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The Baltimore where Frances Harper was raised in the 1840s was rife with racial tensions, and the economy was growing rapidly due to the trade in cotton and industrialization (Fields, 1985). This meant that ideas about racial equality, and ideas of economic and political development that were of importance elsewhere in the country, were of great interest locally. The Abolitionist Movement had been gathering more adherents throughout the 1830s and into the 1840s with increased publicity, and William Lloyd Garrison and others were frequent visitors to Baltimore. The Movement as a political and therefore public force, in newspapers and magazines, in lectures and speeches, was an established part of Baltimore public culture. Frederick Douglass, who had been enslaved in Maryland, published his first autobiography in 1845, and became a celebrity public presence amongst those in the Movement. He was only seven years older than Frances Harper, and therefore a social contemporary, unlike Sojourner Truth, who was born in 1797.

Frances Harper, because of her family’s involvement in the Movement, would have had contact with both noted Black abolitionists by the 1840s. She would work extensively with both in the decades to come. Frances Harper would also come to work with Harriet Tubman from the 1850s, from whom she was only three years apart in age. It is important to give readers a sense of the activist environment that surrounded Frances Harper in her teen years and twenties, as she began to form her ambition for a vocation beyond that traditionally available to her as servant and housewife.

I want the reader to resist the compression of generations, particularly when considering the life of someone such as Frances Harper, whose work reflected the different political forces at work in different decades. It does matter that, when Frances Harper was a young child, the organization of anti-slavery efforts in Boston led to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal and then Maria Stewart’s writings. It matters that decades of Black women’s efforts to organize in literary circles and social groups to address the problem of slavery had already become a factor in the definition of free Black life in the North (Jeffrey, 1998, pp. 64–5). Frances Harper’s uncle William was at the center of the debate between anti-slavery activists, between colonization and becoming a new category of former slave and a free Black community (Sinha, 2016a; Washington, 2015, pp. 63–7). What should the larger goal of a necessary emancipation be in the context of a heightened public conversation about the Abolition of slavery, a conversation that was also active in Europe at the time?

By the 1840s and 1850s, the Abolitionist Movement was represented by several journals and regularly published newspapers, public-speaker fora in cities across the Northeast, and discussions in the living rooms and salons of the very civil society that had birthed the nation some 80 years earlier (Sinha, 2016a). It was in this same period that efforts toward establishing an American university and college system of higher education were accelerating, and as a result the development of social spaces for learning about, discussing, and organizing around specific concerns that were both local and national in focus was an acceptable activity for many in the society. The Black community as a political force within this public – what today is sometimes referred to as a new counter-public – was well established by the 1840s and 1850s, with the first Black student graduating from Oberlin College in 1844. That Frances Harper attended a local academy in the 1830s can be attributed to the fact that her uncle had helped found the institution, as academies and schools were not yet regularly accessible to young Black women (Baumgartner, 2019).

For reasons not clear to historical researchers, Frances Harper was not provided the support by her family expected by a young Black woman in a middle-class household such as the Watkinses’. At 13, she was forced to make her living as a servant for a White family in town, which was not something that would be expected of a child in a Black middle-class home. While the Watkinses had many children of their own, their income and social status were sufficient to have maintained Frances Harper at home throughout her schooling years (Washington, 2015, p. 70). In her later writing, Frances Harper does not speak glowingly of her childhood, and in fact describes those years as ones lacking in the affection and love that a mother would have provided. Something to remark on in this context is that it is unusual that someone as prolific as Frances Harper did not pen an autobiography. If we think of the slave autobiographies written by those who she worked alongside in the period leading up to the Civil War, hers would be a remarkable and expected document for us today from the pen of a free Black woman. That such a text does not exist is perhaps a testament to the pain and emotional difficulties that Frances Harper may have experienced as a young girl. As several researchers have opined, there is much to suggest that her childhood was fraught and wanting in affection (Foster, 1990; Still, 1872; Washington, 2015). At the same time, this exposure to service work as a young teenager must have been formative and important to her own intellectual development. It also meant she was outside what otherwise would have been a very restrictive Black middle-class household.

