Martin R. Delany's Civil War and Reconstruction: A Primary Source Reader

INTRODUCTION

I

To engage Martin Robison Delany (1812–1885) is to confront the complexities and paradoxes of nineteenth-century black American leadership. He embodied the utilitarianism and pragmatism that the late August Meier described as the defining attributes of nineteenth-century black leadership.¹ He refused to confine his life and struggles within the Manichaean good-versus-evil framework. There was no absolute good or absolute evil in Delany’s worldview. On the contrary, in crucial historical moments and contexts, Delany acknowledged only complex contending forces and interests, each with discernible merits and demerits. By characterizing Delany as someone who could not be classified with either the good guys or the bad guys, Delany aficionado Victor Ullman captured his ambiguity, or what many of Delany’s contemporaries perceived as his behavioral eccentricity.² In Delany’s judgment, no choice or condition was absolute or sacrosanct. His decisions were determined not so much by dogmatic adherence to some ideologically or racially defined considerations but by the dictates of what his conscience and reason determined to be in the interest of blacks. Delany made this poignant declaration early in his abolitionist career; "I care little for precedent, and therefore, discard the frivolous rules of formality, conforming always to principle, suggested by conscience, and guided by the light of reason."³ In other words, he gauged situations and events through the prism of his utilitarian and pragmatic lenses.

To his nineteenth-century contemporaries (black and white alike), Delany evoked and conjured conflicting images, perceptions, and emotions. To some, he was the quintessence of blackness.⁴ His friend and fellow abolitionist, with whom he collaborated as coeditor of the North Star, Frederick Douglass, underscored Delany’s racial essentialist character when he observed that while Douglass merely thanked God for making him a man, Delany always thanked God for making him a black man.⁵ Bishop Daniel Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church once described Delany as someone who had far greater love for his race than he had for humanity. He was, in Bishop Payne’s words, too intensely African to be popular and thereby multiplied enemies where he could have multiplied friends.⁶ The white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison portrayed Delany as so black as to make his identity with the African race perfect.⁷ One contemporary, Nelson Grant of Circleville, Virginia, identified Delany among the finest of men.⁸ Others, however, offered far less flattering portraits. Two of them reflected the ambivalence Delany evoked. To William H. Burleigh of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Delany was both a man who is as black as the ace of spade … who can make a good speech and also someone who lacks common sense.⁹ Responding to a request for reference on Delany’s character, William M. Shim of Pittsburgh wrote,

Mr. Delany … was well known as an intelligent, active, energetic, zealous and uncompromising abolitionist.… I am constrained to express the opinion that he is not a man to be relied on for any great Christian or missionary enterprise. He is one of several who was at different times proposed to fill vacancies in the Board of Trustees of the college, against whom Mr. Avery set his face firmly and decidedly.… Affirmatively he has the reputation of being visionary and officious and negatively … lacks some of the indisputable requisite of such character as you seem to be in search of.¹⁰

After listening with great apprehension to a public lecture Delany delivered to Freedmen on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, in the early phase of Reconstruction, Edward M. Stoeber, first lieutenant with the 104th United States Colored Troops, reported to the assistant adjutant general that he considered Delany a thorough hater of the white race.¹¹ And yet it was precisely during this period that some highly placed white conservative introduced Delany as the honest exemplar of the honest colored men of South Carolina.¹² Another described Delany as an educated man, a true patriot, and statesman who acquitted himself so completely alongside the first gentlemen of South Carolina.¹³

These mixed and conflicting perceptions mirrored the deeper and larger conflicts, ambivalences, or what Theodore Draper aptly termed dualities of Delany’s public life.¹⁴ At some times, especially during the mid-nineteenth-century phase of his career, Delany espoused militant nationalist and anti-American ideas and values. Later, however, during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, he publicly disavowed such militancy, opting for racial reconciliation, compromises, and accommodation. That Delany’s life and struggles embodied such dualities was not unique. In fact, this was a defining attribute of black leadership orientation to America in the nineteenth century.¹⁵ As August Meier explained, Overall, the typical late nineteenth-century black political leader in the South was a moderate. All were practical men who saw the necessity of compromise. They were also ambitious men who needed white support to advance themselves and the interests of their black constituents. Even the most militant spokesmen … found astute compromise essential to obtain the benefits desired either personally or for the race.¹⁶ Delany was therefore no exception.

