Birth of Charles Carroll Stewart

Charles Carroll Stewart was born in Annapolis, Maryland on February 28, 1859. He moved with his family to Washington shortly after. As a teenager, he prepared for a career as a dentist before accepting a job surveying what would become the Panama canal. When he returned from South America, he apprenticed as a ship-builder. Still not satisfied, he traveled throughout the United States and Europe, and in parts of Africa and Asia. In 1882, he settled down as a journalist.

He worked for a time for the Washington Bee in D.C. before moving on to the Baltimore Vindicator. His role included not only being a writer but also a manager and publisher.

Stewart's major contribution to the world of 19th-century journalism came in 1884. That year, he organized a national news bureau especially for African American journalists. Their mission, in part, was "to promote in every legitimate way the best interests of our race through the medium of the press." He served as the group's president for three terms. His writings were published throughout the country, as far-flung as Arkansas, Maryland, Ohio, and Virginia. In Indianapolis, he became editor of the Indianapolis World.

His prolific journalism resulted in his invitation to the dedication exercises of the Washington Monument in 1885. He was the only black journalist represented; one account says he met President Chester A. Arthur. He later became the second vice president of the "Associated Correspondents of Race Newspapers.

Death of Mrs. Hawthorne

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne outlived her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne by seven years. When Hawthorne died far from home in 1864, she wrote that he avoided "the pain of bidding us farewell." Publisher James T. Fields convinced the grieving widow that his various journals and notebooks, particularly those from his travels, should be published. Sophia became his posthumous editor and noted, "It is a vast pleasure to pore over his books in this way." The result was Notes in England and Italy, with "Mrs. Hawthorne" credited as author. As she prepared the book, she wrote:

I seem to be with him in all his walks and observations. Such faithful, loving notes of all he saw never were put on paper before. Nothing human is considered by him too mean to ponder over. No bird, nor leaf, nor tint of earth or sky is left unnoticed. He is a crystal medium of all the sounds and shows of things, and he reverently lets everything be as it is, and never intermuddles...

Even with these happy thoughts, however, Sophia was burdened with grief. As Annie Adams Fields (wife of James) remarked, "What an altered household! She feels very lonely, and is like a reed." Soon, the Hawthornes' home at The Wayside in Concord, Massachusetts was unbearable, and she moved with their children to Europe. She had become distrustful of her husband's publisher and, at one point, accused him of not paying the royalties she was due for her husband's work. Fields blamed his former partner, the late William Davis Ticknor. Ticknor's close friendship with Hawthorne, he alleged, resulted in "the highest rate of copyright [the company] ever paid." The dispute was soon settled.

It was in England that Sophia died on February 26, 1871. She was 61. A week later, she was buried in London's Kensal Green Cemetery. 135 years later, Sophia Hawthorne (as well as her daughter Una) was reburied in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where she remains next to her husband.

Birth of George William Curtis

George William Curtis was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1824. His mother died when he was an infant and his father sent him to a boarding school in Massachusetts when he was six years old. A few years later, he rejoined is newly-remarried father when the family moved to New York. As a young man, Curtis joined the communal experiment at Brook Farm.

After an extended trip to Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, he joined the literary world in New York (as did many other former Book Farmers). He worked with notable people like George Palmer Putnam, Charles Frederick Briggs, and Parke Godwin. He also married the sister of Robert Gould Shaw, who later commanded the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War. Curtis's own writings are mostly journalistic; many are travel sketches. He also wrote short biographies and was a popular lecturer.

In the charming collection Little Journeys to the Homes of American Authors (1896), Curtis contributed a sketch on the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson — which reads more like a long walk through the town of Concord, Massachusetts. Curtis occasionally flirted with Transcendentalism and was a frequent visitor to Emerson's home. He also was a particular proponent of the work of James Russell Lowell; his last lecture before his death focused on Lowell on his birthday — which happens to be George Washington's birthday as well:

His birth on Washington's birthday seems to me a happy coincidence, because each is so admirable an illustration of the two forces whose union has made America. Massachusetts and Virginia, although of very different origin and character, were the two colonial leaders.. Virginia was the Cavalier of the Colonies, Massachusetts was the Puritan.

