Born to free parents in Maryland in 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was one of the most well-known women of her day. During her life she was a poet, activist, novelist, and orator. After teaching at Union Seminary in Ohio (later named Wilberforce University), Harper was unable to return to home because Maryland prohibited the entrance of free blacks. Instead, in 1853 she went to Philadelphia - the black cultural and political capital of the nineteenth century. There, she lived in an underground railroad station, a home where fugitive slaves were hidden and where she listened to the tales of runaways. These tales, coupled with her exile from the state of her birth, influenced her decision to become an abolitionist. Because of her education and self-presentation, she became a major orator, giving speeches and reading her poems around the country. During this period, she published her first collection of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854).

Throughout her career, Harper published essays, short stories, and serial novels in black publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Weekly Anglo-African. From 1865 to 1875 – the period roughly coinciding with Reconstruction (the period following the Civil War) – she traveled extensively throughout the South, lecturing to black and white audiences. She also lived with the freedmen and recorded her observations in a series of letters published in black and abolitionist newspapers.