Martin Delany's writing skills first appeared and developed in writing for his own newspaper in Pittsburgh, "The Mystery," These reports and editorials caught the eye of many journalists, since "The Mystery" was, for several years in the 1840s, the only newspaper published by African Americans. Often cited as a source of columns and opinion in newspapers including other mainstream newspapers and in William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, "The Liberator," it was only a matter of time that Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany would meet and germinate together the idea of a new "black voice" newspaper, "The North Star."
"Common sense will decide and forever put to rest a decision to the contrary, that among people of sense, an implication to its intentions to an expression. . .Then, according to this reasoning, which is simple and fair, the Constitution of the United States is a pro slavery instrument, and no consistent anti slavery person should either vote or hold office under it.
"Is there aught in this to condemn? Let us suppose that like Mr. Douglass, the editor of the Gazette," had been piratically robbed for twenty five years out of his liberty, subjected during which time to all the injury, insult and degradation, concommitant (sic) with Slavery, and whose mothers and sisters are still groaning in degradation, all sanctioned by the Constitution and upheld and supported by the Union; would he be less a 'fanatic' than Douglass?
"Had he, like we, borne the torture of knowing his father to have served fifty fouryears of his life in Virginia Slavery, and was now only free of his own will, having walked away and staid (sic), whose head is now hoary with the blighting frosts of his wintry pilgrimmage, and whose cheeks deeply furrowed by the sorrows of his toiling pathway, would he, dare he withhold the justly merited rebukes and spontaneous outbursts of his manly indignation against the upholders and abettors of such a system??
"Aye, he would welcome the omnipotent arm of Jehovah, stretched forth in terrible projection, holding in his grasp the mighty thunderbolt of vengeance 'red with uncommon wrath' ready to dash into eternal nothingness, all and everything that contributed to the perpetuity of such a system! No union with slaveholders: Perish the Union or any Government rather than to be upheld by the forfeiture of the liberties of the people."
'The Mystery,' August, 1847, in response to criticisms in 'The Pittsburgh Gazette' of visiting dignitaries, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison
