Chapter 4

ONE GREAT BUNDLE OF HUMANITY

When Frances Ellen Watkins Harper stood up before the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, she did not mince words. She came to face down figures no less formidable than Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, so she needed to be at her best. She was the only Black woman to speak in a gathering brimming with skilled orators. Most often quoted is her admonition that “we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” It was a fierce reframing of American politics that rejected differences of race and of sex. What she did not say also mattered, and Harper did not speak about property rights or the ballot. Instead, her grievances emanated from the everyday indignities Black women endured on the nation’s streetcars, where Harper had been roughed up, ridiculed, and refused service. All this, while white women watched. “You white women speak of rights. I speak of wrongs,” she railed. No one dared talk back.¹

EVEN AMONG THOSE who had followed the rising tensions of the 1850s closely, few anticipated the fury and scope of the Civil War. Yes, there were those in the North who feared they’d be overrun by the South’s slavocracy—the interlocking power that slaveholders exerted over politics, economics, and law. Southerners worried that a free soil–abolitionist alliance presided over by the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln would lead to slavery’s demise. Some of the most defining disputes arose over how states and territories to the west would regard slavery.²

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)

GETTY IMAGES

The war caused real disruptions. Trade, commerce, and the production and processing of staple crops—especially cotton—suffered. Filling military ranks and quotas, North and South, drew men away from farms, factories, plantations, and workshops toward enlistment, conscription, and the procurement of substitutes. Demands for foodstuffs and the depletion of the labor force made life on the home front bleak, especially in regions where troops practiced “scorched earth” policies and targeted civilians or co-opted their homes by billeting soldiers and establishing military outposts there. North and South, citizens questioned aloud who bore the costs of war. Working-class white people especially wondered whether they were risking their own lives to preserve the privileges of the planter and the industrialist. And why were they asked to pay the ultimate price to liberate the distant millions of Black Americans? Antidraft riots and desertion exacerbated the chaos of war. The conflict went on for months, and then years, longer than anyone had anticipated in 1860. It was a revolution.³

The future of slavery was at the heart of the conflict, no matter how politicians may have spun the Civil War to be about other matters. Some fought to preserve their own slaveholding privileges. Others assented to war to clear the way for a future in which slaveholding could expand, especially to the west. Free-soil principles led some to sign on to the conflict. They hoped to keep slavery from expanding into states and territories, leaving the way clear for economies built upon smaller farms, modest manufacturers, and wage labor. Those with abolitionist commitments took up arms as a next step in a campaign to end, unequivocally and irreversibly, holding persons as property. Notions such as “states’ rights” and “preserving the Union” elided how everyone who contemplated the war did so through a lens that was clouded by their thinking about the future of slavery.⁴

Black Americans were of one mind when it came to war: after the discouraging years of the 1850s, they hoped it might provide a radical opportunity. Enslaved people watched and waited for the moment when disruptions—battles, destruction, and displacement—provided a chance to steal their liberty. Fugitives and refugees—people displaced by the movement of troops and the destruction of property—took to the road, hoping to land behind Union lines and in camps set up just out of harm’s way. In the North, Black Americans clamored to serve the Union. They could nearly taste the freedom and civil rights that their valor might win for everyone. They lobbied and voted with their feet, even though they faced unparalleled risk when Confederate officials treated Black prisoners of war as anything but that—capture meant enslavement or death.⁵

For women, the war presented new opportunities and new burdens. The absence of able-bodied men left women alone to run farms, workshops, and entire households. Women saw their work, even domestic duties, in political terms. When they maintained households and managed finances, trade, or commerce, women were doing their part for the war as well as for their families. And women stepped up their relief work when the Army showed that it was unprepared for the war’s human demands. Here, the benevolent work that many women had done locally, in their neighborhoods and churches, became part of a national network of women who supported the war. Women’s concerns extended to the well-being of sons and husbands, and in war these concerns became politicized. Love transformed mothers and wives into demanding members of political culture. They lobbied public officials—including the president—on the course of the war, for the support of soldiers, and for the needs on the home front, sometimes with raised voices. It was a delicate business for middle-class women, Black and white, who risked their status as ladies.⁶

The war loosened Black women’s bonds. Enslaved women were more likely than their male counterparts to remain on plantations and farms and at urban homesteads. But many of them took their chances when they made it to Union camps, where they traded labor for a modicum of safety and a distance from servitude. Others, often with children and elderly persons to care for, arrived at refugee camps, where they set up, crude though they were, their first households as free people. Union officials did not anticipate how many women and children would seize freedom and be on the move, taking advantage of the cover offered by the chaos of war. Officers would absorb a small number of women into the domestic work that supported troops—cooks and laundresses were essential to sustaining the war effort. Still, the lives of many more refugeed women verged on the dangerous, and were shot through with brutality. They did not gain freedom merely by crossing a line; freedom’s full promise remained unfulfilled.⁷

