The Introduction to Black Reconstructions gives a basic description of the volume, which offers the most nuanced treatment currently available of Black print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It articulates both the kinds of recovery work and methodological innovations in the book and demonstrates how the recovery work inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. It recognizes that many period texts – by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Mattie Jackson – are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key trends in American culture. It describes the book’s three parts – “Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities”; “Persons and Bodies”; and “Memories, Materialities, and Locations.” It places all of this work in dialogue with key scholarship, especially that flowing from W. E. B. Du Bois’s massively important Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

The Return of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Eric Gardner (bio) My title speaks to the contemporary scholarly sense of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s return to the public sphere after her brief marriage to Fenton Harper, which ended when he died in May 1864. Scholars like Margaret Hope Bacon and Frances Smith Foster have documented that return briefly, and I have explored Harper’s marriage and select lectures from 1866 and 1867.1 However, our account of the author in the mid-1860s remains deeply incomplete: it pays little attention to her lecturing, and it says little about how Harper relaunched her career, reshaped her message, and reconceptualized her public role as a Black woman intellectual, activist, and poet. Drawing on accounts of over fifty public speeches Harper gave between 1864 and early 1866, as well as diverse other sources, this essay chronicles Harper’s (re)insertion of her voice in US oral and print culture with attention to her interpersonal/organizational and print networking and self-promotion, and especially the lectures and writing she shared amid the fast-shifting US thought-scape at the Civil War’s end and Reconstruction’s beginning.2 I am particularly concerned with Harper’s play with conceptions of various publics, including those that [End Page 591] Catherine Squires terms “enclave public spheres.”3 Within and beyond the larger formation of reform culture, I am especially interested in Black enclave spaces, as well as politically and/or socially diverse abolitionist, unionist, and/ or Republican spaces, and more “popular” white public spaces like the traditionally defined lyceum culture.4 In this work, it is crucial to recognize, as Tom F. Wright asserts, that “the lyceum was a matter as much of print as of performance.”5 We also need to think about not only how, per Wright, “the very orality of the lecture form suggested a new intermediary creativity between text and voice,”6 but also how writers like Harper wove together oratory, printed poetry, and various other modes. I thus argue that Harper was not simply fashioning a return; she was reconstructing her public presence even as she was arguing for specific and sweeping ways of reconstructing the nation. She consistently worked to create and expand public spaces for Black women—room for what Derrick Spires might mark as fuller “practices of citizenship”; she hoped, as Carla Peterson recently argued in an immensely important critical intervention, to move conceptions of public and individual sympathy more toward “mutuality and interdependence.”7 If we weave these recognitions together with my concept of “militant intersectionality,”8 we can conceptualize how Harper sought to fashion and broaden cooperative, egalitarian communities that depended on and fostered real partnership; embraced differences in race, gender, class, and region; and used these differences to help fuel progress at both local and national levels. Before exploring this return, we should briefly trace Harper’s place in American culture. For much of the latter nineteenth century, diverse African Americans located her at the forefront of Black letters. But while Hallie Quinn Brown’s Homespun Heroines (1926) offered a praise-filled biography of Harper, the general twentieth-century turn in critical sentiment appears in W. E. B. Du Bois’ Crisis obituary, [End Page 592] which said that she “was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song; she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading.”9 Mired in modernist aesthetic sensibilities, as well as gender bias and the “New Negro” impulse to avoid considering slavery, many assessments of Harper in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century found only historical or ancestral value. V. F. Calverton’s 1929 Anthology of American Negro Literature, for example, offered one Harper poem—compared to seven by Countee Cullen and four each by Claude McKay and Langston Hughes—and generally dismissed the work of “Mrs. Harper” and numerous early Black poets as “hopelessly inept and sentimental” texts that “aspired to the stately” and ended up being purely derivative.10 Harper’s Black contemporaries would likely have been baffled by such dismissals. William Wells Brown’s 1863 The Black Man called her poetry “soul-stirring.” 11 A Princeton, New Jersey, correspondent for...