150 years ago: Timrod and Harper

 The Daily Courier in Charleston, South Carolina published "Ethnogenesis" in its February 23, 1861 issue. The poem, written by Henry Timrod, was immediately republished and celebrated throughout the South. Also known as "Ode on Occasion of the Meeting of the Southern Congress," asks that the date signifying the birth of the new Confederate States of America be marked in Heaven. At their first meeting of Congress, held in Montgomery, Alabama, Timrod was inspired to write his poem then and there. "At last, we are a nation among nations," he writes. Amid his rejoicing, however, Timrod considers the possibility of a violent response from the North:

What if, both mad and blinded in their rage,
Our foes should fling us down their mortal gage,
And with a hostile step profane our sod!
We shall not shrink, my brothers, but go forth
To meet them...

That same day, the Anti-Slavery Bugle published "To the Cleveland Union-Savers," a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Subtitled "An Appeal from One of the Fugitive's Own Race," the poet notes that Union men who believed in freedom had yet to act strongly on behalf of enslaved people:

Men of Cleveland, had a vulture
   Clutched a timid dove for prey,
Would ye not, with human pity,
   Drive the gory bird away?

...On your Union's bloody altar
   Was your helpless victim laid;
Mercy, truth, and justice shuddered,
   But your hands would give no aid.

And ye sent her back to torture,
   Stripped of freedom, robbed of right, —
Thrust the wretched, captive stranger
   Back to Slavery's gloomy night!

Sent her back where men may trample
   On her honor and her fame
And upon her lips so dusky
   Press the cup of woe and shame.

There is blood upon your city, —
   Dark and dismal is the stain;
And your hands would fail to cleanse it,
   Though you should Lake Erie drain.

There's a curse upon your Union!
   Fearful sounds are in the air;
As if thunderbolts were forging
   Answers to the bondman's prayer...

But ye cannot stay the whirlwind,
   When the storm begins to break;
And our God doth rise in judgment
   For the poor and needy's sake.

And your guilty, sin-cursed Union
   Shall be shaken to its base,
Till ye learn that simple justice
   Is the right of every race.

Ah, not this granite, dead and cold!

On the birthday of George Washington, the aging Walt Whitman commemorated the completion of the famous obelisk monument to the first president in Washington, D.C. The poem that he wrote was published in the Philadelphia Free Press on February 22, 1885:

Ah, not this granite, dead and cold!
Far from its base and shaft expanding—the round zones circling, comprehending;
Thou, WASHINGTON, art all the worlds, the continent's entire—not yours alone, America;
Europe's as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer's cot,
On frozen North, or sultry South—the Arab's in his tent—the African's;
Old Asia's there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;
(Greets the antique the hero new? 'tis but the same—the heir legitimate, continued ever,
The indomitable heart and arm—proofs of the never-broken line,
Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same—e'en in defeat defeated not, the same:)
Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,
Through teeming cities' streets, indoors or out, factories or farms,
Now, or to come, or past—where patriot wills existed or exist,
Wherever Freedom, poised by Toleration, swayed by Law,
Stands or is rising thy true monument.

Incidentally, Whitman's brother was named George Washington Whitman after the first president.

*Further reading: See the original pages where the poem was printed in the Free Press and the original manuscripts with Whitman's edits, both courtesy of the The Walt Whitman Archive. See also Jerome Loving's biography Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself.

Wilcox: Weep, and you weep alone

On February 21, 1883, the New York Sun published the poem "Solitude." Its author, Ella Wheeler (later Mrs. Wilcox) received $5 for it. It became immensely popular - to the point where it "became hackneyed," she admitted in her autobiography. In that book, she also explained the inspiration for the poem.

Earlier that month in 1883, Wilcox donned a white gown before boarding a train in her home state of Wisconsin. She saw a fellow passenger, dressed all in black. That woman was deeply saddened by the recent death of her young husband and, after talk with her, Wilcox felt that her pleasant trip had been ruined by the somber conversation. Soon, however, reunited with friends, she easily forgot the unpleasant experience and almost felt guilty. She was immediately inspired to write the opening lines to what became her most famous poem:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
         Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
         But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
         Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
         But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
         Grieve, and they turn and go;
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
         But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
         Be sad, and you lose them all;
There are none to decline your nectar'd wine,
         But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
         Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
         But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
         For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
         Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Tillman: To will, to do, to work, to strive

Born in Mound City, Illinois on February 19, 1870, Katherine Davis Chapman (later, Tillman) began her writing career by purposely aiming, as she said, for "the young women of my race." She grew up in part in South Dakota then went to college in Kentucky. At age 18, she was a published poet when the Christian Recorder printed her poem "Memory." She continued publishing poetry, plays, essays, and short stories specifically "to the young women of [her] race," as she wrote.

