represents the democratic aspirations of the society. To constantly measure racial equality with a claim to having once been enslaved – as being less than human perhaps in the eyes of some – retains in the new conception of race after slavery the condition, the possibility, of an enslavement to come. Such an argument suggests that the baseline of the Black experience is always slavery, and not a freedom that is suborned or taken away. This difference in perspective matters today, as we seek a description of how racism thrives in spite of our effort to create conditions of equality socially, economically, and politically.
Imagine instead if a person had always been free, if someone Black in America had never been a slave. Should we then make the story of slavery their definition, rather than accept that for many Black people in the US slavery and freedom were more complicated, requiring a description of racial equality beyond that of asking Whites for justice in the form of allowing Black people to be free? The end of legal slavery occurred concurrently with the argument about what constraints could exist for free Black equality in the society, a conversation centuries old, about the definition of political equality between racial groups in the society. Frances Harper is an important voice in this tradition of exploring the definition of racial equality within the Black community – someone who left a legacy of published work for us to consider.
The kidnapping of free Black people and their sale into slavery caused a furor in the society in the decades leading up to the Civil War not solely because the sale of Black people was thought by many to be morally wrong, but because it suggested that all Black people were potentially slaves, in ways that had not previously been true in the US. This idea of slavery as a natural state of Black life in the US not only is incorrect historically, but also allows for an erroneous description of the racial justice to be achieved today. It is very important to understand the contribution of Frances Harper to how we think of race today, in terms of her being a free Black woman writing during the last two decades of legal slavery, and then for several decades after the Civil War. There was no one else in the period, no other free Black writer or poet, who addressed the problem of both race and gender, and what these ideas meant for the society, with such success. Frances Harper is singular, unique, and I want to suggest her work is central to a consideration of how we should think of race and gender in the US from the 1840s to the 1890s, and therefore also how we describe a critical race and gender politics in the US today.
Frances Harper’s work disturbs a desire to return today to a conversation about what race requires as a supposedly natural condition – the desire to engage in this as a question, rather than to reject its assumptions as fundamentally flawed. It is important to understand how important this counter-argument to slavery was in her lifetime, and how in the 1840s and throughout her life she wrote about the intersectional politics of race and gender as an aspiration of democratic society. Her life and work represents a very different description of racial reconciliation for the society than is often offered when thinking only about the concerns of the White male slave owner, the permission given through a definition of Whiteness for the ownership of human beings, over many generations in the society. That she spent her entire adult life writing, speaking, and campaigning on behalf of racial and gender justice is a fact that should add weight to our assessment of her legacy, and should make us think twice about the current tradition of reducing her contribution to American letters and society in her lifetime to a few short poems and one major novel, Iola Leroy.
Frances Harper in the 1840 and 1850s
If we take the newly rediscovered volume of verse, Forest Leaves, as having been published sometime between 1846 and 1849 (Ortner, 2015), Frances Harper was between 21 and 24 when she published her first volume of verse. She no doubt wrote poetry before this, but in the extant letters from the period there is evidence of some reluctance on the part of publishers to publish the poems. Her childhood education at the Academy and experience as a servant in a household with an extensive library that she was given permission to peruse in her free time, and the exposure to poetry readings and public speeches in the abolitionist social community of which her uncle and aunt were a part, provided the opportunity for Frances Harper to develop her craft. In this, but for the material differences in our lives today from hers, Frances Harper had what many today would think of as those influences necessary to create a poetic muse.
Her uncle William had been at the center of the development of the Abolitionist Movement in Baltimore for decades, and was an active contributor to the publishing of writings in support of the Movement. His house was a frequent location for meetings with other central figures of the growing Abolitionist Movement, such as Willian Lloyd Garrison. One of William’s sons, a cousin of Frances Harper, was also involved in the Abolitionist Movement and a public speaker on this issue. He would later facilitate her introduction to abolitionists in the Northeast (Washington, 2015). But another influence on the life of the young Frances Harper was the work of women writers and poets, and public speakers in the Abolitionist Movement, such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (Washington, 2015, p. 69). Even as a young child, she was brought into contact with the work and persons of women who were able to publicly declare their ideas about slavery, racism, and gender.
This publicity was at odds with the prevailing gender social norms whereby women were expected to be silent in public gatherings where men were present, and not engage in public speaking to an audience comprised of both men and women. This early exposure to women writers, poets, and speakers was definitely important to the young Frances Harper’s sense of what was possible. She would go on to be only one of several Black women to speak regularly as part of the Abolitionist Movement (Peterson, 1995).
African American print culture
It was from Sojourner Truth that Frances Harper saw firsthand the difficulty of making a living as a public speaker. To raise sufficient money for her travels and sustenance while on the speaking circuit, Truth would sell small commemorative items related to herself and her story at her talks. Truth’s image on sale, in the pamphlets, was for everyone present a natural extension of the tradition of printing and public newspapers in the free African American community throughout the Northeast at the time. Instead of ignoring the growth of print culture in the African American community, we should consider how important this must have been for Harper, as an aspiring poet and writer – someone who sought to reach an audience with her written word (Peterson, 1995, pp. 310–12).
The Liberator, a newspaper published first in the 1830s by Garrison, was constantly seeking submissions from African Americans, for example, as was The Colored American. Once Douglass started publishing the newspaper The North Star in 1847, Harper and other aspiring African American writers were given a ready forum in it. Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly, his other two newspaper publications, also published their work (McHenry, 2002, p. 116; Washington, 2015, pp. 61–6). While certainly there was an eager White American readership for this work, there was also an extensive African American audience for these newspapers and for literary magazine content. African American literary societies had been an important mainstay of the free African American community since their inception, and before the founding of the new nation. The newspapers that circulated within the free African American communities emphasized the importance of reading and education as a means of moral and political progress. It was in Freedom’s Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, that African American literary societies and their participants, such as David Walker and Maria Stewart, were able to find a larger audience for their writings. In 1837, The Colored American began publishing work dedicated to the audiences from these literary societies (McHenry, 2002, p. 102).
Always free
It is very important today to understand what the erasure in our collective memory of the presence of a larger, engaged African American reading public prior to the Civil War means for us (McHenry, 2002, p. 137). This erasure serves, in this period, to elevate the struggle for Emancipation and the plight of the slave as a condition of African American life, over the reality of a free Black population that was
