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Chapter 2 fr a nce s sm it h fost er Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (825–9) Frances E. W. Harper’s professional reputation was first established as an abolitionist lecturer and writer. Her poetry and prose appeared regularly in antislavery publications such as the North Star, the Liberator, the Anti-Slavery Bugle, the Provincial Freeman, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. William Still verifies her prominence in that movement by devoting an entire chapter of his history, The Underground Rail Road (872), to Harper’s life and by including excerpts from about thirty of her letters. Though Frances E. W. Harper is most frequently remembered as an abolitionist , Harper’s interests and her audiences, even before emancipation, were more diverse than this single issue. In recognition of her leadership as a featured writer or contributing editor to the Repository of Religion and Literature and Science and Art, the Anglo-African Magazine, the Christian Recorder, and other African-American periodicals, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (89) deemed Harper “the journalistic mother, so to speak, of many brilliant young women who have entered upon her line of work” (Penn 422). Among those African-American journalists to whom Harper was mentor and friend were Mary Shadd Cary, Ida B. Wells, Victoria Earle, and Kate D. Chapman. Furthermore, as a national officer of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a leader in the women’s suffrage movement, and an ardent pacifist, Frances E. W. Harper shared the podium with luminaries such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances E. Willard and published regularly in journals dedicated to these causes. In short, Frances Harper’s life and letters were inextricably woven with various nineteenth-century social reform movements. For 44 | frances smith foster more than sixty years, she was an international figure with extensive networks among the literati and political leaders. Not only was Frances E. W. Harper a popular writer and a political arbiter, she was also one of the first African-American women to make her living as a wordsmith who published texts intended to make history as well as to recover or to revise it. Thus it is particularly striking that there are few extant letters in which Harper writes about writing. Whether it be in terms of aesthetics and authorial purposes or in terms of the more mundane but certainly relevant business correspondence of a professional author, one finds hardly any letters that speak directly about Harper’s literary experiences or theories. Perhaps even more curious is the fact that in what appears to be the only extant private letter in which Harper wrote specifically about the kinds of literature she espoused, she says, “If our talents are to be recognized, we must write less of issues that are particular and more of feelings that are general. We are blessed with hearts and brains that encompass more than ourselves in our present plight [. . .]. We must look to the future which, God willing, will be better than the present or the past, and delve into the heart of the world” (Redding 39).¹ Since Harper’s writing career was devoted to championing specific causes, this statement seems more than a little odd. When one considers that this letter was addressed to Thomas Hamilton, the editor of the Anglo-African Magazine, which proudly presented itself as published by, for, and about African Americans, it seems even more odd. Moreover, the “present plight” to which Harper referred was the Civil War, a topic that few, if any, nineteenth-century American writers could ignore and a topic upon which Harper focused in two novels, an epic, and countless shorter poems. For a woman who published thousands of words, who inspired and mentored many writers during a professional writing career of more than six decades, the sixty-five words about writing seem meager indeed—until one factors in several historical and social realities. To understand her comments to Hamilton, two words, “extant” and “appears,” need emphasis. “Extant” suggests that what we possess is not necessarily all there was or is. Indeed, evidence is clear that the personal papers of African-American writers available to researchers or the general public are only a small part of the body of materials generated over the past centuries. Put simply, the vast majority of the writings by African Americans before now have been misplaced, hidden, or destroyed. “Appears” is also important because the excerpt from Harper’s letter is a...

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