Gendering the Debate over African Americans' Education in the 1880s: Frances Harper's...

Gendering the Debate over African Americans' Education in the 1880s: Frances Harper'sReconfiguration of Atticus Haygood's Philanthropic ModelAuthor(s): Sarah RobbinsSource: Legacy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2002), pp. 81-89Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679416 .

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Gendering the Debate over African Americans' Education in the 1880s: Frances Harper's Reconfiguration

of Atticus Haygood's Philanthropic Model

Sarah Robbins Kennesaw State University

In the years after the Civil War, white Ameri cans north and south debated the capacity of

former slaves to be educated for citizenship, while leading African American authors (and some white supporters) used fiction, speeches, and other forms to demonstrate the capabilities of the race for full civic participation. As evi

dent in teaching texts like Lydia Maria Child's

The Freedmen's Book and novels like Albion

Tourgee's Bricks Without Straw, this discourse

about democratic participation was often

closely bound up with arguments about

whether or not the freedmen of the south

should or even could be educated. By the 1880s, when Radical Reconstruction had been dis

placed by calls for national reconciliation, this contest frequently shifted focus to the kind and

degree of education most suitable for African

Americans. Some "New South" leaders began to

suggest to their constituencies that making some allowances for the education of blacks could bring long-term benefits to a region that

clearly needed to become industrialized.

Meanwhile, northern foundations such as the

Peabody and Slater funds became increasingly powerful arbiters of African American educa

LEGACY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, 2002, COPYRIGHT ? 2003 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, LINCOLN, NE

tion experiences, exercising much more decisive

control over the curriculum of institutions

aimed at teaching blacks than the loose confed

eration of the Freedmen's Bureau and mission

ary societies had in the 1860s. In particular, the

small group of white male foundation agents who ran the Slater Fund?Rutherford B. Hayes, Daniel Gilman and Atticus Haygood?consis

tently set African American educational pro

grams within a race-specific industrial model.

Along those lines, Haygood's 1885 report to the

Fund's Board of Trustees, a purportedly benign discussion of The Case of the Negro, as to Educa

tion in the Southern States, is representative of a

policy that was institutionalized at sites such as

Tuskegee and Hampton institutes. Haygood's 1885 report depicted "the negro" as "a good citi

zen," but one whose status would remain infe

rior, constrained by the very work "habits" of manual labor the Slater Fund's educational model would allow?a model denying access

both to liberal arts study and to the moral, eth

ical, and social leadership more "naturally" appropriate to the superior white race (soff). When we see how writing like Haygood's set

such firm limits on African American educa tion and citizenship, we have a heightened appreciation of the negotiation Frances E. W.

Harper carried out in her 1880s serialized novel,



Trial and Triumph, which addressed issues

about blacks' education through the experi ences of characters being taught at home, in

church, on the job, and in school?that is, within a nurturing community education

model. And if we position Harper's portrayal of

education alongside a white middle-class tradi

tion of home-guided teaching that assigned moral training to motherly mentors, we can

understand how she used affiliation based on

gender to counter Haygood's argument based on race.

Overall, during post-Reconstruction, Harper's education-oriented literature faced what could

have been a debilitating dilemma evident in

texts like Haygood's. Yet, in speeches like "A Fac

tor in Human Progress" and in her Trial and

Triumph serial, Harper encouraged members of

her race to adapt domesticated learning prac tices and educational goals that had been

touted, earlier in the nineteenth century, by white, middle-class women writers like

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (e.g., in her "Ella"

narrative in Stories for Young Persons) and Lydia

Sigourney (e.g., in Letters to Mothers). Consis

tent with the ideal of Republican motherhood, these antebellum narratives had argued for

white women's increased access to learning so

that they could prepare their children for civic

responsibilities. Portraying women's home

based teaching as a vital force uplifting the

nation, these domestic literacy management stories had later been adapted by writers like

Sarah Josepha Hale to portray women school

teachers as naturally extending middle-class

women's rightful teaching role into the larger

community.

Harper's appropriation of this white women's

genre represented an astute response to race

based educational discourse that was, in the

1880s, being dominated by white male cultural

arbiters even as white women writers were seek

ing to revise the genre to claim their own

chances at higher education and work in the

professions. That is, Harper's adaptation of the

domestic teaching narrative returned the genre, on one level, to its most traditional form?

exalting home-based literacy management by an enlightened mother figure?in the case of

Trial and Triumph, Harper's character Mrs.