There is no doubt this relative freedom, no matter how arduous in its requirements, allowed Harper access to the gendered experiences of African Americans who were of a different social class than her own family. In the household where she worked, she was granted permission to take her service breaks in the White family’s extensive library, an opportunity that she was encouraged by her employer to take advantage of. From the perspective of the contemporary reader, the experience with differences of class and social station, racial inequality, and the gender politics to which the young Frances Harper was exposed both at home, in Academy classes, and in her work as a servant provided the environment expected of someone who would later achieve the incredible public and literary success she would acquire in her lifetime. What was missing as a young child was only a commitment – the personal conviction to contribute to specific political goals in her lifetime. This she would acquire in the 1840s and 1850s, as events in the larger society defined the opportunities available to her as a teacher and poet. Her first publication, Forest Leaves, shows little evidence of the political journey that Frances Harper would undertake in later decades, but also should warn readers against assuming that her poetry in later decades arose solely as a function of a description of political activism. Frances Harper was a poet before she became active as a public speaker, and so I think we should consider Frances Harper as a poet who found her muse in the social and political events of her time. That she was also a writer of prose, an important nationally recognized activist, and a phenomenal and famous public speaker reveals the tremendous force of intellect and will she was to carry throughout her life.

The problem of her work for the contemporary reader is that Frances Harper in fact developed what would be considered at the time – and today – four very successful careers simultaneously. If we acknowledge this fact, we must concede that Frances Harper was in her day one of the most important figures of the last half of the nineteenth century. Without taking away from the perception we have of the contributions of, for example, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells, or Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, Frances Harper produced a variety of work, and was so important to the many political events of the time that, today, we should recognize how her ideas and presence gave to the society something both exceptional and enduring. She should be a household name for us, and that she isn’t represents a tremendous loss.

That Frances Harper was able to publish Forest Leaves in the mid to late 1840s is an accomplishment not to be ignored, as she did not have the expectation of publicity, and the vocation of the poet affirmed, beyond her immediate circle of friends and family. For a Black person to publish poetry was still not a common occurrence, and Black women were not encouraged to publish by a public that discouraged their participation in social spaces where organizational activities sought a hearing. There exists no evidence of support for her poetic ambitions as a Black woman from within Frances Harper’s family, and, as Washington points out, one of the most important abolitionist journals of the period, The Colored American, in 1838 had published an editorial critical of Black women engaging in public speaking and protests on behalf of the goals of the Movement (Washington, 2015, p. 69). What we do not have from the period is a description of her friends, her personal interlocutors, and researchers instead are reduced to analyzing the early volume of poetry for clues as to her intimate and personal life (Ortner, 2015). Forest Leaves contains poems centered on themes of personal conviction, intimacy, and loss, in addition to being a study of the place that religious faith should hold in the thoughts of her audience.

The combination of independence and education evident in the childhood of Frances Harper led to her being hired as a faculty member in 1850 at Union Seminary in Ohio, which later provided the institutional foundation for Wilberforce College. Hired to teach sewing, Harper was the first woman faculty member at the Seminary. She was 25 years old. If we consider this in the context of that time period, rather than of our own time in which many Black people claim firsts, in sports, in the media, and in politics, we can imagine how difficult and precocious it must have been to seek and gain employment at the Seminary. This was a novel and important achievement, when the idea of the Black exception proving the rule of racial equality as it does today was not yet discovered. She was, instead, someone who refused to accept the limitations placed upon her, not as a matter of freedom, but as a statement of equality. There is ample evidence in her later writings that her professional ambition was always described in both gendered and racial terms, just as she was always aware of the class politics that circumscribed her choices.

Harper left Ohio in 1852, and instead moved to Little York, Pennsylvania, and began teaching young children. From her letters, it is clear that she soon became disenchanted with the job. It is hard to reconcile her disenchantment with teaching in this instance with her enthusiasm for teaching young children in the South some 15 years later, immediately after the Civil War, unless we think about the fact that the early position offered no obvious outlet for her personal ambitions to address the larger issues of injustice in the society. There is no one personal event that obviously defined the sense of political commitment for Frances Harper, with the exception of her exposure to the conditions in which people lived around her, and her access to those in the Abolitionist Movement at the time. However, there is one political event that many researchers attribute as the turning point in Harper’s professional direction (Still, 1872, p. 758).

