Born to free parents in Maryland in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most well-known women of her day. During her life she was a poet, activist, novelist, and orator. After teaching at Union Seminary in Ohio (later named Wilberforce University), Harper was unable to return to home because Maryland prohibited the entrance of free blacks. Instead, in 1853 she went to Philadelphia – the black cultural and political capital of the nineteenth century. There, she lived in an underground railroad station, a home where fugitive slaves were hidden and where she listened to the tales of runaways. These tales, coupled with her exile from the state of her birth, influenced her decision to become an abolitionist. Because of her education and self-presentation, she became a major orator, giving speeches and reading her poems around the country. During this period, she published her first collection of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854).
Throughout her career, Harper published essays, short stories, and serial novels in black publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Weekly Anglo-African. From 1865 to 1875 – the period roughly coinciding with Reconstruction (the period following the Civil War) – she traveled extensively throughout the South, lecturing to black and white audiences. She also lived with the freedmen and recorded her observations in a series of letters published in black and abolitionist newspapers. According to Harper scholar, Frances Smith Foster: “Harper had a particular gift for combining social issues, Afro-Protestant theology and literary innovations” (Written by Herself,). Following Reconstruction, she continued to write and was one of the founders of the burgeoning Black Women’s Club movement. Harper died on February 20, 1911.
Two of Harper’s novels, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) and Iola Leroy (1892), reflect her experiences in the Reconstruction South. Minnie’s Sacrifice is the story of Minnie and Louis LeCroix, two mulattos who are raised to believe they are white until early adulthood, and who, like Iola Leroy, choose to cast their lots with the newly freed slaves of the South. They dedicate themselves to the moral, economic, and political uplift of the freedmen. The marriage of these two educated, fair-skinned mulattos assures their role as part of a leadership elite who will help to guide the emerging black nation made up of newly freed slaves and an educated, propertied, mixed-race middle class. Iola Leroy, Harper’s most well-known work, though set in the Reconstruction South, expresses the concerns of the 1890s, a period known as the nadir of African-American history.
The plot of Iola Leroy is similar to that of Minnie’s Sacrifice, but it focuses more on an individual character, the mulatto Iola Leroy. As with Minnie and Louis, Iola believed herself to be white until the death of her white father. Sold into slavery, Iola witnesses at firsthand the horrors of the institution. Following its abolition, she joins a community of educated free blacks, comprising professionals and intellectuals and including her new husband. The novel is longer and wider-ranging than Minnie’s Sacrifice. Harper uses it as an opportunity to explore issues as diverse as women’s suffrage, black civil rights, and temperance. Furthermore, she articulates a theory of black intellectuals which greatly resembles and precedes W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth – the educated elite who would provide leadership for the black masses.
Though very similar, the two novels are products of their times. During Reconstruction (1865–77) African Americans made major advances following the end of slavery. The period saw the establishment of refugee centers, hospitals, and schools for free blacks and poor whites. In 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act and established the Freedman’s Bureau to protect black lives and rights. By 1868 over 4,000 schools were founded including Morehouse, Fisk, Hampton, Howard, and Atlanta. The period also witnessed the passage of three major constitutional amendments: the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery; the 14th Amendment, making the freed persons citizens; and the 15th Amendment, granting black men the right to vote. During the decade following the Civil War, the newly enfranchised blacks helped to elect a black governor of Louisiana, sent sixteen black congressmen to Washington, DC and changed the complexion of state legislatures throughout the South.
The end of Reconstruction is marked by the withdrawal of Federal Troops from the South in 1877. At this time the Democrats returned to power and the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1866, stepped up its campaign of racial harassment and terrorism. The 1890s witnessed major setbacks for black Americans. In 1895 Frederick Douglass died and Booker T. Washington delivered his accommodationist Atlanta Exposition Address. The Atlanta Exposition gave Washington the opportunity to address southern white leaders about the South’s race problem. In 1896 the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson made Jim Crow – the doctrine of so-called “Separate but Equal” – the law of the land. Finally, during this period the number of lynchings increased dramatically. Over 90 per cent of these were the result of white mob violence on black men.