Tributes to Nina Baym (1936–2018) Frances Smith Foster, Eric Gardner, Susan K. Harris, Melissa J. Homestead, Carla L. Peterson, Jean Pfaelzer, Sarah Ruffing Robbins, Nicole Tonkovich, Mary I. Unger, Karen A. Weyler, and Sandra A. Zagarell ____ A wonderful thing about our profession is we can make friends of folk we have never met. That's what happened with Nina Baym and me. Unlike Nina, I had not heard of the famous quotation about scribbling women and triple-barreled names, but I too had been through the entire standard set of readings and rituals that made for a PhD and also wondered where the women were. Woman's Fiction revealed a lot both in content and in style. Although I value the information, I was most influenced by her style: concise, clear, and coherent. Baym's books had little of the academic flourishes, intellectual obfuscation, and what I read as self-aggrandizement characteristic of too many scholars, critics, and theorists. Her work articulated, validated, and exemplified my inchoate ideas about exclusion perfected by definitions and criteria based upon limited, even predetermined, data. I really didn't want to meet her, because sometimes the imagined friend is quite superior to the real person. But, not so in the instance of Nina Baym. When our paths finally crossed, Nina Baym was open and accessible, welcoming and real. She had a laugh that made me smile and eyes that looked right at me as if she saw not what I symbolized but who I am. We didn't exchange home phone numbers, so we clearly did not become BFFs. But there was always a nod and smile, a quick word or suggestion, a sense that we were kindred. And, ever after when I read her work, I felt her energy and her passion for inclusive, relevant research and knew that she was working really hard to get it right, not just for the reviewers but for readers of every ilk. Frances Smith Foster Emory University ____ It took a long time for me to reconcile "Nina Baym" and "Professor Baym," and when, after I'd finished my doctorate, she told me I should call her Nina, I simply stuttered, "Uh . . . thanks, Professor Baym." "Nina Baym" stared at me whenever I looked at the Nortons on my shelves, or at her host of books and articles that challenged disciplinary assumptions on canonical white men from Hawthorne and Cooper to James and Hemingway, [End Page 1] or at her massive work on American women writers that was not only fieldshaping but field-making. Don't get me wrong: wonderful teacher that she was, Professor Baym was intimidating enough. She had a way of commanding a room that made even the tallest among us feel like we were looking up, and a powerful certainty that "old-fashioned" archival work could be—and had to be—made new again. She brooked no foolishness. Here's the story I tell most often about Professor Baym. Back when you could bring scissors on a plane, Professor Baym brought one of my drafts in her carry-on. When she returned, she handed me a stack of paper: cut-out pieces taped together on new sheets with markings everywhere. Then she handed me a stack of odd pieces of all shapes and sizes. I think I looked at that second stack and asked, "What are these?" "What's left." I had agonized over those pages. The sea of ink, I had expected. But she had sliced, diced, and handed me shavings for the trash. The nerve. The arrogance. But also . . . The effort of thinking through all those words. The patience. The willingness to help me make something that people could really read and use. The kindness. The care. "Every word matters," she was saying, "every word." This was not the last cut-up draft she handed me, nor the last moment when I learned how deeply connected the scholar and teacher were—for both "Nina Baym" and "Professor Baym" were all about moving our conversations forward, about making things for real use. That piece eventually became my first published article, and the conversations we had on Harriet Wilson, nineteenth-century...

Abstract Not until the end of the 20th century did scholars begin to look at early African American print culture in the depth it deserves. A story painfully intertwined with the transatlantic slave system and racism, early black print engagement combined, from its beginnings, responses to white aggression and a powerful set of individual and communal desires to read about, record, and, via print, share truths of black life in the United States. Some of the first creators of black print in the United States, from the authors of the earliest slave narratives to poet Phillis Wheatley, had to think through questions of individual and communal identity vis-à-vis emerging American socio-political structures and find ways to ensure control over their own voices in a white-dominated culture that tried to exclude, use, or abuse those voices. But early black print culture is not simply the story of a single genre like the slave narrative or of exceptional individuals like Wheatley. Rather, it is also the story of organizational print tied to churches, conventions, and activist groups. It is as well the story of a diverse range of modes, from the rich pamphleteering tradition (perhaps most excitingly expressed by David Walker) to early black periodicals like those edited by Samuel Cornish and Philip Bell. Especially after 1830, it also became the story of a range of black women (from Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper), of African Americans across the North (and occasionally in the midst of the slave South), and of an increasing number of formats, genres, and approaches. And it became a story of how black activists might interact (in print and beyond) with white antislavery activists, recognizing both shared and different goals and philosophies as they attempted to fight not only for emancipation but for broader civil rights.

