Women of distinction/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
MRS. FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER.
for a motherless girl of thirteen, and yet heavy burdens are sometimes great tutors and incentives that we in after-life appreciate more fully.
While earning her bread she chanced to be in a family that taught her some of the domestic arts and at the same time gave her a chance to satiate her great and growing thirst for books. She was notably never idle, and ere she had reached womanhood her first volume, "Forest Ivcaves," was written, consisting of both prose and poetry, which was afterwards published. So creditable were her early writings that some critics doubted that she was the author.
About 1851, desiring to be in a free State, she moved from Baltimore to Ohio, where she engaged in school-teaching for awhile, but soon found her way into Pennsylvania, where she again taught school at Little York.
Still, not satisfied because of profound love for her people who were in the cruel bonds of slavery, she often thought of the condition of affairs in Baltimore, and upon one occasion said, "Homeless in the land of our birth and worse off than strangers in the home of our nativity." While yet in doubt as to whether she might be more useful to her race as a school-teacher or otherwise she wrote as follows to a friend for advice: "What would you do if you were in my place? Would you give up and go back and work at your trade (dressmaking)? There are no people that need all the benefits resulting from a well-directed education more than we do. The condition of our people, the wants of our children and the welfare of our race demand the aid of every helping band, the God-speed of every Christian heart. It is a work of time, a labor of patience, to become an effective school-teacher, and it should be a work of love in which they who engage should not abate heart or hope until it is done. And after all, it is one of woman's most sacred rights to have the privilege of forming the symmetry and rightly adjusting the mental balance of an immortal mind."
Mrs. Harper was in full accord with everything that tended towards the freedom of the slaves from a bondage of both soul and body. She was a real missionary, a Christian missionary, in all her works.
For about one year and a half she lectured and traveled through Eastern States, creating a sensation wherever she spoke. The Portland Daily Press, in speaking of a lecture which she had delivered upon the invitation of the Mayor of the town, said: "She spoke for nearly an hour and a half, her subject being 'The Mission of the War, and the Demands of the Colored Race in the Work of Reconstruction,' and we have seldom seen an audience more attentive, better pleased, or more enthusiastic. Mrs. Harper has a splendid articulation, uses chaste, pure language, has a pleasant voice and allows no one to tire of hearing her. We shall attempt no abstract of her address; none that we could make would do her justice. It was one of which any lecturer might feel proud, and her reception by a Portland audience was all that could be desired. We have seen no praises of her that were overdrawn. We have heard Miss Dickinson, and do not hesitate to award the palm to her darker colored sister."
She then went to Canada to see the fugitives, and expressed her delight as follows: "Well, I have gazed for the first time upon Free Land, and, would you believe it, tears sprang to my eyes, and I wept. Oh, it was a glorious sight to gaze for the first time on a land where a poor slave, flying from our glorious land of liberty, would in a moment find his fetters broken, his shackles loosed, and whatever he was in the land of Washington, beneath the shadow of Bunker Hill Monument or even Plymouth Rock, here he becomes a man and a brother. I have gazed on Harper's Ferry, or rather the rock at the Ferry; I have seen it towering up in simple grandeur, with the gentle Potomac gliding peacefully at its feet, and felt that that was God's masonry, and my soul had expanded in gazing on its sublimity. I have seen the ocean singing its wild chorus of sounding waves, and ecstasy has thrilled upon the living chords of my heart. I have since then seen the rainbow-crowned Niagara chanting the choral hymn of Omnipotence, girdled with grandeur and robed with glory; but none of these things have melted me as the first sight of Free Land. Towering mountains lifting their hoary summits to catch the first faint flush of day when the sunbeams kiss the shadows from morning's drowsy face may expand and exalt your soul. The first view of the ocean may fill you with strange delight; Niagara—the great, the glorious Niagara—may hush your spirit with its ceaseless thunder, it may charm you with its robe of crested spray and rainbow crown, but the land of Freedom was a lesson of deeper significance than foaming waves or towering mounts."
While in Ohio, in autumn, 1860, the subject of our sketch was married to Mr. Fenton Harper, a resident of that State. She had laid by some means, with which she purchased a farm and soon went into her own home after marriage. She still remained a strong anti-slavery advocate, and despite domestic duties she continued her literary pursuits at times, and during this period produced some of her best works.