Free Black women shared the enthusiasms of their sons and fathers for the war. And they, too, began to put their principles into action. Some women adapted the networks of benevolence through which they had long provided poor relief, aid to widows and orphans, and burial funds to the needs of soldiers and refugees. Others left the relative calm and safety of Northern towns and cities to aid newly freed people in the South, serving as nurses, caretakers, and teachers. These women explained their work in expressly political terms. They even undertook work they had never done before. For the first time, women were building schools, carrying firearms, negotiating with laborers, masterminding fundraising campaigns, traveling alone and far from home, and risking their safety and reputations as they worked alongside soldiers and refugees. The war unsettled much of everyday life, and Black women stepped into the fray.⁸

When Confederate forces surrendered at Appomattox in spring 1865, the country was left with the monumental task of rebuilding. This required a reimagining of society. Reconstruction, the period immediately following the war’s end, was the nation’s first experiment in interracial democracy. Remaking a postconflict society demanded that lawmakers and citizens alike attend to production and trade, infrastructure and labor. No blueprint existed from which to plot points from total war to normalcy, not to mention prosperity. The emancipation of four million enslaved people required that the entire nation reformulate its economy. Those who had treated human property as assets saw their net worth give way to human liberation. The agriculture and industries that rested upon the extraction of free and forced labor had to wrestle with former slaves’ demands for wages, compensation, and even shares of land into which they had been forced to pour their blood and sweat.⁹

Left alone, a world of modest, self-sufficient Black communities might have sprouted across the South after the Civil War. African Americans aspired to autonomy above all. But whether the demand came from Southern elites who aimed to reestablish their political supremacy or from public officials who saw in the labor of former slaves a way to fill their tills, Black Americans were never simply left alone to determine their futures. Federal officials—first the Army and then a newly created Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, often termed the Freedmen’s Bureau—oversaw Reconstruction’s earliest years. Former slaves got out ahead of bureaucrats, making what they needed out of very little and rebuilding: tilling soil, erecting schoolhouses, reuniting families, and convening congregations of faith. Their efforts would represent some of Reconstruction’s most enduring successes. Former slaves partnered with Black Northerners who had migrated south, along with missionaries, Black and white, who committed to the well-being of the newly liberated. They debated politics in Union Leagues and traded ideas in pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers. Freed people set the terms for an African American public culture that would soon rival that which had long been part of Northern cities and towns.¹⁰

Despite that vibrancy, the old regime of the prewar era threatened to reinstall itself—only this time, with a thin veneer called “freedom” covering it. Onerous labor contracts aimed to bind Black Southerners—entire families—to the soil and to the rhythms of staple crop production. Legislators set in place Black Codes that marked former slaves as second-class citizens, with only a barebones capacity to protect their property and their persons. Organizations like the Knights of the White Camelia directed intimidation and violence at Black Americans, attempting to keep white men on top the new social order. What, then, was the meaning of freedom? former slaves and their allies asked.¹¹

In Congress, lawmakers asked the same question. They set out to answer it by writing new laws and amending the Constitution, all in an effort to breathe meaning into freedom and to give it teeth. They designed three amendments with this in mind. When it abolished slavery in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment promised that no postwar re-enslavement scheme could gain a toehold in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 made formerly enslaved people—and all those born in the United States—citizens. It guaranteed equal protection under the law and due process—lofty principles, the meaning of which would only be worked out over time. And then in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment barred the states from using race to deny voting rights—an important step toward ensuring that Black men would have access to the polls, jury service, and office holding. Civil rights acts complemented the amendments, spelling out what citizenship and equality meant, from the rights to sue and be sued to the rights to testify and make and enforce contracts. This constitutional revolution promised that Black Americans would always have a seat at the table of law and policy.¹²

EVEN BEFORE THE war’s end, Americans wondered who former slaves would be in a world without their forced labor. Four million people, once claimed as the property of others, became members of political culture. Freedom did not guarantee political rights, but it was impossible to deny that if the country was to reunite after a brutal conflict over slavery, it must address who could vote and hold office going forward. The political rights of Black men came first to mind for many. But debates about the rights of women also arose. No one could say for certain in 1865 where those debates might lead. The years of Reconstruction opened a door, and many Americans who had long been excluded from polling places and legislative chambers vied for their chance at power.

