Oxford University Press American Literary History

Martin Delany's "Blake" and the Transnational Politics of Property
Author(s): Jeffory A. Clymer

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 4, History, Economics, and Criticism
(Winter, 2003), pp. 709-731
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567929
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Martin Delany's Blake and
the Transnational Politics of
Property
Jeffory A. Clymer
Martin Delany's picaresque novel, Blake,; or, The Huts of

America, tells the story of a black slave, Henry Holland, a.k.a.
Blacus, a.k.a. Blake. After his wife is sold away, he escapes from a
Mississippi plantation and journeys throughout the South, visit-
ing slaves and clandestinely organizing a future outbreak of black
revolutionary violence. After part 1 ends with Henry leaving New
York on a ship heading for Cuba where he hopes to find his wife,
part 2 picks up with Henry similarly attempting to organize rebel-
lion in Cuba. In Cuba, we learn that Blake is the son of a wealthy
mulatto merchant and was tricked into slavery when he mistak-
enly boarded a slave ship as a young man. There Blake eventually
finds his missing wife and, in concert mostly with free, wealthy
Cubans of color, continues organizing a rebellion. Delany's novel
then unexpectedly breaks off at its most intensely suspenseful mo-
ment, just as it seems the coalition of Cuban slaves and free per-
sons of color is poised for a murderous rebellion.'
Written by a man who led one of the most varied lives of all
nineteenth-century Americans (at different times Delany was a
newspaper editor, inventor, African explorer, author, soldier, lec-
turer, black emigrationist, Freemason, Freedmen's Bureau offi-
cial, and political candidate), this often formally clumsy novel is
now recognized for its fascinating insights into the relationship
between the US and Cuban slave economies immediately prior
to the Civil War. Over the last decade critics have accordingly of-
fered shrewd transatlantic and Pan-African interpretations of
Blake, starting with Paul Gilroy's deeming it a cornerstone text
in any theorization of a black diaspora and Eric Sundquist's
analysis of the novel within hemispheric-wide discourse on slav-
ery and American expansionism. More recently, Robert Levine
DOI: 10.1093/alh/ajg040
American Literary History 15(4), ? Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved.
710 Martin Delany's Blake and Transnational Politics
has identified Blake as "a Pan-African vision of black nationalism

that means to combat and expose the limits of the U.S. national-
ism espoused by blacks aligned with [Frederick] Douglass" (190);
Timothy Powell has offered a rich reading of Delany's only novel
as a key American postcolonial text.
In this essay, I analyze how Delany negotiates cultural and le-
gal ideas concerning different forms of property-whether taking
the form of land, movable items, or persons-within his view of
the antebellum international political economy. Blake suggests
that it is impossible to make sense of America's political structure
and economy without understanding it in relation to the eco-
nomic decisions and practices of other nations, specifically the
mercantile interests of competing countries, conflicts between de-
caying and rising imperial powers in the Caribbean, and interna-
tional debates over the traffic in slave bodies and the goods they
produced. Thus, I read the novel alongside several antebellum cul-
tural artifacts--ranging from court cases and legislative acts, to
passports, to covert government communications--that embody
both national and transnational elements and collectively help to
gloss Delany's understanding of politics and property in his novel.
Blake, I argue, provides a highly nuanced meditation on the recip-
rocal effects that international commerce and ideas regarding
property, in its several legal forms, had upon each other and on
how both persons and nations understood their identities in the
years leading up to the Civil War.
Blake is, to say the least, obsessed with the political quan-
daries that arise as people and commodities move and are moved
across borders. In the novel's opening scene, which Delany care-
fully notes takes place "[o]n one of those exciting occasions dur-
ing a contest for the presidency of the United States," several Cu-
ban and American businessmen, including Blake's owner, Colonel
Stephen Franks, travel to Baltimore "for the purpose of complet-
ing arrangements for refitting the old ship 'Merchantman'" (3).
It quickly becomes apparent that the Merchantman, a Baltimore
clipper, is being illegally "refitt[ed]" as a slave ship. And follow-
ing this meeting, Henry's master returns to Mississippi, provides
Blake with a paper allowing him "to pass and repass wherever he
wants to go," and dates the note "Nov. 29th, 1852" (27). This sense
of perpetual movement of owners and slaves will bear directly
on how Delany dramatizes cultural and legal ideas about property
throughout his novel.
Because Blake's pass is dated November 1852, the Cuban-
American meeting that opens the story must have taken place dur-
ing the presidential campaign that resulted in the 1852 election of
Franklin Pierce, a Northern Democrat with strong Southern ties
American Literary History 711
who was also committed to the acquisition of Cuba as a slave

