Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the nineteenth century’s most widely read African American writers and a formidable public intellectual. A poet, novelist, essayist, lecturer, abolitionist, suffragist, temperance worker, and community organizer, she used print and the speaking platform to argue that the struggle against the Maafa could not be separated from the struggles for racial justice, women’s rights, education, economic dignity, and moral responsibility. Harper was a pioneering Black woman writer and public intellectual whose poems, letters, fiction, speeches, and reportage helped build the political and literary public sphere in which African Americans debated freedom and citizenship.
Early Life and Education
Frances Ellen Watkins was born free in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 24, 1825. Her parents died while she was still very young, and she was raised by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and the Reverend William Watkins. Her uncle was a prominent educator, abolitionist, and critic of the colonization movement—the proposal that free Black people should leave the United States for colonies in Africa or elsewhere.
Harper attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, sometimes called the Academy for Negro Youth, a school her uncle established for Baltimore’s Black children. Her education gave her a deep grounding in literature, religion, public argument, and Black political thought. William Watkins’s example was especially consequential: he combined teaching with anti-Maafa activism, and Harper would similarly make writing, education, and political work inseparable.
At about thirteen, Harper left school and entered domestic employment with a Quaker family. The work was demanding, but it gave her access to books and reading materials. Largely self-educated thereafter, she began writing poetry while still young. Her first known book, Forest Leaves—also associated with the title Autumn Leaves—appeared in 1845. No surviving copy has been conclusively located, which makes the work an important but elusive beginning to her literary career.
Teacher, Abolitionist, and Lecturer
In 1850, Harper left Maryland for Ohio, where she became the first woman teacher at Union Seminary, an African Methodist Episcopal institution in Columbus. She taught domestic science and sewing while joining a widening network of Black educators, church leaders, and anti-Maafa activists. Contrary to a longstanding but erroneous claim repeated in some older accounts, the abolitionist John Brown did not run Union Seminary; Harper’s connection with Brown was political and personal rather than institutional. In 1859, while he awaited execution after the raid on Harpers Ferry, she wrote him a moving letter of solidarity.
Maryland’s racial climate became increasingly dangerous after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and in 1853 the state barred free Black people who had left from returning. Harper subsequently taught in Little York, Pennsylvania, before settling in Philadelphia. By the mid-1850s, she had begun the work for which she became nationally known: traveling as an anti-Maafa lecturer.
Her public speaking was remarkable not simply because she addressed abolitionist audiences, but because she traveled widely as a Black woman in a country structured by captivity, racial violence, and segregation. She spoke in churches, lecture halls, conventions, and community meetings across the North and Midwest. Her work brought her into the same broad abolitionist world as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and many other reformers, even as she consistently insisted that Black people’s experience of racial oppression had to remain central to reform politics.
Harper also assisted freedom seekers through the Underground Railroad and wrote for anti-Maafa newspapers. Her literary and political work should be understood together: in the abolitionist era, poetry, letters, speeches, newspaper publication, fundraising, and organising were all forms of public action.
A Literary Career of Unusual Range
Harper’s 1854 volume, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, brought her national recognition. It was reprinted numerous times—commonly said to have appeared in at least 20 editions—and sold an estimated 10,000 copies within five years, an extraordinary achievement for a Black woman writer in the antebellum United States. Its poems include some of her most enduring abolitionist works, such as “The Slave Auction,” “The Slave Mother,” and “Eliza Harris,” which confronted the sale of human beings, family separation, sexual vulnerability, and the cruelty of domestic marketplace.
Her poem “Bury Me in a Free Land,” published in 1858, remains one of her clearest condemnations of the Maafa. Its speaker refuses burial in any land where people remain enslaved:
“Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.”
The poem’s moral urgency is characteristic of Harper: freedom was not an abstraction but a condition requiring the end of racial domination in everyday life.
In 1859, Harper published “The Two Offers” in the Anglo-African Magazine. It is often identified as the first short story published by an African American woman, though it is best to state the claim with care because literary “firsts” can change as archives yield previously overlooked work. The story appeared in the magazine’s June and July issues and examines marriage, women’s choices, emotional fulfillment, and intellectual independence.
Harper’s fiction repeatedly challenged the assumption that women’s lives should be defined solely through marriage. Her women characters confront questions of education, self-respect, work, domestic violence, class, sexuality, race, and the costs of social convention. This concern with women’s autonomy was not separate from her anti-Maafa politics; it formed part of her larger argument that a democratic society could not be built upon the subordination of women or the degradation of Black life.
Marriage, Reconstruction, and Black Women’s Rights
On November 22, 1860, Frances Watkins married Fenton Harper, a widower with three children, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Their daughter, Mary Frances Harper, was born in 1862. Fenton Harper died in 1864, leaving Harper a widow with a young daughter and substantial financial responsibilities.