Lasette. Harper's seemingly conservative move

here has sometimes prevented today's readers

from appreciating this text and others utilizing similar strategies, such as her turn-of-the

century speeches on motherhood and her 1890s

novel, Iola Leroy.1 However, situating Harper's

work?especially Trial and Triumph?in an

historical context that positions it in relation to

male writing on education like Atticus Hay

good's helps us appreciate both her artistry and

her argument.

Atticus Haygood's 1885 report to the Board of

Trustees of the Slater Fund, The Case of the

Negro, as to Education in the Southern States, demonstrates white male power brokers' post Reconstruction moves to set African American

educational goals within a race-specific "indus

trial" framework. The Slater Fund was estab

lished in 1882 by a Connecticut philanthropist

impressed by what the Peabody Fund had done

to improve educational opportunities for

African Americans in the south. Seeking accommodation with white southerners still

opposed to black uplift programs, the Slater

Fund assembled a board that included benevo

lent but not radical supporters of the freedmen

and tied its educational objectives to the New

South emphasis on economic growth.2 Typical of the board's attitude, according to Roy Finkenbine, was this diary entry by Rutherford

B. Hayes, a leading member:

"Educate only at schools which provide some

form for industrial education-Let the nor

mal instruction be that men must earn their

own living, and that by the labor of their hands

as far as may be. This is the gospel of salvation

for the colored man. Let not labor be servile,

but in manly occupations like those of the car

penter, the farmer, and the blacksmith" (71).

82 legacy: volume 19 no. 1 2002



To carry out this program in the south, the

Slater Fund chose as its general agent Atticus

Haygood, a Georgia minister who had served as

president of Emory College. Haygood, a friend

of New South politician Henry Grady, was

viewed in the 1880s as neither a stubborn enemy nor a radical supporter of African Americans.

Haygood's 1889 book, Our Brother in Black, for

instance, would reaffirm the position staked

out in his 1885 Slater agent's report, one that

would have endeared him to white northern

liberals without causing the "better" class of

southerners to reject him or his views.3 Hay

good argued there that since "six millions of

negroes" were in the south "to stay," and that

since slavery had left the freedmen as unpre

pared for citizenship as a burned house would

be for giving shelter, all Americans needed to be

concerned about the education and financial

support required to help the "negro [be] a

neighbor."4 Despite his efforts to accommodate

northern ideas on this issue, the general pro

gram Haygood outlined as ideal for African

Americans would have appealed to conserva

tive southern whites. For example, he declared

that the races must be kept entirely separate in

schooling, in light of their inherently different

educational agendas and "natural" racial traits.5

Specifically, he assumed that the immediate

need the negro had to support himself and his

family precluded freedmen from placing as

much emphasis on the "spelling-book" as on

the manual-labor-type "work" that he must do

"for a living" (144,136). Confirming a hierarchy of race-based traits, needs, and prospects, in

other words, Haygood confidently urged his

fellow southerners to exhibit their superiority

through a benevolently paternal stance toward the freed people, thereby, in practice, insuring perpetuation of that very hierarchy. Along those lines, Haygood waxed enthusiastic about

the benefits of allowing southern blacks to own

land. But the details of his vision of "industry" and "economy" among such landowners rele

gated African Americans to a permanent peas

ant status: "the Romans understood this. . . .

Mobs are not made up of land-owners."

According to Haygood, landed blacks (even with only one small plot and "a cabin") would

accept the status quo, thereby resisting "com

munism" or, presumably, social uplift like that

envisioned by Frances Harper (212). If Haygood's moralizing for Our Brother in

Black helped solidify a race-based social hierar

chy, his impressive accumulation of data on

education "for colored people in the Southern

States" in his 1885 Slater report indicated a close

connection between the rapidly developing view of education as a science (hence, a mascu

line professional enterprise) and the hierar

chizing of curricula for different groups in the

United States to reaffirm the top-dog position of white men (18,3). In line with education his

torian Mariolina Salvatori's observation that

late-nineteenth-century American pedagogy was becoming less a humanistic art and more a

statistics-oriented and male-led science, Hay

good repeatedly invoked the power of tables,

charts, population figures, percentages, and

appendices to support his contentions about

the progress the Slater Fund should celebrate

and the lingering concerns the foundation

should address for African American education

in the south.6 On the one hand, for example,

Haygood cited figures indicating that literacy rates had improved and that attendance at

