Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

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In: 19th Century Women, Abolition, Civil War, Literature

 “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.” Inscription, Contemplative Court,  Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was a poet, abolitionist, and suffragist who first achieved renown through her antislavery poetry. Born in 1825, a free woman in Baltimore,  she published her first book of poems at around the age of twenty. Before the Civil War, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she joined the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and worked with William Stills helping slaves escape via theRead More →