While Harper had published poems prior to the Civil War, it was during Reconstruction that she began to publish longer fiction. An early black feminist, Harper focused much of her attention on the women of the South, and they would emerge as the most significant characters in her creative writing as well. Although black women were not granted many of the privileges of citizenship, including the right to vote, Harper saw them as central to the development of a New South. Minnie of Minnie’s Sacrifice, Iola of the novel Iola Leroy and Aunt Chloe of Sketches of Southern Life are feminists and express their anger and protest over the fact that black women are not enfranchised at the same time as black men.
Harper’s Reconstruction writings differ from those that follow. In her important study of post-Reconstruction writings by black women, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: the Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century, Claudia Tate argues that following the failure of Reconstruction, black women’s “novels of ‘genteel domestic feminism’ . . . reflect the view-point widely held among turn-of-the-century African Americans that the acquisition of their full citizenship would result as much or more from demonstrating their adoption of the ‘genteel standard of Victorian sexual conduct’ as from protesting racial injustice” (4). According to Tate, these novels allowed black Americans to define themselves politically during a time when hard-won civil rights gains were under assault (4). This was certainly the context in which Iola Leroy was published.
The writings of Reconstruction differ from Iola Leroy in several important ways. Among these, the most significant is Harper’s articulation of her notion of black citizenship. These works – letters, three volumes of poetry, and the serialized novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice – suggest that during Reconstruction, Harper moved from the integrationist vision of her abolitionist days and toward an emergent black nationalism.
In the context of the time, black nationalism would have been a radical political stance that differed from much of the abolitionist movement in its consistent challenge of the fundamental tenets of white supremacy as well as calling for the eradication of slavery. Elizabeth J. West writes: “Although its meaning has not remained unchanged, black nationalism in its broadest sense means the collective effort of blacks to secure social, political, and economic group interest” (“Black Nationalism,” 76). Martin R. Delaney, Alexander Crummell, and Henry Highland Garnet are widely recognized as the major proponents of black nationalism in the nineteenth century. I have never seen Harper listed among them. In its insistence on black landownership, what I am referring to as black nationalism preceded the social vision of Booker T. Washington. However, its proponents never advocated a capitulation to white supremacy as did Washington.
Harper’s Reconstruction writings all directly engage the issues that consumed the nation during this critical period of American history. These texts offer a direct commentary on urgent political debates. Furthermore, as critics like Hazel Carby, Claudia Tate, Carla Peterson, and Frances Foster have argued about Iola Leroy, all of Harper’s Reconstruction writings served a pedagogical function. They were written and published as Harper’s contribution to the public debate about black citizenship, and they sought to teach, inform, and shape the opinions of her black audiences. They were also written during a time when Harper became aware of the increasing class divisions within the black community that emerged following emancipation. Finally, Harper’s Reconstruction writings were also more experimental and more democratic than novels or slave narratives in their content but especially in their form and reach. As objects, books assume a certain kind of audience: a literate one with the leisure time to read. Because Harper’s Reconstruction writings included open letters from the road and the text from her speeches, both of which were published in newspapers, she reached a broader audience than she would have had she only published books. In addition, she read her poems aloud at public gatherings and audiences eagerly awaited her recitation of them.
Minnie’s Sacrifice was published in installments in the black publication the Christian Recorder, a publication of the AME Church. As such, it is meant to be read in quick snatches of time, to be read aloud. Finally, Minnie’s Sacrifice is of special significance in the African-American literary tradition in that it is one of the very first novels by an African-American to portray black women as victims of lynching as well as rape. Frances Foster’s discovery of this novel significantly alters our reading of the early African-American literary tradition.
