The Fifteenth Amendment and Epic Struggles

Abstract Chapter 6 studies Harper’s work in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment. Noting the comparative dearth of sources from these years, it explores Harper’s expanded travels in the South, post-amendment ideological shifts, and growing attention to respectability politics and the acquisition of land and capital. In this, it considers essays and public letters published in the Christian Recorder and elsewhere. From these frames—as well as discussion of Harper’s purchase of a Philadelphia home in 1871—the chapter turns to a detailed reading of two new pamphlets, Poems (1871) and Sketches of Southern Life (1872). In treating Poems, it emphasizes how Harper continued to make older poems speak to newer moments. In exploring Sketches, it considers the poems tied to protagonist-speaker Aunt Chloe as a kind of small epic, with Chloe as not simply speaker but epic hero. The chapter concludes with discussion of Harper’s 1872 endorsement of Ulysses S. Grant.