Many of these writings were published in The A. M. E. Church Review and other publications associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The Church Review serialized her two novellas, Beryl Weston's Ambition: The Story of An Afro-American Girl's Life (1893) and Clancy Street (1898). In her works, she emphasized that black women could serve useful roles in society — not only as wives and mothers, but also as professionals and community leaders. As she wrote in her essay "Afro-American Women and Their Work":

We have been charged with mental inferiority; now if we can prove that with cultivated hearts and brains, we can accomplish the same that is accomplished by our fairer sisters of the Caucasian race, why then, we have refuted the falsehood... We owe it to God and to the Negro race, to be as perfect specimens of Christian womanhood as we are capable of being... All men are created free and equal and women ditto.

Few details exist about Chapman after 1902, though she apparently married a reverend named G. M. Tillman. So far as I know, no images of her have been identified and the date of her death is unknown. Her poem "The Highest Life":

To will, to do, to work, to strive
    To be supremely strong,
To highest things to be alive
    And turn unscathed from wrong;
To love the good that God has made
    In earth and air and sky,
To do while here our little part,
    And after that to die.

Such death as comes to Mother Earth
    By Winter's frost and snow,
And then in Heaven's eternal Spring
    More beautiful to grow;
Such air to breath, such days to live,
    Are for all souls most meet.
This, then, were highest life to live,
    And life most full and sweet.

*Recommended reading: The Works of Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers) (1991), edited by Claudia Tate, the only major scholar of Chapman Tillman that I found.

Inauguration of Davis: to be let alone

Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as the first (and only) President of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861 — 150 years ago today. That day, the Rhode Island-born poet Henry Howard Brownell wrote "The Old Cove," with the epigraph, "All we ask is to be let alone":

As vonce I valked by a dismal svamp,
There sot an Old Cove in the dark and damp,
And at everybody as passed that road
A stick or a stone this Old Cove throwed.
And venever he flung his stick or stone,
He'd set up a song of "Let me alone."

"Let me alone, for I loves to shy
These bits of things at passers by —
Let me alone, for I've got your tin
And lots of other traps snugly in; —
Let me alone, I'm riggin' a boat
To grab votever you've got afloat; —
In a veek or so I excpects to come
And turn you out of your 'ouse and 'ome; —
I'm a quiet Old Cove," says he, vith a groan:
"All I axes is — Let me alone."

Just then he came along the self-same vay,
Another Old Cove, and began for to say —
"Let you alone! That's comin' it strong!—
You've ben let alone — a darned sight too long; —
Of all the sarce that ever I heerd!
Put down that stick! (You may well look skeered.)
Let go that stone! If you once show fight,
I'll knock you higher than ary kite.
You must hev a lesson to stop your tricks,
And cure you of shying them stones and sticks, —
An I'll hev my hardware back and my cash,
And knock your scow into tarnal smash,
And if ever I catches you 'round my ranch,
I'll string you up to the nearest branch.

"The best you can do is to go to bed,
And keep a decent tongue in your head;
For I reckon, before you and I are done,
You'll wish you had let honest folks alone."
The Old Cove stopped, and the t'other Old Cove
He sot quite still in his cypress grove,
And he looked at his stick revolvin' slow
Vhether 'twere safe to shy it or no, —
And he grumbled on, in an injured tone,
"All that I axed vos, let me alone."

Brownell witnessed several battles in what became the American Civil War and often wrote poetry of his experience. Many were collected in 1864 as Lyrics of a Day; or Newspaper-Poetry. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes called him "Our Battle Laureate." A year later, Davis was captured; that incident became a poem too.

Miller: loudest when still

They called him "The Poet of the Sierras," but he called himself Joaquin Miller (though he was born in Indiana as Cincinattus Heine Miller). When he died on February 17, 1913, his last words were recorded as, "Take me away. Take me away."