May 23, 1864, death came as a swift messenger and called from her side her husband. Still she was undaunted, and like a warrior continued to fight the great enemy of her country—Slavery; she fought him to the end.
She had full confidence in God as intending to bring about just such results from the war as would free the bonded slaves. She watched every step the great and bloody struggle made, and once in a letter to a friend said: "And yet I am not uneasy about the results of this war. We may look upon it as God's controversy with the nation. His arising to plead by fire and blood the cause of His poor, needy people. Some time since Breckinridge, in writing to Sumner, asks, if I rightly remember, 'What is the fate of a few negroes to me or mine?' Bound up in one great bundle of humanity, our fates seem linked together, our destiny entwined with theirs, and our rights are interwoven together."
She still trusted, for she had, by long experience, learned to "labor and to wait." She labored, she prayed, she trusted, and sure, as God always does on the side of the right, the war ended and the slaves were free, for Lincoln's proclamation had sounded the death knell to the cursed institution at the door of every slave-holder. The door had opened and the light had shone in. Who can tell the millions of hearts that leaped for joy? Praise God, the war ended, the slaves are free, and now the burdens of education and justice before the law fall upon the shoulders of this great and good woman.
How shall I best elevate them and how shall they get their rights? seemed to have been two of the questions that now confronted Mrs. Harper. She set out and for a good part of several years traveled through the South, visited them in their homes and speaking to them from the public rostrum, and never, through fear of any consequence whatever, allowed herself to disappoint an audience.
In joke a friend wrote her from Philadelphia as to her being bought out by the Rebels. She replied as follows: "Now in reference to being bought by Rebels and becoming a Johnsonite, I hold that between the white people and the colored there is a community of interests, and the sooner they find it out the better it will be for both parties; but that community of interests does not consist in increasing the privileges of one class and curtailing the rights of the other, but in getting every citizen interested in the welfare, progress and durability of the State. I do not, in lecturing, confine myself to the political side of the question. While I am in favor of universal suffrage, yet I know that the colored man needs something more than a vote in his hand; he needs to know the value of a home-life; to rightly appreciate and value the marriage relation; to know how and to be incited to leave behind him the old shards and shells of slavery and to rise in the scale of character, wealth and influence; like Nautilus, outgrowing his home to build for himself more stately temples of social condition. A man landless, ignorant and poor may use the vote against his interests, but with intelligence and land he holds in his hand the basis of power and elements of strength."
During this long journey through the South Mrs. Harper was ever mindful of the virtue and character of our women. She well knew the abuses they had suffered, the wrongs that they had endured, the advantages that had been taken of them when they were not allowed, under the cursed and cruel lash, to utter a murmuring word in self-defense. Now it was just and proper for some strong friend to remind them that they had rights which all men should respect; that as free people they could be a moral people only when the women were respected and treated as moral beings. This she seems to have been anxious to have them do; hence she wrote as follows from Georgia: "But really my hands are almost constantly full of work; sometimes I speak twice a day. Part of my lectures are given privately to women, and for them I never make any charge, or take up any collection. But this part of the country reminds me of heathen ground, and though my work may not be recognized as part of it used to be in the North, yet never, perhaps, were my services more needed; and, according to their intelligence and means, perhaps never better appreciated than here among these lowly people. I am now going to have a private meeting with the women of this place if they will come out. I am going to talk with them about their daughters, and about things connected with the welfare of the race. Now is the time for our women to begin to try to lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone."
Up to the time she returned to Philadelphia Mrs. Harper continued to write and discuss the condition of the ex-slave. She worked in home, in church, in Sunday-schools and on the public rostrum North and South; she was the constant advocate of the rights of an oppressed people.
Mrs. Harper has been one of our most energetic temperance workers, and has held sway with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union as no other Afro-American woman has ever done. Her work in this respect has given the race great prestige before the world.
A great and profound writer in both prose and poetry, a lecturer of no ordinary tact and ability, a master-hand at whatever she applies herself, she still lives at the time of this writing. Her pen is ever at work; her writings are many and varied.