the state could be enslaved if they returned. The law was perceived as an answer to the problems of the growth of the free Black community in Baltimore, of the relationship between the free and the enslaved typified in the personal experience of Frances Harper, and of the appeal of Maryland as a destination for runaways, which heightened tensions between North and South (Fields, 1985). Suddenly, at 28, Harper lost legal access to the state of her birth, and this new status, coupled with the highly publicized kidnapping and sale of a free Black man in the state upon passage of the law, is thought to have radicalized her and emboldened her to write and protest in public for the Abolitionist Movement (Still, 1872, p. 757).
Frances Harper moved to Philadelphia in 1853, and lived at the home of William and Letitia Still, one of the centers for the Movement in Pennsylvania. At this time, she sought to become an active member of the Underground Railroad, but was discouraged by those participating in the Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia – largely, it seems, due to her being a single woman, and the precarity of her own free status because of the new law in Maryland (Parker, 2010, p. 103; Still, 1872, p. 758). She faced the likelihood of being enslaved if she were to assist runaways in Maryland to escape north. Women were also openly discouraged from representing their opinions in public, and only two Black women, of the many engaged in organizing in the Abolitionist Movement, were regular public speakers up to the Civil War. The two were, in fact, Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper.
When we think about this rejection of her application to become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, we should take a step back from this study of her life and think about how, today, we reduce the experiences of Black people in the immediate pre-Civil War period to the problem of slavery. Frances Harper had never been a slave, and so the idea of the new law was perceived by her and other free Blacks as an insult to their own categorical status; even though they had not been described as citizens, they were still, in their own social standing, equal to the Whites around them. The idea of being available to enslavement must have seemed ridiculous in its reduction of social and legal capacity, something beyond intimate understanding, and at the same time an explicit attack on their person.
The rejection of this idea of being a natural slave on a personal level would have propelled most free Blacks to the barricades, so to speak, on behalf of their humanity, alongside many Whites who had, of course, lived alongside free Blacks (Spires, 2019, p. 221). In fact, we should consider the fugitive slave law in this context as a partial catalyst for the collapse of the regime of slavery in the United States. The law thought necessary to safeguard the system of enslavement by slave owners was also perhaps the instrument of its defeat. It created an enormous problem for how race was defined in the society. We should think of the fugitive slave laws as an attempt to change the practice of racial difference – as an extension of a particular dehumanization of Black people that even some of those in the South who were accepting of the slavery must have found problematic.
For someone with the intellectual gifts and creative impulses of Frances Harper, the idea of her being subject to enslavement if she returned to Maryland, where she was born, must have felt like a violation of the very idea of her person and the capacity she had to write and reason. It is important to disabuse ourselves also of the contemporary notion that slavery was a thing of the Southern states and not also present, under different economic conditions than the large-scale plantation economy in the South, in the form of domestic, farm, and factory labor in the North. Frances Harper had grown up in Baltimore with slaves working and living in her neighborhood, and the differences between her social standing and theirs would have been painfully obvious, and politically salient to Frances Harper as an adult. Sojourner Truth, for example, had been a slave in the North.
In 1854, Frances Harper published her second book of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which was an immediate success and gained her considerable attention. In the same year, at the age of 29, Frances Harper gave her first speech, in Massachusetts, and shortly thereafter began lecturing regularly for the cause of Abolition in Maine, despite public hostility expressed by those who felt it was not respectable for women to speak in public (Foster, 1990, pp. 11–12; Logan, 1999, p. 49; Painter, 1996, p. 139).
The Maine anti-slavery women’s organizations were very active, and Frances Harper was their only Black woman public speaker, a fact that must have been important to her own personal development as someone who would later become a central figure in post-Civil War Women’s Rights movements (Logan, 1999, p. 2; Still, 1872). She was also a talented seamstress and so was able to contribute directly to the sewing circles raising money for the Movement (Salerno, 2005, pp. 128–31).
The space of the public in which lectures and political speeches occurred was deemed the province of men, and women were to be granted access only exceptionally. Frances Harper was determined to become a regular public speaker, and she succeeded, but not through the direct intervention of her cousin William Watkins Jr., who was involved in the Abolitionist Movement in the New York area (Washington, 2015, p. 71). She participated in the Movement through the organizational efforts of women. She negotiated her moral stance with her audience as she lectured – as a single woman, later when married, and then as a widow after 1864 – and constantly answered for her erudition, as some accused her of not being Black simply because they lacked experience of Black people with an education (Still, 1872, p. 772; Yee, 1992, pp. 112–14).
Andreá Williams argues that Frances Harper, in her capacity as a single woman for much of her public speaking career, modeled the idea of “single blessedness” (Williams, 2014). Alongside the traditional characterization of single women in public as pernicious and immoral was a social capacity to define the single woman as contributing to the sanctity of marriage, through the single woman’s labor in support of this ideal. As Williams points out, the single woman could also be thought of along a continuum from the “kind Aunt who assists her overwhelmed married sister to the unwed churchgoer who masters fundraising” (Williams, 2014, p. 101). The single woman could in this conceptual frame justify in public their assistance of an anti-slavery cause and organization, in support of the moral probity that this political activism represented; they had found a community that, from this perspective, could make positive use of their single status (Williams, 2014, p. 113). As Williams points out, the support that Frances Harper provided for the widow of John Brown after Harpers Ferry falls within this category of the single woman providing assistance to support marriage, where her status as single allows her to aid the widow unconditionally (Still, 1872, p. 763; Williams, 2014, p. 111).
This narrow capacity for social acceptance in public did not obviate the social force of the description of the immorality of single women speaking in public, and the historical record demonstrates that Frances Harper experienced public criticism for her status, as did all single women who were public speakers in the Movement (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 208). In her letters from the early period of her public speaking, we get a sense of how difficult it must have been to be a single Black woman abolitionist speaker in Maine, sleeping in houses owned by Whites, and traveling with White women (Still, 1872).
Reports suggest, however, that Harper was quickly able to become a poised, organized, and charismatic speaker, forthright and learned in her delivery (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 207). The evidence of this that we have today is in the praise lauded upon her speeches in letters and published newspaper accounts, as well as the record of the speeches themselves in later decades at national conferences and conventions (Still, 1872, pp. 775–6, 779–80; Yee, 1992, pp. 117, 119). That Frances Harper often spoke extemporaneously and responded to her audience with alacrity and respect, entertaining them as well as providing listeners with unconventional thoughts and ideas, made the announcements of her impending lectures something of a local occasion, after her first years in the field. She was paid very little, if anything, for these lectures, which meant that she needed to offer something to her audience that incentivized them to purchase the poetry books that she would sell alongside each event. Often, she would recite her poetry as a part of her lecture.
That Harper sold thousands of copies of the book Poems in this fashion should, by today’s economic calculations, earn our respect for her speaking talent. Her talks were sufficiently valuable for her also to be at the
