Frances Harper

Frances Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (24 September, 1825 - 22 February, 1911) born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland, was an African American abolitionist and poet.

Her mother died three years later and she was looked after by relatives. She was educated at a school run by her uncle which was Waco High , Rev. William Watkins until the age of thirteen when she found work as a seamstress.

Her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, was published in 1845, the book was extremely popular and over the next few years went through 20 editions. In 1850, she started working in Columbus, Ohio as a schoolteacher. Three years later in 1853, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and became a travelling lecturer for the group. She was also a strong supporter of prohibition and woman's suffrage. She often would read her poetry at these public meetings, including the extremely popular Bury Me in a Free Land.

Harper served as Superintendent of Colored Work in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and fought against the idea that alcohol abuse was a problem particular to African American men. (The Gilded Age, p. 114)

In 1892, she published a novel about a rescued black slave and the Reconstructed South, called Iola Leroy, one of the first books published by an African American. Later, she also wrote Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping and Trial and Triumph.

Harper was a strong supporter of women's suffrage and was a member of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

Personal Life

Youth and Education

Frances Ellen Watkins was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1825 to free parents. When she was three years old her mother died, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and uncle. Her uncle was the abolitionist William Watkins, father of William J. Watkins, who would become an associate of Frederick Douglass. She received her education at her uncle's Academy for Negro Youth and absorbed many of his views on civil rights. The family attended the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.

At the age of fourteen, Frances found a job as a domestic. Her employers, a Quaker family, gave her access to their library and encouraged in her literary aspirations. Her poems appeared in newspapers, and in 1845 a collection of them was printed as Autumn Leaves (also published as Forest Leaves).

Frances was educated not only formally in her uncle's school, but also through her exposure to his abolitionist views, their family's participation in their church, and the Quaker and other literature made available to her through her employment.

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In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, causing the conditions for free blacks in the slave state of Maryland to deteriorate. The Watkins family fled Baltimore and Frances moved on her own to Ohio, where she taught sewing at Union Seminary.

She moved on to Pennsylvania in 1851. There, alongside William Still, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada.

Watkins continued to write, and in 1854 her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects attracted critical notice and became her biggest commercial success. In these poems she attacked not only racism but also the oppression of women. Most of the earnings from this and her other books went to help free the slaves. In 1854 she also began her lecturing career. She was much in demand on the anti-slavery circuit and she traveled extensively in the years before the Civil War.

John Brown, who had been principal at Union Seminary when Watkins had worked there, led the unsuccessful uprising at Harper's Ferry in 1859. Watkins gave emotional support and comfort to Mary Brown during her husband's trial and execution. In a letter smuggled into John Brown's prison cell, Watkins wrote, "In the name of the young girl sold from the warm clasp of a mother's arms to the clutches of a libertine or profligate,—in the name of the slave mother, her heart rocked to and fro by the agony of her mournful separations,—I thank you, that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race."

In 1859 Watkins's tale "The Two Offers" appeared in the Anglo-African, the first short story to be published by an African-American. Although cast in fictional form, the piece is actually a sermon on the important life choices made by young people, women in particular. The tale relates the tragedy of a woman who mistakenly thinks romance and married love to be the only goal and center of her life. "Talk as you will of woman's deep capacity for loving," Watkins preached, "of the strength of her affectional nature. I do not deny it; but will the mere possession of any human love, fully satisfy all the demands of her whole being? . . . But woman—the true woman—if you would render her happy, it needs more than the mere development of her affectional nature. Her conscience should be enlightened, her faith in the true and right established, and scope given to her Heaven-endowed and God-given faculties."

Writing

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An April 24, 1851 poster warning colored people in Boston about policemen acting as slave catchers.

The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slaveholding interests and Northern Free-Soilers.

A significant source of conflict between Southern slave states and Northern free states was the lack of assistance given by Northerners to Southern slave-owners and their agents, who were seeking to recapture escaped slaves. Many Southerners viewed this as support for abolitionism, and resented Northern officials' refusal to respect Southern states' rights. In contrast, most Northern states had abolished slavery within their borders, and many Northern officials did not want their local institutions to be used to support the enforcement of Southern states' slavery laws. They viewed efforts to compel such assistance as an infringement of Northern states' rights.