Yet despite his complex, ambivalent, and at times conflicting dispositions and idiosyncrasies, the portrait of Delany that came to dominate twentieth-century black American memory was of the ideologue, the racial essentialist, uncompromising, and anti-European Black Nationalist. This was the Delany glamorized in twentieth-century Black Nationalist discourses. There was hardly an acknowledgment or awareness of his dualities and ambivalences. A major historiographical challenge for Delany scholarship, therefore, remains the dominance of a personality that reflected only a dimension of his life and struggles (the radical, militant, anti-establishment character; the quintessence of blackness). There is no acknowledgment of the other conservative, accommodating, and pro-establishment personality. Thus, Delany is memorialized as an implacably militant and uncompromising ideologue of the black struggles.

Emphasis on his radicalism could be attributed to the ideological and instrumentalist slant of the context of his historical rebirth. Twentieth-century reconstruction of Delany’s life coincided with the upsurge of instrumentalist historiography in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁷ Black history was then driven by what Peter Walker (in a different context) characterized as selective perception syndrome, in which only data or information that reinforced a certain ideological disposition were isolated and highlighted. This informed how Delany was conceptualized.¹⁸ Consciously or subconsciously, those who studied Martin Delany tended to steer toward, and highlight only, aspects of his life and thoughts that dovetailed with the radical and anti-establishment ethos of instrumentalist history. This was clearly, as Peter Walker rightly observed (again, in a different context) an attempt to resolve the problem of human unruliness … by avoiding it.¹⁹ Delany’s authorized biographer, Frank (Frances) Rollin set the tone by describing Delany as someone "who conformed to no conservatism for interest’s sake nor compromises for the sake of party or expediency … His sentiments partaking of the most uncompromising radicalism.²⁰ Rev. Theodore J. Holly of the Episcopal Church of Haiti portrayed Delany as manly and independent, someone who refused to play second fiddle to whites on issues relating to the black struggle … his devotion to his race was such that he would not compromise with whites, always preferring to ‘be himself’, alone in ‘solitary grandeur’ against republican radicalism, corruption, evincing foresight that enabled him anticipate the demise of reconstruction."²¹

Delany was therefore exalted as the ideological father of black radicalism, and his values and idiosyncrasies were magnified for adaptation. In other words, Delany became the exemplar of implacable militancy in the iconography of twentieth-century black resistance. However real, this militant persona was not Delany’s one and only personality trait. Despite the existence of Bill McAdoo’s critical and damning portrait of Delany’s nationalist ideas published in 1966 and subsequent revisionist publications in the last decade and half about Delany’s ambivalence and pragmatism, the ideological and instrumentalist portrait has remained dominant.²² There appears to be both a reluctance and failure on the part of most modern scholars to acknowledge that Delany’s life was not just one long chapter of indefatigable militancy, but a set of complex historical experiences and contexts that mirrored his ambivalent values and thoughts.

For more than two decades after the publication of Victor Ullman’s and Dorothy Sterling’s pioneering biographies of Delany and subsequent works by Floyd J. Miller and Cyril Griffith, black American historiography ignored the crises and contradictions of Delany’s life and thoughts.²³ Few are willing to engage the phenomenon of dualities that Theodore Draper much earlier identified as crucial to understanding Delany’s life and thoughts or even acknowledge the ambivalence Victor Ullman suggested when he described Delany as someone who could not be classified with either the good guys or the bad guys. Delany seemed frozen in an ideological twilight zone: a one-dimensional, radical, anti-establishment character. Although there have been studies that highlight the complexities of Delany’s life and thus raise questions about the instrumentalist genre, critics in both scholarly and popular discourses reject and delegitimize any interpretation or portraits of Delany other than the ideological and instrumentalist. Consequently, Delany has been, and remains, the victim of what the late Walter Rodney (in a different context) termed the grand singular narrative or discourse, a strictly ideological and binary discursive mode that is devoid of nuance.²⁴ He’d been compartmentalized and fitted with ideological straitjacket often by scholars who either have not taken time to study his life and writings, or have only sketchily read portions of his writings without an understanding of their historical contexts. Others simply relied on interpretations by so-called Delany scholars whose objective is to advance Delany as an ideological arsenal for twentieth-century Black Nationalist resistance. They invent and popularize a dehistoricized personality. The ambiguities and nuances of his life and thoughts are either deemphasized or jettisoned, reproducing, in the process, a distorted portrait. These Delany scholars and experts pontificate dogmatically about the instrumentalist and nationalist worldview while refusing to acknowledge anything about Delany that contradicted the ideological and nationalist worldviews they defended.