"schools for colored children in the southern States" had increased (10-12). But Haygood also

marshaled statistics about the poor physical conditions in "the schools for colored people,"

especially in rural districts, and he worried over

the rise in the number of children being instructed by "colored teachers," since many of them were "pitiably incompetent" (13-14). Sug

gesting that "common schools for colored chil

dren must [eventually] depend on colored

teachers," Haygood argued for improved teacher training, and he offered examples of

graduates of "Atlanta University, Fisk, Howard

University and others" as "successfully prepared"

Sarah Robbins 83



for teaching their race. Still, Haygood declared in

missionary-like language, sustained white con

trol of black education in the south was clearly essential: "It is necessary, if this great movement

to educate and Christianize these people is to

succeed, if it is to be saved from total collapse, that the white people should, for a long time, not

only furnish most of the money required to carry on the work, but most of the men and women

who are to give it direction" (16).

Direction, of course, was one of the special ties of groups like the Slater Fund and the

Peabody Foundation, as their selection of par ticular schools and programs to receive sub

stantial funds inevitably shaped curriculum.

And indeed, the institutions Haygood singled out for praise had already benefited from

northern philanthropic largesse?along with

guidance on how to define themselves. Accord

ingly, Haygood outlined both the current "work

done by some of the more advanced of these

schools" and his own self-assured view of the

educational content and "methods" the Slater

Fund should support. He admitted that more

"colored men and women" needed to be "pre

pared for educational leadership by the training and culture of the higher studies" (36). But

Haygood also insisted that a persistent "weak

ness" in the southern African American popu lation linked to "the antecedents and present status of the race" meant students' progress would necessarily be very limited for genera tions to come (38).7 Thus, he argued, the Slater

Fund should invest in programs recognizing the race's very modest capacities, specifically in

those stressing training for the "trades" or

"some manual occupation" allowing "colored

youths to make a living, and to become useful

citizens" (48). In his paternalistic articulation of this ideal

curriculum, Haygood envisioned teaching

quite at odds with the ideology imbedded in

women's domesticated literacy models from

the earlier decades of the century (49). For

example, although he did not entirely erase the

attainment of strong moral "character" from

this educational program, his idea of what that

moral sense would be for "the black man," and

how it would be achieved, marked a clear

departure from the goals that middle-class women authors had advocated: teaching for

informed moral choice and proactive political behavior grounded in empathy, collaborative

study of print text, and heightened language use.8 Thus, for Haygood, morality for "our

brother in black" would best be inculcated

through "the whole routine of daily life," the

"good habits" of work, "rather than of mere

book knowledge" (47). In shifting the manage ment of learning away from a maternal model

of domesticated literacy to the Slater Fund's

paternal "management" of manual/trade work

habits, Haygood also argued for a different (and a lesser) conception of "the negro" as "a good citizen" than antebellum and Reconstruction era white teaching mother figures had imag ined for their own children and, in some cases

(e.g., Lydia Maria Child), for African Ameri

cans (50).9 In contrast to the most liberal of

these domesticated models, Haygood's Slater

Fund conceived of "the work of educating the

negro" as a hierarchy-supporting enterprise,

permanently relegating black Americans to

inferior citizenship, bound up in work "habits" rather than intellectually supported moral

choice.

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH'S CREATIVE VISION OF COLLABORATIVE MOTHERHOOD

In a late-nineteenth-century social context still

maintaining close connections between litera

ture, education, and civic participation, a partic

ularly appropriate strategy for Harper to use for

resisting such social constraints Umiting African

American education for citizenship would be to

reassert the viability of a gendered literary genre that had been associated so long with an ideal of

teaching for empathetic, proactive citizenship.




Defining race-oriented educational needs and

how best to achieve them were, in fact, the cru

cial issues in Trial and Triumph. Refusing to

accept the limited program of learning and

political activity imagined for blacks by white

male education leaders like Atticus Haygood,

Harper offered an alternative narrative argu ment in her post-Reconstruction serial, calling for moral citizenship training above job-related educational goals, while suggesting that black

strides already made in civic participation would

be impressive to white "men who [were] writing and talking about the Negro problem," if they could "only come in contact with ... thoughtful

men" like her character Mr. Thomas (222ff.).

