“Nature Marked Him for Combat”: Gender and Racial Politics in Frances Rollin’s Post-Civil War Biography of Martin Delany

In “Nature Marked Him for Combat,” I address the politics of Reconstruction in the context of Frances Rollin’s 1868 biography of black nationalist, Martin Delany. In 1866, after having returned to her South Carolina home from exile, Rollin booked passage on a steamer headed from Charleston to Beaufort. But after she was denied her spot in the first-class cabin on the U.S. navy transport, she sued for antiblack discrimination. Brought south in his capacity as Major of the 104^th U.S. Colored Troops, famed abolitionist and thinker Martin Delany provided Rollin counsel in her fight for racial equality. Once Delaney learned of Rollin’s interest in writing, he persuaded her to compose his biography, a biography intended to offer an affirming image of black manhood. Much as literary scholar John Ernest and historian Stephen Hall have shown in antebellum black intellectual life, I will argue that Rollin resorted to the political and intellectual craft of historical writing in The Life and Public Services of Martin Delany (1868) to combat supposedly innate racial traits associated with black man. White supremacists intended to marginalize and discredit African American men as well as women with such racial concepts, and Rollin, feeling empowered by Delany’s race pride along with her long-standing hostility to racial violence, converted the history of black Civil War service into an affirmation of black manhood. Rollin averred that black soldiers, exemplified by Delany, helped save the Union, affirming black humanity and making African American men fit for the citizenship.