In 1853, Maryland passed its fugitive slave law, which stated that any free Black person who had left the state could be enslaved if they returned. The law was perceived as an answer to the problems of the growth of the free Black community in Baltimore, of the relationship between the free and the enslaved typified in the personal experience of Frances Harper, and of the appeal of Maryland as a destination for runaways, which heightened tensions between North and South (Fields, 1985). Suddenly, at 28, Harper lost legal access to the state of her birth, and this new status, coupled with the highly publicized kidnapping and sale of a free Black man in the state upon passage of the law, is thought to have radicalized her and emboldened her to write and protest in public for the Abolitionist Movement (Still, 1872, p. 757).

Frances Harper moved to Philadelphia in 1853, and lived at the home of William and Letitia Still, one of the centers for the Movement in Pennsylvania. At this time, she sought to become an active member of the Underground Railroad, but was discouraged by those participating in the Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia – largely, it seems, due to her being a single woman, and the precarity of her own free status because of the new law in Maryland (Parker, 2010, p. 103; Still, 1872, p. 758). She faced the likelihood of being enslaved if she were to assist runaways in Maryland to escape north. Women were also openly discouraged from representing their opinions in public, and only two Black women, of the many engaged in organizing in the Abolitionist Movement, were regular public speakers up to the Civil War. The two were, in fact, Sojourner Truth and Frances Harper.

When we think about this rejection of her application to become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, we should take a step back from this study of her life and think about how, today, we reduce the experiences of Black people in the immediate pre-Civil War period to the problem of slavery. Frances Harper had never been a slave, and so the idea of the new law was perceived by her and other free Blacks as an insult to their own categorical status; even though they had not been described as citizens, they were still, in their own social standing, equal to the Whites around them. The idea of being available to enslavement must have seemed ridiculous in its reduction of social and legal capacity, something beyond intimate understanding, and at the same time an explicit attack on their person.

The rejection of this idea of being a natural slave on a personal level would have propelled most free Blacks to the barricades, so to speak, on behalf of their humanity, alongside many Whites who had, of course, lived alongside free Blacks (Spires, 2019, p. 221). In fact, we should consider the fugitive slave law in this context as a partial catalyst for the collapse of the regime of slavery in the United States. The law thought necessary to safeguard the system of enslavement by slave owners was also perhaps the instrument of its defeat. It created an enormous problem for how race was defined in the society. We should think of the fugitive slave laws as an attempt to change the practice of racial difference – as an extension of a particular dehumanization of Black people that even some of those in the South who were accepting of the slavery must have found problematic.

For someone with the intellectual gifts and creative impulses of Frances Harper, the idea of her being subject to enslavement if she returned to Maryland, where she was born, must have felt like a violation of the very idea of her person and the capacity she had to write and reason. It is important to disabuse ourselves also of the contemporary notion that slavery was a thing of the Southern states and not also present, under different economic conditions than the large-scale plantation economy in the South, in the form of domestic, farm, and factory labor in the North. Frances Harper had grown up in Baltimore with slaves working and living in her neighborhood, and the differences between her social standing and theirs would have been painfully obvious, and politically salient to Frances Harper as an adult. Sojourner Truth, for example, had been a slave in the North.

In 1854, Frances Harper published her second book of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, which was an immediate success and gained her considerable attention. In the same year, at the age of 29, Frances Harper gave her first speech, in Massachusetts, and shortly thereafter began lecturing regularly for the cause of Abolition in Maine, despite public hostility expressed by those who felt it was not respectable for women to speak in public (Foster, 1990, pp. 11–12; Logan, 1999, p. 49; Painter, 1996, p. 139).

The Maine anti-slavery women’s organizations were very active, and Frances Harper was their only Black woman public speaker, a fact that must have been important to her own personal development as someone who would later become a central figure in post-Civil War Women’s Rights movements (Logan, 1999, p. 2; Still, 1872). She was also a talented seamstress and so was able to contribute directly to the sewing circles raising money for the Movement (Salerno, 2005, pp. 128–31).