Along those lines, although she acknowledged the practical benefits of acquiring both voca

tional skills and intellectual capital, she recorded

multiple conversations positing the inadequacy of curricula that de-emphasized moral educa

tion in an era when access to work in the trades

and professions was often denied to blacks

because of white prejudice.10 For instance, in her

subplot about the forthright Mr. Thomas, who

had been trained as both a carpenter and a

schoolteacher, but who was shut out from both

types of work because of his color, she argued that developing an unwavering morality was the

most important learning of all (233-36, 186).

Relying on his strength of character, Mr. Thomas

passed through his many trials to the triumph of

running his own business, whereby he could also

"help others," encouraging them "by his own

experience not to be too easily discouraged, but to . . . learn in whatever capacity they were

employed to do their work heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men" (245). Though drawing upon both his school-based textbook knowledge and his vocational training, Mr. Thomas was

guided primarily by a moral sense nurtured

through the conversational domestic pedagogy of Harper's idealized teacher, Mrs. Lasette.

An equally crucial ongoing dialogue in Trial

and Triumph centered on the specific question of how much education was needed in the 1880s

by African American women, especially a

woman like the main character Annette?

whose "ante-natal" background was suspect

and for whom some might therefore set low

expectations.11 In fact, Annette's aunt, Eliza

Hanson, objected to her niece's continuing to

attend school and to write poetry when she

might "better go out to service" (228-29).

Alluding to the argument that would later be

associated with W. E. B. Dubois, Mrs. Hanson

scolded Annette: "'You seem to think that there

must be something very great about you. I

know where you want to get. You want to get among the upper tens, but you haven't got style

enough about you for that.'" According to Mrs.

Hanson, "'cook[ing] a beefsteak'" would be a

"'better'" use of Annette's time than '"trying to

string verses together'" (228). Annette's grandmother, however, had made

a commitment to keep her grandchild in

school. To Mrs. Hanson's plea that her mother

not '"work [herself] almost to death'" for this

promise made at Mrs. Lasette's urging, Mrs.

Harcourt responded, '"Maybe something will turn up that you don't see just now. When a

good thing turns up if a person ain't ready for it they can't take hold of it'" (229). To reempha size the idea that future opportunities must be

prepared for through education, Harper had

Mrs. Lasette arrive to join in the conversation? a debate in which Annette's case played a repre sentative role. Harper had Mrs. Lasette turn aside Mrs. Hanson's complaint that "'puffing

up Annette with the idea that she is something extra'" would backfire and that "'always'" hav

ing '"a book stuck under her nose'" was a waste

of the girl's time (230). Instead, in an echo of antebellum texts urging enhanced education for (white) women, Mrs. Lasette asserted that

Annette (and, by extension, other African American girls like her) deserved every oppor

tunity for advanced learning. In casting herself as a social guardian while condemning those who ostracized the girl, Mrs. Lasette made clear that class prejudice within the race, operating

Sarah Robbins 85



alongside white prejudice, was an important factor limiting black educational achievement

and that thoughtful race leaders should combat

both. So, just as forcefully as Mrs. Hanson

argued for Annette's being put "'out to service'"

(and therefore presumably being forever rele

gated to working-class status), Mrs. Lasette and

Mrs. Harcourt supported advanced educa

tional opportunities for the talented girl,

thereby stressing the possibility of rising in

social status through intellectual training linked to moral nurturance. Here as elsewhere

in the novel, Harper made the key component of Annette's education?its home-based ele

ment?a shared teaching by two surrogate mothers, Mrs. Harcourt and Mrs. Lasette.

