Blake; or the Huts of America is a novel by Martin R. Delany that was serially published in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and 1862 (it was not published in complete book form until 1970). Delany was born free in 1812 in Charles Town, Virginia (later West Virginia). Giving a panoramic view of slave life in the nineteenth century, Delany’s novel tells the story of Henry Blake, an escaped slave who travels throughout the southern United States and to Cuba in an effort to plan a large-scale slave insurrection. Written in part as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Blake‘s strong, militant, and revolutionary protagonist offers a counterexample to the seemingly docile Uncle Tom character popularized by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Because the final installments of the novel have been lost, twenty-first-century readers may never know if Blake’s planned revolution is successful; still, the novel offers an important nineteenth-century depiction of slavery and a potential way to end it.
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