Even by Martin Delany’s uncommon standard, 1859 was an eventful year. In early May, Delany departed New York on the Mendi, a ship owned by three Liberian merchants supportive of his efforts to resettle American slaves in West Africa. In early July, he arrived with a small company in Cape Palmas and immediately began addressing crowds of Monrovians who, according to the local newspaper, packed the Methodist Episcopal Church on at least two occasions to hear him advertise “the desire of an African nationality that has brought me to these shores.”1 After one month in Liberia, Delany led an expedition some twelve hundred miles to Yoruba, searching for land in the Niger Valley on which to build a new community. By December, he had negotiated a treaty with the Alake (chief) of Abeokuta designed to establish a settlement for African American emigrants in cooperation with Egba inhabitants of the region.2 In early 1860, he departed for England to lecture and raise funds for the project.

This chapter shifts to the island of Cuba and the La Escalera conspiracy in the mid-1840s. As this chapter reveals, this conspiracy between free and enslaved people of color in the Spanish colony to overthrow their oppressors takes center stage in the later novels of Martin Delany and Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, each of whom turns to La Escalera in order to develop a particular vision of Black revolution in the hemisphere.

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.”Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.

In the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, free African Americans felt they had as much to lose as fugitive slaves. Many felt that they would never be recognized as citizens and that they would never be granted legal equality or social acceptance in the predominantly white United States. This chapter shows that, against this backdrop, free-soil havens abroad resonated more than ever as potent symbols of liberty, equality, uplift, and independence. They offered a stark contrast to the United States’ ongoing commitment to slavery at its very highest levels. Building on decades of practice, American anti-slavery advocates in the 1850s leveraged the practical and symbolic value of international free-soil havens to bolster the fight of freedom and equality at home and abroad. From national anti-slavery conventions to burgeoning black nationalist political thought, this chapter shows that free-soil spaces became dominant focal points of escape, resistance, and collective action until the outbreak of civil war in 1861.

While always hostile to white demands that they expatriate, free black northerners considered emigrating on their own terms, as an affirmation of their dual identity as black and American. Even as stalwart integrationists such as Frederick Douglass criticized his peers for betraying their enslaved kin, emigrationists such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and James Theodore Holly debated the true purpose of black exodus, as well as the most desirable destination, concurring only in their dislike for the ACS and Liberia. Where to go? Canada, for its proximity to the United States? The Niger Valley, for its connection to their African ancestry? Or Haiti, the one black-run state in the Western Hemisphere, and a bastion of black militancy? As emigrationists duly divided, exploring and settling distant lands, they were shocked to realize just how American, even “Anglo-Saxon” their assumptions really were – and how much they had to call on much-resented white assistance. And so, like white colonizationists, they entered the 1860s praying that some more powerful entity would assume the onerous task of fostering African American emigration.