The first story of African American literature in Reconstruction that many students and scholars still hear is a story of absence. That story is wrong in both broad conception and specific details, but it is worth quickly retelling for context. Key scholarly reference works of the 1970s and 1980s—decades that featured a notable broadening of the canon and US literary history—offered little revision to earlier assertions that there essentially wasn’t an African American literature of Reconstruction. The landmark History of Southern Literature (1985), compiled under editor Louis D. Rubin, Jr., for example, gave its first in-depth treatment of African American writers in a chapter called “Black Novelists and Novels, 1930–1950”; a laudatory New York Times review claimed that the book “highlighted the chief currents and the crucial changes in Southern imaginative expression over three and a half centuries” and offered the “most encyclopedic . . . history of Southern black writing yet compiled” (Lewis BR18). Similarly, the immense Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), prepared under editor Emory Elliott, generally ignored African American literature in and of Reconstruction even as it offered interesting bits on Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt—the latter contribution prompting a Times review to grumpily assert that the volume made “earnest, ungainly efforts to represent ‘minority’ voices” (Adams BR6).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Militant Intersectionality Eric Gardner We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. —Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, (Address to the Eleventh Woman's Rights Convention, May 10, 1866) I am coming right home to Philadelphia, and not intending to spend my ammunition on the Rebels, who are so many thousand miles away. But I am to talk to those who clasp hands with Rebels in the city of Philadelphia, and I am not going to bathe my lips in honey when I speak. —Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, ("National Salvation," delivered in Philadelphia, January 31, 1867) The handful of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's antebellum anti-slavery poems now often anthologized and her one novel originally published between boards, Iola Leroy (1892), have turned out to be a small fraction of her work. Frances Smith Foster and other scholars have added three more novels (all serialized), a postbellum epic poem, and a wide range of other poetry, essays, sketches, and short fiction to a list of print work spanning more than six decades. Harper's impact at the lectern was similarly massive. A major voice on abolition, civil rights, women's rights, and temperance, she gave hundreds of lectures in locations from Maine to Florida to Kansas; addressed legislatures and/or party conventions in at least five states; and shared podiums with figures like Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and Susan B. Anthony. I thus begin with two simple and long-overdue recognitions: Harper was immensely important to nineteenth-century American culture, and, because of that, we must consider her experiences during and just after the US Civil War. Scholarly discussion of this period of Harper's life remains, when not absent, deeply inadequate. The basic scholarly story of Harper's Civil War, which generally relies on a selective retelling of a biographical sketch by activist and Harper confidante William Still in his 1872 The [End Page 505] Underground Rail Road, goes something like this: After becoming a well-known abolitionist, Frances Ellen Watkins met and, on November 22, 1860, in Cincinnati, married Fenton Harper, an Ohio widower with three children. They settled on a farm outside Columbus that was reportedly bought with her earnings. They had a daughter, Mary, early in 1862. Frances Harper returned to activism after her husband's death on May 23, 1864, not quite a year before the war's end, and she regained national prominence at the end of the 1860s. This story says little about politics or public engagement, though Fenton Harper had been a delegate to the 1857 Ohio State Convention of Colored Men. Margaret Hope Bacon concluded that though Frances Harper "lectured once or twice during this period, she was mainly content to stay at home, helping to augment the family income by making and selling butter" in a "quiet life" (31, 32). Like Bacon, Blyden Jackson, writing in the late 1980s, suggested that she became "something of a recluse" (267). Scholars in the 1990s complicated that assessment a bit: Donald Yacovone noted that "responsibility—shared or otherwise—for four children" was far from a "quiet life" (98). But even recent scholarship has ignored or downplayed Frances Harper's socio-political engagement and evolution during and just after the Civil War. We are only now beginning to attend to Foster's recognition that Harper nonetheless "continued to publish and lecture" during these years (18). Initial archival research tells us that during her marriage, Harper published at least three poems in the Weekly Anglo-African, an essay and two poems in the Christian Recorder, a poem in Pine and Palm, a poem in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and a poem in the Anti-Slavery Bugle that was reprinted by the Liberator. That last poem, the reasonably well-known "To the Cleveland Union-Savers"; her September 22, 1862, Recorder essay "On the War and the President's Colonization Scheme"; and her lesser-known October 10, 1863, Weekly Anglo-African poem "The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth" demonstrate a powerful updating...

Judith Madera’s Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature makes an exciting contribution to the nexus of literary studies and critical geography by showing how literature “serves as an important vehicle for … understanding the operations of place as creative strategies for living” (5) and how we might use “process geography” to help open “the terms of analysis for the study of place in literature” (16). Madera also enriches our growing sense of how nineteenth-century African American literature “arranges geographical meaning” (2), and smartly recognizes that “Black geographical literature … is the textual reclaiming and reconstituting of actual places” (12). While the book unfolds in roughly chronological order, Madera notes that the close readings offered in Black Atlas disrupt “ideas of black history as a march of progress, or a story of protest within a national frame” and “are not sequenced around a series of symbolic spaces” or “topical sites in black history” (2). She thus studies works by William Wells Brown, Martin Delany, James Beckwourth, Pauline Hopkins, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson in order to “locate and historicize … the highly interstitial scope of placement blacks worked through—both materially and perceptually—in the United States” (3) and to highlight different “literary geographies” (17).

