Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,962

This is the grave of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

Born in 1825 in Baltimore, Watkins grew up in the city’s free Black community. Both of her parents were free. But they both died in 1828. We don’t know why. Their three year old girl and only child was an orphan. But her mother’s brother William Watkins, a reverend in the city, took her in and raised her. He also trained her in fighting for the rights of Black people. Watkins was a strong and active abolitionist in a place it was not safe to do that. He passed that fighting spirit onto his niece. None of that meant she was wealthy though. The family gave her as much school as they could, but by the time she was 13, Watkins was working as a domestic laborer for a white family. But the family owned a bookstore and she read many of the books.

All this put her in what passed for an elite Black community at the time. She started writing her own antislavery essays as early as 1839, when her first known publication was published in a local newspaper. She also wrote poetry and her first book of poems came out in 1845. Long considered lost, a historian found a copy in the archives about 10 years ago, so that’s pretty cool. In 1850, she was hired to teach at Union Seminary, a college near Columbus, Ohio that taught Black students of both genders. She taught domestic science. This is one of the precursors to Wilberforce University, the AME-owned college that was legendary in training the Black professional class. While there, she lived in a house that was on the Underground Railroad and she continued writing her poems, including 1854’s well regarded, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Might want to work on the title. It sold about 12,000 copies in the first four years and went through four reprints in her lifetime.

Part of the reason that Watkins was able to sell so many poems is that she was probably the most well-known woman on the abolitionist speaking circuit. In 1854, she gave a lecture called “Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race” that she was paid many times to give around the North. William Lloyd Garrison wrote the preface for Poems. In 1858, she published her most famous poem, “Bury Me in a Free Land.” As with much of her poetry, it was a political poem about the horrors of slavery and the need to organize for freedom. It built on the beloved theme of this era–a dying child, the same trope that Harriet Beecher Stowe had used to great popular effect in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Watkins also believed in women’s rights and worked on that.

In 1859, Watkins married a man named Fenton Harper. They had a daughter, but he died in 1863. So she moved back to the east coast with her child and did not remarry, though she kept his last name for the rest of her life. She continued to lecture for the rest of her life. That’s how she supported herself. She was able to make it work too, at least sometimes. For example, in 1891, she gave the keynote to the National Council of Women of America, where she continued her legendary activism. The speech read, in part:

“As long as there are such cases as moral irresponsibility, mental imbecility; as long as Potiphar’s wife stands in the world’s pillory of shame, no man should be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law. A government which has power to tax a man in peace, and draft him in war, should have power to defend his life in the hour of peril. A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, and where this is wanting nothing can make up the deficiency.”

After the Civil War, in addition to her lectures, Harper did some Reconstruction work and then wrote about it in 1872’s Sketches of Southern Life. Much of it detailed the horrible living conditions of the freed people. She serialized three novels in the 1860s as well, though they seem to have been the kind of romantic fiction of the era that hasn’t aged well. But she wrote a full on novel as well, 1892’s Iola Leroy, which dealt with life as a Black woman in the U.S., racial passing, discrimination, temperance, and women’s suffrage. It’s set in the last decades of slavery and first decades of freedom and revisits these themes. Henry Louis Gates Jr. edited the Penguin reprint in 2010 that brought this back to public attention. It was not the first novel by a Black woman in American history–that’s probably Harriet Wilson with her 1859 work Our Nig. But it’s still an important work historically, if less so literally.

Also, Harper knew that Philadelphia was a horrible city for Black people. The City of Brotherly Hate lived up to its more accurate name when she was thrown off public transit and fought it. She later said, “Now let me tell you about Pennsylvania. I have been traveling nearly four years, and have been in every New England State, in New York, Canada, and Ohio; but of all these places, this is about the meanest of all.”

Later in life, Harper also was involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, though this got strained when Frances Willard went increasingly into really gross racism over time. But for Harper, the WCTU was an advocate for federal power over social policy and, sure she believed in temperance too, but the real point here was to reestablish the idea so the government could use its power for racial equality too. Harper also strongly rejected the racism of white women who opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because it did not include women. But then Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were never really committed to abolitionism anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a turn for them to go full racist.

Harper lived a long life, a total legend of activism. She died in 1911, at the age of 85.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper is buried in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale, Pennsylvania. As for why a new grave was placed next to the old gravestone that is still up, I do not know.

If you would like this series to visit other Black women activists of the period, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mary Shadd Cary is in Washington, D.C., and Victoria Earle Matthews is in Queens, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.