Mark Brunswick: “The Delaware Way And The Black Community In Wilmington, Ctd.”

Editor’s Note: We are beyond thrilled that Mark Brunswick will soon be joining us as a regular contributor to Delaware Liberal.  There are precious few voices with Mark’s knowledge and sagacity in the entire State.  He’ll even have his own byline and everything!  Until he’s firmly situated on our WordPress app, we’ll post his articles for him.  Here, Mark continues his historical survey of the interaction between The Delaware Way and Delaware’s Black community:

More from Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1924 essay, ‘Delaware: A Jewel of Inconsistencies.’

“The Underground Railway flourished in Delaware, side by side with the most infamous slave running syndicate in the country, headed by Patty Cannon of nefarious memory…Slaves passing through on their way to freedom, slaves slipping over the Maryland border, from the Chesapeake, only a few miles away; freedmen, traveling through the state on legitimate business; freedmen going about their own affairs from one part of the state to another, were all grist for Patty Cannon’s mill. Frederick Douglass tells us, in his autobiography, that he did not breathe freely until he had passed through Delaware when making his dash for freedom.”

“Delaware is a state of anomalies, of political and social contradictions. We have noted its strange attitude in the Civil War, fighting for the Union Cause and rejecting the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. It was Delaware, by the way, which held up the ratification of the suffrage amendment until it seemed as if the whole cause would be lost—until Tennessee came to the rescue and was the needed thirty-sixth state before the year was out.”

Delaware did have an interesting role in the Civil War. Not in rebellion against the Union, social practices remained largely intact. In 1862, Delaware, with fewer than 3,000 slaves, rejected the federal proposal of ‘graduated emancipation’ to purchase the freedom of slaves with federal funds. We proudly and justifiably hold up the work of Thomas Garrett and the Underground Railway but don’t talk so much about the infamous Patty Cannon and the industry of slave catching. Roger Taney, the Supreme Court Justice who authored the Dred Scott decision, was also on the district court for Delaware.

The denial of the ‘Freedom Amendments’ until 1901 means that economic and social conditions of slavery remained unchallenged alongside allusions to equality. Juneteenth did not arrive until 1901. In the meantime, the state constitution, codifying many of the practices which are the focus of justice system reform today, was rewritten in 1897. It also seems that the state did not embrace full political rights for women until after the very last moment.

In my final post on how the Black community developed in The Delaware Way, I will be exploring Dunbar-Nelson’s assessment of the Black political environment.