state. When Pierce won the White House in 1852, his victory was
boisterously greeted with raucous torchlight parades and ban-
ners announcing "The Acquisition of Cuba Must Now Be Ful-
filled" and "May the Queen of the Antilles Be Added to Our Glori-
ous Confederacy under the Prosperous Administration of Pierce"
(Foner 2: 70). Pierce responded by implicitly referring to Cuba
and its strategic commercial location in his inaugural address:
"[T]he policy of my Administration will not be controlled by any
timid forebodings of evil from expansion. Indeed, it is not to be
disguised that our attitude as a nation and our position on the
globe render the acquisition of certain possessions not within our
jurisdiction eminently important for our protection, if not in the
future essential for the preservation of the rights of commerce and
the peace of the world" (121). With Pierce's assertions in mind, we
can see that the veiled allusion to his election within a context of
illegal slave trading in Blake's opening scene immediately suggests
that demystifying the rationales for claiming ownership in both
"certain possessions not within our jurisdiction" and in persons
are closely related projects for Delany.
Yet even as Delany consciously begins his novel by drawing
attention to the links between presidential politics and slave trad-
ing, he also appears quickly to distance Blake's businessmen from
national politics. These men "appeared little concerned about the
affairs of the general government" and are instead "entirely ab-
sorbed in an adventure of self-interest" (3). Glenn Hendler sug-
gests that Delany sets up this opposition between civic obligations
and economic self-interest and then shortly thereafter deflates this
conflict via a "gendered rhetoric of civility" that operates between
Northerners and Southerners in the novel who share a commit-
ment to the slave trade (67). That certainly appears to be the case,
but Delany does more than suggest how easily shared economic
interests can paper over other potential political disagreements.
Starting the book with the election campaign that signaled a re-
newal in American attempts to acquire Cuba as a potential slave
state, Delany undermines the apparent distinction between civic
and personal duties by intimating that, in fact, such differences do
not really exist. With the US on the verge of electing a government
already committed to the possibility of both American slavery's
southward expansion, and, as we will see later, the pursuit of shad-
owy attempts to acquire Cuba, it does not matter if businessmen
pursue "an adventure of self-interest" while remaining oblivious
to politics. Instead, Delany's opening lines insist that the interests
of America's proslavery, expansionist national government and
the businessmen are in fact the same, specifically because traffic in
the illegal slave trade strengthened the illicit economic forces that
were trying to bring Cuba into America's orbit as part of a US
slave empire.2
Delany thus begins by establishing the American national
politics that made it possible for businessmen to pursue their own
economic well-being while also advancing the nation's politico-
economic goals. Tellingly, he immediately follows this initial de-
piction of slavery's role in international economic schemes with a
passage depicting America's internal traffic in slave bodies, thus
formally linking these two aspects of the slave economy. When
Franks returns to his Mississippi plantation, he finds that Ara-
bella Ballard, a Northern relative of his wife, has come to visit for
the purpose of buying Mrs. Franks's maidservant, Maggie, who is
also Henry's wife. Arabella wants Maggie in particular because
she desires to take "a well-trained" servant with her when she and
her husband move for the winter to their estate in Cuba (7),
though instead of keeping Maggie, Ballard ultimately sells her to
another "proprietor of a sugar estate" near Havana (65).
Indeed, the reason that Mrs. Ballard is so determined to
have Maggie in the first place is somewhat puzzling because the
Northern woman is horrified at the decent treatment the maid-
servant receives from Mrs. Franks. As Maria Franks fusses over
her maid's appearance, acting "more like . .. an elder sister than
a mistress" and even allowing Maggie to wear dresses made from
the same cloth as hers, Arabella Ballard is aghast at the Southern
woman's conduct (6). Delany's point, of course, is to demonstrate
that Northerners could be even more vicious toward blacks than
Southerners, but the import of this scene lies even deeper and rests
more centrally in Colonel Franks and Mrs. Ballard's agreement to
transfer ownership of Maggie "without [the] knowledge and con-
sent" of Maria Franks (8).3
Franks and Ballard's collusion in Maggie's personal fate exem-
plifies their agreement on larger political and economic issues. When
Colonel Franks presses his wife's Northern cousin on the potential
political differences between the North and South, Mrs. Ballard
replies that he "will find the North true to the country." Whether this
truly means a harmony of interests is also quickly answered, for as
Arabella remarks, "in our country commercial interests have taken
precedence of all others, which is a sufficient guarantee of our
fidelity to the South" (4). Ballard's formulation reproduces the open-
ing scene's logic but with this twist: the pursuit of personal economic
gain is not merely in line with the policies of an expansionist presi-
dent, for Delany further indicates that the pursuit of commercial
gain means that being "true to the country" is the same thing as be-
ing faithful to Southern attitudes regarding slavery.
Delany's emphasis on shared "commercial interests" repre-

sents his particular inflection of a notion common to much ante-
bellum African-American writing, which held that the Southern
position on slavery simply was the national position as well. In
particular, though, he draws readers' attention to the importance
of legal debates about property in this nationalization of Southern
attitudes when he writes that Ballard's husband served as the
judge in the first case brought under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.
This notorious law required Northerners to assist in capturing
runaway slaves, menaced anyone assisting a fugitive with fines and
imprisonment, and made it possible without a warrant to arrest a
person suspected of being a runaway. And Judge Ballard, though
a Northerner, would even go beyond the black-letter dictates of
the law. He "hold[s] as a just construction of the law, that . .. by its
provision every free black in the country, North and South, are li-
able to enslavement by any white person" (61). Moreover, by re-
ferring in this scene to both Mrs. Ballard's maneuvering to sell
Maggie into Caribbean slavery and Judge Ballard's prominence in
defending the opinion that runaway slaves were, essentially, stolen
property, Delany further implies that the movement of slaves
within America is inseparable from the forms of slavery's interna-
tional traffic.
Delany's interest in how slaves circulated throughout the
antebellum political economy gives increased significance to an
otherwise minor and fairly predictable plot detail. We learn that
the plan to sell Maggie to Mrs. Ballard originated from a desire to
frighten the slave following "a conversation between her and some
free Negroes, at Saratoga Springs" on Mrs. Franks's most recent
trip to the North (8). While it is not surprising that "free Negroes"
are the source of Maggie's agitation, the New York location gives
the scene added resonance. It puts the novel's plot in direct dia-
logue with 1850s legal cases addressing the proprietary relation-
ship between owners and slaves when they traveled together. The
most famous such case was the 1857 Dred Scott v. John F A. Sand-
ford decision, and Delany has his most racist characters ventrilo-
quize phrases drawn from Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's decision
at several points in his novel. Beyond this, the specific image of
free blacks meeting with a slave who is traveling with her owner in
New York specifically conjures up Lemmon v. People, a New York
case that smoldered throughout the 1850s. Before it was rendered
moot by the outbreak of the Civil War, many people in the late
1850s believed Lemmon would be the next major battle over the
contradictory status of human slaves as movable property that
had risen with such urgency in Dred Scott.
Lemmon v. People grew out of one of the nineteenth century's
countless relocations of people. In this instance, Jonathan Lem-

mon and his wife were migrating from Virginia to Texas along
with their eight slaves in 1852.4 Because the best way to make that
voyage was to go first to New York and depart from there, the
Lemmons sailed to the metropolis, where they took their slaves
ashore with them to a hotel while they waited to continue their
journey. But in 1841, New York had repealed all statutes allowing
a "foreign slaveholder" the "privilege ... of temporarily sojourn-
ing in or passing through the State with his slaves" (Lemmon 619).
As of that date, any slave brought into New York by his or her
master was considered free. Therefore, a free black man named
Louis Napoleon petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus on the
Lemmon slaves' behalf when he learned they were in the city.
Lemmon claimed a federal right to move between states without
losing his property while temporarily in a state that he had to pass
through in the course of his journey, but on 13 November 1852
Judge Elijah Paine of the Superior Court of New York set the
slaves free.
Interestingly mirroring the North-South logic of Delany's
opening scene, soon after the decision the New York business
community promptly raised $5,000 to compensate the Lemmons
for their loss in an effort to reassure their Southern clients. To the
Southern press, however, the Lemmons' slaves had essentially
been stolen from them, and editorials in the Richmond Daily Dis-
patch fumed that Northern states no longer felt bound by the Con-
stitution. Sensing a matter of pressing sectional interest, the state
of Virginia appealed the decision. The lower court's decision was
upheld by the New York Supreme Court in October 1857, and
then again in the New York Court of Appeals, the court of last re-
sort before the US Supreme Court. In a narrow five-to-three vote
finally reached in March 1860, Judge Paine's original decision was
upheld, even though the US Supreme Court had decided Dred
Scott in the interim and the Lemmon decision was clearly at odds
with the Court's ruling in that case. Had Southern secession not
intervened, it appeared to many contemporary commentators
that the case was headed straight for the Supreme Court. In the
wake of Dred Scott, Northerners feared that the New York deci-
sion would almost certainly be overturned, leaving the North
open to what, in their view, would be yet another step in the in-
eluctable march toward nationalizing slavery.5
For a reading of Blake, the significance of Lemmon lies in the
way the lawyers' and judges' rhetoric about property, liberty, slav-
ery, and nationhood provides another discourse to express the
same issues in Delany's fiction. But whether Delany specifically
followed the developments of Lemmon v. People, as well as any di-
rect influence the case had on Blake, is uncertain. Levine is con-

