"Words for the Hour": A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the most popular and highly respected African American poet before Paul Laurence Dunbar; in fact, Harper’s dialect poems characterizing the speech and attitudes of former slaves helped to pave the way for his later success. Probably born on September , , in Baltimore to free parents, Frances Watkins was raised by an aunt. There is no record of the names of either parent or of the aunt who took her in when she was three. At the age of thirteen, she left school to take on paid domestic and child care work. At the age of fourteen, however, Harper published her first essay. At the age of twenty, in , she reputedly published a volume of poems and essays called Forest Leaves. This is a remarkable achievement for a young black woman having to support herself through domestic work; no copies of this publication survive. In , Harper moved to Ohio and taught sewing and embroidery briefly as the first female teacher at Union Seminary. This was the first of a number of relatively short-lived positions that kept her moving around the country. She taught in New York, returned to Philadelphia, then moved to New England, taking employment with the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a traveling lecturer. A radical abolitionist, Harper both grounded her remarks broadly in Christian moral philosophy and urged her listeners to political action. She was extremely successful as a lecturer, owing to both her great oratorical skill and eloquent writing. During this same period, Harper published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (), which was reprinted several times before the war and had sold ten thousand copies by . In that year she returned to Philadelphia, continuing her lecturing for the Philadelphia Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. In , Frances Watkins married the widower Fenton Harper, and together they purchased a farm in Ohio, where they lived until his death in . Deeply in debt, Harper moved her daughter and three stepchildren to New England to rejoin the lecture circuit for the remainder of the Civil War. After the war, Harper turned her attention to the project of reconstruction and aiding newly freed slaves, lecturing throughout the South to a wide variety of audiences, black and white. By the time of her death, Harper was among the best-known and most widely respected African Americans for her work in several social and political movements —abolition, temperance, black and women’s suffrage, women’s rights,  African American education, and racial justice. An activist as well as a writer throughout her life, she never stopped publishing essays and poems and in the later decades of her life also wrote novels. Iola Leroy () was the first novel by an African American to deal directly with the Civil War and Reconstruction and remains the work by which Harper is best known today. She is almost equally famous, however, for her “Aunt Chloe” series of poems, published in Sketches of Southern Life (). These poems similarly present a story of enslavement, Civil War, and emancipation, but here through the single distinctive voice of a clearsighted and uneducated woman. In total, Harper published at least nine volumes of poetry. After having been at the forefront of most major reform movements of the nineteenth century, Frances E. W. Harper died of heart failure in Philadelphia in . She was celebrated at her death for her poetry, stories, and fiction and for her life of service to reform. The Slave Mother1 Heard you that shriek? It rose So wildly on the air, It seemed as if a burden’d heart Was breaking in despair. Saw you those hands so sadly clasped— The bowed and feeble head— The shuddering of that fragile form— That look of grief and dread? Saw you the sad, imploring eye? Its every glance was pain, As if a storm of agony Were sweeping through the brain. She is a mother, pale with fear, Her boy clings to her side,  C  V  C W P . Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, . Most of Harper’s poems were published first in periodicals , but records of first publication are difficult to find; we have depended for this information and for historical context on Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day:A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, ) and on Paula Bernat Bennett, NineteenthCentury American Women Poets. All poems reprinted here are cited from A Brighter Coming Day. [18.191.102.112] Project MUSE (2024-04...