This chapter explores Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s neglected epic poem “Moses: A Story of the Nile” (1869). It argues that Harper harnessed the biblical story to create spaces for Black history, agency, and action, and thus placed Black voices at the center of debates over faith, the past, and the nation’s future. It recognizes that “Moses” was also a striking artistic experiment for Harper and a text deeply intertwined with her Reconstruction-era oratory. To support a close reading of the poem’s content and form, after establishing basic facts about “Moses” as a printed artifact, the chapter considers Harper’s 1867 and early 1868 lectures as corollaries to the poem’s composition, later 1868 and early 1869 lectures as critical to the poem’s final form, and both groups of lectures as paratexts. The chapter concludes by hinting at how this approach could shape consideration of a broader range of Reconstruction texts.

Eric Gardner’s “Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry” begins to consider how a group long crucial to Black print – ministers and church activists – adapted religious rhetoric after the Civil War and specifically reached into militaristic language in ways that allowed Black writers and readers to think about national and local citizenship, church engagement, the mission and meaning of the Civil War, the continuing violence surrounding many Black lives, and Black print within the larger arena of Black faith. Initially anchored in two key books published early in Reconstruction by major AME figures, Bishop Daniel Payne’s The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s An Apology for African Methodism, the essay broadens to consider how such rhetorics reached into texts such as Harper’s serialized Recorder novel Sowing and Reaping and Henry McNeal Turner’s eulogy to Charles Sumner.

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).

Published in the February 23, 1861 Anti-Slavery Bugle and then reprinted in the March 8, 1861 Liberator, Frances Harper's “To the Cleveland Union-Savers” has much to teach us about the content, approaches, and reception (then and now) of nineteenth-century American women's poetry of slavery and abolition. The poem, whose final stanza opens this essay, only began to garner scholarly attention following its inclusion in a handful of anthologies at the end of the twentieth century. Its neglect probably came partly from many twentieth-century critics’ use of modernist and/or post-modernist aesthetics as the sole measures of poetic quality. If they knew of the poem's existence, such critics would likely have dismissed Harper's pronounced metrics and sometimes-expected rhymes – as well as her Protestant, sentimental, reform-centered ethos, images, and arguments – even though many of her nineteenth-century readers and listeners valued exactly these features. Its neglect may also be partly attributed to a hierarchy of genres: “To the Cleveland Union-Savers” works within traditions of occasional and podium poetry – both dismissed by many twentieth-century critics. This poem about the rendition of “hunted sister” Sara Lucy Bagby is also, of course, clearly political and topical – modes many twentieth-century critics assumed were opposed, in simple binary, to artistic creation. Even those who valued select political or topical poetry might have dismissed women poets – and especially women poets of color. Further, the poem was “newspaper verse”: it was never published in a “major” periodical venue in the nineteenth century, did not appear in book form until after the Civil War, and even then appeared in a work of history (William Still's 1872 The Underground Rail Road) rather than a collection of poetry, making it a likely candidate for being labeled as of “historical interest” only – a New Critical kiss of death. If they knew of the poem, many modern critics might simply have ignored it because of the supposed ephemerality of its original publication venue; of course, many may never have seen the poem simply because they failed to look at such venues.