vincing that Delany wrote the bulk of Blake between 1856 and
1859, and that he also revised portions of it in 1861 after returning
from Africa and Europe (177, 179). This corresponds with the pe-
riod in which Lemmon gained notoriety, as it was being discussed
outside the directly interested states of New York and Virginia
by 1857 or so and also achieved a greater prominence by 1860
(Finkelman 301-02). It is likely that Delany would have known
about and been interested in Lemmon, especially given that
Blake's frequent allusions to Dred Scott demonstrate his interest
in urgent legal issues. But whether or not Delany was intimately
aware of Lemmon's intricacies, the case is especially relevant for
understanding Blake because it marks a remarkable confluence
with the novel's own methods for inscribing 1850s relationships
between race and property.
As in Blake, arguments in the case understood slave tran-
sit in America in terms of international commerce. Lawyers
on both sides, as well as the judges, returned repeatedly to the
issue of comity: was New York bound to respect the laws of Vir-
ginia, and what exactly did that entail since honoring Virginia's laws
meant upholding slavery? Arguing for Virginia, Charles O'Conor
stated that "[b]y the comity of civilized nations, the stranger is
allowed to pass through a friendly territory without molesta-
tion" (Lemmon 581), and Justice Thomas W. Clerke's dissent
added, perhaps somewhat wishfully in the context of 1860, that
the relations between the states have to be tighter than between
nations, and so respect for Virginia's law was paramount (Lem-
mon 642). Like Blake's fictional scenarios, this turn to the lan-
guage of international politics suggested that commercial traffic
in slaves required a frame of reference that extended beyond Amer-
ica's internal debate.
This question of establishing and crossing borders was also
evident in Lemmon's rather tortured construction of the boundary
between humanity and inanimate movable property. For Virginia,
O'Conor suggested that because "[p]roperty in movables does not
exist by nature," but "must have an origin in some law," it is there-
fore "groundless" to imagine a "distinction ... between slave prop-
erty and other movables" (Lemmon 572-73). In other words, be-
cause an item only becomes property through explicit legal
recognition, there was no need to distinguish between human and
inhuman forms of property. By arguing that property does not ex-
ist in a state of nature, O'Conor also countered the common ar-
gument that slavery was itself against the law of nature. Accord-
ing to O'Conor, outlawing slavery was equivalent to abandoning
laws of property altogether and regressing to a state of nature.6
Even more interesting, perhaps, than O'Conor's discussion of hu-

mans' natural state was William M. Evarts's response on behalf of
New York. He argued that slavery is maintained by "mere pre-
dominance of physical force" (Lemmon 597), so, in the words of
his cocounsel, Joseph Blunt, Lemmon "has not been deprived of
property by these proceedings. The appellant had no property in
these persons. It ceased to be property when he brought them into
the State of New York" (Lemmon 590). In Blunt's view, the slaves
were transformed from movable property to autonomous humans
simply because the New York legislature had both deemed New
York's air too pristine for a slave to breathe and had the power to
enforce that view within the state.
For Blunt and Evarts, the question of what makes someone
either a movable piece of property or a human is not an ontologi-
cal issue but a problem of rhetoric backed up by the physical
power to enforce that language. And while Delany obviously and
rightly would not have given so much away on the issue of blacks'
essential humanity, the relationship between power and identity
plays a crucial role in Blake. Near the end of the novel, Blake ex-
horts his Pan-African coconspirators with a bald claim to the su-
periority of brute force: "On this island ... we are the many and
the oppressors few; consequently, they have no moral right to hold
rule over us, whilst we have the moral right and physical power to
prevent them" (287). As Gregg Crane has argued, Delany's em-
phasis on the sheer power that Cubans of color potentially held
over the island's numerically inferior white inhabitants conflates
the discourses of power and rights with troubling implications for
any restraints on the will of the majority and protections for mi-
norities (530).
Yet if Delany was not able to change-or was perhaps not
even interested in changing-the essential terms of the mid-
nineteenth-century discourse of power, in Blake he is more inter-
ested in theorizing the relationship between holding property in
land and holding property in humans. For Blake's planned Pan-
African rebellion on Cuba, the ability to appropriate Spanish and
American property and transform it into a new black nation is
predicated on Cuba's citizens of color first recognizing and claim-
ing property in themselves. For instance, according to Blake's co-
conspirator Madame Cordora, "people never entertain proper
opinions of themselves until they begin to act for themselves"
(262). In fact, until participating in Blake's cabal, she "never be-
fore felt as proud of [her] black as [she] did of [her] white blood"
(262). Put this way, Delany's emphasis on the power of black
blood in Blake can sound rather essentialist to twenty-first-
century readers, and there is no doubt that he, perhaps usefully in
the context of the 1850s, attempted to counter racial apartheid by

