Bartering Principle for Wealth: Frances E.W. Harper's Religio-Political Critique of American Capitalism

As a promoter of self-help and race uplift, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a champion of the small, honest, hardworking entrepreneur.  In an ironic way, she appreciated Jefferson’s notion of the self-sustaining citizen, whether that person were his ideal of the virtuous yeoman farmer or her more practical small business person.  Her image of the small entrepreneur making an honest living off of the land or in the city, however, tended to be a former slave or freed person—the very individual whom Jefferson thought had no ability to be independent, much less a successful, self-sustaining, well-informed citizen.  In presenting the freed person as virtuous entrepreneur and citizen in fiction, speeches, and essays, though, Harper was not simply challenging Jeffersonian prejudice.  She was also providing an indirect critique of American capitalism.  Indeed, her image of the freed person as a virtuous entrepreneur and citizen was an integral part of a much broader, religious and political critique of the nation’s economic system, especially as it turned black bodies into capital.  This paper focuses on Watkins Harper’s broader critique of American capitalism by investigating the way in which her antebellum experiences as a free person of color in a slaveholding democracy shaped the moderate anti-capitalist views that ran throughout her activist career.