Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

By: Frances Smith Foster

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

Sex:  Female

Born:  Baltimore, Maryland, United States
24 September 1825

Died:  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
20 February 1911

Activity/Profession:  Fiction Writer, Poet, Political Activist

(b. 24 September 1825; d. 22 February 1911),
internationally recognized journalist and the nineteenth century's most prolific African American novelist and best-loved African American poet, known as the “bronze muse.”

For sixty-eight years, Harper wrote, recited, and published poetry and fiction, essays, and letters, all designed to delight and to teach people how to live lives of high moral purpose and dedicated social service.

But the publication of over a dozen books and innumerable poems, essays, and stories was only a part of her efforts to work for what she called “a brighter coming day.” Harper was an active member of the Underground Railroad, one of the first African American women to be hired as an abolitionist lecturer, a founder of the American Woman Suffrage Association, a member of the national board of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and an executive officer of the Universal Peace Union. She was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, the director of the American Association of Educators of Colored Youth, and a tireless worker for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Colored Women's Congress. By word and by deed, she became such a symbol of empowering and empowered womanhood that women across the nation organized F. E. W. Harper Leagues or named local chapters of national organizations after her, like the many Frances E. Harper Women's Christian Temperance Unions. She was judged a “Woman of Our Race Most Worthy of Imitation,” listed in Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century, and was included in Patriots of the American Revolution. In his 1911 memorial tribute, the president of the Universal Peace Union, Alfred H. Love, reported that she had “acquired the title of ‘Empress of Peace and Poet Laureate.’”

Frances Harper was—among other things—a member of the Underground Railroad, an abolitionist, a renowned journalist, a poet, a suffragist, and a founding member of the National Assocation of Colored Women. This print is captioned “Mrs. F. E. W. Harper, author and lecturer.”

Ohio Historical Society: The African-American Experience in Ohio

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Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in the slave city of Baltimore, Maryland, but by the age of three she was an orphan. It was a loss to which she was never reconciled. In a letter to a friend many years later, she wrote: “Have I yearned for a mother's love? The grave was my robber. Before three years had scattered their blight around my path, death had won my mother from me. Would the strong arm of a brother have been welcome? I was my mother's only child.” In comparison with the majority of black Americans of that time, however, Watkins lived a privileged life. She was reared by relatives and attended the prestigious William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, an institution founded by her uncle and noted for its emphasis upon biblical studies, the classics, and elocution, as well as for the political leadership and social service of its graduates. As a young woman, Watkins was noted for her industry and intelligence. By the age of fourteen, she had acquired an education superior to that of most nineteenth-century women of any color or class in the United States. She had gained a reputation locally as a writer and a scholar, but when she left the academy, the best employment she could obtain was as a seamstress and babysitter for the owners of the local bookstore.

Baltimore was never a comfortable place for free black people to live, and by 1850 it had become perilous indeed. When her uncle closed his school and moved his family to Canada, Watkins moved to Ohio and became the first female faculty person at the newly established Union Seminary, the precursor to what is now Wilberforce University. In his annual report of 1851, principal John M. Brown noted that “Miss Watkins…has been faithful to her trust, and has manifested in every effort a commendable zeal for the cause of education; and a sacrificing spirit, so that it may be promoted.” After Union Seminary, she taught in Little York, Pennsylvania. Then, in 1853, she moved to Philadelphia in order to devote herself entirely to the abolitionist cause. The exact nature of her involvement there is not known, but it is known that she lived with the William Still family, whose home was the main depot of the Philadelphia Underground Railroad. She frequented the local antislavery offices, where she learned both the theory and practice of that organization, and she published several poems and essays in the Christian Recorder; Frederick Douglass's paper, the Liberator; and other periodicals.