insisting on the inherent and specific power of "black" blood.7
As Madame Cordora's statements reveal, Delany's aggres-
sive racial essentialism in Blake aims to reimagine Cuban power
relations. As a corollary, it also sought to counter the period's
widespread essentialist arguments in favor of slavery, of which
O'Conor's remarks in Lemmon are highly representative. As the
Virginia attorney explained to the court in a classic racialist for-
mulation, "[t]he negro never has sustained a civilized social or-
ganization" (Lemmon 573), and so "[i]t follows that in order to
obtain the measure of reasonable personal enjoyment and of use-
fulness to himself and others for which he is adapted by nature, the
negro must remain in a state of pupilage under the government of
some other race" (574). Approaching this issue of a "natural"
fitness for slavery from the opposite direction, O'Conor also wor-
ried aloud to the judges that if Lemmon weren't overturned, "the
non-slaveholding States could pen up all slaveholders within their
own States as effectually as the slave is himself confined by the rule
applied in this case" (580). Raising this specter of white slavery,
O'Conor is warning the court that acknowledging what Evarts
mordantly termed the arbitrary and "artificial relation" that
makes humans into property could logically lead to white South-
ern slave owners being held as slave property (598). O'Conor's
narrative of horrors represents his attempt to reinvigorate the
ideological, naturalizing "self-cloaking mechanism" of American
racial policy that New York's decision threatened to reveal as con-
tingent and based solely on force.8 Attempting to make black slav-
ery seem natural by appealing to what his audience would regard
as the ludicrous spectacle of wealthy white planters held as slaves,
O'Conor thus also attempted to reaffirm the line between black
property and white humanity.
Delany and O'Conor shared an essentialist argumentative
line in what were highly dissimilar arguments for, on the one hand,
certain identifiable, valuable, and inherent African traits and, on
the other, the naturalness of black slavery. Delany also attempted
to have it both ways, so to speak, by working to undermine essen-
tialist proslavery arguments put forward by slavery's apologists.
Similar to Lemmon, Blake also features a scene in which a white
man ponders white slavery. The white Southerner, Major James
Armsted, shocks Judge Ballard by explaining that he "would just
as readily hold a white as a black in slavery, were it the custom and
policy of the country to do so. It is all a matter of self-interest with
me" (64). For Armsted, there is nothing at all "natural" about
black chattel slavery. As Crane interprets Armsted's comments,
the major openly acknowledges that slavery is based on naked
self-interest and power relations that, to be sure, also construct a

rhetorical edifice of racial ideology and justifications (539). And
like O'Conor's arguments before the New York Court of Appeals,
Delany's making Judge Ballard the audience for Armsted's re-
marks underscores the law's role as one of the primary compo-
nents of any naturalizing discourse. Most important, though, De-
lany's crucial repetition of the phrase "self-interest" here and in
the novel's opening scene emphasizes the connection between in-
dividual, apolitical slave owners and the business of illegal, inter-
national slave trading. Although Armsted protests that he would
hold whites or blacks in slavery merely according to "custom,"
this repetition reinforces how the major's feigned political disin-
terest and silence as he pursues economic gain nonetheless com-
ply with the racist policies and economic practices to which he
turns a blind eye.9
While Delany charts the implications that followed from

how people and property moved and were moved in the 1850s,
Henry's progress throughout the novel also enacts a distinct and
conscious counterhistory to the legal, sanctioned forms of moving
slaves. Blake gains its initial momentum, as several scholars note,
from the paradigmatic scene in antislavery novels of the forced
breakup of slave families. The sale of Henry's wife while he is away
from Franks's plantation incites his peripatetic travels stoking
The novel thus yokes the rebellion throughout the slave states. The novel thus yokes the
deeply personal with the deeply personal with the political and does so in a way that offers
political and does so in a
a direct riposte to nineteenth-century racist beliefs concerning
way that offers a direct
riposte to nineteenth-
slaves' supposed inability to form emotionally intimate ties. In-
century racist beliefs deed, the only thing that Henry had recognized as a compulsion
concerning slaves' for remaining in slavery was not fear of his master but love for and
supposed inability to form commitment to his wife. As Blake combatively informs Franks,
emotionally intimate ties.
"I'm not your slave, nor never was ... ! And but for my wife and
her people, I never would have stayed with you till now. I was de-
coyed away when young, and then became entangled in such do-
mestic relations as to induce me to remain with you; but now the
tie is broken!" (19). Blake, however, elsewhere confides to a friend
that as a young man he had legally been "sold ... to a noted trader
... one Colonel Franks" (194). Blake's anger causes him to dis-
miss fervently the law of slavery as an ideological facade; thus this
early scene anticipates how his illicit movements are central to
Delany's interrogation of how property itself is understood and
represented.
When Henry leaves Colonel Franks's plantation, he travels

to all corners of the South-from Louisiana to Arkansas to South
Carolina to Virginia's Dismal Swamp-and is continually recog-
nized by slaves as a Messiah figure who has come to liberate them.
Blake's travels are so varied that the narrative practically offers a
tutorial in antebellum Southern geography. More specifically, the
discourse of travel also provides Delany with one of the book's
most significant metaphors-the "White Gap"-and two of the
book's powerful images-money and passports. As Henry ex-
plains his plot to a slave in identical language on two separate oc-
casions, "With money you may effect your escape almost at any
time. Your most difficult point is an elevated obstruction, a mighty
hill, a mountain; but through that hill there is a gap, and money is
your passport through that White Gap to freedom. Mark that! It
is the great range of White mountains and White river which are
before you, and the White Gap that you must pass through to
reach the haven of safety" (84).
John Ernest has written that Delany uses the language of
market economics as a method for imagining freedom; fleeing
slaves literally buy the liberty that whites possess. As Ernest puts
it, Blake's "literal and figurative map to liberty" ironically "capi-
taliz[es] on the dominant culture's bankrupt moral economy"
(122-23). The novel makes this economic lesson concrete shortly
after this scene, when Henry, leading a group of runaway slaves,
encounters a recalcitrant ferryman who refuses to accept their
forged passes and row them across the Arkansas River. Henry
therefore shows the man "a shining gold eagle." Seeing this mon-
etary "emblem of his country's liberty, the skiffman's patriotism
was at once awakened," and he dutifully rows the fugitives across
the river (135). Though the "emblem" of the US that the ferryman
responds to is ostensibly the eagle, Delany deftly implies that
money itself equally symbolizes America. Furthermore, he acer-
bically demonstrates that in capitalist America money, and evi-
dently only money, can trump political ideology and individuals'
racist beliefs.
Soon after this run-in with the ferryman, Delany elaborates
on the nationalist symbology evoked by the gold eagle coins. In a
very similar scene, the fugitives confront another confused ferry-
man who refuses to help them cross a river because "the Nebrasky
Complimize Fugintive Slave Act, made down at Californy, last
year" obliges him "to fulfill it by ketchin' every fugintive that goes
to cross this way, or I mus' pay a thousand dollars, and go to jail
till the black folks is got, if that be's never" (140). Interestingly, the
only thing the skiffman gets right is the amount of the fine to be
levied on those who broke the Fugitive Slave Law. As in other
scenes in the novel, Delany delights here in ridiculing ignorant

