public-speaking profession in the country, sharing the stage with everyone from Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony to Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and conducting sometimes two lectures a day, several days a week, for decades. She was a rare individual as a speaker, but also someone who did not trade on her own exceptionality by accepting social advancement and acceptance. For Frances Harper, what mattered was not her own person, but what she could do for other Black people. This perspective on the nature of her own contributions to the causes of her day held true throughout her life.
It is this profession of speaking on behalf of the anti-slavery cause that provided the impetus for the collection of her poetry in this period of her life, determining the type of sentimental poetry that she produced, so that it would be legible to, and meet the needs of, those without an extensive education beyond the capacity to read the Bible. These requirements defined its published form as well, in small inexpensive books that people could carry away from the lectures.
In what would today be considered chapbooks, the audience could enjoy the poems in the privacy of their own homes, and consider the ideas of which she would speak publicly. These small books contained poems on the subjects dear to those to whom the Abolitionist Movement sought to appeal, but also addressed the problem posed by the conditions whereby gender, race, and class intersected within the lives of everyone in the society. Frances Harper’s poetry in the 1854 Poems, and later work in the period before the Civil War, was drawn from the experiences she had with self-emancipated refugees, the needs of the people she encountered in her travels and on the lecture circuit, as well as her personal knowledge of events such as the protests at the recapture of the former slave Burns in Boston in 1854, the death of Nat Turner, and the many examples of militancy by abolitionists in the 1850s leading up to the Civil War.
Because of the distance with which many think of racial politics in their daily lives, and the limits to which we allow poetry on this subject to impact us today, it is difficult to understand how powerful these books of poems and her recitations must have been for her audience. An audience without access to social media and the steady stream of video information with which we are constantly inundated would have been enthralled by the charisma and confidence she displayed. They would have welcomed the opportunity to listen to her readings and lectures.
That Harper was also usually accompanied by other lecturers, and the speaker events were advertised through the auspices of a well-known anti-slavery society, meant that there was usually a large public in attendance, as the issue of slavery was considered one of great controversy in the 1850s. We should also consider that there were few universities to serve as centers for public conversation about controversial topics or specific ideas, at the time. These lectures were held in meeting halls, churches, and public gathering places. In this historical sense, we should think, then, of Frances Harper as participating in a quintessential American democratic public politics, as the speaker in the town square and church hall.
Frances Harper describes her first successes as a public speaker thus:
Last night I lectured in a White church in Providence. Mr. Gardener was present, and made the estimate of about six hundred persons. Never, perhaps, was a speaker young, or old, favored with a more attentive audience … My maiden lecture was Monday night in New Bedford, in the Elevation and Education of our People. Perhaps as intellectual a place as any I was ever at of its size.
(Still, 1872, p. 758)
A month after this occurred, Frances Harper was employed by the State Anti-Slavery Society of Maine as a regular lecturer, giving scheduled talks three times a week (p. 759). In 1853, the narrative Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup had been published, and after reading it Frances Harper began advocating for the Free Products or Free Labor boycott movement, whereby those in the North should refuse to purchase goods made in the South by slave labor. This movement was more honored in the breech, and was never successful as an economic boycott (Gordon, 1997, p. 47; Still, 1872, p. 760).
By 1856, Frances Harper had left Maine and was lecturing regularly throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts to great acclaim. As an agent for the Western Anti-Slavery Society, Frances Harper gave speeches in Kansas and Nebraska. After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 violated the 1850 Missouri Compromise to not permit slavery in new territories, the Movement realized that slavery as an institution would continue to grow in importance in the nation. Thus, fiery and popular speakers such as Frances Harper were sent to agitate for the anti-slavery cause. She toured Canada in this period as well (Washington, 2015, p. 77). She did this for the next three years, while also writing poetry and prose. This was when she would have traveled with Sojourner Truth, selling her books of poetry alongside the copies of the narrative and images of Truth, to support their labor.
There is no evidence that Frances Harper acted personally as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, but she donated financial support and her own time to assist those who did. At the same time, we can say today, with what we now know about the Railroad, that we wouldn’t expect her activities if she had been a conductor to become public or the activity of a conductor to become known unless, as in the case of Harriet Tubman, the person was a former slave risking recapture by assisting those still enslaved.
When Margaret Garner was captured in 1856 in Ohio, after killing her daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery, Frances Harper was deeply affected. She writes in a letter to William Still, “Ohio, with her Bibles and churches, her baptisms and prayers, had not one temple so dedicated to human rights, one altar so consecrated to human liberty, that trampled upon and down trodden innocence knew that it could find protection for a night, or shelter for a day” (Still, 1872, p. 764). Frances Harper also wrote a poem published in 1857 about the ordeal: “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio” (Graham, 1988, pp. 28–30).
The 1850s was a time when the fugitive slave laws were testing the accommodation that the North had made with the slave South in response to the Missouri Compromise of 1850. As a free Black woman, Frances Harper had to motivate her audience with the idea that she faced the legal threat of enslavement if she were to return to Maryland. This was a different approach than that of the former slave testifying to the horrors of their captivity. Instead, Frances Harper spoke to the audience’s capacity to imagine how someone like her could be thought of as enslaved. Erudite, poised, socially capable, and genteel, Frances Harper the poet stood before her largely White audiences and asked the question of how Black people could be thought of as naturally, instead of capriciously and immorally, enslaved by others. This was not a statement of racial difference from Whites first, but rather a question of what the audience thought being Black should require of the nation. What was the category of the human to which race should apply? Would they countenance the reduction of her status to that of a slave because of the economic needs of the slavers, or respond to her poetic genius, her ability to articulate many of the same personal ambitions and desires as her audience, regarding the meaning of freedom and faith?
Accepting the injustice of the fugitive slave laws did not require that a White person admit to social equality with Frances Harper, but rather that the audience accept that a shared description of racial difference did not encompass the necessity of slavery. In her person, Frances Harper was advocating for political equality, the idea that, once free, a Black person was considered a person with certain inalienable rights due from the government, and with rights with regard to the desires of all other persons, even if these were White. In this sense, the social mores against women speaking in public must have emphasized and focused her message, rather than detracted from its impact.
Harper would have been perceived as courageous and unusual, representing as a Black woman how a Black person who had never been a slave could be thought of as someone with rights that all should respect. But public speaking in this way by Frances Harper must have required enormous courage and fortitude – the crowds were often not respectful or polite, and it was sometimes dangerous (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 208; Washington, 2015, p. 72). What called her to lecture? Since we have little direct autobiographical information about
