I can still recall perfectly the day Johanna Ortner walked into my office, asking me to be her doctoral advisor, and in search of a dissertation topic. After the Civil War, her speeches were neglected in the temperance and women’s rights press. According to an admiring John Stephenson, on one occasion, Harper spoke “eloquently of the wrong of the slave” for two hours “in a soul stirring speech.” He reported to Garrison, who knew Harper’s abolitionist uncle William Watkins well, that “Miss Watkins is a young lady of color, of fine attainments, of superior education, and an impressive speaker, leaving an impression, wherever she goes, which will not soon be forgotten.” (Garrison, along with the Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy, had lived with black abolitionists Jacob T. Greener and Watkins in a boarding house in Baltimore, when he briefly co-edited The Genius of Universal Emancipation with Lundy in 1829. If Harper has long occupied a pride of place in African American literature, she surely deserves a similar place in African American intellectual and political history. Yes Ethiopia yet shall stretchHer bleeding hands abroadHer cry of agony shall reach. Historians, philosophers, and political theorists have also sought to recover black women’s early intellectual history. William Watkins, who had brought up his orphaned niece and was a teacher and clergyman himself, no doubt provided her with a political education in abolition as well as a conventional education in reading and arithmetic. While writing an article on the caning of Sumner, I discovered that African Americans corresponded frequently with the Radical Republican from Massachusetts and most, like Frederick Douglass, anointed him “our Senator.” But it was Harper’s poetic tribute to Sumner that remained with me. Why are early Americanists so obsessed with region—with geography, in short—rather than with chronology? Our historiographical queries pushed our scientists to think through the meaning and implications, not merely of current scientific consensuses, but also of past ones. For more great content, check out our other projects, (Just Teach One) and (Just Teach One African American Print). In the poem "Ethiopia," she speaks from third-person point of view. Yes, Ethiopia yet shall stretch. After penning this philippic, Harper issues a stinging critique of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime colonization schemes: “The President’s dabbling with colonization just now suggests to my mind the idea of a man almost dying with a loathsome cancer, and busying himself about having his hair trimmed according to the latest fashion.” The playfulness and skill of the mature Harper’s critique here stands in contrast to the earnest tone of her first literary production, Forest Leaves. Sophie White, “Trading Looks Race, Religion and Dress in French America,” Commonplace: the journal of early American life, accessed September 30, 2019, http://commonplace.online/article/trading-looks-race-religion-dress-french-america/. Harper.' While Johanna’s recovery of Forest Leaves allows scholars of literature to further develop their criticism and understanding of Harper’s literary productions, as is evident in other essays in this issue, her activist speeches and writings, lying hidden in plain sight, help us reconstruct the nature of her forgotten activism. In a dance, movement and steps are like words and sentences. On my encounters with Harper see Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2016), “Allies for Emancipation? Based on an oft-quoted Biblical saying deployed by early black abolitionists, Harper repeats this first paragraph at the end of her poem with added emphasis, “Oh stretch” and the conviction that Ethiopia shall “find redress from God.” Black abolitionists from Richard Allen to David Walker often evoked divine vengeance against the crimes of slavery and racism. With her too, I turned to the work of literary scholars like Boyd, Carla Peterson, Frances Smith Foster, and Maryemma Graham to fully appreciate the breadth of Harper’s oeuvre, poems, short stories, novels, and not the least, her speeches, many of which went unrecorded in the abolitionist and black presses. On the Christian Recorder see Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York, 2015). Harper (New York, 1988). We are still in the process, he goes on to note and as Johanna’s discovery makes clear, of “unearthing the nineteenth century roots” of black women’s literary tradition. Historical memory operates differently in professional military circles. A. On Harper see Melba Boyd, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E.W. Clearly, in a nineteenth-century literary style, Harper, as Graham argues, like writers associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, rejected the conceit of art for art’s sake. She was hired as a lecturing agent by the Maine Anti Slavery Society, went on lecture tours as far west as Michigan, according to the black abolitionist William C. Nell, and assisted the adroit secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, William Still. © Poems are the property of their respective owners. Her mother died three years later and she was looked after by relatives. Harper 1825-1911 (Detroit, Mich., 1994), Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York, 1990), and Maryemma Graham, Complete Poems of Frances E.W.
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