patronage being always extended to the talented and meritorious of the race—still its immediate support was never held out to him. Solely upon his own will, perseverance, and merits can be based the secret of his success wherein others have failed.
His mother was considered a most exemplary Christian, active and energetic, with quick perceptions and fine natural talents, inheriting all the finer traits of character of her Mandingo origin. The Mandingoes, from their love of traffic, are nicknamed the “Jews of Africa.” An incident which is related of her shows the force of character which she transmitted to her son. An attempt was made to enslave herself and children, five in all, in Virginia, where they resided. Being informed of it, she at once determined to test or avert it. Taking the two youngest, she set out on foot, with one lashed across her back, and the other in her arms; she walked, the distance from Charlestown to Winchester in time to meet the court, consulted her lawyer, entered suit, and when all difficulties were satisfactorily adjusted, she returned to her children triumphant. “Some Roman lingered there,” that neither the miasma of slavery, with which the atmosphere about was impregnated, nor the uncertain future of her children, could crush out; but a slow and steady fire burnt forever in her soul, and gleamed along the pathway of her youngest born to guide him to duty in the unequal strife of his race. She lived long enough to witness the overthrow of the oligarchy against which she had contended in Virginia. She died at Pittsburg, in the family of her son, Samuel Delany, in 1864, at the age of ninety-six.
This family attained great longevity, as is again shown in the father of Major Delany, who gave every indication of a hale old age, when he was carried off by the cholera which swept over Pittsburg at one time, when he had reached his eighty-fourth year. In life he was known as a man of great integrity of character, of acknowledged courage, and was remarkable for his great physical strength. He was well known in Martinsburg, where, for a stipulated sum, he obtained his freedom, thence went to Chambersburg, whither his family had preceded him. He bore a scar on his face, the result of a wound, which adds another testimony to the “barbarism of slavery.” It was inflicted by the sheriff of the county, who, with eight men, went to arrest him one morning, because he had nine times torn the clothes from off the person of one Violet, as he was endeavoring to inflict bodily punishment on him. Each time, as he dashed the man Violet from him, he assured him he had no wish to injure him.
The sheriff and his men, approaching, were warned by him to keep off. He then fortified himself behind a wagon in a lane, and, being armed with its swingle-tree, bade defiance to the authority attempting to surround him. The better to effect a retreat, if necessary, by climbing backwards he raised himself to the top of the fence, his face to his persecutors. At the moment the top was gained, he was brought to the ground, senseless and bleeding, by a skilfully-directed stone. He was then secured and taken to prison at Charlestown.
The sheriff was desirous of shooting him; but Violet, with a view to his market value rather than appreciation of his determined courage, objected most decidedly to this, adding that he was “too good a man to be killed.” The stone was thus substituted for the bullet. With this mark of brutality daily before the eyes of his children, and in its train all the humiliations and bestial associations to which their hapless race was subjected, it is no matter of wonderment that Martin Delany should watch every enactment concerning his race with exactness, and his bitterness against their oppressors and abettors would sometimes outrun his sense of the politic, or that all his efforts should, through life, converge to the same end to contribute his aid to root out every fibre of slavery and its concomitants.
On the 15th of March, 1843, he was married to Kate A., youngest daughter of Charles Richards, of Pittsburg, the grandfather and father of whom had been men of influence and wealth of their time. This daughter was one of the heirs to their estate, which had increased in value, as it embraced some of the best property in the city of Pittsburg, estimated at nearly two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This was finally lost to them in 1847, simply by a turn of law, in consequence of the unwillingness of attorneys to litigate so large a claim in favor of a colored against white families.
Mrs. Delany is a fine-looking, intelligent, and appreciative lady, possessed of fine womanly sympathies, and, always entering fully into his pursuits, has contributed no little aid to his success.
With a companion whose views are so thoroughly in unison with his own, his domestic relations are prosperous and happy. Equally as zealous for the interest of her race, and self-sacrificing as himself, she encouraged and urged him on in his most doubtful moments—for many they were while the political horizon was darkened by the thick clouds of slavery.
While they were never possessed of means, through her management many poor fugitives and indigent persons were succored by them. She has cheerfully borne poverty when it could have been otherwise, and would forego personal comforts rather than he should fall back from the position he had taken, for pecuniary benefits for herself and children.
From this marriage eleven children were born, seven of whom are living. In the selection of the names of these children, the speciality is again evident. If the names given to children generally are intended as incentives to the formation of character, then, when they are sufficiently marked by selections from prominent characters, it may at least be indicative of the sentiments of the parents. If this is admitted, then the choice of names of these children gives unmistakable evidences of the determination of their parents that these brilliant characters should not be lost sight of, but emulated by them. While they are strictly in keeping with the father’s characteristic, they being all of African affinity or consanguinity, they are nevertheless remarkable amidst such surroundings as American contingencies constantly present. The eldest is Toussaint L’Ouverture, after the first military hero and statesman of San Domingo; the second, Charles Lennox Remond, from the eloquent living declaimer; the third, Alexander Dumas, from that brilliant author of romance; the fourth, Saint Cyprian, from one of the greatest of the primitive bishops of the Christian Church; the fifth, Faustin Soulouque, after the late Emperor of Hayti; the sixth, Rameses Placido, from the good King of Egypt, “the ever-living Rameses II,” and the poet and martyr of freedom to his race on the Island of Cuba; the seventh, the daughter Ethiopia Halle Amelia, the country of his race, to which is given the unequalled promise that “she should soon stretch forth her hands unto God.”
CHAPTER II.
EARLY EDUCATION.
In the recent struggle through which the nation has passed, like convulsions, sometimes, of certain portions of the physical world, old features and landmarks are swept away, and new features are apparent, developing on the surface, the existence of which very little, if anything, was heretofore known.
A class has been invoked into action, to whose sublime patience and enduring heroism the genius of poetry will turn for inspiration, while future historians, recognizing evidences of the true statesmanship which they have exhibited through the dark night of slavery, will place them amid the brightest constellations of our time. This class exhibited the same anomaly in the midst of slavery, that the slaves in a government whose doctrines taught liberty and equality to all men, and under whose banner the exile and fugitive found refuge, presented to the civilization of this century. They were an intermediate class in all the slave states, standing between the whites and the bondmen, known as the free colored; debarred from enjoying the privileges of the one, but superior in condition to the other, more, however, by sufferance than by actual law. While they were the stay of the one, they were the object of distrust to the other, and at the same time subject to the machinations and jealousies of the non-slaveholders, whom they rival in mechanical skill and trade. Prior to the rebellion these represented a fair proportion of wealth and culture, both attributable to their own thrift and energy. Unlike the same class at the North, they had but little, if any, foreign competition in the various departments of labor or trade against which to contend. Immigration not being encouraged at the South, as at the North, could not affect their progress, thus leaving all avenues open to the free colored, while they were excluded from the more liberal and learned professions. But if their faculties for accumulation were preferable to the same class North, there