The Delany historiography is at a crossroads and has been for decades. Conflicting interpretations and genres compete for authentication. There are unresolved questions. Was Delany militant and uncompromising? Or, was he, like leading blacks of his times, pragmatic, utilitarian, accommodating, and at times conservative? Or, better still, could Delany have been a combination of some or all of the above attributes? In other words, did he manifest complex and conflicting dispositions (radical, conservative, ideologue, pragmatist, utilitarian, accommodating, and compromising)? How do we address these questions? One practical approach would be to afford Delany greater latitude for self-representation by bringing readers within earshot of his voice. In other words, the historical reconstruction of Delany must include giving readers unfiltered access to his writings and speeches. The objective here is to let Delany speak for himself, with little authorial intervention; to allow the reader full access to his ideas and writings, and a glimpse into the mind of this other Delany; and thus gain informed knowledge and understanding of the neglected and marginalized dualities and ambivalences of his life and thoughts. No medium has proven more effective in bringing subject and readers within communicative proximity, thus bridging decades, if not centuries, of historical time, space, and distance, than the documentary genre.

The availability of original papers and documents has tremendously enriched the historiographies of black leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell, and many others.²⁵ These documentary anthologies provide direct and unrestricted insights into these leaders’ minds and thought processes. A major challenge of the Delany historiography, however, has been assembling his scattered documents. Robert Levine has taken the lead in tacking this difficult task, and his published anthology is indeed welcome and long overdue.²⁶ That it took more than three decades after the publications of the first modern biographical studies of Delany in the early 1970s before his collection of documents was published underscores the difficulty associated with Delany’s papers. Acquiring and publishing Delany’s speeches and writings, scattered in libraries, archives, and private collections across the globe, is a daunting task. Another consideration was the devastating loss of hundreds of Delany papers in the fire that engulfed Wilberforce College in 1866. As a trustee, Delany maintained a personal library on the third floor, which was completely destroyed.²⁷

The potency of the instrumentalist genre and its shortcomings compel hearing directly from Delany. Levine’s anthology is a step in the right direction and a work of immense historiographical significance. For the first time, readers have access to Delany’s own words and writings. This is important, given the dominant ideological context within which Delany has been constructed since the 1960s. A major shortcoming of the Levine anthology, however, is the sketchy and inadequate representation of the crucial Civil War and Reconstruction phase of Delany’s life and struggles. While Levine’s anthology satisfies a critical need, the poor representation of the Civil War and Reconstruction leaves a gaping hole. The few documents Levine selected for this period neither illuminate the complexities of Delany’s ideas and activities nor reflect the depth of the crises that his advent into politics provoked in South Carolina. Also, the documents Levine presented are mostly brief excerpts, not full documents. This shortcoming, therefore, compromises understanding of both the complexities of Delany’s ideas and his location within the ideological spectrums of black leadership in American history.

Regardless of how others viewed his actions, Delany perceived himself first and foremost as a laborer in the cause of humanity. He underscored this universalistic character of his vision at crucial moments in both the antebellum and postbellum eras. First, in the vast majority of reports, letters, and commentaries he published in the North Star during his brief collaboration with Frederick Douglass (1847–49), Delany closed with Yours for God and Humanity.²⁸ Second, in his 1871 landmark letter to Douglass in which he rendered a lengthy and damning review of Radical Reconstruction and what he characterized as its destructive impacts on Black America, he closed with "Your friend and co-laborer in the cause of Humanity.²⁹ Delany’s repeated construction of his struggles within the broader universalistic as opposed to a racialist purview was not coincidental. He was deliberate in opting to define himself within a universalistic" frame at a time when, he felt, leading blacks were duped into embracing and endorsing racialized, culturally provincial, and divisive Weltanschauung. This is a portrait of Delany that some critics have yet to acknowledge. This universalism was most vividly demonstrated during his advent into politics in Reconstruction South Carolina.

