uncle William was at the center of the debate between anti-slavery activists, between colonization and becoming a new category of former slave and a free Black community (Sinha, 2016a; Washington, 2015, pp. 63–7). What should the larger goal of a necessary emancipation be in the context of a heightened public conversation about the Abolition of slavery, a conversation that was also active in Europe at the time?
By the 1840s and 1850s, the Abolitionist Movement was represented by several journals and regularly published newspapers, public-speaker fora in cities across the Northeast, and discussions in the living rooms and salons of the very civil society that had birthed the nation some 80 years earlier (Sinha, 2016a). It was in this same period that efforts toward establishing an American university and college system of higher education were accelerating, and as a result the development of social spaces for learning about, discussing, and organizing around specific concerns that were both local and national in focus was an acceptable activity for many in the society. The Black community as a political force within this public – what today is sometimes referred to as a new counter-public – was well established by the 1840s and 1850s, with the first Black student graduating from Oberlin College in 1844. That Frances Harper attended a local academy in the 1830s can be attributed to the fact that her uncle had helped found the institution, as academies and schools were not yet regularly accessible to young Black women (Baumgartner, 2019).
For reasons not clear to historical researchers, Frances Harper was not provided the support by her family expected by a young Black woman in a middle-class household such as the Watkinses’. At 13, she was forced to make her living as a servant for a White family in town, which was not something that would be expected of a child in a Black middle-class home. While the Watkinses had many children of their own, their income and social status were sufficient to have maintained Frances Harper at home throughout her schooling years (Washington, 2015, p. 70). In her later writing, Frances Harper does not speak glowingly of her childhood, and in fact describes those years as ones lacking in the affection and love that a mother would have provided. Something to remark on in this context is that it is unusual that someone as prolific as Frances Harper did not pen an autobiography. If we think of the slave autobiographies written by those who she worked alongside in the period leading up to the Civil War, hers would be a remarkable and expected document for us today from the pen of a free Black woman. That such a text does not exist is perhaps a testament to the pain and emotional difficulties that Frances Harper may have experienced as a young girl. As several researchers have opined, there is much to suggest that her childhood was fraught and wanting in affection (Foster, 1990; Still, 1872; Washington, 2015). At the same time, this exposure to service work as a young teenager must have been formative and important to her own intellectual development. It also meant she was outside what otherwise would have been a very restrictive Black middle-class household.
There is no doubt this relative freedom, no matter how arduous in its requirements, allowed Harper access to the gendered experiences of African Americans who were of a different social class than her own family. In the household where she worked, she was granted permission to take her service breaks in the White family’s extensive library, an opportunity that she was encouraged by her employer to take advantage of. From the perspective of the contemporary reader, the experience with differences of class and social station, racial inequality, and the gender politics to which the young Frances Harper was exposed both at home, in Academy classes, and in her work as a servant provided the environment expected of someone who would later achieve the incredible public and literary success she would acquire in her lifetime. What was missing as a young child was only a commitment – the personal conviction to contribute to specific political goals in her lifetime. This she would acquire in the 1840s and 1850s, as events in the larger society defined the opportunities available to her as a teacher and poet. Her first publication, Forest Leaves, shows little evidence of the political journey that Frances Harper would undertake in later decades, but also should warn readers against assuming that her poetry in later decades arose solely as a function of a description of political activism. Frances Harper was a poet before she became active as a public speaker, and so I think we should consider Frances Harper as a poet who found her muse in the social and political events of her time. That she was also a writer of prose, an important nationally recognized activist, and a phenomenal and famous public speaker reveals the tremendous force of intellect and will she was to carry throughout her life.
The problem of her work for the contemporary reader is that Frances Harper in fact developed what would be considered at the time – and today – four very successful careers simultaneously. If we acknowledge this fact, we must concede that Frances Harper was in her day one of the most important figures of the last half of the nineteenth century. Without taking away from the perception we have of the contributions of, for example, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells, or Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Frances Harper produced a variety of work, and was so important to the many political events of the time that, today, we should recognize how her ideas and presence gave to the society something both exceptional and enduring. She should be a household name for us, and that she isn’t represents a tremendous loss.
That Frances Harper was able to publish Forest Leaves in the mid to late 1840s is an accomplishment not to be ignored, as she did not have the expectation of publicity, and the vocation of the poet affirmed, beyond her immediate circle of friends and family. For a Black person to publish poetry was still not a common occurrence, and Black women were not encouraged to publish by a public that discouraged their participation in social spaces where organizational activities sought a hearing. There exists no evidence of support for her poetic ambitions as a Black woman from within Frances Harper’s family, and, as Washington points out, one of the most important abolitionist journals of the period, The Colored American, in 1838 had published an editorial critical of Black women engaging in public speaking and protests on behalf of the goals of the Movement (Washington, 2015, p. 69). What we do not have from the period is a description of her friends, her personal interlocutors, and researchers instead are reduced to analyzing the early volume of poetry for clues as to her intimate and personal life (Ortner, 2015). Forest Leaves contains poems centered on themes of personal conviction, intimacy, and loss, in addition to being a study of the place that religious faith should hold in the thoughts of her audience.
The combination of independence and education evident in the childhood of Frances Harper led to her being hired as a faculty member in 1850 at Union Seminary in Ohio, which later provided the institutional foundation for Wilberforce College. Hired to teach sewing, Harper was the first woman faculty member at the Seminary. She was 25 years old. If we consider this in the context of that time period, rather than of our own time in which many Black people claim firsts, in sports, in the media, and in politics, we can imagine how difficult and precocious it must have been to seek and gain employment at the Seminary. This was a novel and important achievement, when the idea of the Black exception proving the rule of racial equality as it does today was not yet discovered. She was, instead, someone who refused to accept the limitations placed upon her, not as a matter of freedom, but as a statement of equality. There is ample evidence in her later writings that her professional ambition was always described in both gendered and racial terms, just as she was always aware of the class politics that circumscribed her choices.
Harper left Ohio in 1852, and instead moved to Little York, Pennsylvania, and began teaching young children. From her letters, it is clear that she soon became disenchanted with the job. It is hard to reconcile her disenchantment with teaching in this instance with her enthusiasm for teaching young children in the South some 15 years later, immediately after the Civil War, unless we think about the fact that the early position offered no obvious outlet for her personal ambitions to address the larger issues of injustice in the society. There is no one personal event that obviously defined the sense of political commitment for Frances Harper, with the exception of her exposure to the conditions in which people lived around her, and her access to those in the Abolitionist Movement at the time. However, there is one political event that many researchers attribute as the turning point in Harper’s professional direction (Still, 1872, p. 758).
In 1853, Maryland passed its fugitive slave law, which stated that
