Martin Delany, First Black Field Officer

Martin Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia, in eighteen twelve, even though his father was enslaved, and he received his early education after the family moved to Chambersburg in southern Pennsylvania. He went on to become one of the most remarkable figures of the nineteenth century. He published an antislavery newspaper, the Mystery, and later helped launch the North Star with Frederick Douglass, and later wrote one of the first major works of African American political thought, arguing for Black self-determination.

During the Civil War, Delany recruited African American soldiers for the Union Army and in eighteen sixty-five received a commission from President Abraham Lincoln as a major in the United States Army, making him the first African American to hold the rank of commissioned field officer. After the war he worked in South Carolina during Reconstruction. His life traced the full arc of the antebellum freedom struggle, from fugitive-slave law resistance to military command.