whites and, perhaps, in signifying on the writing style commonly
used in the nineteenth century to represent slave dialect as well.'
But beyond this, the specific states mentioned by the bewildered
white man as he erroneously describes the Fugitive Slave Law also
indicate the particular way in which Delany is asking readers to
think about the exodus from slavery. Choosing two states that
were simultaneously pivotal in national debates about slavery and
also the destination for a vast number of antebellum migrants, De-
lany uses the geographically minded ferryman to suggest that his
antislavery polemic is not only a matter of political rights but also
a geopolitical question that hinges on how nations are defined and
their borders imagined."
In this light, Delany's metaphor of the passport for travers-
ing the "White Gap" assumes an importance that critics have
overlooked. In 1856, shortly before Delany finished working on
his novel, Congress for the first time asserted that the federal gov-
ernment held the exclusive right to issue passports and that they
should be given only to American citizens. Before that year, no
federal law regulated passport issuance, and individual states, as
well as local municipalities, had frequently generated them (Tor-
pey 95). Because the modern passport is a marker of citizenship,
Delany's reference to passports metonymically, and subversively,
represents the transformation of the fleeing slaves from embodied
legal property into personhood. But because the passport vouches
not just for a particular individual identity, but an identity as
a specifically national subject, Delany's passage also ironically
highlights America's historical linkage of citizenship and white-
ness. He is thus appropriating one of the prime signifiers of ante-
bellum whiteness as an ironic textual metaphor for escaping
the debilitating effects of a white apartheid culture, for moving
"through that White Gap to freedom."
By invoking this image of passports, Blake represents the
passage out of slavery within a simultaneously national and inter-
national framework of citizenship and border crossing. This an-
ticipates the second half of the novel's focus on a Pan-African re-
bellion that can found an independent black state which will at
once stand apart from white nations and offer a unified national
homeland for all people of color. Or, as Delany described the sit-
uation that he desperately wanted to change in an 1852 emigra-
tionist pamphlet, "there have in all ages, in almost every nation,
existed a nation within a nation-a people who although form-
ing a part and parcel of the population, yet were from force of
circumstances... forming in fact..,. no part..,. of the body pol-
itic ... there is none more so than that of the colored people of
the United States" (Condition 12-13). While Delany's tract spe-

cifically addresses free blacks, his larger point is that all African
Americans in America are, by dint of custom, subject to either de
facto or de jure slavery. Consequently, his 1850s novel delineating
an escape from slavery, as well as his political nonfiction, hinges
on these same images of racialized nations, borders, and the
movement across such boundaries toward freedom that are drawn
together in the metaphoric passport providing safe passage
through the white gap.
In Blake, Delany consciously ties passports' evocation of in-
ternational movement to economic issues through the "White
Gap" passage's other image of money. The scene's depiction of
money, slaves, and transnationalism also provides the key to the
relationship between the politics of slavery and the larger forms of
international business in the novel. These intertwined issues of
slavery and world commerce come together forcefully in an early
conversation between Judge Ballard and Major Armsted. Ballard
complains about "the hateful customs" of Cuba, which permit
"the most stupid and ugly Negro you meet in the street [to] ask for
a 'light' from your cigar" (62). In such cases, Ballard "invariably
compl[ies], but as invariably throw[s] away [his] cigar" (62). A
bemused Armsted cannot refrain from gently lampooning the
judge's squeamishness: "You Northerners are a great deal more
fastidious about Negroes than we of the South, and you'll pardon
me if I add, 'more nice than wise,' to use a homily. Did ever it oc-
cur to you that black fingers made that cigar, before it entered your
white lips!-all tobacco preparations being worked by Negro
hands in Cuba-and very frequently in closing up the wrapper,
they draw it through their lips to give it tenacity" (62-63). Judge
Ballard's naivet6 represents whites' habitual blindness to the cru-
cial roles people of color have historically played in the Western
Hemisphere's economy. Moreover, as Lori Merish astutely writes,
the judge clings to the notion of the cigar as an implicitly white
commodity and is therefore horrified by the symbolic recupera-
tion of Cubans' intimate relationship with the cigar that stems
from the production process (276). And similar to the earlier
scene in which Ballard's wife and Colonel Franks mix notions of
civility and political economy as they discuss slavery, Delany uses
Ballard's foolishness subtly to protest the ideological paradoxes
and incoherence of a racially organized capitalist economy
As with the passport metaphor, Delany seems to have care-
fully chosen the cigar as an economic image in his novel. By the
mid-nineteenth century, tobacco, and especially the famed Cuban
cigar, had become an important article of international trade. In
the words of David Turnbull, British consul to Cuba in 1840, there
was already "a constant and steady demand in the great cities of
the Union for the exquisite cigars of Puerto Principe and the Ha-
vana" (319). Historian Jean Stubbs confirms that "cigar manu-
facturing was Cuba's nineteenth-century industrypar excellence,"
and that it "[c]ater[ed] to a rapidly growing export market from the
early years of the century onwards" (16). Indeed, cigar exports to
the US and Europe more than doubled from 140 million to 360
million between 1840 and 1855, and there were over 1,200 cigar-
rolling shops on the island, with many employing several hundred
workers (Stubbs 17).
This invocation of tobacco in Blake takes on added mean-
ing when readers later learn that Henry is, in fact, "the son of a
wealthy black tobacco, cigar, and snuff manufacturer" (193). As
Levine has noted, the novel's critics have yet to consider fully the
implication of this lineage, which is, following Armsted and Bal-
lard's conversation, that Blake's Cuban family most likely owned
slaves. Indeed, Levine points out that Blake's character appears
even more fraught when readers simultaneously learn the rest of
his history (204). Although Henry inadvertently shipped to sea on
a slaver as a young man, he apparently did not protest until he
himself was also seized and sold into slavery (193-94).
But while Henry's childhood may complicate our under-
standing of his adult politics, it is more important to note that
Delany chooses to have Blake's family engaged in tobacco pro-
duction, rather than sugar cultivation. Although prosperous at
midcentury, Cuba's tobacco producers did not depend heavily on
slave labor, especially compared to the sugar plantations. Indeed,
the sugar industry was in many ways solely responsible for the in-
centives to smuggle new slaves onto the island after Spain signed
treaties in 1817 and 1835 promising to stop importing slaves into
Cuba (Foner 1: 186). Conventional wisdom among Cuban sugar
planters held that it was less expensive to work field hands to death
within five years and simply replace them than to invest in their
health and care. Plantation owners also had an aphorism captur-
ing this harsh reality: "Sugar is made with blood" (Paquette
55-56). This mindset and the inherently backbreaking work of
sugar production made Cuban slavery into one of the most brutal
forms of servitude known to the nineteenth-century world. To
quote British consul David Turnbull again, "in no quarter, unless,
perhaps, in the Brazils ... is the state of slavery so desperately
wretched as it is at this moment [1840] on the sugar plantations..
of Cuba" (48). As Turnbull registers, the brutality associated with
sugar cultivation horrified abolitionists and animated their po-
lemics much more than tobacco or coffee farming did.
By choosing to connect Blake implicitly to slavery via his
family's tobacco interests rather than the more widely produced

