The Civil War and Reconstruction
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, many African Americans deployed their pens and their
voices to convince Pres. Abraham Lincoln that the nation was engaged in nothing less than a war
to end slavery, in which Black men, initially barred from enlisting, should be allowed to fight.
This agitation led eventually to a decisive force of 180,000 Black soldiers joining the Union
army. Charlotte Forten Grimké, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia civil rights activist and
author of the most important African American diary of the 19th century (a recent edition of
which is The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké [1988]), spoke for most Black Americans
when she wrote of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: “Ah, what a grand, glorious day this
has been. The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely
come.” When the Civil War effectively ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865,
African Americans hoped finally to witness a new era of freedom and opportunity.
The short-lived era of Reconstruction in the United States (1865–77) elicited an
unprecedented optimism from African American writers. Elizabeth Keckley, who rose from
slavery in St. Louis, Missouri, to become the modiste and confidante of first lady Mary Todd
Lincoln, articulated in her autobiography, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four
Years in the White House (1868), a spirit of sectional reconciliation espoused by many other
leading African Americans of the Reconstruction era. Autobiographies such as Brown’s My
Southern Home (1880) and Douglass’s Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) joined
Keckley’s in anticipating progress for the newly freed men and women of the South under the
benevolent eye of reformed government in the South. In Sketches of Southern Life (1872), a
volume of poems based on her own travels among the freed people of the South, Harper created
an effective counter to the popular white stereotype of the passive and incompetent formerly
enslaved person in Aunt Chloe Fleet, whose wit and wisdom expressed in Southern folk
vernacular evinced the literary potential of African American dialect writing.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries
As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-
conscious Black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century.
Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular
American literature—which middle-class Black writers often imitated—to a real-world
sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African
American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white
audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher
and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that
highlighted the centrality of educated Black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in
Black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.
African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led
by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among Black readers with two book-length epic
poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in
Spenserian stanzas.