As a boy, he moved with his family to Oregon. As a young man, he wandered and took a variety of jobs — a cook, judge, miner, Pony Express rider, and he was even jailed for stealing a horse in California. He also wrote essays, local color prose, and poetry. On a decade-long trip to London, he wore a comically-exaggerated Western outfit that included cowboy boots and spurs, a cape and sombrero. His appearance was a disgust to other American writers there like Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. Welcomed as an authentic curiosity nevertheless, Miller earned a greater reputation overseas than at home – the British even gave him the nickname "The Byron of Oregon."

After his death, Miller was cremated and his ashes spread at his California estate, "The Hights," now Joaquin Miller Park. The event was photographed.

From Miller's 1890 collection In Classic Shades and Other Poems, "The True Poet":

O, heard ye the eloquent song of God's silence?
   The vines are His lines; and the emerald sod,
The page of His book, and the green-girdled islands
   Are rocked to their rest in the cradle of God.

God's poet is silence! His song is unspoken
   And yet so profound, and so loud, and so far,
That it thrills you and fills you in measures unbroken —
   The unceasing song of the first morning star.

The shallow seas moan! As a child they have muttered,
   And mourned, and lamented, and wept at their will;
The poems of God are too good to be uttered —
  The dreadful deep seas, they are loudest when still.

Nell: These cheering indications

As a journalist and author, William Cooper Nell continuously exposed the plight of black Americans, particularly as an advocate for the abolition of slavery. He was an historian as well, and published books on the role Africans played in the shaping of the country (Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 in 1851 and Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855). He also fought for better education for blacks.

In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison's newspaper The Liberator dated February 16, 1857, Nell demanded "equal rights for colored schoolchildren." Though many would argue about the difficulties for blacks in the South, Nell focused on the North, noting that more work was needed. "The theory of an equal common school system is yet to be realised throughout the entire North," he wrote. He documents conditions in his native Boston, as well as in Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania. He especially notes that black families are paying taxes and, therefore, have a right to public education.

Rather than focusing on the negative, however, Nell gives examples of successful progress for education. As he concluded: "These cheering indications should stimulate the friends of humanity to continued well-doing, for success will ultimately bless all their labors."

Nell himself was the product of a segregated school system. Like most black people in Boston, he studied at the Abiel Smith School. Upon graduating, his accomplishments were impressive enough to merit one of several awards for Boston schoolchildren. However, because he was black, he was not allowed to attend the awards ceremony. He determined to "hasten the day when the color of your skin would be no barrier to equal school rights."

*Much of the information in this post can be found in William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist; Selected Writings 1832-1874.

Death of Lew Wallace

Though he was a Union general during the Civil War, a territorial governor of New Mexico, and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, today Lew Wallace is best known as the author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), the second highest-selling American novel in the 19th century. He died in Crawfordsville, Indiana on February 15, 1905.

Wallace's last literary work was his own autobiography, published posthumously in 1906. In it, he explained the origins of his famous book.

It is possible to fix the hour and place of the first thought of a book precisely enough; that was a night in 1876. I had been listening to discussion which involved such elemental points as God, heaven, life hereafter, Jesus Christ, and His divinity. Trudging on in the dark, alone except as one's thoughts may be company good or bad, a sense of the importance of the theme struck me for the first time with a force both singular and persistent.

Wallace wrote that he felt "painfully" for not knowing enough about Christ. "I was ashamed of myself," he wrote, and resolved to study, though the idea of delving into theology caused him to shudder. He considered the field "an indefinitely deep pit filled with the bones of unprofitable speculations."

The book proved popular enough that it was adapted for the stage almost immediately. The most famous adaptation, however, was a few decades later: a film version starring Charlton Heston.

In 1910, a statue of Wallace, depicting him in his Civil War years, was installed at the Capitol building in Indiana. Several schools and roads are named after him, especially in New Mexico. His study, a building he built near the end of his life, is now open to the public as a museum.

Chesnutt: the whole race situation

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Charles W. Chesnutt took to the podium to read some of his Stories of the Color Line. His February 14, 1901 reading was the first of several that month throughout the South, mostly North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Chesnutt, an activist for civil rights and a writer of some renown, also used the tour for research for a novel which he published later that year.

The Marrow of Tradition fictionalized the so-called "race riots" in Wilmington in 1898. More than 20 black people were killed in a successful takeover of the town government by white supremacists. At the time, Chesnutt (who was only about 25% black) referred to it as "pure, malignant and altogether indefensible race prejudice." He was particularly disappointed because he believed North Carolina had "superior fairness and liberality in the treatment of race questions."