By 1854 Watkins was in New Bedford, Massachusetts, lecturing on antislavery and equal rights and, shortly thereafter, was employed by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a traveling lecturer. Watkins's travels took her throughout New England and southern Canada and as far west as Detroit and Cincinnati. She became a highly popular speaker and earned accolades from journalists, who applauded her highly articulate and “fiery” speeches yet reported her delivery as “marked by dignity and composure” and “without the slightest violation of good taste.” Watkins often incorporated her own poetry into her lectures. This, combined with her regular publication in various newspapers and magazines, helped to create her national reputation as a poet. Thus, when Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects was published in 1854, it was printed in both Boston and Philadelphia, sold over ten thousand copies in three years, and was enlarged and reissued in 1857. Most likely it was her considerable contribution to the antislavery efforts that has made many scholars refer to her as an abolitionist poet, but this volume, and all of her subsequent collections, contained poems on a variety of subjects. In addition to well-known antislavery poems such as “The Slave Mother,” “The Fugitive's Wife,” and “The Slave Auction,” the poems in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects deal with issues such as religion, heroism, women's rights, black achievement, and temperance. Some of the poems are responses to contemporary writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dickens. Some are reinterpretations of Bible stories. Others comment on events such as the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837, the Methodist church's expulsion of one of its ministers because of his antislavery stance, and the news report about a slave in Tennessee who was beaten to death because he would not testify about an escape attempt by other slaves.

The major themes of Harper's early writing and lectures are those that she expounded throughout her career: personal integrity, Christian service, and social equality. Far from repeating homilies and slogans, however, the full corpus of her work reveals a unique blend of idealism and pragmatism, faith and philosophy. Though she consistently wrote of being “saved by faith,” of looking for “light in darkness,” and of believing that “the pure in heart shall see God,” she also spoke crisply, even stridently, about the need for mass political action, the virtues of civil disobedience and economic boycotts, and the occasional necessity for physical confrontation. She argued that it was not enough to express sympathy without taking action. According to the Philadelphia press, she was one of the most liberal and able advocates of her day for the Underground Railroad and the slave. She was a longtime friend and colleague to activists such as Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Highland Garnet, and she remained a staunch and public supporter of John Brown after the failure of his raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal in 1859. Her personal hero was Moses. In the serialization of her long dramatic poem Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869), she commented, “I like the character of Moses,” because “he is the first disunionist we read about in the Jewish scriptures.”

Hers was neither an assimilationist nor a separationist creed; Watkins preferred education over violence. She believed, as the title of one of her early essays declared, “We Are All Bound Up Together.” The burdens of one group were “The Burdens of All” and, as the poem of that name makes clear, without interracial cooperation, no group will be spared:

The burdens will always be heavy,
The sunshine fade into night,
Till mercy and justice shall cement
The black, the brown and the white.

Yet Watkins recognized the contradictions and complexities of issues and was not afraid to take controversial stands or to compromise when necessary. For example, she worked assiduously with the American Equal Rights Association, but when the racism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other white feminists became apparent in their disparaging remarks about black men, she sided against them, urged the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment allowing blacks to vote even though it excluded women, and ultimately contributed to the dissolution of that group and the formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Watkins made her position widely known. She believed in equal rights for all, but if there had to be a choice between rights for black Americans and rights for women, then she would not encourage any black woman to put a single straw in the way to prevent the progress of black men. She took this stance even though she also argued that her own close observation had shown that women are the movers in social reform, that while men talk about changes, the women are implementing them.

In 1860 Watkins married Fenton Harper, a widower with three children. They moved to a farm outside Columbus, Ohio, and they had a daughter, Mary. Marriage and family responsibilities left her little time to lecture or to write, but during the Civil War years Frances Harper did continue to speak out and to publish occasionally. Fenton Harper died in 1864 and that same year Frances returned to full-time lecturing. For the next several years, she traveled continuously throughout the North and in every southern state except Texas and Arkansas, lecturing and working for the Reconstruction effort. Papers throughout the nation advertised her appearances, reported on her travels, and published her letters about her experiences. Despite her hectic schedule, Harper did some of her most experimental writing in the postbellum years. In 1869 she published a serialized novel, Minnie's Sacrifice, in the Christian Recorder. In Moses: A Story of the Nile, she retells the Old Testament version of the Hebrews' Egyptian captivity and exodus. Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a pioneering effort in African American dialect and folk characters that narrates the story of slavery and Reconstruction through a series of poems told by “Aunt Chloe” is considered by many critics to be her most innovative and best literary contribution. In 1873 Harper began writing for the Christian Recorder a series of fictionalized essays called “Fancy Etchings.” Using a cast of characters whose conversations upon current events and social mores served to expose the issues and propose solutions, Harper pioneered the journalistic genre that others such as Langston Hughes were to make popular a half century later.

