The Return of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

My title speaks to the contemporary scholarly sense of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s return to the public sphere after her brief marriage to Fenton Harper, which ended when he died in May 1864. Scholars like Margaret Hope Bacon and Frances Smith Foster have documented that return briefly, and I have explored Harper’s marriage and select lectures from 1866 and 1867.¹ However, our account of the author in the mid-1860s remains deeply incomplete: it pays little attention to her lecturing, and it says little about how Harper relaunched her career, reshaped her message, and reconceptualized her public role as a Black woman intellectual, activist, and poet. Drawing on accounts of over fifty public speeches Harper gave between 1864 and early 1866, as well as diverse other sources, this essay chronicles Harper’s (re)insertion of her voice in US oral and print culture with attention to her interpersonal/organizational and print networking and self-promotion, and especially the lectures and writing she shared amid the fast-shifting US thought-scape at the Civil War’s end and Reconstruction’s beginning.²

I am particularly concerned with Harper’s play with conceptions of various publics, including those that Catherine Squires terms “enclave public spheres.”³ Within and beyond the larger formation of reform culture, I am especially interested in Black enclave spaces, as well as politically and/or socially diverse abolitionist, unionist, and/ or Republican spaces, and more “popular” white public spaces like the traditionally defined lyceum culture.⁴ In this work, it is crucial to recognize, as Tom F. Wright asserts, that “the lyceum was a matter as much of print as of performance.”⁵ We also need to think about not only how, per Wright, “the very orality of the lecture form suggested a new intermediary creativity between text and voice,”⁶ but also how writers like Harper wove together oratory, printed poetry, and various other modes.

I thus argue that Harper was not simply fashioning a return; she was reconstructing her public presence even as she was arguing for specific and sweeping ways of reconstructing the nation. She consistently worked to create and expand public spaces for Black women—room for what Derrick Spires might mark as fuller “practices of citizenship”; she hoped, as Carla Peterson recently argued in an immensely important critical intervention, to move conceptions of public and individual sympathy more toward “mutuality and interdependence.”⁷ If we weave these recognitions together with my concept of “militant intersectionality,”⁸ we can conceptualize how Harper sought to fashion and broaden cooperative, egalitarian communities that depended on and fostered real partnership; embraced differences in race, gender, class, and region; and used these differences to help fuel progress at both local and national levels.

Before exploring this return, we should briefly trace Harper’s place in American culture. For much of the latter nineteenth century, diverse African Americans located her at the forefront of Black letters. But while Hallie Quinn Brown’s Homespun Heroines (1926) offered a praise-filled biography of Harper, the general twentieth-century turn in critical sentiment appears in W. E. B. Du Bois’ Crisis obituary, which said that she “was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song; she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading.”⁹ Mired in modernist aesthetic sensibilities, as well as gender bias and the “New Negro” impulse to avoid considering slavery, many assessments of Harper in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century found only historical or ancestral value. V. F. Calverton’s 1929 Anthology of American Negro Literature, for example, offered one Harper poem—compared to seven by Countee Cullen and four each by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes—and generally dismissed the work of “Mrs. Harper” and numerous early Black poets as “hopelessly inept and sentimental” texts that “aspired to the stately” and ended up being purely derivative.¹⁰

Harper’s Black contemporaries would likely have been baffled by such dismissals. William Wells Brown’s 1863 The Black Man called her poetry “soul-stirring.” ¹¹ A Princeton, New Jersey, correspondent for...