sugar, Delany wants both to give his hero an early connection to
slavery and simultaneously to diminish its impact on his protago-
nist's future credibility and identity. By growing up in a privileged
Cuban family but apparently spared from witnessing the worst
horrors of slavery, Blake avoids becoming inured to slavery's sheer
abusiveness. Thus relatively unsocialized into a Cuban culture of
slavery, Blake is ready and able to rebel against forced servitude
when he realizes its horror. Blake embodies the possibility-as
the last part of the novel narrates-that Cuba's wealthy people
of color can learn to forego their class privilege and instead join
forces with the island's slave population in an effort to overthrow
Spanish rule and form a Pan-African republic.
Henry has to "learn" to hate slavery, and the potentially sub-
versive implications of this new mindset are made concrete when,
in a moment of thematic symmetry, Blake sails on a slave ship
again. This time, however, he purposefully does so as a committed
revolutionary. Blake enlists on "a slaver as sailing-master, with the
intention of taking her in mid-ocean as a prize for ourselves, as we
must have a vessel at our command before we make a strike" (198).
The ship that Blake plans to commandeer is "freighted with pow-
der" and equipped with "several fine field pieces" (198). From his
position as sailing-master, Blake additionally believes that he can
recruit many black sailors "who will make a powerful force in car-
rying out [his] scheme on the vessel" (198). Coincidently, and in a
move that knits the novel's two parts together, the slave ship that
Blake has his eye on is the Baltimore clipper, Merchantman, now
fittingly renamed the Vulture (201).
Yet the capture of a well-armed sailing vessel never takes
place. Although the return trip from Africa is electric with racial
tension, such as when the black slaves among the common sailors
"chanted with cheerful glee" about overturning the particular
tyranny of Cuban slavery (207), the opportune moment for stag-
ing the revolt never arrives. Indeed, just when the black sailors
seem on the verge of taking the ship, and the slaves in the hold
have also broken through their fetters, a massive storm erupts and
the white officers manage to regain command, escape the tempest,
and safely land their illegal slave cargo in Cuba. In light of Blake's
desire and opportunity to capture the Vulture, this forestalled re-
volt, during which he "was strangely passive to occurring events
below" decks (236), is very odd and has largely puzzled the novel's
critics.12
The scene of unrealized revolt aboard the slave ship, how-
ever, has important implications for Delany's depiction of the
transnational politics of property. Specifically, America's legal
history of understanding the illicit slave trade as piracy can help

make sense of Blake's own frustrated efforts to commandeer the
Vulture. In 1820, lawmakers sought to curtail the rampant illegal
smuggling of slaves that had been going on since the legal termi-
nation of America's slave trade in 1808 by explicitly deeming such
acts to be piracy:
[I]f any citizen of the United States, being of the crew or

ship's company of any foreign ship or vessel engaged in the
slave trade, or ... any ship or vessel, owned in the whole or
part, or navigated for, or in behalf of, any citizen or citizens
of the United States, shall land ... on any foreign shore, seize
any negro or mulatto, not held to service or labour by the
laws of either of the states or territories of the United States,
with intent to make such negro or mulatto a slave ... such
citizen or person shall be adjudged a pirate,. and, on conviction
thereof... shall suffer death. (Act 600-01; emphasis added)
Yet the law went largely unenforced. In 1824, the US similarly en-
tered into negotiations with Britain over a treaty that would iden-
tify the slave trade as piracy, but an agreement was never enacted
because the Senate encumbered it with amendments unacceptable
to the British (Du Bois 138-40).
Maybe Delany did not have this unenforced law or unratified
treaty in mind when he wrote Blake, but such explicit language
connecting slave trading and piracy did, in fact, appear in his
slightly earlier nonfictional writing about Cuba. In an 1849 article
for the North Star warning of America's "perfidious wicked de-
sign" to annex Cuba, Delany writes that "Cuba is the great west-
ern slave mart of the world, containing the barracoons or refining
shops to the slave factories of Pedro Blanco, and other pirates on
the western coast of Africa" ("Annexation" 160-61). In Blake's
scene of frustrated revolt, Delany essentially signifies on this legal
understanding of slave traders as pirates. By (almost) making
Blake into this figure of a pirate, even as the ship's white crew
would also have legally been considered pirates, Delany multiplies
the scene's levels of bitter irony concerning property ownership.
Proposing that Blake, who at this point in the novel is presumed to
be a free black man, will encourage slaves to steal property (i.e.,
themselves) from white men who hold only an illicit title to them,
the Vulture passage makes the notion of ownership itself incoher-
ent. Indeed, Blake is at once a potential plundering pirate and a
black revolutionary nationalist who encourages slaves to stake a
claim to property in themselves, while the white sailors-some of
whom have direct economic interests in the ship's cargo--are
both enterprising businessmen and international criminals. The

passage thus offers an ironic, implicit response to the 1820 piracy
law's failure to stop the illegal slave trade. Like that largely unen-
forced law and the American-British treaty that was never ratified,
Blake's own act of piracy fizzles.
As Blake sails on the Vulture alongside American slave trad-
ers, Spanish sailors, and African slaves, Delany's novel evokes the
midcentury's disputes concerning not only how property was de-
fined and how it moved between nations but also how property
ownership was legitimated in the first place. It is therefore fitting
that the Vulture manages to return to Cuba, where the ship's slaves
melt into the citizenry and devise plans for taking over the island
itself. This sets up Delany's final move in his depiction of the sev-
eral forms that property disputes took in this period, as he ends
the novel by turning to the contentious question of what nation
would claim Cuba as its property and on what grounds. As the
final chapters depict impending revolt on the island and highlight
the various attitudes toward Cuba held by American business-
men, Spanish politicians, Cuban slaves, and free people of color,
the novel also, coincidently, brings readers back to the connec-
tions between presidential politics and notions of property with
which it opened.
Delany's themes and specific language in the book's closing
chapters conjure up the infamous 1854 Ostend Manifesto, which
was produced during Pierce's presidency and gained widespread
notoriety shortly before the period in which Delany wrote most
of Blake. The Ostend document was the rhetorical outcome
of America's decades-long attempt to wrest Cuba from Spain
Pierce's secretary of state, William L. Marcy, directed the US min
isters to Britain, France, and Spain-James Buchanan, J. Y. Ma
son, and Pierre Soul6, respectively-to consult with each other on
the feasibility of persuading Spain to sell Cuba without angering
the other European nations. The ministers met at Ostend, Bel-
gium, in October 1854 and submitted their ideas in the form of a
secret letter to Marcy that same month. Although Pierce, unde
pressure from abolitionists, immediately distanced himself from
the ministers' document as its details leaked out, the Ostend
Report concisely articulated the links among racial politics, in
ternational economics, and property that his administration
supported, and which Delany confronted in his fiction an
nonfiction.
The ambassadors wrote that "Cuba is as necessary to the
North American Republic as any of its present members" because
the "natural and main outlet of the products" of the US "can
never be secure, but must ever be endangered whilst Cuba is a de-
pendency of a distant Power... " ("Ostend" 261). The ministers