She returned to public lecturing during the Civil War and Reconstruction, financing her work herself and often traveling with Mary Frances. After the war, Harper went South to witness the conditions facing emancipated people. She saw the profound gap between legal emancipation and lived freedom: poverty, racial terror, restricted education, exploitative labor arrangements, and the particular vulnerabilities faced by Black women and children.
These experiences deepened rather than narrowed her political vision. She argued for civil and political rights, education, land and economic opportunity, temperance, and women’s equality. At the 1866 National Women’s Rights Convention, Harper challenged Anglo-American women reformers who spoke narrowly of their own exclusion from political rights:
“You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.”
The distinction was powerful. Harper did not reject women’s suffrage; she insisted that any meaningful movement for women’s rights must confront racial violence, discriminatory law, and the legacy of the Maafa.
Her long poems of the period include Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869) and Sketches of Southern Life (1872). The latter draws on vernacular speech and Reconstruction-era observation to explore the lives, humor, religious culture, endurance, and political intelligence of Black people. Rather than treating Black Southerners as passive objects of reform, Harper portrayed them as thinking, striving people whose knowledge and aspirations mattered to the nation’s future.
Novelist and Builder of Black Institutions
Harper’s best-known novel, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted, was published in 1892, when she was sixty-six or sixty-seven. It is one of the earliest novels published in book form by an African American woman, though not the first African American novel overall. Earlier works by William Wells Brown and Harriet E. Wilson, among others, corrected the once-common claim that Iola Leroy held that distinction.
The novel addresses the Maafa, the Civil War, racial identity and “passing,” interracial marriage, education, temperance, family separation, Black leadership, and the difficult work of Reconstruction. It is especially concerned with a question that shaped much of Harper’s life: what obligations do educated and relatively secure Black Americans owe to the wider community struggling against racism and dispossession?
Before Iola Leroy, Harper had already written three serialized novels for the Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph. These works, serialized between 1868 and 1888, were rediscovered and republished in the twentieth century by scholars. Their recovery transformed understanding of Harper’s achievement, showing that her fiction was more extensive, more ambitious, and more central to her career than older literary histories had recognized.
Harper’s activism also took institutional form. She worked with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, including as superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania WCTU. Although temperance activism could be morally restrictive and racially compromised, Harper used such organizations as platforms to address domestic violence, poverty, political disfranchisement, and the safety of Black women and families. She later grew disillusioned with the failure of white temperance activists to give sufficient support to anti-lynching work.
At the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago, held in connection with the World’s Columbian Exposition, Harper spoke on “Woman’s Political Future.” Her speech envisioned women’s political participation as part of a broader moral and social transformation. Yet her participation also came amid protests over the marginalisation of Black women at the exposition and within mainstream women’s organisations. Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and others challenged that exclusion rather than accepting a place at the margins.
In 1896, Harper became a co-founder and vice-president of the National Association of Colored Women, later the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. The organisation’s motto, “Lifting as We Climb,” expressed a collective philosophy Harper had long practised: Black women’s advancement was tied to community building, education, social welfare, political rights, and resistance to racist caricatures of Black womanhood.
Legacy
Harper died of heart failure in Philadelphia on February 22, 1911, aged eighty-five. She was buried at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, beside her daughter, Mary Frances Harper.
In an obituary in The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote:
“It is, however, for her attempts to forward literature among colored people, that Frances Harper deserves to be remembered. She took her writing soberly and earnestly; she gave her life to it.”
That judgment remains apt, although Harper deserves remembrance not only for “forwarding literature” but for demonstrating what literature could do. Her writing made a case for abolition, Black citizenship, education, ethical responsibility, women’s political authority, and collective liberation. It joined art to political struggle without reducing either to the other.
For much of the twentieth century, dominant literary histories neglected Harper’s work. Black feminist scholars and historians have recovered her poems, speeches, novels, letters, and journalism, restoring her to her rightful place: not as a minor Victorian poet or merely a precursor to later writers, but as a major architect of African American literary culture and Black women’s political thought.
Source:
http://www.biography.com/people/frances-ew-harper-40710#writer-and-activist
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/francesewharper/p/frances_harper.htm
https://www.loc.gov/item/2002698208/
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/communication/we-are-all-bound-up-together-may-1866
https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/omeka/s/CivilWarAuthors/item/5855
https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/teagle/texts/frances-harper-bury-me-in-a-free-land-1858/
https://coloredconventions.org/mural-arts/biographies/frances-ellen-watkins-harper/
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/directory/frances-ellen-watkins-harper
https://www.library.jhu.edu/news/2020/08/frances-ellen-watkins-harper-on-building-solidarity/