I want to suggest that Harper’s articulation of a more radical notion of black citizenship is more explicit during this period than later, because Reconstruction provided more room for a greater range of discussion and debate about black participation in American social, civic, and economic life. This was certainly not the case during the 1890s – a period that witnessed the systematic dismantling of the minimal progress made during Reconstruction. By radical notion of black citizenship, I mean Harper’s insistence that in order for the newly freed blacks to participate fully as citizens of the American democracy, they not only needed the franchise, but also should: (1) be granted access to quality education; (2) benefit from the redistribution of land; and (3) be granted protection from racial violence. In fact, for Harper, these three things were even more important than the franchise, for she believed that without the acquisition of education, land, and protection, the freedmen would be incapable of exercising their right to vote in an informed and responsible manner. Melba Joyce Boyd, Harper’s biographer, notes that Harper’s vision for the freedmen included a program of “Literacy, Land, and Liberation.”
Harper’s growing black nationalism is most evident in her advocating of cross-class alliances between blacks and free people of color, rather than a coalition between poor whites and the freed people. She addressed her writings to free blacks and free people of color in an effort to convince them of their shared fate with the former slaves. However, unlike President Johnson, who warned poor whites against aligning themselves with former slaves because the freedmen were their competitors, Harper questioned the viability of such an alliance because she recognized poor whites’ investment in whiteness. This investment allowed them to support racist agendas that were not in their best interest.
In a letter dated July 26, 1867, which was later published as “Affairs in South Carolina” in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (August 1867), Harper writes:
Freedom comes to the colored man with new hopes, advantages and opportunities. He stands on the threshold of a new era, with the tides of new dispensation coursing through his veins; but this poor “cracker class,” what is there for them? They were the dregs of society before the war, and their status is unchanged. I have seen them in my travels, and I do not remember ever to have noticed a face among a certain class of them that seemed lighted up with any ambition, hope or lofty aspirations. The victims and partisans of slavery, they have stood by and seen their brother outraged and wronged; have consented to the crime and have received the curse into their souls . . . I think the former ruling class in the South have proved that they are not fit to be trusted with the welfare of the whites nor the liberty of the blacks.
(Harper, A Brighter Coming Day, 124)
In this letter, Harper understands the plight of poor whites to be that of a people who have been exploited by an elite class but whose capitulation to that elite contributes to their own oppression. She identifies white supremacy as the ideology which facilitates this capitulation. Over a century later this would become the central argument of Edmund Morgan’s classic American Slavery, American Freedom. In contrast, Johnson misinformed poor whites that black enfranchisement would lead to an “alliance of blacks and planters” and as such would restore the prewar slavocracy of which, in his view, poor whites were true victims.
By 1865, Johnson’s policies and the newly elected representatives drawn from the prewar slave-owning class created an atmosphere that led one visitor to the south to note that “Murder is considered one of (southern whites) inalienable state rights.” In Texas alone, while 500 white men were indicted for the murder of blacks between 1865 and 1866, not one was convicted (Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 95). Harper documents state-sanctioned terrorism against the freedmen in her letters. Later, this becomes central to her Reconstruction fiction as well. Such acts of violence are not as explicit in Iola Leroy.
In a letter from Eufaula, Alabama dated December 9, 1870 and published in William Still’s The Underground Railroad, Harper notes: “a number of cases have occurred of murders, for which the punishment has been very lax, or not at all, and it may be will never be.” She recounts the murder of a black man who had married a white woman, and the beating of a black woman by a group of white men who forced themselves into her cabin. These acts of violence against the freedmen as well as other acts of political and economic disenfranchisement are central to Harper’s creative writing.