Like Miriam and Ellen in Minnies Sacrifice, Mrs. Harcourt had sound mothering instincts

and a great capacity for hard work, but she was

restricted in her maternal abilities because of her

southern background, her straightened finances, and her limited education. Belonging, according to Harper, to "that class of colored people whose

freedom consisted chiefly in not being the chat

tels of the dominant race," Mrs. Harcourt "was

naturally bright and intelligent, but had come up in a day when the very book of the Christian's law

was to her a sealed volume."12 Nonetheless,

although "not. . . educated through the aid of school books and blackboards," Annettes grand

mother "had obtained that culture of manners

and behavior which comes through contact with

well-bred people, close observation and a sense

of self-respect and self-reliance." On the death of

her husband, she had shouldered "the burden of

life bravely," raising three successful sons as well

as her daughters (188-89). With their occupa tions ranging from "skillful farmer" and "car

penter" to "school teacher" turned physician, Mrs. Harcourt's sons exemplify the power of her

maternal influence, as well as the expanding

range of opportunities opening up to black

males eager to serve their "community" (199).13

Raising Annette truly challenged Mrs. Har

court's efforts to enact a caring maternal ideal,

however. With Annette's mother Lucy having died and her father having abandoned his

responsibilities, Mrs. Harcourt was left to sup

port her grandchild on a very limited income.

Shut out of better housing because of her race

and her poverty, Mrs. Harcourt had to raise

Annette amid the "unfavorable environments,"

"moral contagion," and backward "social

atmosphere" of an undesirable neighborhood (197). Still, the determined grandmother coun

tered the negative "influence" of their sur

roundings by bringing her granddaughter into

frequent contact with their old friend Mrs.

Lasette, a self-conscious model of African

American Republican motherhood extended

into the larger race community. By making "it a

point to hold in that neighborhood, mothers'

meetings and [to] teach [former slave] mothers . . . how to build up light and happy homes

under the new dispensation of freedom,"

Harper's Mrs. Lasette embodies a race-based

ideal of community-oriented maternal peda

gogy (197-98). Adapting the white, middle-class

model of benevolence to the needs of 1880s

black urban life, Mrs. Lasette "visited" "lowly homes" where "her presence was a benediction

and an inspiration" (198). But she also opened

up her own home to members of her race like

Mrs. Harcourt and Annette, linking them to an

enlightened community culture.

Overall, the characterization of Mrs. Lasette

represents Harper's vision for a collaborative

African American motherhood, one she would

develop more fully in 1892 in Iola Leroy. For

example, although Harper would extend and

refine the role of the conversazione in the uplift of African Americans in the later novel and

would depict Iola's "teach [ing] in the Sunday school, help [ing] in the church, [and] hold [ing]

mothers' meetings" in Utopian terms (246,

276), already in Trial and Triumph she touted

the power of Mrs. Lasette's parlor discussion

leadership, her promotion of advanced print

literacy, and her empathetic advice-giving to

both women and men (186). This portrait of




Mrs. Lasette's home-based teaching clearly cast

the so-called "woman's sphere" of her enter

prise as interacting with the larger political cul

ture, rather than being separated from it.

Working to counter the "ignorance which slav

ery had left [in her people], she could not be

content by shutting up herself to mere social

enjoyments within the shadow of her home"

but instead dedicated herself "to dispel the

darkness which [had] hung for centuries

around [the] path" of her race (245-47). While

guiding others' learning by holding gatherings in her home, she also prepared them to carry out a similar role. For instance, Mrs. Lasette

"directed" Annette "in her reading," selecting "books, which appealed to all that was highest and best in her nature, and kindl[ing] within

her a lofty enthusiasm to make her life a bless

ing to the world" (266).14 If Harper's configuration seems too moralistic

and conservative today, we need to remember that

many readers would have seen it as both practical and visionary in her own time. To resist con

strained versions of African American civic par

ticipation being portrayed in white male texts and

institutionalized in philanthropic programs like

Atticus Haygood's, Harper used a strategy blend

ing her gender and race affiliations. The steps she

took toward advocating full sociopolitical enfran

chisement for African Americans in Trial and Tri

umph would be further extended in Iola Leroy, where male/female partnerships like those of Iola/Latimer and Harry/Lucille would represent an even more fully developed version of race-ori

ented social agency informed by a revised, activist model of middle-class motherhood. Reading Trial and Triumph as a prelude to her final novel, we can gain a clear sense of the evolution in her

thinking. But even that awareness should not

obscure the achievements of the earlier narrative

itself, as rhetorically strategic in its own time?as a complex oppositional discourse interacting with

contemporary white texts to re-formulate social

conceptions of race, gender, education, and polit ical power in American culture.

