Martin Dalany

This document is a speech delivered on 23 July 1865 by Martin Delany, who was an abolishionist and a Black leading American officer in the US army during the Civil War, and was employed the same year he made this speech by the Freedmen's bureau, a federal agency. He addressed to all the people who were listening to him in a church in St Helena Island, freed slaves, in order to give them advises and to help them starting their new life. Indeed, all the slaves were declared free and citizens of the United States after the end of the Civil War, in April 1865. Delany wants the slaves to become really free, able to live by their own. Therefore, in a first part, I will analize what Delany advises the salves to do in order to begin their new life, and then in a second part what he says about the new freedom of the Blacks, and how he see them. Finally, in a third part, we will see the failures of this freedom, and what Delany thinks they should do to really become free.

The main part of Dalany's speech is a way to give advises to the Blacks. He wants them to become land owners, to « grow vegetables » line 15, not for their masters, who were taken advantage of slaves' work to win « thousands and thousands » of dollars (l.5-6), but for themselves and for their families. The idea, that slaves can make benefits or profits is new : before they were forced to work for their master, in horrible working and living conditions, and not owing anything. Furthermore, Blacks now had the right buying lands and forming their own families « for you and your families » line 15. They can also built communities, with churches, schools, … That another way to make the Blacks equal to the Whites.

In 1865 General Serman promised « forty acres and a mule » to the Blacks : lands, that they could cultivate. The Governement is counting on them to become « Producers of the country » by being famers and land owners, it considers them as a powerful help. Here Delany quotes tobacco, cotton, by exemple, which are things they have already been cultivating when they were slaves. The Governement has been helping them to become free, and now consider them as his citizens, and as so, they also become representants of the country. They are the work force in the South.

The Freedmen's bureau was a federal agency that the Congress created after the Black Codes passed in the South, which forbidded Blacks to own farms and to have a proper job. It's a Federal Agency of the army sent in the South in order to protect people from the Southerners and to help the former slaves and give them advices. Here, Delany is a representant of the Freedmen's Bureau.

During the Civil War, in 1863, the Governement declared the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a turning point of the war declaring that abolishinism of slavery was a new goal in the Great War. It is «  a war policy » (l.1). President Lincoln declared that all slaves should be free men, the North being in favour of abolishion. It attracted many Blacks to provide military informations during the Civil War opposing the North and the South of the United State.

But the common prejudice before the Civil War and more particulary in the South, was to think that Blacks were like animals, that they were not even human. Here Delany calls them « men and women » in his speech. He sees

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