Harper published three volumes of Reconstruction poetry, Moses: a Story of the Nile (1869), Poems (1871), and Sketches of Southern Life (1872). The last of these, Sketches of Southern Life draws most extensively on her experiences in the South and it begins to map out the terrain of Harper’s political vision for the newly emancipated blacks. It is also pioneering in its introduction of the persona Aunt Chloe, who is of the newly emancipated folk but who is not pushed to the margins of the poem’s narrative as such characters are in the novel Iola Leroy. While the protagonist of Iola Leroy is a member of an educated mulatto elite who cast their lot with the poor freedmen, Aunt Chloe is a former slave who speaks in dialect. However unlike the folk characters of the Iola Leroy, Aunt Chloe learns to read, is articulate, literate, political, and comes to own property.
Carla Peterson notes that the Aunt Chloe poems are significant in that they “are no longer grounded in sentimental culture.” According to Peterson, these poems posit a notion of home that is no longer “the sentimental site” of those victimized by the slave system. Instead, it is a “political locus in which the socially active and empowered work collectively to implement black political Reconstruction” (“Doers of the Word,” 212). This theme of the home as a site of activism and empowerment becomes one of Harper’s major concerns throughout Reconstruction. Furthermore, Aunt Chloe is one of the first nonelite black characters in black writing. She is juxtaposed against the stereotypes of loyal, loving black “aunts” of southern lore. The Aunt Chloe poems present Harper’s vision for the newly freed blacks, especially for the women, in whom she held such faith.
Louis LeCroix, of Minnie’s Sacrifice, articulates Harper’s political opinions and vision. Throughout the narrative, Louis’s perspective on the possibilities for black participation in American democracy shifts significantly. At first, upon arrival in the South, Louis notes:
We are going to open a school, and devote our lives to the up building of the future race. I intend entering into some plan to facilitate the freedmen in obtaining homes of their own. I want to see this newly enfranchised race adding its quota to the civilization of the land . . . We demand no social equality, no supremacy of power. All we ask is that the American people will take their Christless, Godless prejudices out of the way, and give us a chance to grow, an opportunity to accept life, not merely as a matter of ease and indulgence, but of struggle, conquest, and achievement.
In asking not for social equality, but for access to literacy, the removal of social and political barriers, and the chance for the freedmen to prove themselves, Louis prefigures Booker T. Washington. Furthermore, his notion of black citizenship is even less radical than that of the early proponents of Reconstruction Radicalism. Eric Foner notes that “Reconstruction Radicalism was first and foremost a civic ideology, grounded in a definition of American citizenship. On the economic issues of the day no distinctive or unified Radical position existed.” The Radicals advocated equal opportunity regardless of race (Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 106–7). Like Louis, the Radicals felt that the national government had to guarantee “equal political standing and equal opportunity in a free-labor economy” (108). Neither the Radical Republicans nor the earlier Louis call for federal protection of southern blacks or for the redistribution of land. Note the “us” and “them” sensibility of this passage. There is the “we” of the mulatto class who help the “freedmen.” And the “we” of the leadership class and the freedmen who are not included under the rubric of “the American people.”
As the narrative develops and as Louis becomes more aware of the constant threats of violence under which southern blacks live, he becomes an advocate not only of black suffrage, but of black self-defense as well. Speaking to the freedmen, he says, “Defend your firesides if they are invaded, live as peaceably as you can, spare no pains to educate your children, be saving and industrious, try to get land under your feet and homes over your heads” (86). In their insistence on black self-defence, Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X echo Louis’s words. Wells admonished black readers and audiences to take up arms in self-defense against the terrorism of lynch mobs. Malcolm X criticized the turn-the-other-cheek doctrine of Martin Luther King and encouraged black Americans to defend themselves against racists and bigots. Through Louis, Harper articulates her theme of Literacy, Land, and Liberation as well as a critique of a federal government that refuses to protect its very own citizens.
