Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Militant Intersectionality

Abstract

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Militant Intersectionality Eric Gardner We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. —Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, (Address to the Eleventh Woman's Rights Convention, May 10, 1866) I am coming right home to Philadelphia, and not intending to spend my ammunition on the Rebels, who are so many thousand miles away. But I am to talk to those who clasp hands with Rebels in the city of Philadelphia, and I am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak. —Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, ("National Salvation," delivered in Philadelphia, January 31, 1867) The handful of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's antebellum anti-slavery poems now often anthologized and her one novel originally published between boards, Iola Leroy (1892), have turned out to be a small fraction of her work. Frances Smith Foster and other scholars have added three more novels (all serialized), a postbellum epic poem, and a wide range of other poetry, essays, sketches, and short fiction to a list of print work spanning more than six decades. Harper's impact at the lectern was similarly massive. A major voice on abolition, civil rights, women's rights, and temperance, she gave hundreds of lectures in locations from Maine to Florida to Kansas; addressed legislatures and/or party conventions in at least five states; and shared podiums with figures like Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Susan B. Anthony. I thus begin with two simple and long-overdue recognitions: Harper was immensely important to nineteenth-century American culture, and, because of that, we must consider her experiences during and just after the US Civil War. Scholarly discussion of this period of Harper's life remains, when not absent, deeply inadequate. The basic scholarly story of Harper's Civil War, which generally relies on a selective retelling of a biographical sketch by activist and Harper confidante William Still in his 1872 The [End Page 505] Underground Rail Road, goes something like this: After becoming a well-known abolitionist, Frances Ellen Watkins met and, on November 22, 1860, in Cincinnati, married Fenton Harper, an Ohio widower with three children. They settled on a farm outside Columbus that was reportedly bought with her earnings. They had a daughter, Mary, early in 1862. Frances Harper returned to activism after her husband's death on May 23, 1864, not quite a year before the war's end, and she regained national prominence at the end of the 1860s. This story says little about politics or public engagement, though Fenton Harper had been a delegate to the 1857 Ohio State Convention of Colored Men. Margaret Hope Bacon concluded that though Frances Harper "lectured once or twice during this period, she was mainly content to stay at home, helping to augment the family income by making and selling butter" in a "quiet life" (31, 32). Like Bacon, Blyden Jackson, writing in the late 1980s, suggested that she became "something of a recluse" (267). Scholars in the 1990s complicated that assessment a bit: Donald Yacovone noted that "responsibility—shared or otherwise—for four children" was far from a "quiet life" (98). But even recent scholarship has ignored or downplayed Frances Harper's socio-political engagement and evolution during and just after the Civil War. We are only now beginning to attend to Foster's recognition that Harper nonetheless "continued to publish and lecture" during these years (18). Initial archival research tells us that during her marriage, Harper published at least three poems in the Weekly Anglo-African, an essay and two poems in the Christian Recorder, a poem in Pine and Palm, a poem in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and a poem in the Anti-Slavery Bugle that was reprinted by the Liberator. That last poem, the reasonably well-known "To the Cleveland Union-Savers"; her September 22, 1862, Recorder essay "On the War and the President's Colonization Scheme"; and her lesser-known October 10, 1863, Weekly Anglo-African poem "The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth" demonstrate a powerful updating...