went on to argue that, in fact, all "commercial nations of the
world" would benefit from Cuba's severance from Spain and the
island's annexation to the US (262). To this end, the three men en-
couraged the American government to offer Spain up to $120 mil-
lion for Cuba (260). But while the men began by focusing on
Cuba's potential importance to American commercial activity,
when they turned to addressing Spain's possible rejection of a
monetary offer, the diplomats quickly conflated market econom-
ics with the fear of racial revolt: "We should, however, be recreant
to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers, and commit
base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be
Africanized and become a second St. Domingo, with all its atten-
dant horrors to the white race, and suffer the flames to extend to
our own neighboring shores. . . ." (266). Fearing such "African-
ization" of Cuba, the ministers' rhetoric reached a fever pitch
when they claimed that America was "justified in wresting it from
Spain" in order to prevent another black republic from forming in
the Caribbean, "upon the very same principle that would justify
an individual in tearing down the burning house of his neighbor,
if there were no other means of preventing the flames from de-
stroying his own home" (265). For these ambassadors, suppress-
ing an imagined black rebellion becomes the most compelling way
to gain control over Cuba's economic potential.
In Delany's novel, Judge Ballard also spitefully argues that
Cuba is "a moral pestilence, a blighting curse" and "must cease to
be a Spanish colony, and become American territory" because
"[t]hose mongrel Creoles are incapable of self-government" (62).
Like the authors of the Ostend Manifesto who drew together eco-
nomic and territorial forms of imperialism and defended their
cause with the specter of potential black retributive violence
against whites, Ballard imagines US ownership of Cuba as a way
to promote regional economic and political stability. As both a
businessman who profits from the international slave trade and a
judge, Ballard emblematizes Delany's belief that illegal interna-
tional traffic in slave bodies was an integral if unspoken element of
the commercial activity alluded to in the Ostend Manifesto and,
further, that the US legal system, which Ballard represents, cru-
cially overlooked it. Or, as Delany wrote elsewhere, Cuba "is the
great channel through which slaves are imported annually into the
United States, contrary to the law of the land ... and those in
power, the supreme Judicial and Executive authorities being gen-
erally slaveholders or their abettors, well know these facts, and by
keeping silence wink at and encourage such undisguised, infa-
mous deeds of daring" ("Annexation" 161-62).
Because Delany recognized Cuba as the linchpin in the ille-

gal movement of slaves into the US, he imagines a revolutionary
cabal that can put a halt to this slave trade by transforming Cuba
into a Pan-African republic. But Delany does not simply repro-
duce the 1850s turmoil over Cuba in Blake. He also demonstrates
a deft attention to language by reproducing the terminology of the
Ostend Manifesto as he shows how white violence breeds black
revolution. As Blake draws to a close and politico-racial tensions
mount, Ambrosina Cordora, daughter of an upper-class, revolu-
tionary, Cuban woman, is stopped on the street by an American
shopkeeper who, "[s]natching up a horsewhip" and "seizing her
by the breast of the dress rending it in tatters," beats the young
woman mercilessly (311). Fuming with anger after this symbolic
if not literal rape, Ambrosina declares, "I wish I was a man, I'd lay
the city in ashes this night, so I would" (313). Just a few lines later,
the book ends with the working-class cook, Gopher Gondolier,
going out "to spread among the blacks an authentic statement of
the outrage: 'Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say"' (313).
Delany closes by having a young, molested, upper-class
woman of color instigate a revolution by directly reproducing the
Ostend Manifesto's most notorious metaphor of "flames" and
"burning house[s]." And while this scene confirms Delany's own
troubling tendency to see women of color almost entirely as sym-
bols of purity and its potential violation, it is nonetheless key that
he uses Ambrosina to turn the Ostend Manifesto on its head. By
making Ambrosina the victim of this sexualized assault, Delany
reverses the common racist charge that black men target white
women as rape victims. Along these same lines, the scene debunks
the notion that class status can in any way protect black women.
Despite Ambrosina's lament that she wishes she was a man, it
is equally important that the scene dissolves class distinctions
among people of color by inciting the black working-class cook,
Gondolier, to acts of revolutionary violence. The Ostend Mani-
festo resurfaces in Blake and raises the very issues of national sov-
ereignty, economic relations, and racial violence that fired the im-
perial imaginations of its original authors. But as Delany both
implicitly cites the infamous letter and simultaneously yanks its
meanings and implications into a new form that leads to black
revolution against Spanish and American interests in Cuba, he
transforms the manifesto's imagery into a protest against the very
notions of property espoused by the document's original framers.
In Blake, Delany draws attention to and attempts to revise
powerful antebellum ideas. While even Delany in his later years
omitted his only and largely forgotten novel in discussions of his
eventful life, imaginative literature's ability to reconfigure domi-
nant beliefs, and perhaps thereby shake them, must have figured
in his decision to write a novel of impending black revolution.
And again, even though Delany's scant remarks on the novel im-
ply that it was mostly motivated by a desire to earn money that
could finance his trip to scout out Africa's potential as a site for a
black American emigrant colony (Levine 178-79), this dismissive
explanation turns out to reinforce the novel's own logic. Attempt-
ing to manipulate the American marketplace and sell his book
in order to support an African venture that aimed to undermine
slavery by producing high-quality, cheap, African cotton, De-
lany's professed reason for writing fiction sits comfortably along-
side his only novel's plot devices that also aim to reconfigure the
complex antebellum sphere of racial politics and international
commerce.
Notes
This essay was written with the support of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at
the Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities.
1. Blake was partially serialized in 1859 and again in 1861-62 but not published
in book form until 1970. As Levine has pointed out, the 1970 edition, which re-
mains the only in-print version of the novel, unfortunately does not include the
novel's full title: Blake, or the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley,
the Southern United States, and Cuba (Levine 191, 290).
2. On Southern slaveholders' desire to unite American and Caribbean slavery,

