vision of intersectional political responsibility is remarkable and singular. She clearly represented for attendees these very ideas of a conjoined, collective argument for rights for Black people and women in her own person, and was aware of the discursive arguments required to bring this political awareness to her audience. Invoking Harriet Tubman as a figurative Moses for the nation in her speech merged the two competing ideas of freedom and slavery in the form of a Black woman working on behalf of an idea of rights for everyone in the nation. Very shortly after this speech, the idea of a unity of purpose between White women and Black people would collapse in the face of the development of the Black codes and Jim Crow. With this went also the acceptance of a more capacious vision of racial and gender equality, for which Frances Harper was the foremost advocate in print in the decades after the War.
In 1869, Frances Harper published the book of poems Moses: A Story of the Nile, and she serialized her first novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice, in the Christian Recorder. She had been traveling across the Northeast and in the South, teaching and lecturing in the years since the end of the War, and her health was failing because of the rigors of the schedule she set herself (Still, 1872). It must have been a very physically demanding and precarious social experience to travel in the war-torn South at the time. Both published works engage directly with the theme of how to develop gender and racial equality in the society, and reflect Harper’s commitment to the idea of rights and obligations for Black people in this new society.
As a consequence, in part, of this physical debilitation, in 1871, at the age of 46, Frances Harper was back in Philadelphia, where she settled, buying a house for herself and Mary. There she worked as Assistant Superintendent of the YMCA, and continued to write essays, fiction, and poetry. At this time, she also began working for the Temperance Movement.
Like many of her contemporary poets, Harper reissued published works with amendments and new material. In her lifetime, there were at least 20 editions of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, and 10 other extant volumes of poetry, her 4 novels, numerous essays, speeches, and letters were published. Harper was a poet and writer who, at 46, had already accomplished as much as most in their entire careers. She was a public figure, someone who was immersed in the work of national organizations.
Frances Harper belonged to a small set of women who regularly wrote and spoke in public, but was the only Black woman among them to brave the public organizational arena in addition to writing. Because Harper was an activist writer and poet, much of her written work involved experiences that occurred as a result of those movements and organizations of which she was a part. For her, the concerns of her art always existed alongside her concern for the place of the writer and poet in defining the political ideas that determine how people should live together.
In 1871, Harper published Poems, and then, in 1872, she published what many consider her most important volume of poetry, Sketches of Southern Life (Fisher, 2008, p. 57; Graham, 1988, p. xliv). Taken together, Moses and Sketches represent an important contribution to the African American poetry canon, a detailed and excellent analysis of which was produced by Melba Joyce Boyd (1994) in her book Discarded Legacies (Graham, 1988, p. xli). Frances Harper continued to publish poetry in the decades that followed, particularly – but not exclusively – addressing the themes of individual morality, gender, race, and temperance. She wrote the newspaper column “Fancy Sketches” from 1873 to 1874, which could be considered a short second novel, and serialized the novel Sowing and Reaping in the Christian Recorder from 1876 to 1877.
The gaps between the novels are filled with organizational activity, essays, and speeches, but the work that Frances Harper was engaged in after the Civil War was largely obscured by the social transformation wrought by the reconsolidation of White authority and new laws requiring Black subordination. The concepts of political rights and equality for Black people that Frances Harper had championed for two decades before the War had, by the 1870s, proven ephemeral and elusive. Her writing and poems represented a literary call to a collective counter-authority to resist the rise of a new restrictive White South after the War, which was taken up in the 1890s by a new generation of Black writers and poets who could depend on the publishing traditions and literary networks that she and others had developed in the decades after the War (Gordon, 1997, p. 54).
After 1871, Frances Harper’s activism was defined by combining the disparate strands of African American educational and social development, the Suffragist Movement, and the Temperance Movement into a theme of racial uplift for Black people (Terborg-Penn, 1998, p. 67). This was a more complicated field to survey for her and her audience than Abolitionism, and while her popularity never waned during her lifetime, the biographer William Still stopped his discussion of her life after the early 1870s.
In this period, Harper authored 3 novels, at least 40 poems, and numerous essays and letters. But she was also central to the development of the Temperance and Suffrage movements, participating in local, state, and national organizational efforts. In 1872, it would still be 20 years before Iola Leroy was published, which was one of the most popular novels of the latter part of the nineteenth century. What occurred during that time to dampen our interest today in that period of her life?
The 1870s and 1880s, like the more recent 1980s and 1990s, were periods of political reconsolidation and conflict, after major shifts in the social institutions that described racial difference. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, in a similar way to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Acts of 1965, transformed how people could bring their interest in racial inequality to bear on their social activity. Prohibiting slavery, making all Black people citizens, and granting all men 21 years and older the right to vote transformed the organizations that had formed around these issues before and during the Civil War (Dudden, 2011, pp. 162–3).
It seems too easy to make the stark claim that Black men did not fulfill their promise to Black women when, after being granted the vote, they refused to advocate vociferously for the rights of women. And yet, when we read Frances Harper’s novels and poetry of the period after 1869, there is a missing element throughout – the widespread organization of Black men on behalf of women’s rights. Even though many Black men, such as Frederick Douglass, did argue in conferences and in meetings about the importance of Black women to their cause of democracy in the society, the failure of the immediate post-War movement to secure the voting rights of Black women has to be seen as an intersectional compromise of race and gender, damaging to the effective development of the rights of the Black community in the decades that followed (Terborg-Penn, 1998, pp. 62, 81).
However, the truth is more complicated than a description of the capacity of a unidimensional gender politics to divide the nascent and fragile commitment to a collective Black community politics by Black men and women after the War. In fact, the major political contestation that occurred publicly within the national organizations was that between White and Black women, and the capacity of racial politics to split the women’s Temperance and Suffragist national organizational effort along racial lines (Foster, 1990; McDaneld, 2015, pp. 395–402; Painter, 1996; Parker, 2010, pp. 129–36; Rosenthal, 1997, p. 159). The institutional expansion of a Whiteness that, after the War, would realize new possibilities for social advancement was too effective a political force and overcame the desires of both White and Black women to remain in coalition on the issue of racial equality. This wasn’t the case of interpersonal politics overwhelming an opportunity, even though this is the focus of much research by historians – but a problem of how racial difference is reproduced within institutions.
As social imperative, through violence, and then as a political reality, the collapse of the institutions that supported the enslavement of African Americans required new institutional structures and processes. The auction system, the slave catchers, the transportation of slaves to market, the banking and loan system, insurance agents, the plantation owners, and small farms that owned one or two slaves, along with slave labor that engaged in everything from farm work, household cleaning, nursing children, artisanship, to prostitution on behalf of their owners, were replaced in the years immediately after the War with a new description of racial inequality.