Louis also blames the federal government for providing an atmosphere that would allow for the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866: “If Johnson was clasping hands with rebels and traitors was there no power in Congress to give, at least, security to life? Must they wait till murder was organized into an institution, and life and property were at the mercy of the mob? And, if so, would not such a government be a farce, and such a civilization a failure?” (86). In calling into question the federal government’s ability and willingness to protect the freedmen, Louis might be commenting on Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. The bill sought to assert “national power to protect blacks’ civil rights.” It was a radical act which “defined all persons born in the United States (except Indians) as national citizens and spelled out rights they were to enjoy equally without regard to race – making contracts, bringing lawsuits and enjoying the benefit of ‘all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property.’ No state law or custom could deprive any citizen these rights” (Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 110).
As radical as the bill was, it did not create a federal force to protect the rights of citizens. This was left to the states. The federal courts were expected to enforce the bill. The primary focus of the bill was on eradicating discriminatory state laws and not on protecting the freedmen from violence. Johnson claimed that guaranteeing blacks full citizenship would discriminate against white people. In spite of the flood of reports coming in from the Freedman’s Bureau documenting numerous acts of violence against blacks who sought to exercise their rights, Johnson asserted: “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race” (Foner, Short History of Reconstruction, 112–13). In an effort to counter Johnson’s veto, the Republicans introduced the 14th Amendment, which declared all persons born or naturalized in the US national and state citizens with all the rights and privileges thereof.
Louis grows more and more convinced of the need for Radical Reconstruction as he confronts and tries to counter the continuing violence and violation of citizens’ rights in the south. Although blacks remained committed to the Republican Party, Harper, through Louis, was critical of the party. “My faith is very strong in political parties,” he says. However the narrator notes: “Yet there were times when his words seemed to him almost like bitter mockery. Here was outrage upon outrage committed upon these people, and to tell them to hope and wait for better times but seemed like speaking hollow words” (86). Furthermore, Louis, like Harper, differs from even the most radical Republicans in that he knows that political rights mean little without economic independence for the freedmen. Eventually, Harper joined the freedmen in their plea for redistribution of land. For most freedmen, landownership was an integral part of their definition of freedom. In calling for land for the freedmen, Harper and Louis depart from southern mixed-race landowners.
One consequence of Louis’ outspokenness is the danger it brings to himself and his family. The violence that Harper reports in her letters provides her with material that drives her narrative as well in that she incorporates specific instances of violence into the novel. For instance, in a letter from Darlington, South Carolina dated May 13, 1867, Harper relays the true story of a lynching of a young black woman:
About two years ago, a girl was hung for making a childish and indiscreet speech. Victory was perched on our banners. Our army had been through, and this poor, ill-fated girl, almost a child in years, about seventeen years of age rejoicing over the event, and said that she was going to marry a Yankee and set up housekeeping. She was reported as having made an incendiary speech and arrested, cruelly scourged, and then brutally hung. Poor child! she had been a faithful servant – her master tried to save her, but the tide of fury swept away his efforts.
(Harper, A Brighter Coming Day, 123)
Harper’s letter refers to the murder of a young black woman, Amy Spain, who was lynched in Darlington in 1865. She is reported to have shouted “Bless the Lord the Yankees have come.” The story of her lynching appeared in Harper’s Weekly, September, 30, 1865 (E. Forbes 47). This episode also finds its way on to the pages of Minnie’s Sacrifice. A recently freed slave woman tells Louis:
Well, you see it was jist dis way. My darter Amy was a mighty nice chile, and Massa could truss her wid any ting. So when de Linkum Sogers had gone through dis place, Massa got her to move some of his tings over to another place. Now when Amy seed de sojers had cum’d through she was might glad, and she said in a kine of childish way, ‘I’se so glad, I’m gwine to marry a Linkum soger, and set up house-keeping for myself.’ I don’t spect she wer in arnest ’dbout marrying de sojer, but she did want her freedom. Well, no body couldn’t blame her for dat, for freedom’s a mighty good thing . . . Well, when she said dat, dat miserable old Heston— Well, he had my poor girl tookened up, and poor chile, she was beat shameful, and den dey had her up before der sogers and had her tried for saying ‘cendiary words, and den dey had my poor girl hung’d.
