Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction

In a trans-bellum public career of over fifty years, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper fought for abolition, women’s suffrage, Black suffrage, civil rights, and temperance. She fashioned a sense of literature across genre that engaged deeply with both her activism and questions of aesthetics, craft, and art. Still, while Harper was well-known during her lifetime, many twentieth-century critics dismissed or ignored her. Even amid interest spurred by a new generation of scholars, Harper has often been reduced to an abolitionist poet who later, decades after emancipation, published a notable novel. Her massive efforts amid the Civil War and Reconstruction have been especially understudied and misunderstood.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Reconstruction explores how this major African American author-activist claimed the book’s nation-shaking moments as her own. Author Eric Gardner places a longitudinal sense of Harper’s novels, poems, essays, and sketches published during these years alongside the fullest investigation to date of her lecturing career, and explores how she crisscrossed the nation-lecturing in locations from Maine to Florida to Kansas-to advocate for human rights. The book thus brings exciting new insight to Harper’s oratory and activism, serialized novels like Minnie’s Sacrifice and Sowing and Reaping, and key poetry from Moses to Sketches of Southern Life, and it links the breadth and reach of her ideas directly to her tenacious itinerancy.
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 builds from deep archival research to combine biography, cultural history, and context-centered literary analysis. It argues that Harper forged an intersectional praxis of public life that modelled the citizenship she demanded and that danced with constructions of community, memory, and history amid national upheaval. It 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.＂

Eric Gardner is Chair of the English Department at Saginaw Valley State University. Author of two prize-winning monographs--Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) and Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015)--he has also edited five books and published a wide range of shorter work on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. A founding convenor of Just Teach One: Early African American Print and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has won recognition from organizations ranging from the Saginaw County NAACP to the National Endowment for the Humanities.