Background

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was a Federal law which enforced a section of the United States Constitution that required the return of runaway slaves. It sought to force the authorities in free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters. In practice, however, the law was rarely enforced. Some Northern states passed "personal liberty laws", mandating a jury trial before alleged fugitive slaves could be moved. Otherwise, they feared free blacks (who could vote in ten of the thirteen states at the time of the adoption of the Constitution) could be kidnapped into slavery. Other states forbade the use of local jails or the assistance of state officials in the arrest or return of such fugitives. In some cases, juries simply refused to convict individuals who had been indicted under the Federal law. Moreover, locals in some areas actively fought attempts to seize fugitives and return them to the South. The Missouri State Supreme Court routinely held that transportation of slaves into free states automatically made them free. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), that states did not have to proffer aid in the hunting or recapture of slaves, greatly weakening the law of 1793.

New law

In the response to the weakening of the original fugitive slave act, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made any Federal marshal or other official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave liable to a fine of $1,000. Law-enforcement officials everywhere now had a duty to arrest anyone suspected of being a runaway slave on no more evidence than a claimant's sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trial or testify on his or her own behalf. In addition, any person aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to six months' imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a fee for their work.

Effects

In fact the Fugitive Slave Law brought the issue home to anti-slavery citizens in the North, since it made them and their institutions responsible for enforcing slavery. Even moderate abolitionists were now faced with the immediate choice of defying what they believed an unjust law or breaking with their own consciences and beliefs. The case of Anthony Burns fell under this statute.

Many Methodists were highly active in the abolition movement, though the Methodist Episcopal Church was officially reluctant to touch the issue because it did not want to fan the flames of inter-sectional hatreds after the Southern wing split off in 1844. Two splinter groups of Methodism, the Wesleyan Church in 1843 and the Free Methodists in 1860, along with many like-minded Quakers, maintained some of the "stations" of the Underground Railroad. Most of the stations were maintained by African Americans.

The Fugitive Slave Act brought a defiant response from abolitionists. Reverend Luther Lee, pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Syracuse, New York wrote in 1855:

I never would obey it. I had assisted thirty slaves to escape to Canada during the last month. If the authorities wanted any thing of me my residence was at 39 Onondaga Street. I would admit that and they could take me and lock me up in the Penitentiary on the hill; but if they did such a foolish thing as that I had friends enough on Onondaga County to level it to the ground before the next morning.

Other opponents such as African American leader Harriet Tubman simply treated the law as just another complication in their activities. The most important reaction was making the neighboring country of Canada the main destination of choice for runaway slaves. Only a few hundred runaways made it to Canada in the 1850s.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, General Benjamin Butler justified refusing to return runaway slaves in accordance to this law because the Union and the Confederacy were at war, the slaves could be confiscated and set free as contraband of war.

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Sources

Print Sources

• Calhoun, Charles W. 1996. The gilded age: essays on the origins of Modern America. Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources. ISBN 0842025006 and ISBN 0842024999
• Shockley, Ann Allen. 1989. Afro-American women writers, 1746-1933: an anthology and critical guide. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: New American Library. ISBN 0452009812 and ISBN 9780452009813
• McGriggs, Imogene. 1987. Frances Harper: a historical perspective. Thesis (M.A.)—Bowling Green State University, 1987.
• Boyd, Melba Joyce. 1994. Discarded legacy: politics and poetics in the life of Frances E.W. Harper, 1825-1911. African American life series. Detroit, Mich: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0814324886 and ISBN 9780814324882

Online Sources

• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-?), The Underground Rail Road - Project of UC Davis. Retrieved March 29, 2007.
• Malik, Geeta. WRITER HERO: FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS, My Hero Project. Retrieved March 29, 2007.
• Grohsmeyer, Janeen. Frances Harper, Unitarian Universalist Historical Society. Retrieved March 29, 2007.
• Harper, Francis E.W. November 15, 1892. Enlightened Motherhood - An Address Before the Brooklyn Literary Society, The New York Times Company; About, Inc., Retrieved March 29, 2007.
• Campbell, Stanley W. 1970. University of North Carolina Press. The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860, Online Version provided by Questia Media America, Inc. Retrieved March 29, 2007.

• John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (1999)

External links

• Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1825-1911. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved March 22, 2007.
• Complete text of the Fugitive Slave Law
• Compromise of 1850 and related resources at the Library of Congress
• "Slavery in Massachusetts" by Henry David Thoreau
• Runaway Slaves a Primary Source Adventure featuring fugitive slave advertisements from the 1850s, hosted by The Portal to Texas History

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