(87–88)
Harper’s audiences would have been used to stories of black women’s experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. Writers such as Douglass and Harriet Jacobs had provided scintillating suggestions of the sexual exploitation of white women. However, these audiences probably were not as used to the black women being the object of lynching and other forms of murder. Minnie’s Sacrifice adds black female martyrs to the pantheon of murdered black men that fill black political and literary history. Furthermore, the story of the young girl’s death is recounted at the funeral of the novel’s heroine, Minnie. That the story of the lynched girl is narrated at the funeral of the more privileged lady links the two women and suggests that despite differences of class and color, their fates are inextricably bound. Unfortunately, the installment that narrates the circumstances of Minnie’s death has not been found; however, earlier chapters suggest that her death might have resulted from the political work in which she and her husband are engaged.
Finally, while Harper relays the historical account of this story in her own voice and language in her letter, in the novel she allows the young woman’s mother to tell the story in dialect. Harper gives voice to the less educated freedwoman and in so doing allows her to draw the link between her own child and the fair, lovely, educated Minnie. The mother and her daughter come from the class of blacks most vulnerable to white southern violence, and Harper reminds her reader of this by focusing on the violence done to the child and not that done to Minnie or one of her class. As such, she seems to be saying to her reader, “you must have sympathy for all victims of such violence, not simply those with whom you identify.”
The concluding installment of the series is Harper’s direct address to her readers about the pedagogical and political intent of the story. It reads like the traditional “Dear Reader” of abolitionist literature, except the intended reader is not from a northern middle-class white audience, but from a northern middle-class black one. “May I not modestly ask that the lesson of Minnie shall have its place among the educational ideas for the advancement of our race?” (90). Harper’s plea is to the newly educated black elite: “It is braver to suffer with one’s own branch of the human race . . . for the sake of helping them, than to attempt to creep out of all identity with them in their feebleness, for the sake of mere personal advantages” (91).
Some might argue that this plea is a classic example of the doctrines of racial uplift – doctrines that recent scholars identify as elitist. Racial uplift was the name given to the belief that the black elite could “uplift” the masses of poor black people by being moral exemplars and acting as spokespersons for and representatives of “the race.” I read Harper’s plea as a call to those who might have greater access to opportunity because of the brief but significant gains of Reconstruction. Harper warns them not to abandon those blacks who are incapable of taking advantage of such opportunities because of continued violence and other forms of opposition from the southern states. By aligning Minnie’s death with that of Amy, Harper is also telling her readers that their fates are aligned with those of the most oppressed freedmen. In fact their position was indeed quite tenuous. The black upper class was quite small and their economic security was always in jeopardy. In spite of this, Carla Peterson notes, “The post-bellum period witnessed the slow emergence of a new class structure and sensibility that separated the mass of common laborers from a growing black professional and business class. This class was not always able to comprehend the labor issues facing black workers and felt at times that the political and social interests of the two groups no longer necessarily coincided” (“Doers of the Word,’” 198). Harper’s plea was not only to this growing black professional and business class of the South, but also to black northerners whom she feared would lessen their vigilance once the cause of abolition was won.
In closing, the final call of the novella is a call for action as well as a warning to her readers not to be fooled by the appearance of progress. The novella serves as a warning about the very tenuous nature of black citizenship and the necessity of remaining vigilant against the forces that would seek to deny it. Finally, it also illustrates Harper’s belief in the power of fiction to engage political issues and to shape public opinion. By ending her narrative with the death of the major character and not with a scene of familial bliss or racial progress, Harper asserts that in the midst of great progress and social change the status of black people remains precarious. By the time Harper again turned to fictionalize her Reconstruction experiences in 1892, those hard-won elements of black citizenship were already being dismantled. A consideration of her Reconstruction writings sheds new light on her better-known later efforts and suggests the way that the political climate influences the form and content of creative efforts.