NOTES

1. While Trial and Triumph has not yet garnered much scholarly attention, several helpful readings have positioned Tola Leroy'm cultural context. See, for

example, John Ernest, who argues that Iola Leroy

"resists cultural imperialism by claiming authority over white culture's central icons" (500). For a related

perspective on Harper's writing as in dialogue with

post-Reconstruction's white stereotypes of black

women, as well as gendered ideals associated with

courtship and marriage, see Claudia Tate's discussion

of the "'true black woman'" as "domestic nurturer,

spiritual counselor, moral advocate, social activist,

and academic teacher" in Harper's writing (97).

2. See Peeps on the links between industrial edu

cation and philanthropy from the 1880s through the

1920s in the south. Peeps argues that institutions

such as Tuskegee and Hampton prospered under

Slater support, whereas Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta

universities received relatively less funding because

they did not embrace the industrial education credo

as fully (263ff.).

3. Although Haygood's paternalism is deplorable

today, he did incur the wrath of southern racists in

his own era. Harold W. Mann reports that Haygood's

"close association with Negroes and the good opin

ion they held of him" eventually led "to stories of

unseemly intimacy between the Slater agent and the

'black brother,'" including an editorial hinting that

he had fathered mixed-race children (194-95).

4. See Our Brother in Black 5, 17, 75, 183. Like a

number of other post-Civil War southern writers,

Haygood emphasized that, however bad slavery may

have been, it was preceded by an even worse condi

tion: "the huts and kraals of Africa" (188).

5. In the context of this racist stereotyping, even by

supporters of African American education, we can bet

ter understand Harper's 1880s position on school inte

gration, as outlined in Trial and Triumph. Harper has

Mrs. Lasette and Mr. Thomas say that, in the long run,

school integration was so important to African Ameri

can uplift that the temporary loss of teaching positions for blacks who had taught in segregated settings should be viewed as an acceptable short-term cost (204-05).

Sarah Robbins 87



6. Contrast, in this regard, Harper's insistence

throughout her career on the close connection

between the arts (and the feelings they nurtured) and

intellectual/rational development. So, for example, as

early as 1873 in "Fancy Etchings," Jenny tells her Aunt

Jane that "poetry is one of the great agents of culture,

civilization and refinement" and imagines showing

"men and women to love noble deeds by setting them

to the music, of fitly spoken words" (Brightly Coming

Day 225). For Jenny, as for Harper, education involved

using the spirit/heart along with "the intellect" to

acquire "powers and capacities" (225).

7. For similar rhetoric, see excerpts from George

Gary Bush, "The Education of the Freedmen," His

tory of Education in Florida (1889) in Salvatori, 173 ff.

8. That this educative model was accessible to at

least some African Americans before the Civil War is

clear not only from Harper's own personal antebel

lum teaching career but also from the pedagogical ideals and practices suggested in the Memoir of James

Jackson, recentiy edited by Lois Brown, but originally written by Jackson's African American teacher, Miss

Susan Paul, in the 1830s. As Brown's insightful intro

duction shows, Paul was sometimes constrained by

race-related experiences. Still, like Charlotte Forten

Grimke later, Paul affiliated in her personal teaching

practices with class- and gender-based pedagogies.

Taken together, the Paul and Grimke teaching/writ

ing careers show that Harper's 1880s educational lit

erature built on an African American as well as a

white women's tradition.

9. Contrast, in this context, Harper's 1891 "Duty to

Dependent Races" speech. Harper singled out Hay

good's longtime ally Henry Grady for criticism (37).

Opposing inadequate schooling, Harper discounted

the view "that permitting [freedmen] to share citi

zenship with others in the country [was] inimical to

the welfare of the nation" (38). "Instead of taking the

ballot from his hand," she urged, "teach him how to

use it, and to add his quota to the progress, strength, and durability of the nation" (39).

For the Slater Fund's politicized emphasis on

industrial education, see Rubin, Teach the Freeman,

especially xxviii, xliv, and 1-li. Rubin chronicles Hay

good's correspondence favoring schools using the

industrial model, while pressuring others to adopt it

(xxviii).

10. By the time she published Iola Leroy in 1892,

Harper may have shifted her position somewhat. See

her closing note, where she comments that the "race

has not had very long to straighten its hands from the

hoe, to grasp the pen and wield it as a power for good,

and to erect above the ruined auction-block and

slave-pen institutions of learning," but where she

looks forward to "a brighter coming day," when, in

the Utopian vision of this final novel, such progress will have been fully achieved (282).

