Autograph manuscript poem signed and in the hand of African American abolitionist and educator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, consisting of a transcription made in 1900 of the first stanza of six lines from her poem "An Appeal to the American People", titled here simply as "An Appeal". Single page sheet, verso blank, 8.75" x 7.25", with the top edge unevenly clipped.
When a dark and fearful Strife
Raged around the nation's Life,
And the traitor plunged his steel
Where your quivering heart could feel,
When your cause did need a friend
We were faithful to the end.
Originally published in her 1871 collection Poems, and issued around the same time as a separate circular, the poem is a tribute to the African Americans who fought to preserve the Union during the Civil War and their loyalty to the United States.
Born to free African American parents in Baltimore in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper began her literary career writing for antislavery journals and published her first book of poems in 1845, making her one of the first published African American poets after Phillis Wheatley. Her career mixed writing and abolitionist activism and, following the Civil War, joined other progressive causes such as women's suffrage and advocacy for civil rights. She served as a schoolteacher in the South during Reconstruction and continued to write, publishing further collections of poetry, as well as her widely read book, the novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted which, in 1892, was one of the first novels published by an African American woman.
Autograph material by Harper is exceptionally rare, whether in commerce or in institutional collections.
