engaged in the emancipation of their brethren in bondage. And it makes it too easy to suggest that education and reading have not always been an element of African American life. It allows us to think, therefore, that the problem of race today is simply that suggested by Booker T. Washington toward the end of Harper’s life at the turn of the nineteenth century, to cultivate well-meaning charitable White interests to advance the education of the race. It is not a coincidence that the two literary Black women figures who were well known prior to the Civil War, Maria Stewart and Frances Harper, have had their contribution to our development of ideas about race and society eclipsed by the images of Black women who could not write, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman (Connor, 1994, pp. 74–5; Painter, 1996).
This traditional narrative of erasure truncates the true relationship between Black people and slavery in the US, ignoring that the nation always also contained a free population and that the idea of enslavement is therefore artificial and wrong. This narrative was only true for those seeking to propagate a politics of racial subordination that seeks to reconcile the fact of slavery historically with the need to claim that Black people are always unequal. We can see the development of this racist polemics in how Harper responded to the history of the aftermath of the Civil War in her book Iola Leroy, published in 1892.
Prior to the Civil War, however, Black people had already achieved equality in their literary pursuits – if not materially – with Whites, alongside the presence of slaves in the society. Frances Harper, and all other free African Americans in the society in the 1840 and 1850s, were well acquainted with the importance of literacy and print culture. Periodicals and newspapers formed an important part of the sense of community, as these allowed for news, public debates, and literary works published by Black people to be available to the larger Black population (Peterson, 1995, p. 310).
In the 1850s, the newspapers the Christian Recorder and the Weekly Anglo-African were published, and magazines dedicated to African American literary works began to be published: the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art and the Anglo-African Magazine. It was in the first issue of the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 that Frances Harper began serializing her short story “The Two Offers,” and Martin Delany began serializing his novel Blake; or, the Huts of America (McHenry, 2002, p. 131). And the Christian Recorder was where Frances Harper would publish three novels serially from 1868 to 1888, in addition to the short piece Fancy Sketches (Peterson, 1995, pp. 307–8; Robbins, 2004, p. 179).
In the 1840s and 1850s, when Frances Harper was beginning to find her poetic and literary voice, there was a public ready for her, an audience of African Americans and White Americans willing to carry around her small books and portable newspapers and magazines for further distribution. There was a public that would meet in salons and dining rooms, in literary circles, and read and discuss her poems. It was to this public that Frances Harper became visible in her early twenties with her first book of poetry Forest Leaves, and it is this that partially explains the phenomenal publishing success of her book Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854.
This book of poems would go on to be reprinted 5 times over the next 17 years, and over 10,000 copies were printed. As Michael Bennett points out when comparing the popularity, and therefore public importance, of Frances Harper to that of Walt Whitman at the time, fewer than 100 copies of Leaves of Grass were sold when it was published in 1855. There was no interest in Whitman reading his poetry in public akin to that for Harper. She was, in contrast to Whitman, “the poet of democracy” (Bennett, 2005, p. 48).
In the 1850s, Frances Harper was considered an important poet in the society – one whose poems spoke to the immediate social and political concerns of the population. By the time of the publication of “The Two Offers,” the first published short story by an African American woman, Frances Harper was a well-known and important literary figure, not only in African American society, but in abolitionist circles and the White literate public. By the late 1850s, Frances Harper was a very popular public speaker, and sold her books of poetry to successfully support herself, as Sojourner Truth did with her images.
The question we have to ask ourselves today is how committed we are to the idea of a description of Black women as available to caricature and stereotype, as unequal partners in the democratic polity, meaning that we resist understanding the place of Frances Harper and other Black literary women in developing a response to the challenges of race in the society (Harris, 1997, p. 93). By the 1850s, Frances Harper had begun to establish a literary reputation, not as a former slave but as a quintessential American poet, someone whose writing addressed the major fault lines that existed in the fledgling democratic society. As someone who had always been free, Harper could not be looked upon by White Americans with that particular mix of charity and condescension, the disdain due to having been perceived as less than or differently human, that was reserved for the former slave.
That Frances Harper became a poet and writer, a public speaker, a national organizer should be understood for what it represents for us today, in our perspective on the history of race in America. It is not slavery that defines Black life today, but the need to equate Black people with slavery, with a capacity to be enslaved, unlike White people. Eschewing the idea of slavery as the description of a possible Black life, Frances Harper did not see herself as categorically less than human.
This perspective should not immediately be contrasted with a description that obviates or erases the terrors of slavery, which remained the most important social and political problem in US society in the 1840s and 1850s. Instead, a consideration of Frances Harper’s life should disturb the equation we have today of racial uplift with the convergence of White largesse and moral clarity that we often use to explain Black life after the prohibition of slavery. Not all Black people required an education by Whites in the obligations of citizenship and equality, and White people in the 1840s and 1850s understood this, if they were not too prejudiced to even entertain the fact of a free Black reading and literary public.
A private life
The Baltimore where Frances Harper was raised in the 1840s was rife with racial tensions, and the economy was growing rapidly due to the trade in cotton and industrialization (Fields, 1985). This meant that ideas about racial equality, and ideas of economic and political development that were of importance elsewhere in the country, were of great interest locally. The Abolitionist Movement had been gathering more adherents throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s with increased publicity, and William Lloyd Garrison and others were frequent visitors to Baltimore. The Movement as a political and therefore public force, in newspapers and magazines, in lectures and speeches, was an established part of Baltimore public culture. Frederick Douglass, who had been enslaved in Maryland, published his first autobiography in 1845, and became a celebrity public presence amongst those in the Movement. He was only seven years older than Frances Harper, and therefore a social contemporary, unlike Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797.
Frances Harper, because of her family’s involvement in the Movement, would have had contact with both noted Black abolitionists by the 1840s. She would work extensively with both in the decades to come. Frances Harper would also come to work with Harriet Tubman from the 1850s, from whom she was only three years apart in age. It is important to give readers a sense of the activist environment that surrounded Frances Harper in her teen years and twenties, as she began to form her ambition for a vocation beyond that traditionally available to her as servant and housewife.
I want the reader to resist the compression of generations, particularly when considering the life of someone such as Frances Harper, whose work reflected the different political forces at work in different decades. It does matter that, when Frances Harper was a young child, the organization of anti-slavery efforts in Boston led to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal and then Maria Stewart’s writings. It matters that decades of Black women’s efforts to organize in literary circles and social groups to address the problem of slavery had already become a factor in the definition of free Black life in the North (Jeffrey, 1998,
