State History

This article originally appeared on the National Abolition Hall of Fame website.

Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911), nee Watkins, was the most prominent African-African female social reformer and writer in 19th-century America. Although she was born free in slaveholding Baltimore, she was orphaned as a toddler. As an orphan, she was subject to indenture and vulnerable to kidnapers, which meant she could easily have become a slave if her uncle, the Reverend William Watkins, Sr., had not taken her into his home and raised her as his daughter.

Watkins herself became an abolitionist orator after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.  In 1854, while teaching at a school in York, Pennsylvania, she was scandalized by the wrongful enslavement and death of a free black laborer named Edward Davis. By making her realize that she could have been him, Davis' case compelled her to identify even more closely with her enslaved people--an identification that resulted in her "pledging" herself "to the Anti-Slavery cause,” as she put it to close friend and colleague, William Still. Read more...