A small-town newspaper like the Rutland Weekly Herald was not an obvious place to discover the suggestion that Black women should have the vote. The predominantly white city of Rutland had grown up around the marble quarries of southern Vermont. There, the Herald’s editors had long kept their readers tuned in to antislavery and women’s rights politics. The town’s residents had come to expect this. From time to time, Rutland had hosted radical reform meetings, most recently the Free Convention of 1858. That call had brought to Rutland advocates of free trade, education, labor and land reform, temperance, antislavery, and women’s rights in one roiling gathering. Women’s rights debates—from marriage and free love to property rights—dominated there.¹³

Still, when the Herald’s editors endorsed voting rights for Black women in 1865, it proved to be a bold and unexpected move. Black women had not taken part in the 1858 convention, nor were they spoken of there except as enslaved people. But the war had broadened the Herald’s perspective, and its editors looked toward a new future, saying out loud what some readers hoped for and others feared. The “terrible scourge” of war had rid the nation of the “inequality and wrong” of slavery. And though wounds were still fresh, there was reason to celebrate. The nation was on the road to ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, and “the utter annihilation of that which has been denominated the sum of all villainies… African slavery.”¹⁴

The Herald warned that slavery’s abolition was just the beginning. The nation was starting a long process of righting itself. Granting enslaved people freedom was a first step, but it was not enough. Other blights remained, especially barriers to Black political rights, and the paper urged its readers to consider how these wrongs should be eradicated. What would it take to make former slaves into citizens and voters? The Herald counseled that even those Americans tucked away in the small corners of New England must face “the dark and crying evil of the present hour, the disenfranchisement of colored men and women.” Enslavement and disfranchisement, twin evils, had to go.¹⁵

The editors continued on to the subject of Black women and the vote. Why they did so is hard to say. Words ascribed to Sojourner Truth clearly moved the Herald’s editors, who used a report on one of her speeches to craft a vision of how Black women fit into political culture. Black women had a capacity for hard work: “They can plough, hoe, pick cotton, and make the welkin ring with their songs as well as the men.” Black women stood out for having shouldered the burdens of production and reproduction: “They can nurse their own children, as well as those of their mistresses, and work sixteen hours a day, which the men cannot do.” The paper misrepresented Truth’s actual words, but it was true to her spirit when it promoted the prospect that Black women would join men at the polls.¹⁶

The paper’s final point would have won the agreement of Black women from Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth to Mary Ann Shadd Cary. “WOMEN? Shall colored women be allowed to vote? Why not?” The Herald’s editors turned the table on readers who assumed that Black women were not suited to political rights. They encouraged new thinking about who should have access to the ballot and on what terms. They intended their words to be provocative and to stir up readers. But it was not a hollow gesture. Black women themselves were already demonstrating that they were entitled to rights: “They know as much,” the paper pointed out, “and are as patriotic and as moral as the men.”¹⁷

The remarks of a small-town Vermont newspaper alone would not take Black women far in the rough politics of Reconstruction. But that editorial was a sign that even some white Americans saw Black women coming. In the years that followed, anyone who was surprised, whether in rural Vermont or in the heart of the nation’s capital, when a Black woman claimed her seat at the table would need to adjust. Those who thought such women out of bounds were behind the times and would have to abandon old assumptions. The Herald mocked those who might resist: “The idea of women and especially colored women voting, is altogether too radical. It is tearing up by the roots all the long-established usages and maxims of human society.” The Herald thought it nearly laughable to discount their political rights, and so did many Black women.¹⁸

THE CIVIL WAR set people in motion: armies on the march, refugees displaced by war, and relief workers determined to repair the devastation. Many Americans, including Black women, faced circumstances they’d never known and traveled to locales they’d never before seen. For many, the journey was a literal one. Women exiled in Canada returned to the United States. Women in the North headed to the South, while others made a reverse migration. Across the country, Black women stepped up and then into the breaches of war, as teachers, nurses, and relief workers. The personal became undoubtedly political, as Black women did the same kinds of jobs they had long performed in local communities now as part of a broader national effort, one to end slavery and preserve the Union. It was a watershed moment for African American women’s leadership.

With the start of the war, Mary Ann Shadd Cary changed her mind and became a Union loyalist. Cary was among those émigrés to Canada who, when conflict began between North and South, saw the world anew. It was not an easy transformation. Since leaving the United States, Cary had built family and community in a place where the air smelled a lot like freedom. She was a respected commentator and the first Black woman to be a news editor in Canada West. But the outbreak of war redirected her efforts when it appeared that Black men’s military service could alter the course of the conflict. To clothe African American men in uniforms and to place firearms in their hands, she knew, were steps toward overturning an old order and opening new doors to political rights.¹⁹ Cary’s decision came at a time of personal turmoil. Her newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, was struggling to win subscribers and stay afloat. Her husband, Thomas, died in the fall of 1860, after four short years of marriage. She was the sole parent of a toddler, with another child on the way. She nearly withdrew from public life altogether, but fellow emigration advocate Martin Delany called upon Cary to assist him with recruiting Black soldiers to serve the Union.²⁰

