To “Every Hater of American Despotism”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Correspondence in the Nineteenth-Century Black Press

This essay analyzes Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s antebellum newspaper correspondence in the abolitionist press. I argue that Harper’s correspondence constituted diverse readerships as members of a print counterpublic responsible for resisting tyranny. By drawing on Gabrielle Foreman’s theory of simultextuality as a textual object capable of signaling multiple audiences at once, this essay contributes to scholarship on nineteenth-century Black journalism by analyzing how Harper turned to the conventions of correspondence to craft transportable texts. Rather than modeling Black subjectivity for readers through individual correspondents’ personas, I argue that Harper’s public letters deemphasized authorial subjectivity, addressing subscribers in multiple discursive registers at once. Ultimately, Harper’s correspondence exhibited a critical form of sentimentalism that intervened in dominant discourses and emphasized the need for readers to respond.