large-scale slave rebellion was dwarfed by the more immediate issues arising out of the war. In the light of this overt indifference, it is impossible to gauge what impact Blake may have had upon Northern black communities; newspaper comment during this period was devoted to the war itself, the Haytian emigration movement, and attempts to push the national administration to faster action on emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers. Although a black actor, Melachi Dunmore, contemplated dramatizing Delany’s novel, this was never seriously undertaken–and Blake was quickly forgotten.[5]

  To a large extent, Blake is important because of its author’s prominence. Unlike Brown, who served as a notable antislavery lecturer and author during the decades prior to the war (and whose reputation rests largely upon his antebellum activities), Delany’s career spanned four decades of antebellum agitation, Civil War recruiting and soldiering, Freedmen’s Bureau activity and Reconstruction politics. Moreover, although an author of some ability, Delany clearly subordinated his writings to his own ideological orientation, and consequently his only fictional effort marks the artistic epitome of a social and political position–that is, the creative offering of an activist rather than the political expressions of an artist. And finally, it is this nationalistic bent throughout his career which gave Delany a prominence among blacks exceeded by few Afro-Americans of his generation.

  Born of a free mother and a slave father in Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia), on May 6, 1812, Delany claimed to be a descendant of West African native chieftains. [6] He received a scanty education in Charlestown before his mother took her family to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1822, where they were later joined by Delany’s father. In 1831, Delany, then 19, left Chambersburg and traveled over the mountains to Pittsburgh where he found work as a barber and continued his education-studying at a school run by the Rev. Lewis Woodson, a black Methodist minister who had recently moved to Pittsburgh from Ohio. Delany spent twenty-five years in Pittsburgh, dividing his work between moral reform, abolitionism, newspaper editing. From 1843 to 1847, he edited The Mystery, one of the very few black newspapers of the period, and for a year and a half, from late 1847 until the middle of 1849, Delany co-edited The North Star with Frederick Douglass. In this role Delany was generally on the road, delivering antislavery lectures, enlisting subscriptions and writing long and occasionally revealing letters to The North Star describing his work. His attitudes during this period were not unlike those of many other black abolitionists: an awareness of the stridency of Northern prejudice against free blacks, a stress on the necessity for black communities to develop their own sense of pride and community awareness (translated into a “self-help” philosophy which Delany, along with Douglass and many others, promulgated long before Booker T. Washington) and, finally, a sense of moral rectitude at once patronizing toward those of his race unable to achieve personal righteousness and also imitative of the general nineteenth-century concern with moral virtue and ethical grace.

  By 1852, no longer associated with Douglass and having flirted with the idea of a Northern American union of blacks (a progenitor of his later separatist ideas), Delany published one of the most significant and also neglected books by a free black prior to the Civil War–The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. [7] Here Delany enunciated his break with the antiemigration position dominant among abolitionists by advocating Central American emigration as well as the establishment of a Central and South American “nation” which would, by its economic and political potency, contribute to the downfall of American slavery. He did, however, maintain the anti-Liberian position held by most abolitionists. More important in an immediate sense, Delany attacked the prejudice and social and economic discrimination practiced by white abolitionists, and for this he was attacked or ignored by most major abolitionists–white and black–as an apostate. (His charges, obviously impolitic at the time, have recently been substantiated by historians.) Delany’s book, however, was more than a polemical tour de force which set him apart from his fellows: it was a careful and revealing sociological examination of elements within the free black communities of the North. For this reason, if for no other, it is significant.

  From 1852 through February of 1856, when he moved to Chatham, Canada West, Delany continued to practice medicine in Pittsburgh (as he had done since the 1840s when he upgraded his profession from “cupper and leecher” to physician) while espousing what had become an outspoken emigrationist position. He argued the cause of Central American emigration throughout 1853 and 1854 and in August, 1854, led a National Emigration Convention of some 100-odd delegates in a four-day meeting in Cleveland. His paper, “Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” was read at the convention; the essay combined a strong advocacy of Central American emigration (and nationhood) with a nod in the direction of Canadian land investment. [8] Distinguishing between emigration and colonization, Delany continued to attack the American Colonization Society and its Liberian offspring, culminating his anti-Liberian crusade by writing an introduction to William Nesbit’s Four Months in Liberia, an “expose” of conditions in the infant republic published in 1855 by a short-term emigrant from Pennsylvania.[9]

  The apogee of Delany’s nationalist and emigrationist interests came, however, with his African trip of 1859 and 1860–a trip which began, ironically, on Liberian soil. (The trip also enabled Delany to be out of the country during John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry; in May, 1858, he had participated in a Provisional Constitutional Convention at Chatham which discussed the possibility of an attack. [10]) From Liberia, Delany traveled first to Lagos and then Abbeokuta where he met his colleague, Robert Campbell, a young Jamaican who had taught at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and who, with Delany, comprised the “Niger Valley Exploring Party.” At Abbeokuta in late December, 1859, Delany and Campbell signed a treaty with a group of native chiefs. The terms of the treaty were later to be disputed (and, in fact, abrogated by the Alake of Abbeokuta in February, 1861); however, it is clear that Delany and Campbell were contemplating the “select emigration” of blacks from Canada and the United States and the establishment of a colony in the Abbeokuta area. Their plans beyond the establishment of their settlement were, of course, both vague and grandiose, often encapsulating the rhetoric of both the colonizationists and the English philanthropic imperialists. Essentially the Delany-Campbell plan of a nuclear settlement envisioned the eventual spread of Christianity and civilization (identical concepts in much of the African-development talk of the day) along with commerce, which was to serve as the catalyst necessary for Christian civilization to take root. Cotton was to be the prime factor behind the commercial development (or exploitation) of West Africa. Yet cotton was also to serve as an abolitionist weapon: the development of a ready supply of the staple in West Africa would undermine the American South’s economic superstructure by providing English manufacturers (and perhaps others, such as the abolitionist sympathizer Edward Atkinson of Boston) with an alternate source of raw cotton. For Delany especially, the cotton-Christianity-civilization triad represented the benign forces which would be released by an African or black nationalist state gestating in the Niger Valley area around Abbeokuta.[11]

  Delany’s dream of an African settlement (and of his own personal emigration) did not come to pass. In 1861, having returned to Canada after a seven-month fund-raising lecture tour in England (during which his presence at the International Statistical Congress brought embarrassment to the Buchanan administration [12]), Delany organized a proposed colony of Canadian blacks. Support was promised by the African Aid Society of England, and the Rev. William King, the leader of the Elgin community at Buxton, near Chatham, acted as a
n intermediary to expedite the settlement. Unfortunately for Delany, the planned settlement was lost in the increasingly complex web of British imperial designs upon West Africa–especially the rivalry between the British missionaries in Abbeokuta and the English traders centered at Lagos. In the end, the Alake of Abbeokuta, with the sanction of the Rev. Henry Townsend of the Church Missionary Society, denied the terms of the Delany-Campbell treaty; the African Aid Society retreated, and Delany, although still speaking of African emigration, turned his sights elsewhere.[13]

  Delany’s activities during the Civil War are for the most part lost in obscurity. He continued to lecture on Africa throughout 1862 and into 1863 but increasingly turned his attention to the Civil War and the role of blacks in securing their own freedom. By the middle of 1863, Delany was recruiting black soldiers for various state military units. In February, 1865, after the Lincoln administration had made minor forays in the direction of enrolling black officers (in the medical corps), Delany spoke, according to his own testimony, first with the President and then Secretary of War Stanton. On February 26, 1865, he was commissioned the first black Major in the United States Army.[14]

  Unlike Lincoln’s decision to employ black troops, Delany’s commission apparently was not a major policy innovation, but rather an outgrowth of previous developments pointing toward the increased role of Afro-Americans both in the war effort and in what Lincoln thought would soon be the “restoration” of the Union. For the black community, however, Delany’s commission was greeted with the applause and the Major, as he was now to be called, returned to the pantheon of black heroes. (Portraits of Delany in full regalia were sold through The Weekly Anglo-African for twenty-five cents.) After a visit to his family, now living in Xenia, Ohio, and several speeches to packed houses in New York, Delany joined General Rufus Saxton’s command post at Charleston, South Carolina, in April, 1865, as a general recruiter of black soldiers. His military role was minimal at this late date in the war, and it was as a mass educator and politicizer that Delany was to serve in the closing days of the war and the first days of the confusion which followed. In July he was transferred to the newly established Freedmen’s Bureau and assigned to Hilton Head on the Sea Islands as a subassistant commissioner, a position he held until August, 1868, when he was mustered out of the service.[15] As an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau, Delany strongly supported the freedmen’s attempts to retain land previously granted to them and also embodied his land proposals with exhortations to collective action independent of the white presence–both malevolent and salutory–hovering over the Sea Islands. (For this he was criticized by both Laura Towne, one of the more perceptive and humane of the Northern “schoolmarms,” and General James Scott Fullerton, an advance man for President Andrew Johnson’s attempts to destroy the Bureau and to eliminate more radical agents such as Delany.[16])