Feeling the need "to sketch in vivid though simple lines the whole race situation," Chesnutt changed the setting to the fictitious "Wellington." The Marrow of Tradition plot follows two middle-class mulattoes as their first child is born. Though ostracized by Southern society, Chesnutt emphasizes their potential for social good. On the other hand, white characters in the novel begin their plans for takeover:

"Jerry, now, is a very good negro. He's not one of your new negroes, who think themselves as good as white men, and want to run the government. Jerry knows his place, — he is respectful, humble, obedient, and content with the face and place assigned to him by nature."

"Yes, he's one of the best of 'em... He'll call any man 'master' for a quarter, or 'God' for half a dollar... They're all alike, — they're a scrub race, an affliction to the country, and the quicker  we're rid of 'em all the better."

In writing the novel, Chesnutt believed it would be his most important to date and hoped that it "might create sympathy for the colored people of the South in the very difficult position which they occupy." He hoped the book would "become lodged in the popular mind as the legitimate success of Uncle Tom's Cabin... as depicting an epoch in our national history."

*Further reading: Charles W. Chesnutt: Stories, Novels, and Essays (Library of America). Much of the information for this post comes from The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) by William Andrews.

Dunbar: I love the dear old ballads best

Late in 1905, a close friend of Paul Laurence Dunbar died suddenly. The Ohio-born poet felt that his own days were numbered and, though his mother warned him not to, he attended the funeral. It was a harsh, cold winter, and Dunbar stood bareheaded as he watched his friend's coffin lowered into the grave.

"Like the fields, I am lying fallow," he wrote that Christmas, "and it will take a long time to make anything worth coming out in blossom." Separated from his wife Alice Ruth Moore and suffering from tuberculosis, Dunbar was depressed and tired. His mother turned her living room into a bedroom for him and let him sleep close to the fireplace. It was in that room and in his mother's arms that Dunbar died in 1906.

His funeral was held February 12, 1906 at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Dayton — the same church he attended as a boy. He was buried at Woodland Cemetery. A friend, Brand Whitlock (then mayor of Toledo, Ohio), wrote to Dunbar's mother: "You have lost a son, I have lost a friend, but America has lost more than all else and that is a poet."

His poem "Songs":

I love the dear old ballads best,
          That tell of love and death,
Whose every line sings love's unrest
          Or mourns the parting breath.
I love those songs the heart can feel,
          That make our pulses throb;
When lovers plead or contrites kneel
          With choking sigh and sob.

God sings through songs that touch the heart,
          And none are prized save these.
Though men may ply their gilded art
          For fortune, fame, or fees,
The muse that sets the songster's soul
          Ablaze with lyric fire,
Holds nature up, an open scroll,
          And build's art's funeral pyre.

Lee: Go preach the Gospel

I was born February 11th, 1783, at Cape May, state of New Jersey. At the age of seven years I was parted from my parents, and went to live as a servant maid, with a Mr. Sharp, at the distance of about sixty miles from the place of my birth.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h91.html

Thus begins the autobiography of Jarena Lee, first published in 1836, fully titled The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady. Within its first few paragraphs, the text centers on the purpose of the narrative: an account of Lee's religious experience. "The spirit of God moved in power through my conscience," Lee wrote, "and told me I was a wretched sinner." She was first moved in 1804 by a psalm which reminded her she was "born unholy and unclean."

Born free but poor, Lee had few options as a "coloured lady." Her job as a servant, which ripped her from her parents at such a young age, seemed to condemn her to servitude for the rest of her life. But, she writes, she found another calling:

An impressive silence fell upon me, and I stood as if some one was about to speak to me, yet I had no such thought in my heart. But to my utter surprise there seemed to sound a voice which I thought I distinctly heard, and most certainly understood, which said to me, "Go preach the Gospel!" I immediately replied aloud, "No one will believe me."

Lee worried that it was Satan contacting her, especially when he offered to "put words in [her] mouth." She acquiesced nonetheless, and began studying the Bible so much, she claimed, "I... preached in my sleep." Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Church, gave her permission to serve as a traveling preacher, making her a likely candidate as the first black woman to do so in the United States. "I traveled two thousand three hundred and twenty-five miles, and preached one hundred and seventy-eight sermons," she claimed, to integrated audiences of blacks and whites. Not surprisingly, she preached that slavery was a sin that would one day be punished by God.