Cary could not write policy as one of Washington’s elite, but she could pressure those who did. She signed on to recruit young men to the 29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers. She went into the field, drawing upon her skills as a lecturer. Cary retraced familiar routes—by train, by coach, and on foot—with new purpose. She dodged dangers, especially threats leveled by those who opposed African Americans entering their states. She lobbied influential allies, including Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton, who eventually pledged protection for Delany and his agents, including Cary, as they worked to expand the Union’s manpower. She won praise, though it is not clear that she needed it. Cary was, more than once, reappointed to recruit Black troops. She did this work in her own name, winning her distinction as yet another women’s “first.” But this time was different. Cary was trading in ideas and building an army that would fight for the cause of freedom and citizenship that had always been at the heart of her life’s work.²¹

Wartime challenges demanded new policies for the relief of soldiers and refugees. Federal officials set up makeshift hospitals and refugee camps near Washington, DC. There, the devastating human cost of the war was evident. The Army opened Freedmen’s Hospital and Asylum in 1862 on the grounds of the notoriously crowded and unhealthy Camp Barker. The camps were crude outposts of freedom, hard-won points of refuge for formerly enslaved people who left farms and plantations to claim liberty and a small respite behind Union lines. The women among them, first hundreds and then thousands, insisted upon slavery’s demise with their feet and walked toward membership in a radically changing nation. They demanded from federal officials basic rights: food, shelter, and defense from those who regarded them as property or the fodder of war.²²

Harriet Jacobs was among those women in the North to quickly recognize that the politics of freedom turned on the plight of refugees. In spring 1862, walking away from the North, with her daughter Louisa in tow, she returned to the South, first to Washington, DC, and then to Virginia. There, the two women—mother and daughter—rolled up their sleeves. Jacobs did not stop writing. She became one of the first correspondents to report on the plight of refugees for The Liberator. She signed her own name—Mrs. Jacobs—to those clear and confident letters. In the politics of war, Jacobs discovered a new freedom and even joy away from the domestic labor that had previously dominated her life.²³

Jacobs did not cut her ties to the North. Instead, she expanded her networks and won support for the refugees, who were the heart of her concern. She began to build links between Black women who had for too long been separated by the line between slavery and freedom. Other women were her allies. In spring 1863, Jacobs made her way back to New York to attend Susan Anthony’s meeting of the Women’s National Loyal League. Arriving at the rooms of the Cooper Institute, Jacobs became a peer to women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Angelina Grimké Weld. Jacobs opened the league’s inaugural meeting, making her debut as a political speaker with a prayer that called upon God to “save the nation and free the slave.” She served on the league’s executive board, and her mind turned toward politics as she, for example, called for constitutional amendments that would extend “liberty, justice, [and] equality” to former slaves. Winning women’s power was on her mind in these years, showing up even in her work among refugees in Alexandria. There, Jacobs wrestled with men, Black and white, over control of a school for refugee children. By the time the dispute concluded, officials named the school for Jacobs and placed it in the hands of a new head teacher, a woman: her daughter, Louisa.²⁴

Like Jacobs, Sojourner Truth responded to the call of the National Women’s Loyal League and lectured to support the war. Along the way, she was met by the special dangers that accompanied appearing in meeting halls full of both sympathizers and the curious. For Truth to speak publicly about “the war,” rather than about slavery or the rights of women, was especially risky. In Angola, Indiana, she stood her ground in the face of mobs that threatened “tar and feathers, eggs, rails, shooting and a general blowing up” and then shouted her down. Truth was a seasoned speaker. Still, she had to rely upon the protection of local constables and the area’s “best men,” who themselves were vilified for extending to a Black woman a platform and the right of free speech. Truth knew her message rankled, and that the sight of her enraged: “It seems that it take my black face to bring out your black heart; so it’s well I came.… You are afraid of my black face, because it is a looking-glass in which you see yourselves.”²⁵

Truth took up relief work, first providing aid to Black soldiers who were enlisting in her home state of Michigan. There, word reached her that needs were most pressing in Washington, DC, and the same soldiers and refugees who also concerned Harriet Jacobs drew Truth away from her home in the Midwest. She soon headed east from Battle Creek, traveling in the company of her grandson Samuel Banks. She got quickly to work, accepting appointments with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association and later the Freedmen’s Bureau, sharing responsibilities with other women relief workers—Black and white—including Jacobs.²⁶

Truth battled on another front line in the fight for freedom—that of civil rights—especially when she traveled. Back home in Michigan, in the cities of Kalamazoo and Coldwater, Truth had been denied passage while traveling. Arriving in Washington, she knew that she might be ignored or refused when she tried to use streetcars, as Black women and men frequently were in the nation’s capital. Black life in Washington had until recently been regulated by laws that demanded passes and freedom papers. That climate made moving about risky. Each day, Truth uneasily made her way to and from the Freedmen’s Hospital. On a fall afternoon in 1865, a conductor confirmed her worries when he confronted her, intent on keeping Truth off his streetcar.²⁷