Martin R. Delany’s Civil War and Reconstruction, therefore, bridges a critical gap in the Delany historiography. It is imperative that readers have not only direct engagement with Delany’s writings and speeches but also full and unrestricted access. Authorial interventions in the selection process in the form of either summarizing or downsizing of documents, as is the case with Levine’s book, have been significantly responsible for the twin faults of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of Delany. Readers’ understanding and constructions of Delany have thus far been compromised by such disruptive (for want of a better concept) selection process, which often compromised the opportunity to more directly and fully engage and understand Delany. To mitigate this, therefore, the documents in this study are presented in their entirety.

Another important aspect of this publication is the contextualization of Delany’s ideas and speeches. Wherever possible, the documents are presented along with whatever critical responses and reactions they evoked and provoked among his contemporaries. Thus, it is not just Delany’s writings and speeches that are presented here but also his contemporaries’ responses. Juxtaposing Delany’s writings and speeches with the reactions they provoked facilitates not only greater understanding of their full import and significance but also, and perhaps more importantly, appreciation of the magnitude of the power and influences Delany wielded. The documents underscore his political suaveness and the utilitarian, pragmatic, complex, and complicated nature of his political thought. Regardless of the ideological, primordial, or cosmopolitan values and idiosyncrasies one associates with Delany, there is a certain consistent and irrefutable attribute he embodied: Delany loved his race and was unashamedly proud of his African ancestry and heritage. Yet he loved America as well and was as deeply passionate about America as he was about Africa. In Martin Delany this double consciousness, though at times conflicted, was not necessarily irreconcilable. Being African and American reinforced each other. Both identities were fundamental to Delany’s sense of being, to his existential fulfillment.

A primary objective of this documentary study is to help bring clarity to what I consider the existential problematic of the Delany historiography: Who was the real Martin Delany? Was the real Delany militant, anti-establishment, uncompromising, and perhaps even anti-white and anti-America? Or could the real Delany be the conservative, utilitarian, and pragmatist who reached across the racial divide and explored diverse political and social reform strategies? Will the real Martin Delany please rise? In essence, the central and stillunresolved challenge of the Delany historiography remains the inability to agree on the central defining attributes of the man. This is the challenge at the core of this collection of Martin Delany’s Civil War and Reconstruction papers. To gain clarity and understanding of Delany and possibly resolve the existential problematic of the historiography, it is necessary to engage Delany’s own writings and speeches directly. In other words, the reader needs to access Delany more directly through his speeches and writings, not through interpretations and filters provided by others. There are several intellectual benefits to reading Delany’s speeches and listening to and hearing his voice, not the least of which is the acquisition of informed understanding of the dynamics of, and appreciation for, the dualities or ambivalences and contradictions of his life and thought. Delany was clear and unambiguous about his self-definition, the ideas and values he cherished, and his goals and visions for blacks and for America. One need only read his Civil War and Reconstruction writings and speeches to appreciate his complexities.

This study is divided into six chapters representing the key phases of Delany’s Civil War and Reconstruction career. The documents in chapter 1 introduce readers to Delany’s services as a recruiting agent and the first combat black major in the Union Army during the Civil War. They embody his visions, hopes, and aspirations for blacks in postslavery America. They offer glimpses into his patriotic fervor and leadership abilities. In chapter 2, the documents relate to Delany’s next major assignment after the Civil War: as a Freedmen’s Bureau sub-assistant commissioner in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Delany described in detail his views and opinions on what could and should be done to ensure that freedmen had the resources and opportunities to fully explore the meaning of freedom and the benefits of doing so. The documents also highlight some of the critical problems and challenges freedmen confronted, as well as Delany’s strategic efforts and the solutions he proposed that enabled him to create a successful working relationship between freedmen and planters (former slaves and former slaveholders) in his bureau district, a feat that was not matched by bureau agents in other districts.

Documents in chapter 3 introduce readers to the intricacies of the first phase of Delany’s entry into the politics of Reconstruction South Carolina. They elucidate, among others, Delany’s political philosophy and visions, his conflicted and ambivalent views on black political rights, his controversial stand on the subject of social equality, his attempts to curtail black political aspirations, and his insistence that blacks attained some pre-qualification before aspiring for certain political positions. The documents also reveal the reactions and responses of contemporaries across the ideological spectrum (radicals and conservatives) to Delany’s controversial and often provocative views on Radical Reconstruction, his scathing assessment of black political participation and performances in Reconstruction, his critique of Republicanism and its challenges, his unease and disillusionment with the Radical Republican Party in South Carolina, his relentless and scathing rebuke of what he characterized as the Party’s corruptive and destructive influence on blacks. Finally, they reveal the reactions of the Republican Party and its black political allies to Delany’s persistent calls for politics of moderation and compromise. Overall, the documents in this chapter underscore not only the conflicts Delany’s ideas provoked with the ruling Radical Republicans but also the essential and underlying pragmatism of his thoughts. Delany explained the rationale for his advocacy of accommodation and compromise and persistent opposition to what he characterized as the destructive ideological and doctrinal rigidity of Radical Republicanism. The resultant political divergence and controversies became the grounds for Delany’s decision to quit the Republican Party and join the Democratic Party (party of ex-slaveholders and ex-Confederates) in 1876.

The documents in chapter 4 shed further light on the dynamics of Delany’s controversial views on social equality and racial reconciliation, his prescriptions and strategies for attaining justice and equity, the shortcomings and failures of Radical Republicanism, the pitfalls of the Black–Radical Republican Party alliance, and further reactions of ideological opponents to his ideas. The documents also expound on the circumstances leading to Delany’s brief alliance with South Carolina conservatives, independents, and ex-Confederates in an abortive attempt to wrench political power from the Radical Republicans and turn Reconstruction along a more reconciliatory and moderate course. Known as the Independent Republican Movement (IRM), this alliance between Delany and South Carolina conservatives and ex-Confederates exemplified the duality and ambivalence Theodore Draper and Victor Ullman both drew attention to, as well as the compromise August Meier identified as a defining attribute of nineteenth-century black leadership. Equally significant, the IRM also underscored the utilitarian and conflicted nature of Delany’s political thought.

In chapter 5, the documents elucidate the crises of Delany’s conservatism. Here, Delany provided detailed explanations for his persecution by, and ultimately alienation from, the Radical Republicans. He emphasized the political nature of the persecution and elaborated on the circumstances leading to it and to his trial and conviction for grand larceny. The documents also include the commentaries and reaction of contemporaries to Delany’s predicament. Overall, this chapter illuminates the challenges Delany confronted, especially the desperate and difficult political and socioeconomic retributions he experienced during the closing years of Reconstruction. The documents in this chapter also engage the reader more intimately with the dynamics of Delany’s political conservatism, as well as the political and socioeconomic ramifications. Delany offered readers explanations for the grand larceny charge and subsequent trial and conviction. He portrayed the entire episode as politically instigated in retaliation for his conservative ideas and persistent opposition to Radical Republicanism. What is particularly revealing in this chapter is Delany’s introduction of the outline of ten offenses he alleged Radical Republicans had charged him with, which served as justifications for the grand larceny prosecution. Undoubtedly, Delany wanted to publicize these offenses in order to expose the political and vindictive nature of the episode and thus generate public sympathy for his predicament.

The documents in chapter 6 address the underpinnings of Delany’s growing frustration with Radical Republican rule in South Carolina and his momentous decision to switch to the Democratic Party in the epochal election of 1876. In some of the documents, Delany explained the circumstances of his decision to switch Party allegiance and the political and economic costs and consequences. Furthermore, in his correspondence with officials of the American Colonization Society, Delany summarized the negative and vindictive reactions his political conservatism provoked, and the new direction he envisioned in the aftermath of the failure of his political aspirations: emigration and renewed quest for the Black/African nationality.

Overall, this documentary study embodies the complexities, trials, and tribulations of Delany’s postbellum career. The book takes readers through the major phases and transitions of that career: his time as black major, sub-assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, conservative Republican, and independent Republican, his trial and conviction; his transition to a new departurist Democrat, and finally back to his stance on emigration and Black Nationalism.