The space of the public in which lectures and political speeches occurred was deemed the province of men, and women were to be granted access only exceptionally. Frances Harper was determined to become a regular public speaker, and she succeeded, but not through the direct intervention of her cousin William Watkins Jr., who was involved in the Abolitionist Movement in the New York area (Washington, 2015, p. 71). She participated in the Movement through the organizational efforts of women. She negotiated her moral stance with her audience as she lectured – as a single woman, later when married, and then as a widow after 1864 – and constantly answered for her erudition, as some accused her of not being Black simply because they lacked experience of Black people with an education (Still, 1872, p. 772; Yee, 1992, pp. 112–14).

Andreá Williams argues that Frances Harper, in her capacity as a single woman for much of her public speaking career, modeled the idea of “single blessedness” (Williams, 2014). Alongside the traditional characterization of single women in public as pernicious and immoral was a social capacity to define the single woman as contributing to the sanctity of marriage, through the single woman’s labor in support of this ideal. As Williams points out, the single woman could also be thought of along a continuum from the “kind Aunt who assists her overwhelmed married sister to the unwed churchgoer who masters fundraising” (Williams, 2014, p. 101). The single woman could in this conceptual frame justify in public their assistance of an anti-slavery cause and organization, in support of the moral probity that this political activism represented; they had found a community that, from this perspective, could make positive use of their single status (Williams, 2014, p. 113). As Williams points out, the support that Frances Harper provided for the widow of John Brown after Harpers Ferry falls within this category of the single woman providing assistance to support marriage, where her status as single allows her to aid the widow unconditionally (Still, 1872, p. 763; Williams, 2014, p. 111).

This narrow capacity for social acceptance in public did not obviate the social force of the description of the immorality of single women speaking in public, and the historical record demonstrates that Frances Harper experienced public criticism for her status, as did all single women who were public speakers in the Movement (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 208). In her letters from the early period of her public speaking, we get a sense of how difficult it must have been to be a single Black woman abolitionist speaker in Maine, sleeping in houses owned by Whites, and traveling with White women (Still, 1872).

Reports suggest, however, that Harper was quickly able to become a poised, organized, and charismatic speaker, forthright and learned in her delivery (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 207). The evidence of this that we have today is in the praise lauded upon her speeches in letters and published newspaper accounts, as well as the record of the speeches themselves in later decades at national conferences and conventions (Still, 1872, pp. 775–6, 779–80; Yee, 1992, pp. 117, 119). That Frances Harper often spoke extemporaneously and responded to her audience with alacrity and respect, entertaining them as well as providing listeners with unconventional thoughts and ideas, made the announcements of her impending lectures something of a local occasion, after her first years in the field. She was paid very little, if anything, for these lectures, which meant that she needed to offer something to her audience that incentivized them to purchase the poetry books that she would sell alongside each event. Often, she would recite her poetry as a part of her lecture.

That Harper sold thousands of copies of the book Poems in this fashion should, by today’s economic calculations, earn our respect for her speaking talent. Her talks were sufficiently valuable for her also to be at the forefront of the developing public-speaking profession in the country, sharing the stage with everyone from Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony to Fredrick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and conducting sometimes two lectures a day, several days a week, for decades. She was a rare individual as a speaker, but also someone who did not trade on her own exceptionality by accepting social advancement and acceptance. For Frances Harper, what mattered was not her own person, but what she could do for other Black people. This perspective on the nature of her own contributions to the causes of her day held true throughout her life.

It is this profession of speaking on behalf of the anti-slavery cause that provided the impetus for the collection of her poetry in this period of her life, determining the type of sentimental poetry that she produced, so that it would be legible to, and meet the needs of, those without an extensive education beyond the capacity to read the Bible. These requirements defined its published form as well, in small inexpensive books that people could carry away from the lectures.

In what would today be considered chapbooks, the audience could enjoy the poems in the privacy of their own homes, and consider the ideas of which she would speak publicly. These small books contained poems on the subjects dear to those to whom the Abolitionist Movement sought to appeal, but also addressed the problem posed by the conditions whereby gender, race, and class intersected within the lives of everyone in the society. Frances Harper’s poetry in the 1854 Poems, and later work in the period before the Civil War, was drawn from the experiences she had with self-emancipated refugees, the needs of the people she encountered in her travels and on the lecture circuit, as well as her personal knowledge of events such as the protests at the recapture of the former slave Burns in Boston in 1854, the death of Nat Turner, and the many examples of militancy by abolitionists in the 1850s leading up to the Civil War.