Truth was traveling with a white woman, Laura Haviland, who was also a relief worker from Michigan. Truth had permitted Haviland to flag down the streetcar; the women knew that it was unlikely to stop for Truth. As the car slowed, Truth moved to board, stepping up ahead of Haviland, only to have the conductor, John Weeden, roughly take hold of her shoulder, wrenching it to prevent her from boarding. Haviland spoke up in Truth’s defense. But Weeden judged with his eyes, not his ears, and then demanded to know whether Truth “belonged” to Haviland. Haviland responded that Truth did not, that she belonged only to humanity. Despite their teamwork, neither Truth nor Haviland managed to board the streetcar. Instead, they walked to see a doctor and then filed a complaint.²⁸

Truth tested the proposition that she and Haviland were equals—both entitled to board a city streetcar—in court. Her complaint brought Weeden before a Justice Thompson, where the conductor was charged with assault and battery. Truth sat by as Haviland testified that Weeden had seized Truth with “such violence as to injure her shoulder, and that it was done with unusual and unnecessary violence.” The court also heard from Dr. W. B. Ellis, of the Freedmen’s Hospital, who explained that Truth’s “shoulder was very much swollen, and he had applied liniment.” No, Ellis replied in response to the judge’s question, Truth’s injury “was not from rheumatic affection, but from the wrenching of her shoulder.”²⁹

Witnesses for Weeden pitted the conductor’s comportment against that of the former slave, testifying to his “good character” and insisting that he had held back Truth merely “to prevent her from getting into the car, until the passengers, who were to get out at the junction had left the car.” Courtesy rather than racism explained the assault, they claimed. Judge Thompson required Weeden to post bail and guarantee his appearance at court to defend against the charge of assault and battery upon Truth. It appears that Truth eventually won her case. What the precise cost to Weeden was is not known. But the victory for Truth was symbolic. In Washington, not only did she take part in remaking the nation through providing aid to refugees, she also pressed for equality before the law and in her daily life. Her suit against Weeden—there in the nation’s capital—put the city on notice: Black women knew how strike back in the courts when others laid hands on them.³⁰

Other women were drawn farther south. On the Sea Islands, off the South Carolina coast, some of the earliest work of Reconstruction was already under way by 1863. An incursion of Union forces had caused the region’s white residents, especially plantation owners, to flee the islands. Hundreds of people, now former slaves, were left behind—and army officials and missionaries, including Black women, offered their support. Many were drawn to Beaufort, South Carolina, where they saw the future being defined by the fate of these new communities of freed people. Black women returned to places like this. Harriet Tubman was already well known for her work leading to freedom those held as slaves in Maryland. By May 1862, Tubman was in Beaufort, where she worked to help freedwomen become self-supporting. She would go on to serve as a nurse in the local hospital, and as a spy and a scout for the Union Army. Tubman is not best remembered for having spoken about women’s rights. But when she insisted, in a practical gesture, upon giving up her skirts in favor of the comfort and ease of a bloomer costume, she advertised a look that was synonymous with women’s greater freedom.³¹

Other women let their work tell the story of their talents and skills but were not always rewarded. Formerly enslaved in Georgia, Susie King Taylor followed her husband and his band of Black soldiers—the First South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent (later the 33rd United States Colored Troops)—many of them newly free, to the Sea Islands. Taylor did the work she could, beginning as a laundress, a job that gave her enough flexibility to also see to the needs of the men in uniform. Taylor let on to army officials that she had attended school and could read and write. Soon they drafted her to teach soldiers and freed people. Her service earned her admiration and the station of nurse, a story she later told in her 1902 memoir, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers. Because she was a woman, however, Taylor earned neither a salary nor a pension.³²

Charlotte Forten left the comfort of New England for the adventure and purpose that the Sea Islands promised. In the pages of her diary, a young Forten described the climate in which young women activists in the North came of age. Between 1854 and 1862, while working as a schoolteacher in Salem, Massachusetts, she had attended scores of political gatherings. During antislavery meetings, Forten listened to luminaries such as Garrison, Phillips, Remond, and William Cooper Nell, among others. The era’s women speakers, Black and white, especially inspired her ambition: “to be—an Anti-Slavery lecturer.” Like Tubman, she donned a “Bloomer” costume, read newspapers published by women, and practiced her debating skills in a local women’s literary society.³³

By 1862, Forten joined the first wave of African American teachers to venture south and work with Black refugees behind Union Army lines. She was twenty-five years old. She carried with her the ambition of the women who had come before her: Forten’s grandmother Charlotte, her mother, Mary Virginia Woods, and three of her aunts—Margaretta, Sarah, and Harriet—were founding members of the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society in 1833. In Salem, Massachusetts, she had fallen under the influence of Sarah Parker Remond, a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Forten admitted her admiration of Remond’s activism in the pages of her diary: “Last night Miss R. entertained me with an account of her tour, and of the delightful day she spent with Mr. [Wendell] Phillips.… I listened with most unwearied attention until the ‘small hours of the morn’ stole upon us.”³⁴

Secure in her classroom skills, Forten set out to teach among former slaves, of whose “sad… sufferings” she had heard moving accounts. Naive, Forten anticipated that the experience would offer the “delights of travel,” while enabling her to find her “highest happiness” in doing her “duty.” Through the auspices of the Port Royal Relief Association, she secured a position on St. Helena Island. To get there, Forten survived a treacherous sea voyage, and then she learned to defend herself with a gun, travel alone, and minister to the wounded. She knew that her presence, along with that of many other Northern women, raised questions about how former slaves might think about the rights of women. In a December 1862 letter to William Lloyd Garrison, Forten related the events surrounding a Thanksgiving Day celebration during which women’s rights activist “Mrs. Frances D. Gage… spoke for a few moments very beautifully and earnestly.” Forten imagined the freed people’s thoughts upon meeting Gage: “It was something very novel and strange to them, I suppose, to hear a woman speak in public, but they listened very attentively, and seemed much moved by what she said.”³⁵

There, in the midst of war, women mixed politics with teaching and nursing. Black women found their footing on a rough terrain that too often paid little mind to their status as ladies. There was less room for the policing of their public authority when they worked in places where the urgency of war set aside some notions of propriety. There was power to be earned through the commitment, risk taking, and sheer effort that Reconstruction demanded. Black women would not finish the war with a claim to military valor that propelled their sons and husbands into politics. But these women served on the front lines of a revolution that had only just begun.

FOR FRANCES ELLEN Watkins Harper, the war years sharpened her thinking about how Black women’s perspectives—and their struggles against racism and sexism—should define the nation’s way forward. She waded into the war’s roiling political waters in the fall of 1862 when she made a brave stand against the shortcomings of President Lincoln’s initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. She read carefully. The president’s proposed proclamation gave the rebel states one hundred days to surrender. Should they refuse, the president promised to order slavery’s abolition in Confederate-controlled territories. This, Harper endorsed. But what came next troubled her. The president also proposed to colonize—remove from the United States—those persons freed by the proclamation, sending them to Canada, Liberia, or elsewhere. Her resulting speech—“The War and the President’s Colonization Scheme”—decried the president and put Harper on the road to becoming one of the era’s most sought-after political commentators. If she had any worries about challenging Lincoln on the eve of emancipation, it did not show.³⁶

By the spring of 1864, Harper lectured regularly about the consequences of war and the hopes of Reconstruction. Not all her destinations were improbable—she traveled to Black communities near and far, though many of them were new to her. In May, for example, she journeyed to Indianapolis, Indiana, where she delivered a talk titled “Mission of War.” Later that fall, she made her way to Providence, Rhode Island, Worcester and Boston in Massachusetts, and then New York City’s Cooper Union. In crafting her speeches, Harper drew upon her own life story. She stood at the podium when it came time to celebrate the abolition of slavery in her home state of Maryland in November 1864. Harper, a daughter of the South who had long lived in exile, showed off her capacity for astute political analysis, and the day’s cheers for a “free Maryland” touched her deeply.³⁷

Harper was rarely allowed to forget that her place in politics was framed by her race and her sex. At the 1864 National Convention of Colored Men, it was her womanhood that set Harper apart. She was noted as present, but as “among the lady portion” of the delegates. She then watched as Edmonia Highgate, a twenty-year-old teacher from Norfolk, Virginia, gingerly addressed the meeting. Highgate took the podium in the shadow of experienced men such as Frederick Douglass. Remarking upon the upcoming presidential contest, she came down squarely in support of Lincoln’s reelection and she urged other delegates to do the same. Highgate at the same time confessed her inner doubts, wondering aloud whether “she would not be quite in her place perhaps, if a girl as she is should tell the Convention what they ought to do.” The news reports gently mocked her as “a strong Lincoln MAN,” and noted that Highgate was “unwell and labored under a little difficulty speaking.” But Harper’s presence underscored that it was correct when any young woman, including Highgate, took her turn to speak.³⁸

Theodore R. Davis, “The National Colored Convention in Session at Washington, D.C.,” Harper’s Weekly, February 6, 1869

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Black Americans already knew Harper as a poet and orator, whose words were dedicated to promoting antislavery politics. After the Civil War, she became a conscience for the entire country, instructing her listeners—Black and white, men and women—about what it meant to reconstruct the nation. Regardless of sex and color, all of humanity was, she said, bound up together. She believed that when Black women’s dignity was respected, so too would be the dignity of all people. She expressed the hopes and despair of her audience members as she recited her poems, from “Moses” to “The Slave Auction,” “To Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe,” and “The Fifteenth Amendment.” She returned to subjects such as the war and Reconstruction again and again, conditioning her listeners—from veteran Black activists to newly freed slaves—to expect that women would impart astute insights into politics.³⁹

