Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction

Abstract Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought for abolition, women’s suffrage, Black suffrage, civil rights, and temperance throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, all while lecturing across the nation and writing powerful novels, poems, essays, and sketches. While many twentieth-century critics dismissed or ignored her, Harper’s work during the Civil War and Reconstruction was key to histories of Black activism and Black print culture. Building from pioneering archival work, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction gives the fullest account available of how this major African American author-activist claimed the book’s nation-shaking title moments as her own. Recognizing Harper as an important analyst of her social and political moment, a public intellectual, a mother, a poet, a storyteller, a teacher, a theologian, and, simultaneously, a Black woman working in often-unwelcoming public spaces, the book combines biography, cultural history, and context-centered literary analysis. It places a longitudinal sense of Harper’s writing alongside the fullest investigation to date of her lecturing career and gives new insights into texts from Minnie’s Sacrifice to Sketches of Southern Life. The book focuses on Harper’s vision of what Reconstruction could be—not only what needed to be built back after the Civil War but what needed to be wiped away and what needed to be created anew to enact “a more perfect union.” It argues that, amid her tenacious itinerancy, Harper forged an intersectional praxis of public life that modeled the citizenship she demanded and danced with constructions of community, memory, and history amid national upheaval.