Her experimentation with new literary techniques supplemented but did not replace her preference for lyrical ballads. Nor did her writing detract from her social involvement. In 1871 Harper arranged for the publication of the twentieth edition of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects and of the first collection of her published poetry since 1857, a volume simply titled Poems. About that time, she bought a house in Philadelphia, and 1006 Bainbridge became her address until she died. She had become a homeowner, but Harper was rarely at home. She was in great demand as a speaker for lecture series and as a delegate to numerous conventions. She helped develop Sunday schools and Young Men's Christian Association groups in the black community and worked for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents, as well as the security of the aged and infirm. In 1873 she became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and in 1883 she became national superintendent of work among blacks. In this capacity she tried to help those who wished to join the white groups and those who preferred to organize themselves separately. For Harper it was a matter of coalition building. She recognized and did not apologize for racism among some of the individuals with whom African Americans might need to affiliate but declared this a “relic…from the dead past.” Her comments in “The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman” (written for the January 1888 edition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review) are typical of her stance on this issue. In writing about the southern white women who would not work in harmony with black women, Harper satirizes their pretentiousness and makes it clear that, in failing to acknowledge their common interests, these women are not only risking their political future but also their Christian rewards:

"Let them remember that the most ignorant, vicious and degraded voter outranks, politically, the purest, best and most cultured woman in the South, and learn to look at the question of Christian affiliation on this subject, not in the shadow of the fashion of this world that fadeth away, but in the light of the face of Jesus Christ. And can any one despise the least of Christ's brethren without despising Him?"

(p. 316)

On issues of joint concern, Harper believed in and worked with coalitions, but her priorities were always with the progress and elevation of African Americans. Two of her serials, Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story (1876–1877), whose title says it all, and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889), a story about the black middle class during the post-Reconstruction period, were written to that end. It was Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), a work that the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review called the crowning effort of her life, which became her best-known novel. Weaving her story from threads of fact and fiction, Harper wrote to correct the record on slavery and Reconstruction, to inspire African Americans to be proud of their past and diligent in their work toward a greater future, and to persuade all Americans that a stronger sense of justice and a more Christlike humanity was essential to the peace and prosperity of the United States. Incorporating the patterns of antebellum slave narratives and of novels such as William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), and Albion W. Tourgée's The Royal Gentleman (1881) and Bricks without Straw (1880), while refuting the themes of works such as Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia (1887), Harper hoped to demonstrate yet again the utility of beauty. Iola Leroy appears to have been Harper's last long literary project. After that work, she published at least five collections of poetry: The Sparrow's Fall and Other Poems (1894), Atlanta Offering: Poems (c. 1895), The Martyr of Alabama and Other Poems (c. 1895), Poems (1900), and Light beyond the Darkness (n.d.). However, these are generally rearrangements of previously published volumes supplemented by previously uncollected works.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Harper declared the beginning of a “woman's era” and clearly intended to be a part of that brighter coming day. She traveled less and published infrequently, but her counsel and her concern continued to be eagerly sought. During her last years, Harper was often sick. Believing that, because of her failing health and her old age, she would not be able to support herself, many people offered her a place to live and continuing care. Always, Harper gently but firmly declined, saying that she had always been independent, that she loved her liberty, and that she would support herself without charity, as she had always done.

Harper died 22 February 1911. Her funeral was held at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia. She is buried in Eden Cemetery. Her record stands as a testimony to the strength, courage, and vision of African American women who wrote and worked for a brighter coming day. In Sowing and Reaping, Harper describes one of her characters as “a firm believer in the utility of beauty.” Had she been talking about herself, she could not have chosen a more apt phrase.

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