John Brown
Martin Delany's life was mysteriously connected to that of John Brown's: Brown seeking Delany in Canada for support(as described below), to the fact that one of the last people Brown would know, his jailer John Avis in Charles Town, (then) Va., had once played as a small childhood on the same streets of the cozy village in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The greatest mystery is whether or not Delany suggested the Harper's Ferry and Charles Town area to Brown. In either case, Delany, like Henry Highland Garnet and others privy to Brown's plans, were all out of the country at the time the raid occurred, either by chance or design.
F. R. Whipper
Martin Delany told his biographer Frances Rollin (pseudonym "Frank") that he met John Brown when Brown went to Chatham, West Ontario to find recruits and support for leading an insurrection. Delany agreed to chair a convention to hear his wishes. Delany told Rollin that Brown did not spell out his violent intentions, though others present disagreed with Delany's self representation.
John Brown ventured to Chatham, West Ontario, knowing it was well populated with escaped once enslaved black Americans. He conceived of a plan at that time to create a new terminus for the Underground Railroad and wanted to create a new state made up of ex slaves. While getting money from leading abolitionists was possible, his real need was to have brave men to fight with him.
Brown was staying with James Madison Bell, a "plasterer/poet," at his home on King Street in Chatham in 1858.
Delany, who was then practicing medicine and writing in Chatham saw Brown on a street, recognizing him. When asked, Brown replied: "I am, sir, and I have come to Chatham expressly to see you, this being my third visit on the errand. I must see you at once, sir, and that, too in private, as I have much to do, and but little time before me. If I am to do nothing here, I want to know it at once."
Brown and MRD walked to the Villa Mansion hotel and retreated to the private parlor. MRD recalled later that Brown "at once revealed to me that he desired to carry out a great project in his scheme of Kansas Emigration and that he had been advised that, if he could but see me, his object would be attained at once. On expressing my astonishment at the conclusion, with a nervous impatience he exclaimed:
"Why should you be surprised? Sir, the people of the northern states are cowards. Slavery has made cowards of them all. The whites are afraid of each other, and the blacks are afraid of the whites. You can effect nothing among such people."
At Brown's request, MRD organized a constitutional convention scheduled for May 8, 1858 in a school for children of color on Chatham's Princess Street with almost seventy people, mostly formerly enslaved, present.
Among other things, Brown told the gathering: "It is men I want, and not money; Money I can get plentiful enough, but no men. Money can come without being seen, but men are afraid of identification with me, though they favor my measure, they are cowards, sir, cowards!"
At some point in the convention, MRD, who chaired the event, told the gathering that Brown's plans would fail "not having the least chance of giving trouble to the slaveholders," basing this in some part on his first hand journey through the south in 1840.
Brown leaped to his feet and said angrily: "Gentlemen, if Dr. Delany is afraid, don't let him make you all cowards!"
Delany replied immediately, courteously, yet decidedly: "Capt. Brown does not know the man of whom he speaks. There exists no one in whose veins the blood of cowardice courses less freely and it must not be said, even by John Brown of Ossawatamie." As he concluded, the old man bowed approvingly and made his explanations.
Two days later, 34 (about half the group) signed a resolution supporting Brown's plan to forcibly make Kansas a new terminus of the Underground Railroad, instead of Canada, and creating there a new sovereign state.
MRD, serving as secretary to the group, wrote at least once to Brown's deputy John Kagi after they left Chatham. The publishers of "The Provincial Freeman" in Chatham, the Shadd family and their printer Osborn Anderson, a Pennsylvania freed black man, expressed their support of John Brown by drawing a lottery among themselves to see which would represent them and go with Brown's men.
Osborn Anderson "won" the lottery. At the Harper's Ferry raid he was the only black man in the raiding party to escape and later wrote his account of the raid.
While MRD agreed with much of John Brown's beliefs in self determination, he may have doubted Brown's ability to lead such a venture, probably looked askance at this venture of a white man, and claimed later to not have know fully Brown's plan for a violent insurrection.
Brown, later imprisoned in a jail in the town Delany was born in, Charles Town, Va., was befriended by his jailer, John Avis, a childhood playmate of Delany's who remained in touch with Delany in later years, however discreetly.
At that very time of Brown's visit, MRD was completing his powerful novel, "Blake: the Huts of America," about a black man moving clandestinely through the South meeting secretly with groups of enslaved blacks and inciting a violent uprising.