II

Martin Delany was a free black, the youngest of seven children born to Samuel and Pati Delany on May 6, 1812, in Charlestown, Virginia (now in West Virginia). Situated on the valley of the Shenandoah River, Charlestown had fewer than a thousand inhabitants when Delany was born. Delany inherited his free status from his mother, who was free. Under Virginian law, mothers passed their status on to their children. Like most free blacks, however, freedom did not confer any special rights or privileges. Consequently, Delany’s childhood experiences mirrored the ugly and dehumanizing realities of slavery and racism. From the start he encountered a hostile world and acquired firsthand knowledge of slavery through the experiences of his slave father, Samuel. His grandparents were also slaves. His maternal grandparents, Shango and his wife, Graci, had been captured in Africa sometime in the late eighteenth century and transported across the Atlantic. They were finally sold to a planter near Richmond, Virginia. In fact, the society into which Delany was born and raised mirrored the broader contradiction or paradox of American democracy. Jeffersonian Virginia nurtured contradictory and potentially explosive experiences. On the one hand, there was the leisurely, affluent, and elegant lifestyle of the aristocratic ruling class and slave owners. At the other extreme were the dull, poverty-stricken, and dehumanizing experiences of blacks. One authority described the Shenandoah in the early nineteenth century as an agreeable and hospital environment that fulfilled the hopes and aspirations of the early Germans, Scots-Irish, and English immigrants. For these settlers, many of whom, like the Scots-Irish, had escaped persecution elsewhere, the Shenandoah was indeed a promised land.³⁰ For blacks, however, slave and free alike, the Shenandoah was anything but idyllic.

The early settlers supposedly dispensed with slavery. This would change with the arrival of English migrants in the second half of the eighteenth century.³¹ There is still disagreement on the experiences of these early slaves. Soon, however, with the increase in slave population, slavery assumed its distinctive and peculiar character. Slaves were poorly fed and clothed, brutalized, and dehumanized. Such inhumane practices as burning, maiming, and whipping were common. Free blacks, on the other hand, had to contend with the emptiness and fragility of freedom. They were denied all the vestiges of American citizenship, including the right to vote and access to education. These free blacks held desperately and precariously to a fragile freedom that was very often revoked through reenslavement.³² Delany’s parents were soon compelled to flee Virginia for the relative safety of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. But Chambersburg was no haven, and the persistence of racism and discrimination only reinforced Delany’s growing unease and indignation. In July of 1831, at the age of nineteen, and determined to resist and overcome the debilitating weight of oppression and discrimination, Delany left his parents and headed for Pittsburgh.³³ This decision reflected both his growing maturity and his inner determination to become more actively involved in the emerging black abolitionist movement.

By the early nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was fast becoming the seedbed of black abolitionism. The liberal atmosphere and reputation of Pennsylvania had attracted black migrants from other parts of the country. Pittsburgh had in fact become a metropolis of the black struggle, where migrants who were escaping oppressive conditions elsewhere had congregated for years. When Delany arrived, therefore, there was already a nucleus of black abolitionism in formation. These blacks were drawn together by a determination to forge concerted efforts toward meaningful freedom and equality. They had created miniature structures and institutions for self-improvement and cooperative development. Delany also arrived at a momentous time, when blacks were agitated and invigorated by the abortive Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton, Virginia. Although it failed, the episode assumed mythic proportion among blacks. Delany began his education at the African Methodist Episcopal Church Cellar school organized by Daddy Ben Richards, a wealthy realtor and butcher, and Reverend Lewis Woodson, a fugitive from Virginia.³⁴ Although Delany met other notable and influential blacks, two individuals profoundly shaped his ideological outlook: Woodson and William Whipper. Whipper was a native Pennsylvanian from Little Britain in Lancaster County. Both men discussed and explained moral suasion ideas and values in black newspapers and soon became the leading philosophical advocates of the ideology of moral suasion that shaped black abolitionism for the first half of the nineteenth century.³⁵ Delany quickly immersed himself in the struggles and, according to his authorized biographer, registered his vow against the enemies and oppressors of his race.³⁶

Since Delany’s formative years and ideological mentoring and development coincided with the first phase of the Negro National Convention Movement that emerged in Pennsylvania in the early 1830s, his role in these early conventions was minimal. However, within a few years, he rose to become a leading advocate and crusader for moral suasion. Delany arrived Pittsburgh in 1831 and immediately embraced the bourgeoning antislavery and reform activities, especially the struggle for blacks to gain unrestricted access to education. His efforts resulted in the creation of the African Education Society of Pittsburgh. Delany also helped found the Theban Literary Society for