The Other Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

While literary scholars have recovered much of the writings of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, her short stories, poems, and novels, we know relatively little about her life as an activist, an abolitionist before the Civil War and an advocate for temperance and women’s suffrage after the war. This paper will recover Harper’s role as an abolitionist, particularly her forgotten essay against colonization published in the Christian Recorder, the only African American newspaper published during the war. This essay, which lies hidden in plain sight, has not been reproduced in any of the collections on Harper’s writings. This paper, then, will present a different picture of Harper, not so much as an author of sentimental poetry and novels but as a polemicist who sought to intervene in the debates over race, gender, and citizenship in the age of the Civil War. Recently, historians, philosophers, and political theorists have sought to recover black women’s early intellectual history. If Harper has long occupied a place of pride in African American literature, she surely deserves a similar place in African American intellectual and political history.