see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861
(1973).
3. Along these lines, in his 1852 pamphlet, The Condition, Elevation, Emigra-
tion, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Delany argued that
"freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same position po-
litically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bond-
man occupies in the slave States" (14).
4. My summary of Lemmon v. People is drawn from Finkelman 296-310.
5. Justice Hiram Denio nervously anticipated the extension of slave trading to

the North in his opinion for the majority in Lemmon. He wrote that if Lemmon
was allowed to "claim exemption" from New York's laws "on the ground that she
is a citizen of a State where slavery is allowed, and that our courts are obliged to
respect the title which those laws confer, she may [therefore] retain slaves here
during her pleasure; and, as one of the chief attributes of property is the power
to use it, and to sell or dispose of it, I do not see how she could be debarred of
these rights within our jurisdiction as long as she may choose to exercise them"
(610). Delany brings Denio's anxieties into fictional form when he puts similar
ideas about the right to own and sell slaves in the mouth of Judge Ballard, as the
judge describes his transformation from a mere slave owner to a slave trader: "It
is plain that the right to buy implies the right to hold, also to sell. . . . I have there-
fore determined, not only to buy and hold, but buy and sell also. As I have hereto-
fore been interested for the trade I will become interested in it" (60).
6. O'Conor also, perhaps not surprisingly, put forth a corollary argument in

support of his execrable notions regarding black humanity: "The negro ... has
never attained proficiency in any art or science requiring the employment of high
intellectual capacity" (Lemmon 573-74). O'Conor's claim exemplifies a willful
blindness to the forms of racial apartheid that, in fact, had a large effect on De-
lany's own life. For instance, though Delany was among the first blacks admitted
to Harvard Medical School, in 1850 he was asked to leave due to white students'
objections. Moreover, in 1852, Delany's request to patent an invention for mov-
ing trains across mountainous terrain was denied because he was not considered
a US citizen (Sterling 122-39).
7. Anticipating his plot in Blake, Delany argued in his 1854 pamphlet, The Po-
litical Destiny of the Colored Race, that blacks possess "inherent traits, attributes,
so to speak, and native characteristics, peculiar to our race" (203) that make it
possible for them to thrive in the southern US and Central America while "the
whites in the southern part have decreased in numbers, degenerated in character,
and become mentally and physically enervated and imbecile" (221).
8. The term "self-cloaking mechanism" is Powell's. He uses it to describe the

ideological mystifications that have often undergirded American policy toward
its racial and colonial adventures (351).
9. Armsted's turning a blind eye is literally figured in the wrenching scene where
he, Judge Ballard, and Colonel Franks witness the tormented Jim Crow dancing
of a young slave boy who is compelled by the crack of a whip on his bare skin.
During this scene of torture, "Franks stood looking on with unmoved muscles,"
but "Armsted stood aside whittling a stick ... " (67).
10. Henry Louis Gates defines signifying as a rhetorical maneuver that offers a
"tropological revision or repetition and difference" (88).
11. California was crucial to the Compromise of 1850, and Nebraska figured
centrally in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Engineered by Senator Henry Clay
of Kentucky, the 1850 Compromise attempted to maintain the integrity of the
union by mollifying both anti- and proslavery exponents. Under its terms, Texas
surrendered its claim to vast amounts of southwestern land but was offered $10
million as compensation. The compromise also arranged for the organization of
the New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah territories without mention of
slavery and abolished the slave trade-though not slavery itself-within Wash-
ington, D.C. California was admitted to the union as a free state, but the Fugi-
tive Slave Act was also included to assuage Southern anger since adding a free
state disrupted the congressional balance of power between North and South.
Likewise, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act emerged from sectional conflict over
slavery. The law established Kansas and Nebraska as distinct territories and left
the decision over slavery within them to each state's settlers-what Stephen A.
Douglas, the law's architect, famously termed popular sovereignty. The rush to
settle Kansas and the ensuing violence between anti- and proslavery forces led to
the tragedy of "bleeding Kansas" and the founding of the Republican Party as
an antislavery political organization.
12. Noting the peculiarity of this scene, Sundquist, for example, has postulated
that perhaps Delany intends the storm as an allegory of the international bick-
ering between England, Spain, and the US that sometimes hindered antebellum
slave revolt (201-02). Alternatively, Bruce Harvey extrapolates from this scene to
others in which Blake essentially remains a voyeur at key moments and sugges-
tively argues that Delany's passive "hero likely embodies both wishful thinking
and anxiety about his own agency in transforming race relations" (233). Levine
adds that Delany here may be expressing a worry that revolutionary violence can
easily escape the control of those who would lead it (208).
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Newton Lott. New York: Henry Holt, the Slave Trade. 1840. New York: Ne-
1994. 118-26. gro UP, 1969.

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Martin Delany's "Blake" and the Transnational Politics of Property

Author(s): Jeffory A. Clymer

Martin Delany's picaresque novel, Blake,; or, The Huts of

has identified Blake as "a Pan-African vision of black nationalism

who was also committed to the acquisition of Cuba as a slave

Delany's emphasis on shared "commercial interests" repre-

countless relocations of people. In this instance, Jonathan Lem-

rect influence the case had on Blake, is uncertain. Levine is con-

Even more interesting, perhaps, than O'Conor's discussion of hu-

the context of the 1850s, attempted to counter racial apartheid by

self-interest and power relations that, to be sure, also construct a

While Delany charts the implications that followed from

When Henry leaves Colonel Franks's plantation, he travels

scenes in the novel, Delany delights here in ridiculing ignorant

the United States" (Condition 12-13). While Delany's tract spe-

family's tobacco interests rather than the more widely produced

history of understanding the illicit slave trade as piracy can help

[I]f any citizen of the United States, being of the crew or

both enterprising businessmen and international criminals. The

pendency of a distant Power... " ("Ostend" 261). The ministers

Because Delany recognized Cuba as the linchpin in the ille-

2. On Southern slaveholders' desire to unite American and Caribbean slavery,

4. My summary of Lemmon v. People is drawn from Finkelman 296-310.

5. Justice Hiram Denio nervously anticipated the extension of slave trading to

6. O'Conor also, perhaps not surprisingly, put forth a corollary argument in

8. The term "self-cloaking mechanism" is Powell's. He uses it to describe the

An Act to continue in force "An act to Du Bois, W. E. B. The Suppression of

---. The Political Destiny of theHendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments.

Lemmon v. People. 20 N.Y. 562. N.Y. Powell, Timothy. "Postcolonial The-

Merish, Lori. Sentimental Material- Sterling, Dorothy. The Making of an

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