Because of the distance with which many think of racial politics in their daily lives, and the limits to which we allow poetry on this subject to impact us today, it is difficult to understand how powerful these books of poems and her recitations must have been for her audience. An audience without access to social media and the steady stream of video information with which we are constantly inundated would have been enthralled by the charisma and confidence she displayed. They would have welcomed the opportunity to listen to her readings and lectures.

That Harper was also usually accompanied by other lecturers, and the speaker events were advertised through the auspices of a well-known anti-slavery society, meant that there was usually a large public in attendance, as the issue of slavery was considered one of great controversy in the 1850s. We should also consider that there were few universities to serve as centers for public conversation about controversial topics or specific ideas, at the time. These lectures were held in meeting halls, churches, and public gathering places. In this historical sense, we should think, then, of Frances Harper as participating in a quintessential American democratic public politics, as the speaker in the town square and church hall.

Frances Harper describes her first successes as a public speaker thus:

Last night I lectured in a White church in Providence. Mr. Gardener was present, and made the estimate of about six hundred persons. Never, perhaps, was a speaker young, or old, favored with a more attentive audience … My maiden lecture was Monday night in New Bedford, in the Elevation and Education of our People. Perhaps as intellectual a place as any I was ever at of its size.

(Still, 1872, p. 758)

A month after this occurred, Frances Harper was employed by the State Anti-Slavery Society of Maine as a regular lecturer, giving scheduled talks three times a week (p. 759). In 1853, the narrative Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup had been published, and after reading it Frances Harper began advocating for the Free Products or Free Labor boycott movement, whereby those in the North should refuse to purchase goods made in the South by slave labor. This movement was more honored in the breech, and was never successful as an economic boycott (Gordon, 1997, p. 47; Still, 1872, p. 760).

By 1856, Frances Harper had left Maine and was lecturing regularly throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts to great acclaim. As an agent for the Western Anti-Slavery Society, Frances Harper gave speeches in Kansas and Nebraska. After the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 violated the 1850 Missouri Compromise to not permit slavery in new territories, the Movement realized that slavery as an institution would continue to grow in importance in the nation. Thus, fiery and popular speakers such as Frances Harper were sent to agitate for the anti-slavery cause. She toured Canada in this period as well (Washington, 2015, p. 77). She did this for the next three years, while also writing poetry and prose. This was when she would have traveled with Sojourner Truth, selling her books of poetry alongside the copies of the narrative and images of Truth, to support their labor.

There is no evidence that Frances Harper acted personally as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, but she donated financial support and her own time to assist those who did. At the same time, we can say today, with what we now know about the Railroad, that we wouldn’t expect her activities if she had been a conductor to become public or the activity of a conductor to become known unless, as in the case of Harriet Tubman, the person was a former slave risking recapture by assisting those still enslaved.

When Margaret Garner was captured in 1856 in Ohio, after killing her daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery, Frances Harper was deeply affected. She writes in a letter to William Still, “Ohio, with her Bibles and churches, her baptisms and prayers, had not one temple so dedicated to human rights, one altar so consecrated to human liberty, that trampled upon and down trodden innocence knew that it could find protection for a night, or shelter for a day” (Still, 1872, p. 764). Frances Harper also wrote a poem published in 1857 about the ordeal: “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio” (Graham, 1988, pp. 28–30).

The 1850s was a time when the fugitive slave laws were testing the accommodation that the North had made with the slave South in response to the Missouri Compromise of 1850. As a free Black woman, Frances Harper had to motivate her audience with the idea that she faced the legal threat of enslavement if she were to return to Maryland. This was a different approach than that of the former slave testifying to the horrors of their captivity. Instead, Frances Harper spoke to the audience’s capacity to imagine how someone like her could be thought of as enslaved. Erudite, poised, socially capable, and genteel, Frances Harper the poet stood before her largely White audiences and asked the question of how Black people could be thought of as naturally, instead of capriciously and immorally, enslaved by others. This was not a statement of racial difference from Whites first, but rather a question of what the audience thought being Black should require of the nation. What was the category of the human to which race should apply? Would they countenance the reduction of her status to that of a slave because of the economic needs of the slavers, or respond to her poetic genius, her ability to articulate many of the same personal ambitions and desires as her audience, regarding the meaning of freedom and faith?