Washington and Wheatley: a parcel of papers

From his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, General George Washington wrote to his one-time aide-de-camp Joseph Reed on February 10, 1776:

I recollect nothing else worth giving you the trouble of, unless you can be amused by reading a letter and poem addressed to me by Miss Phillis Wheatley. In searching over a parcel of papers the other day, in order to destroy such as were useless, I brought it to light again. At first, with a view of doing justice to her poetical genius, I had a great mind to publish the poem; but not knowing whether it might not be considered rather as a mark of my own vanity than a compliment to her, I laid it aside till I came across it again in the manner just mentioned.

Phillis Wheatley, a former enslaved woman, had written the slave-owning Washington a letter and poem back in October 1775. Her published poems had caused a sensation, particularly in England, in part due to some skepticism that she was capable of writing so well. Her poem "To His Excellency General Washington" offered encouragement in his heaven-blessed endeavors:

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev'ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.

Washington took some time considering how to respond to Wheatley. He finally wrote her a letter at the end of February, thanking her for the poem and inviting her to visit him at headquarters. No evidence exists that she took him up on the offer. That same home which Washington used as his headquarters continued its connection to poetry; decades later, it became the home of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is now open to the public.

*Recommended reading: Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings (Penguin Classics, 2001)

Chopin: count it happiness, indeed, to live

Katherine O'Flaherty was born in St. Louis, Missouri on February 8, 1850 (some sources incorrectly list her birth year as 1851). She would be remembered as Kate Chopin after her 1870 marriage to Oscar Chopin, known as the author of the feminist novel The Awakening (1899). Her earliest published work, however, was a poem. "If It Might Be" was published in 1889 in the Chicago-based magazine America.

Chopin suffered depression after the death of her husband and, shortly after, her mother. Left in debt, her late husband's business failed and she moved back to St. Louis after living in New Orleans. A family friend and physician suggested she turn to writing. She was prolific as a prose writer, often detailing conflicted emotions as a woman. Of her poems, however, only about 20 survive, including "If It Might Be":

If it might be that thou didst need my life;
Now on the instant would I end this strife
'Twixt hope and fear, and glad the end I'd meet
With wonder only, to find death so sweet.

If it might be that thou didst need my love;
To love thee dear, my life's fond work would prove.
All time, to tender watchfulness I'd give;
And count it happiness, indeed, to live.

*Recommended reading: Unveiling Kate Chopin (1999) by Emily Toth and, of course, Chopin's outstanding novel The Awakening.

Motives higher than money-making or notoriety

Walter H. Stowers was born on February 7, 1859 in Canada, where his parents had fled to escape slavery. Three years later to the day, Benjamin B. Pelham was born in Detroit, Michigan. Pelham later founded an amateur newspaper, The Venture, to which Stowers contributed. With the help of other African Americans, together they founded the Detroit Plaindealer in 1883.

Their newspaper was aimed specifically at African American audiences (though they preferred the term "Afro-American" and were leaders in suppressing the use of the term "Negro"). The Plaindealer earned respect for its efforts - one newspaper warned that the publication "does not mince matters, but it calls a spade a spade every time." Its editors explained their motivation:

...Afro-American newspapers have for their raison d'etre other motives higher than money-making or notoriety, seeking which make their success or failure of more moment and of much more interest to those who appreciate their necessity. The failure of an Afro-American journal, i. e., a good one, means not simply that the people are supporting some other in its place, but that they are not inclined to support any. It does not mean simply a transfer of patronage, but a lack of it. It does not mean that the desire is elsewhere gratified, but that there is no desire. It is an index of the tendencies of a people and, to a certain extent, a measure of their progress. 

Their mission, they said, was "to overcome distrust" and "to set an example that there is no field of labor which cannot be successfully explored and cultivated by the Afro-American who is energetic and painstaking." Further, they aimed "for the creation of a distinctive and favorable Afro-American sentiment, for the dislodgment of prejudice and for the encouragement of patriotism." It continued until 1894.