In early 1865, Harper set off on a schedule that was nothing short of grueling. Matter-of-fact newspaper notices of her appearances hid the stress and strain of travel. That year, Harper covered hundreds of miles between New York City, Indianapolis, and Philadelphia. She crisscrossed New England: Boston, Roxbury, Framingham, and Lowell in Massachusetts; Pawtucket and Providence in Rhode Island; and beyond. The year 1866 brought more of the same. Harper’s primary audience was Black Americans, from the North and the South, for whom the future was urgent and fast becoming the present. She shared the bill and the podium with illustrious men, many of whom were her elders. In one speakers’ series sponsored by Philadelphia’s Social, Civic and Statistical Association, she delivered the fourth lecture, on the heels of presentations by William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. She was uniformly praised for her elegance and poise. She headlined commemorations and celebrations, from those marking the Fourth of July to West Indian Emancipation Day and the life and death of the Black Revolutionary War martyr Crispus Attucks. She always brought a distinct woman’s point of view, as suggested by the title of one speech: “A Colored Woman’s Opinion of the Republic.” Mary Ann Shadd Cary had remarked in 1858 that Harper was “the greatest female speaker ever.” In the postwar years, Harper proved her right.⁴⁰

Conceit was not one of Harper’s qualities. By all accounts, her words were direct and incisive while her demeanor was modest and her tone soft-spoken. Harper had cultivated this persona over many years to deflect her critics, especially those who might accuse her of being less than ladylike. The strategy sometimes failed. Critics labeled her a member of a “tribe of female ranters,” and especially deserving of rebuke as “a negress.” She could do little when newspaper editors warned that women like her poisoned pro-Union circles: “We shall soon have a pythoness, white or black, among the ‘properties’ of every Loyal League in the country.” Her appearances made headlines and exposed her to ridicule. One paper remarked that Harper—“a mixed Amazon with the high sounding title ‘Right Rev. Hon. LLD Mrs. F.E.W. Harper’”—had been “haranguing the North Carolina Blacks on suffrage.” Harper encouraged former slaves to vote, and white men did not approve.⁴¹

When the first post–Civil War women’s rights conventions met in May 1866, Harper was there. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony called for delegates to gather for the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention. Harper made the trip and met up with many other veterans of the movements against slavery and for women’s rights, at New York City’s Church of the Puritans. There, old and new allies together established a new American Equal Rights Association (AERA), committed to securing “equal rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.” The delegates elected Quaker activist Lucretia Mott, a woman long associated with antislavery and women’s equality, president. The same group recognized Harper’s leadership and appointed her to the Finance Committee, charged with raising funds for “the cause.”⁴²

Harper came to express her solidarity with the interests of women: “justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law.” She also championed a distinctly Black women’s movement that emanated from the perils of travel that they were obliged to endure: “Going from Washington to Baltimore this Spring, they put me in the smoking car.… Aye, in the capital of the nation, where the black man consecrated himself to the nation’s defence, faithful when the white man was faithless, they put me in the smoking car! They did it once; but the next time they tried it, they failed; for I would not go in. I felt the fight in me; but I don’t want to have to fight all the time.” She pushed back against such indignities, even as they plagued her.⁴³

What women’s movement, Harper asked, would countenance brutality directed at Black women? “Have women nothing to do with this?” It was the strife of streetcars and railroads that were at the root of Harper’s notions about women’s rights. She continued: “Not long since, a colored woman took her seat in an Eleventh Street car in Philadelphia, and the conductor stopped the car, and told the rest of the passengers to get out, and left the car with her in it alone, when they took it back to the station.” No measure of respectability was enough: “One day I took my seat in a car, and the conductor came to me and told me to take another seat. I just screamed ‘murder.’ The man said if I was black I ought to behave myself. I knew that if he was white he was not behaving himself. Are there no wrongs to be righted?” This was the question Harper had come to ask of the American Equal Rights Association: of white women, including Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and of white men, such as Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher.⁴⁴

Harper doubted that white American women would join her in this movement, one that aimed to end the terror of the ladies’ car. The vote for women would not be enough, she urged: “I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by preju[d]ice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party.… You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.” Black women labored and risked their lives, while white women hung back, waiting “to be lifted of their airy nothings and selfishness.”⁴⁵

Harper set the bar high, warning that any movement that would bear passive witness if not itself act to “trample upon the weakest and feeblest” of society invited a “curse in its own soul.” Harper was not there merely to chastise. She had come to advocate an approach that might keep the new coalition together through a demand for voting rights. “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she urged. Harper’s aspirations for the American Equal Rights Association extended beyond the problem of race, beyond gender, and even beyond class and nation. She implored others to join her.⁴⁶