Accepting the injustice of the fugitive slave laws did not require that a White person admit to social equality with Frances Harper, but rather that the audience accept that a shared description of racial difference did not encompass the necessity of slavery. In her person, Frances Harper was advocating for political equality, the idea that, once free, a Black person was considered a person with certain inalienable rights due from the government, and with rights with regard to the desires of all other persons, even if these were White. In this sense, the social mores against women speaking in public must have emphasized and focused her message, rather than detracted from its impact.

Harper would have been perceived as courageous and unusual, representing as a Black woman how a Black person who had never been a slave could be thought of as someone with rights that all should respect. But public speaking in this way by Frances Harper must have required enormous courage and fortitude – the crowds were often not respectful or polite, and it was sometimes dangerous (Jeffrey, 1998, p. 208; Washington, 2015, p. 72). What called her to lecture? Since we have little direct autobiographical information about her experiences when young, we can only speculate. Yet offering herself as a speaker, to the skepticism of others in the organizations, and doing so against the social norms of the day must have been very stressful, and required determination.

Because of the focus of her writing and professional life, I suspect Frances Harper was someone who refused to be defined by the expectations of others. She was someone who wanted to establish in her person the equality, even superiority, of her own faculties, relative to those who would constantly have projected a social conviction of an innate racial superiority over her. This is an enormous weight to bear, this daily struggle against the pretentions of those who, being White, can rely on social norms of racial superiority to further their own desires. In a time when so many Black people were enslaved, the weight of what could be called “racial representation” must have been stifling for a young Black Frances Harper, who was both a poet and ambitious.

Frances Harper and Sojourner Truth were the only Black women who regularly lectured on the wider abolitionist speaker circuits. Sojourner Truth, a former slave, was much older and would sing and speak briefly of her former life as a slave in the North. Referring to printed copies of her narrative for sale, as well as her image, Truth therefore represented something different from the eloquent and literate poet Frances Harper, who would recite from her own poems and speak on the issues of Abolition as a moral imperative. The audience listening to both in one evening would have heard two converging ideas about Black life in the North: the former slave testifying as to the brutality of the experience, and the free woman poet declaiming on the merits of a faith whose moral probity would come with Black Emancipation. In encountering these discussions of what slavery was like and what freedom had wrought, the audience could equate the two as representing the political possibilities of Blackness.

In 1859, at the age of 34, Frances Harper published the short story “The Two Offers” (Foster, 1990). The same year, Harper spent the weeks leading up to the hanging of John Brown – sentenced for the failed rebellion at Harpers Ferry – offering material and emotional support to his wife (Parker, 2010, p. 109). This connection with Brown demonstrates the centrality of the young Frances Harper to the Movement, and suggests that she was more familiar with the organized struggle in the slave states involving the Underground Railroad than is evident from her letters and public writing.

Harper’s relationship with Brown also hints at her understanding of the relationship between gender and race as important to the definition of the Emancipation being sought by the abolitionists. What role was she to be permitted in the Movement, if the wife of John Brown was not also implicated by law in the acts of her husband? Today, this complex assumption of a gender distinction of complicity in the work of the Movement may seem odd at first, but it should remind us that women could not vote, or own property, and were not perceived as public equals to men. They were expected to define their own ambitions through the men in their lives.

This expectation that women define themselves by the men around them would have been extremely difficult for a single woman such as Frances Harper to avoid as a social mandate, and so the absence of men in her life up until 1860 is an important question for future research to explore. At the same time, for Harper, involvement in the Movement came without obvious male attachments or relationships beyond those in the form of older patrons such as William Still. Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” follows on this theme by providing a meditation on the choices available for women, in terms of marriage and professional life, while they did not have formal political rights in the society (Foster, 2010, p. 35). This story emphasized the importance of rights for Black women, as well as the need to develop moral certainty within the Black community. “The Two Offers” challenged the misogyny evident at the time in the Black community, and rejected the required dependence of Black women on the moral constancy of Black men. The publishing of this short story poignantly frames the personal choice that Frances Harper herself made to marry the next year, in 1860, and defines much of what we know about her life in the coming War years from 1860 to 1865.