Chesnutt: Much love and best wishes

Being the son of Charles W. Chesnutt can't be easy. Through short stories, novels, essays, lectures, and biography, Chesnutt explored race issues in the United States. Born in Cleveland, Ohio to two freed black parents, his efforts to improve race relations earned him much respect nationwide and beyond (though, most historians admit he could have easily passed for white). His son Edwin J. Chesnutt became particularly sensitive to racism; after the turn of the century, he tried to escape to Europe.

In one of the earliest letters to his son during that trip, Charles Chesnutt wrote on February 5, 1906: "Have as good a time as you like, within the limits of strict economy, remembering that I am not carrying you, but merely boosting you along." Edwin, a recent Harvard graduate, was having difficulty finding employment.

"We missed you very much for a day or two," Chesnutt's letter continues, "but are getting a little bit adjusted to your absence. The whole family has become wonderfully fond of you since you left... Much love and best wishes."

Less than 20 years later, in 1923, Chesnutt heard that his son's alma mater was trying to exclude blacks from its dormitories and dining halls. A local newspaper in Cleveland reported flippantly about the discrimination. Chesnutt responded to the editor in an angry letter that he expected more from a Cleveland man, "educated in the public schools where he went to school with colored children." The letter, which elicited an apology from the editor, continued:

Colored students have always lived in the dormitories and eaten in the dining halls at Harvard; I have paid the bills of one of them and ought to know. The "living together" and "eating with white folks" involves no more intimacy than life in a hotel, and you know or ought to know that colored men are received as guests at some of the best hotels in Cleveland.

Harper: Are there no wrongs to be righted?

In May 1866, featured speakers addressed the annual National Women's Rights Convention, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Harper, a well-known poet and civil rights activist, was well-respected and a frequent public speaker. Nevertheless, she began her speech that day: "I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform." She went on:

Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which are now demanded.

Harper emphasized that if white women were considered unequal, as a black woman, she was worse off. Nevertheless, all people are "bound up together," she said, and "society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members." Equating the fight for women's civil rights with that of blacks, she hoped for a nation not with privileged classes, but a population of only privileged people, "whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain." Though she admits merely allowing women to vote will not solve everything, she goes on:

You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs... Are there no wrongs to be righted? ...Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America. 

Elsewhere, in her poem "An Appeal to My Countrywomen," Harper wrote:

Men may tread down the poor and lowly,
May crush them in anger and hate,
But surely the mills of God's justice
Will grind out the grist of their fate.

On February 3, 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, allowing black men the right to vote. The 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women, would not pass for another 50 years.

Bicentennial of Delia Bacon

Delia Bacon was born in a log cabin in Tallmadge, Ohio on February 2, 1811. Her father had moved the family there in a speculative venture that failed shortly after the young Delia's birth. The family returned to their roots in Connecticut, but father died shortly after. She was six years old. Her mother, already caring for four other children, sent Delia away to live with a family in Hartford. There, she studied for a time under Catherine Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe), who acknowledged that Delia possessed "one of the most gifted minds I have ever met" and was "an agreeable person."

Others would later disagree.

After a decade of research, in 1857, Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. Her proposition, as she called it, was that William Shakespeare did not exist as we know him, that the plays attributed to that name were written by a coterie of men (including Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser) and that, in fact, the plays were meant to show philosophy, not serve as entertainment, and that its authors hid their true identities due to political fears. This "little clique of disappointed and defeated politicians," as she speculated, "undertook to head and organize a popular opposition against the government, and were compelled to retreat from that enterprise, the best of of them effecting their retreat with some difficulty."

Among her supporters in her Shakespeare skepticism was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who helped publish her first essay on the subject. He even offered her advice on how to frame her argument (likely inspiring the introductory chapter "The Proposition"). The book's preface was provided by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had met her while serving as Consul in Liverpool. In the preface, he admitted he hadn't even read the book before endorsing it. After admitting most readers will first feel "repugnance" at the theory, he explained:

What I claim for this work is, that the ability employed in its composition has been worthy of its great subject, and well employed for our intellectual interests, whatever judgment the public may pass upon the questions discussed. And, after listening to the author's interpretation of the Plays, and seeing how wide a scope she assigns to them, how high a purpose, and what richness of inner meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly return again — not wholly, at all events — to the common view of them and of their author. It is for the public to say whether my countrywoman has proved her theory. In the worst event, if she has failed, her failure will be more honorable than most people's triumphs; since it must fling upon the old tombstone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest tributary wreath that has ever lain there.