Speech of Miss Watkins, (13 May 1857) New York, NY

Context

Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper) was born into a free family in Baltimore, Maryland on September 24, 1825. She became an orphan at the age of three and went to live with her aunt, Henrietta Russell, and uncle, William Watkins, Sr. Driven by his strong belief in education, Watkins Sr. established Watkins’ Academy for Negro Youth, which Harper attended until she was thirteen.1 Although Watkins Sr. influenced Harper’s political activism in the early years of her development, he did not shape her “womanist consciousness.”2 Harper’s family held traditional views regarding women that reflected the socially conditioned gender roles in nineteenth-century America.3 Such views foreshadow the difficulties Harper would face in advancing equal rights for Black Americans and as a Black woman in a predominantly white women’s suffrage movement.4

By 1850, Frances Harper moved to Ohio to attend Seminary School. Soon after, she accepted a teaching position in Pennsylvania. Harper experienced her political “coming of age” in Little York, Pennsylvania, while helping fugitive enslaved people pass through the Underground Railroad.5

In late 1854, the Maine Anti-Slavery Society hired Harper as a lecturer. She traveled across New England, delivering speeches about the moral abomination of enslavement, becoming one of the first Black women on the lecture circuit.6 Harper wielded her eloquence and literary prowess to support the abolition movement that was spreading across the United States. In her abolition oratory, Harper, like other abolitionists, utilized “moral suasion” as a strategy for liberation, aiming to change people’s beliefs or actions by appealing to their “sense of what is proper behavior or thinking.”7 As the Civil War approached, some abolitionists shifted from moral suasion to electoral and legislative strategies, while others adopted militant forms of resistance.8

Throughout the 1850s, the abolition movement faced significant legal challenges. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed escaped enslaved people to be returned to their enslavers, even if they reached a free state. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 expanded enslavement practices into the western territories by creating an avenue to legally circumvent the Missouri Compromise. And on March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, successfully denied citizenship to Black Americans, upheld enslavement in U.S. territories, and declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional.9 These laws and rulings hindered the abolition cause.

It was amidst this solemn, yet spirited, atmosphere that Frances Harper addressed the New York City Anti-Slavery Society on the evening of May 13, 1857. Ten days later, on May 23, a summary of Harper’s speech, titled, “Speech of Miss Watkins,” was published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard.10 Philip S. Foner and Robert Branham assert that this speech remains one of the “few surviving examples of [Harper’s] antislavery oratory.”11

In her May 13, 1857 speech, Harper relied on moral suasion to galvanize the public’s rejection of enslavement.12 She embraced Christianity in her oratory and often drew meaning from biblical stories about Moses.13 In her May 13 address to a predominantly white abolitionist audience, Harper skillfully integrated the tenets of Black liberation theology to craft emotional, ethical, and logical appeals.14 She used the human heart as a metaphor to profess that if we “trace the record of every human heart…we would find no man so…degraded that we could not trace the word liberty [written] upon the soul.”15 By emphasizing the importance of freedom, agency, and dignity, Harper equated the very concept of liberty to divinity and firmly declared that “the law of liberty is the law of God.”16

In 1860, Frances Watkins Harper married Fenton Harper three years after her abolition speech. She had one daughter, Mary, before her husband died in 1864.17 During this Civil War period, Harper wanted the federal government to provide Black people with political and military protections. Her optimism swiftly faded as she witnessed the governmental protections of white citizens while neglecting the violence targeting Black Americans.18

After the Civil War, Harper began to reflect on the oppressions that women faced in marriage, pushing her toward women’s rights and temperance activism.19 In 1874, Harper joined one of the largest women’s organizations that opposed the sale of alcohol—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).20 Despite their commitment to the movement, Harper and other Black women encountered racial discrimination within the WCTU.21 Such racism was pervasive by the 1890s, with surges in lynching atrocities and Jim Crow injustices that accompanied the segregationist “separate but equal” doctrine codified in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).22

Frances Harper tirelessly fought for social justice until her death in Philadelphia on February 22, 1911. Harper rests in the John Brown section of Eden Cemetery, buried in the same plot as her daughter, Mary, who passed away three years before her mother. The tombstone inscription is from the last line in Harper’s poem, “Bury Me in a Free Land”:

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.23

Endnotes

  1. LaRese Hubbard, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: A Proto-Africana Womanist,” Western Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 1 (2012): 68–75. William Watkins introduced Harper to many types of literature, including the Bible, the classics, and anti-slavery writings.
  2. Margaret Washington, “Frances Ellen Watkins Family Legacy and Antebellum Activism,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 1 (2015): 69.
  3. Ibid., 67.
  4. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 67.
  5. Hubbard, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” 72.
  6. Jen McDaneld, “Harper, Historiography, and the Race/Gender Opposition in Feminism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 40, no. 2 (2015): 394.
  7. Adam Chamberlain, “Moral Suasion and Political Action,” American Political Thought 7, no. 1 (2018): 57-58; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 461. Chamberlain contends that political movements from the 1830s to Reconstruction did not share a monolithic interpretation or application of moral suasion.
  8. Donald Yacovone, “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827–1854: An Interpretation,” Journal of the Early Republic 8, no. 3 (1988): 282; Robinson Woodward-Burns, “Solitude before Society: Emerson on Self-Reliance, Abolitionism, and Moral Suasion,” Polity 48, no. 1 (2016): 32; James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 4; Lawrence J. Friedman, “Antebellum American Abolitionism and the Problem of Violent Means,” Psychohistory Review 9, no. 1 (1980): 29.
  9. Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).
  10. Frances Ellen Watkins, “Speech of Miss Watkins,” National Anti-Slavery Standard 18, no. 1 (May 23, 1857): 3; “Black Abolitionist Archive: Frances Ellen Watkins [Harper],” Black Abolitionist Archive, University of Detroit Mercy Libraries, https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/index.php?record_id=1285&collectionCode=baa.
  11. Philip S. Foner and Robert Branham, eds., “Liberty for Slaves,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1901 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 305–306.
  12. Alison M. Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 103.
  13. Herbert Robinson Marbury, Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 52; Patricia J. Sehulster, “Frances Harper’s Religion of Responsibility in Sowing and Reaping,” Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 6 (2010): 1137.
  14. Sehulster, “Frances Harper’s Religion of Responsibility in Sowing and Reaping,” 1137, 1148.
  15. Watkins, “Speech of Miss Watkins,” para. 3.
  16. Ibid.
  17. Eric Gardner, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Civil War and Militant Intersectionality,” Mississippi Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 506.
  18. Frances Harper, “How to Stop Lynching,” The Woman’s Era 1, no. 2 (May 1, 1894): 8-9.
  19. Parker, Articulating Rights, 116.
  20. Melba Joyce Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 226; Frances E. Willard, “Work among Colored People of the North,” Union Signal (June 5, 1884). 
  21. Alison M. Parker, “Frances Watkins Harper and the Search for Women’s Interracial Alliances,” in Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, ed. Christine L. Ridarsky and Mary M. Huth (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 153-154. Parker highlights the racial discrimination within the WCTU. In Harper’s 1884 annual report, she told her readers that she received no funding from the national WCTU organization even though she was traveling and delivering speeches as part of the WCTU.
  22. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Parker, Articulating Rights, 132.
  23. Frances Ellen Watkins, “Bury Me in a Free Land,” The Liberator 28, no. 52 (December 24, 1858): 208.