‘The Slave Auction’ and ‘Bury Me in a Free Land’ by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poems are some of the most influential of the mid-nineteenth century United States. Their impact continues to today, inspiring generations of poets and authors. 

Her nuanced representations of slavery – including the enslavement of women – are vital testaments to the racism, injustice and violence in America immediately prior to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, while revealing the power of the cultural resistance enacted by Harper and her peers. Later in her life, Harper began embracing other literary genres, as can be seen in her novel Iola Leroy (1892), one of the first novels published by an African American woman writer.

Born a free woman in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825, Harper started her career as a teacher and a volunteer for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. After joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853, she publicly campaigned against the enslavement of African Americans by composing anti-slavery poetry, using it as a crucial tool in her fight for abolitionism.

Harper published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects in 1854, which included ‘The Slave Auction’, ‘Eliza Harris’, and ‘The Slave Mother’. Several years later, she composed ‘Bury Me in a Free Land’ (published in The Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1858). Harper regularly performed her poetry at public abolitionist campaigns hosted by the American Anti-Slavery Society, before and after they were published in print. Her compelling skills as an orator are reflected in the style of language chosen for written publication. Her bold, visceral images and rhyming couplets (as seen in ‘The Slave Auction’ with line endings such as ‘eyes’, ‘sold’, ‘cries’, and ‘gold’) resulted in memorable verse which replayed in the minds of audience members listening to Harper recite her words – and these poetic devices became just as memorable for readers engaging with the printed versions which were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals across the US. This memorability ensured that those reading or listening to her verse were forced to confront the central themes of her writing – the horrors of slavery and the urgency of abolitionism – demonstrating the political power of poetry.

Many of her poems, especially those collected in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, express the relationship between enslaved mothers and their children, including children who died prematurely. Based on true accounts Harper had heard and witnessed, she exposed the appalling violence experienced by enslaved women in the nineteenth century, drawing attention to the intersections between racism, misogyny, and patriarchy in American society. 

In ‘Bury Me in a Free Land’, Harper’s speaker describes ‘the mother’s shriek of wild despair / Rise like a curse on the trembling air.’ Harper used emotive metaphors to give voice to the experiences of fellow African American women who were silenced and denied autonomy. As the poem concludes, the speaker emphatically declares that ‘All that my yearning spirit craves’ is a ‘land’ where slavery is abolished and its brutality has ended.

As Koritha Mitchell observes in From Slave Cabins to the White House (2020), ‘Harper’s [writing] contributes to the community conversation’ as she ‘asserted her right to belong in the nation’. Harper’s poetry is sophisticated, compelling and politically urgent, and her themes and questioning of identity continue to carry heart-wrenching weight well into the twenty-first century.

—Daniele Nunziata