11. Annette's status as a child born out of wedlock

positioned her outside of the social milieu of other

middle-class characters in the serial. That her father

was a marketer of liquor could have made her even less

acceptable to a readership Harper addressed earlier in

Sowing and Reaping, her temperance serial for the

same publication. Harper's insistence that a proper

moral training could rescue someone with as dark an

"ante-natal history" as Annette's was an indication of

the author's faith in education as uplift (184). 12. In the context of the literacy practices bound

up with Republican motherhood, Mrs. Harcourt's

inability to read would be telling. Interestingly,

Harper does not play up aspects of Harcourt's expe

rience-based knowledge as a resource for teaching, as

the author had for the southern folk mothers of Min

nie's Sacrifice.

13. Harper's work choices for Mrs. Harcourt's sons

echo the list of appropriate (though limited) labor

options imagined by Slater Fund board member

Rutherford B. Hayes in a diary entry, cited earlier

(farmer, carpenter, blacksmith); but Harper replaces

the blacksmith with a schoolteacher. To emphasize

the greater limits society placed on Mrs. Harcourt's

daughters, who faced double jeopardy of gender and

race, Harper described them as having to settle for

work as seamstresses, with the exception of Annette's

mother Lucy, who "had gone from home to teach

school in a distant city" (199).

14. Harper's characterizations of Annette and Mrs.

Lasette represent, in this regard, a record of two

phases from her own life, the first when she was

slowly learning her role as nurturing teacher for her




race, the second a later period when she was groom

ing others to do similar work. That Harper was fre

quentiy perceived as such a mentor is clear from so

many women's clubs being named for her. See also

several examples (3, 5,13, 59, 60) of Mrs. N. F. Mos

sell praising Harper as a mentor who knew how to

"serve as a stimulus" to others (102-03).

WORKS CITED

Child, Lydia Maria Francis. The Freedmens Book.

1865. New York: Arno, 1968.

Ernest, John. "From Mysteries to Histories: Cultural

Pedagogy in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola LeroyV

American Literature 64 (1992): 497-518.

Finkenbine, Roy E. "'Our Little Circle': Benevolent

Reformers, The Slater Fund, and The Argument

for Black Industrial Education, 1882-1908."

African Americans and Education in the South,

1865-1900. Ed. Donald G. Nieman. New York: Gar

land, 1994.70-86.

Haygood, Atticus G. The Case of the Negro as to Edu

cation in the Southern States: A Report to the Board

of Trustees. Atlanta: Harrison, 1885.

-. Our Brother in Black: His Freedom and His

Future. 1889. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969.

Harper, Frances E. W. A Brighter Coming Day: A

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader. Ed. Frances

Smith Foster. New York: Feminist, 1990.

-. "Duty to Dependent Races." With Pen and

Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century

African-American Women. Ed. Shirley Wilson

Logan. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995.

30-42.

-. Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Ed.

Frances Smith Foster. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

-. Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial

and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels. Ed.

Frances Smith Foster. Boston: Beacon, 1994.

Mann, Harold W. Atticus Greene Haygood: Methodist

Bishop, Editor, and Educator. Athens: U of Georgia

R1965.

Mossell, Mrs. N. F. The Work of the Afro-American

Women. 1894. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Paul, Susan. Memoir of James Jackson: The Attentive

and Obedient Scholar, Who died in Boston, October

31,1833, Aged Six Years and Eleven Months, by His

Teacher Miss Susan Paul. 183. Ed. Lois Brown.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Peeps, J. M. Stephen. "Northern Philanthropy and

the Emergence of Black Higher Education?

DoGooders, Compromisers, or Co-Conspira

tors?" Journal of Negro Education 50 (1981): 251-69.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., ed. Teach the Freemen: The Cor

respondence of Rutherford B. Hayes and the Slater

Fund for Negro Education, 1881-1887. Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State UP, 1959.

Salvatori, Mariolina Rizzi. Pedagogy: Disturbing His

tory, 1819-1920. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. "Ella." Stories for Young Per

sons. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841.95-114.

Sigourney, L. H. Letters to Mothers. Hartford: Hud

son and Skinner, 1838.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire:

The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.

New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Tourgee, Albion W. Bricks Without Straw. New York:

Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1880.

Sarah Robbins 89



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