In 1869 Harper returned to the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in one last effort to have delegates recognize Black women as part of the postwar political culture. There, she endorsed a first step toward her voting rights, a Fifteenth Amendment that prohibited states from making race a bar to voting. It was a victory, but only a partial one. It was the final AERA meeting and in its wake the organization split into two: the American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association. The division reflected how racism was powerful enough to cleave a great new voting rights organization down the middle. With their interests largely set aside, neither organization held much allure for Black women. They failed to realize their vision in the tumult of postwar women’s conventions, but they were not defeated. For Harper and women like her, Black women who aspired to win political rights and with them secure the dignity of all humanity, it was time to look elsewhere. It was time to build their own movement.⁴⁷

MARY ANN SHADD Cary did not join Harper at the AERA meetings of the 1860s. She was not, however, on the sidelines. Cary was still writing, and by the early 1870s she was aiming her pen directly at members of Congress. Black women were ready to assume political rights: “The colored women of this country though heretofore silent in great measure upon this question of the right to vote… have neither been indifferent to their own just claims under the amendments, in common with colored men, nor to the demand for political recognition so justly made every where throughout the land.” Cary aimed to dispel any misunderstanding and warned others not to give in to petty divisions; she rejected attempts to distance Black women from Black men. She echoed Harper by carving out a position that was both in common with Black men’s claim to political rights and part of white women’s ardent cry for universal suffrage.⁴⁸

The two women shared a point of view but had not arrived there by the same route. While Harper was standing up to delegates of the AERA, Cary was in Washington, DC, for the 1869 meeting of the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU). The gathering was crowded with 214 delegates, a who’s who of national leaders, though Cary was the only woman officeholder. Her charge was heading the Committee on Female Suffrage, where she was paired with two white women, budding suffragists Belva Lockwood and Josephine Griffing. Now widowed, Cary supported herself and a young son by teaching public school in Washington, DC. After hours, she remained an activist and keen-eyed commentator. When Frederick Douglass called upon her to serve as an agent for his newsweekly, the New National Era, she grabbed the opportunity to return to the speakers’ circuit. Her ambition only grew. In fall 1869, when Howard University Law School opened its doors, Cary was the only woman to enroll in the very first class.⁴⁹

The bonds she made with women’s suffrage activists at the CNLU endured. Cary soon joined national women’s suffrage organizing, one of a small number of Black women who affiliated with Stanton and Anthony’s new National Woman Suffrage Association. Despite how NWSA’s founders had used anti-Black racism to win support for women’s votes, Cary lauded the organization and attended its conventions. She did not, however, defer to the NWSA focus on a national campaign waged in courts and Congress. She actively worked a more local strategy: Congress should use its power to ensure the voting rights of women in the District of Columbia.⁵⁰

Cary believed in direct action. On a Saturday in April 1871, dozens of women converged upon the District of Columbia’s Board of Registration. Cary, Amanda Wall, and Mary Anderson were the three Black women in the crowd. Petition in hand, the women faced off with the board. When casually rebuffed, they held their position. Supporters soon appeared, including Frederick Douglass. The women insisted that they be given the opportunity to make their applications for a place on the voters’ rolls. They won the point. Each woman formally presented herself, only to be refused. It was dramatic, but it was not merely political theater. Behind the scenes, some planned a test case that would challenge the District’s requirement that voters be “male.” Sarah Spencer, a local teacher, would later bring a suit that failed when a court concluded that the Constitution did not guarantee to any citizen, including a woman, a right to vote. Cary endorsed Spencer’s move, believing it imperative that women push back against the view that neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed political rights. Overall, the effort in April at the Board of Registration netted little: “The refusal [to register the women] was and is a bitter pill to swallow.”⁵¹

Cary seized upon her standing as a citizen governed by Congress rather than by an individual state legislature. In a message to a federal judiciary committee in 1872, she recommended a revision of existing laws: We “hope that the word male may be stricken out by Congress… without delay.” Cary shifted away from constitutional claims to target local laws. Even though women were barred by the Board of Registration and the courts, the District’s prohibition of women voters was still improper and Cary advocated for a small but potent change to the law. She objected to the “discrimination against [women] in the retention of the world male,” and urged that instead women in the District would “vote as men do” before being further “taxed.” They would be “governed by their own consent,” a realization of the “principles of the founders.”⁵²

Cary was a “first” and a beacon among Black women who led the way into politics. She modeled how to challenge the limits imposed on their citizenship and sometimes overcome them. Still, Cary also demonstrated how to avoid political traps, including divisions such as local versus national concerns, legal versus political tactics, and Black- versus white-led organizations. These lines did not serve Black women’s interests. Changing the language of law—striking words like male—was a route to women’s power that resonated far beyond the District of Columbia. Churchwomen, too, were seizing upon this approach, believing small changes in the law—making its language gender neutral—was a starting point in a renewed campaign for rights. Women like Cary pursued voting rights in women’s suffrage associations, while others headed to their churches, employing the same tactics with equal resolve.⁵³