Accessing Early Black Print Eric Gardner My contribution to the 2014 mla roundtable from which this forum grew centered on the word “access,” treating it capaciously and moving from questions of digitization and the preparation of editions to broad questions of praxis. In this Legacy forum I reiterate some of my arguments, update others, and emphasize how those arguments apply especially to Black women’s histories, texts, and places in print culture studies. Now as then, much that I have to say expresses worry and sometimes anger, but, as I did at the roundtable, I want to open with a moment of joy. Drafting the original piece, I snuck time to read the Legacy tributes to Frances Smith Foster and was especially enriched by Elizabeth Engelhardt’s “Cultivate Your Look of Astonished Disdain: Seven Mentoring Lessons from Frances Smith Foster.” “Lesson #3” is “The stakes are too high for us to be bored or boring.” “At the end of … [Foster’s] classes,” Engel-hardt writes, “the lesson was becoming clear. This stuff matters too much to waste time. And we have to do it together” (233–34). This moment remains my primer on access—a broad and expansive “we,” a real sense of duty, and a recognition that with access comes immense responsibility. Digitization has, of course, changed not only the approaches and some of the focal texts of African American literary study but also the very concept of “access.” The North American Slave Narratives project (nasn) on the Documenting the American South website (one of William L. Andrews’s greatest gifts to the field) remains a beacon. It is free, usable with even a slow Internet connection, carefully planned and executed, and rich in rare resources. It makes selective images available and provides some limited apparatus. Further, what might simply seem a massive collection is actually a powerful argument for the diversity of the genre.1 But “digital” does not mean accessible, and far too few of our resources are available even through venues like the nasn project. Try, for example, to find a single early issue of the Christian Recorder online without a subscription to Accessible Archives. If you are at a Research I institution, visit the database page of a regional comprehensive university or a small liberal arts college and imagine doing your work—our work—with the resources many academics actually have. Better yet, visit a handful of public libraries in diverse neighborhoods [End Page 25] and see how many make available the Black Abolitionist Papers, the Black Biographical Dictionaries project, or the Chadwyck-Healey African American poetry collection, to say nothing of the newer historical Black newspaper projects from vendors like ProQuest and ebsco. I submit that if we rediscover wonderful texts and only twenty or even two thousand individuals can access them, we have failed—especially if those twenty or two thousand are only at locations that still have significant library budgets. These issues are particularly important to African American women’s literature. Even as we are beginning to understand that Black and/or abolitionist periodicals often provided the best and sometimes only venues for early Black writers, we have barely begun to confront the fact that such venues were all the more important for Black women, who were generally denied print participation even more than Black men were. Even the small number of Black women able to create and/or find opportunities for book publication often relied heavily on periodicals. Consider, for example, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s single novel originally published between boards and her three novels serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper. Or think of exciting rediscovered writers like Lizzie Hart and Edmonia Goodelle Highgate, who seem to have published only in periodicals. While select projects have allowed scholars to begin to consider such writers, their work will never be widely accessible until we honestly explore alternative recovery and distribution methods and learn the lessons that the nasn project has been teaching for years. Similarly, almost all of the ongoing “big data” projects tied to nineteenth-century American literature will continue to ignore or dismiss Black voices (especially Black women’s voices) until their data sets have wider and...

George Boyer Vashon’s poem “In the Cars” is essentially unknown. After its original appearance in the August 26, 1865 issue of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s weekly Christian Recorder, it does not appear to have been published again. While the poem was collected by the Black Periodical Literature Project and is thus noted in ProQuest’s Black Literature Index, both of these sources, like the original publication, list the author only as “G. B. V.” of Pittsburgh. I have located no other mention of the poem.1 Our cultural forgetting of Vashon’s poem is both surprising and all too believable. Part of that neglect, like that surrounding so many texts discussed in this special issue, springs from its publication venue—an “ephemeral” periodical. Still, Vashon (July 25, 1824–October 5, 1878) was comparatively well known in and beyond nineteenth-century African America. Son of John B. Vashon and Anne Smith Vashon, George Vashon spent much of his youth in Pittsburgh, immersed in a culture of black activism, in which his parents played an important part. At fourteen, he helped establish a youth antislavery society, and this engagement continued when, while attending Oberlin College, he began teaching. By 1859, fifteen years after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin, Vashon had studied law but had been refused admission to the Pennsylvania bar because of his race; had written for Martin Delany’s Mystery, Frederick Douglass’s newspapers, and the 1854 edition of the anti-slavery anthology Autographs for Freedom; had been admitted to the New York state bar and practiced law there; had spent time teaching and writing in Haiti; had participated actively in the black convention movement; had taught for three years at New York Central College, thus becoming one of the earliest black college profes-

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