Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.

This essay positions the works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Maria Stewart in terms of how the two authors wrote about Black girlhood. While Harper’s poetry and Stewart’s orations may be familiar to readers of this volume, Wright introduces their fictional sketches and autobiographical writing, thus opening up more avenues to approach their work for both scholarship and teaching.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Civil War and Reconstruction had become sites of significant narrative contests that were carried out in scores of novels and in hundreds of stories published in popular magazines. These writings are arguably central to any understanding of American literary history but usually are represented by only a few canonical Civil War novels, such as Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895), Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock (1898), and Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Well before the moonlight and magnolia school of Civil War fiction exerted its death grip on the postwar literary imagination, however, an earlier contest waged that sought to set the terms of the debate. Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, William Wells Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper each sought a narrative capable of accounting for the uncertainties and possibilities of this political moment. This essay traces their attempts to imagine a different future, one that broke with the nation’s history of continued abrogation of the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence.

Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.

Sherita Johnson considers a region much more associated with African Americans in Reconstruction in her “Reconstruction of the South in African American Literature.” Johnson examines the transformations of a place, people, and Black literary tradition(s) responding to the political and cultural conflicts of the era and finds that Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, William Wells Brown, James Madison Bell, Albery A. Whitman and Pauline Hopkins all present “Black witnesses” to Reconstruction in their works: slaves emancipating themselves, freedmen and women staking claims to Southern homes built by generational struggles, and black citizens enacting the promises of democracy. Ultimately, her chapter provides case studies of diverse texts – travel narratives, epic poems, autobiographical sketches, and moral theatre – to consider how such works by African American writers help to correct the historical record of Reconstruction and of Southern literary history.

This chapter traces how August 1st celebrations of West Indian Emancipation in the United States impacted the works of Frances Ellen Watkins and James Whitfield. As this chapter shows, such celebrations not only provided an occasion for Watkins and Whitfield to write and perform poetry, but also indelibly shaped the form and content of their works.

Rynetta Davis’s “National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History” considers how nineteenth-century Black women writers contested and revised representations of traditional Black domesticity. Moving outside of the home and beyond traditional forms of domestic work, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Collins, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper suggest that Black domestic work exceeds the home space. Davis thus examines a range of domestic print practices and sensibilities in ways that highlight gender, gendered spaces and work, and print possibilities surrounding such. In this, her chapter considers just what “domestic” citizenship might look like.

The Introduction to Black Reconstructions gives a basic description of the volume, which offers the most nuanced treatment currently available of Black print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It articulates both the kinds of recovery work and methodological innovations in the book and demonstrates how the recovery work inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. It recognizes that many period texts – by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper to Mattie Jackson – are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key trends in American culture. It describes the book’s three parts – “Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities”; “Persons and Bodies”; and “Memories, Materialities, and Locations.” It places all of this work in dialogue with key scholarship, especially that flowing from W. E. B. Du Bois’s massively important Black Reconstruction in America (1935).

Although scholarship on anti-lynching literature generally is robust, most focuses on prose and drama. In parallel, although increasing attention is being devoted to turn-of-the-century poetry, this discourse still often diminishes women’s contributions to this oeuvre by denigrating the aesthetic qualities and political intentions of most female poets in this period other than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Addressing both gaps, this chapter examines anti-lynching verse by three undeservedly little-known authors: Priscilla Jane Thompson (1871–1942), Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman (1870–1922), and Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868–1936). All have been nearly ignored, except for discussions of their dialect poetry. Yet close attention to examples of their formalist verse demonstrates that these poets were not anomalies in their era and instead constituted a key link in a tradition of Black women’s poetics of protest, traceable to Harper and to Phillis Wheatley before her. Ultimately, their poems on this subject offer a new lens on this decade, often unfairly viewed as a pre-Harlem fallow period in African American women’s poetry and political contributions.

Kathy Glass’s “Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance” highlights social networks, textual politics, and Black resistance and focuses on African Americans’ sustained literary activism against myriad social evils after the Civil War. The chapter begins to map the politics of uplift, temperance, and social reform, with emphasis on work by Julia C. Collins, Harper, and William Wells Brown. Glass suggests these texts underscore literature’s potential for political work by inspiring readers and encouraging collective resistance against oppression.

Katherine Adams’s “‘This Is Especially Our Crop’: Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton” thinks deeply about that historical record’s ties to materiality, labor, and “worth.”Adams focuses on writing that promoted cotton as a site for Black economic self-determination – specifically on how writers negotiated the double bind of racial capitalism, simultaneously countering predictions that freedpeople could not become economic producers without white coercion and resisting the reduction of Black personhood to economic value. Analyzing texts from Martin Delany, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and diverse other authors for the Black periodical press, Adams shows how African American writers and thinkers complicated the putative opposition between capitalist and human value by laying claim to both, appropriating the logic of cotton capitalism in order to inscribe Black personhood within its aporia.

Locating a pedagogical impulse in the Reconstruction texts of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Madison Bell, and Albery Whitman, Stephanie Farrar’s “Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry during Reconstruction” identifies an emergent form of Black poetry pioneered in Reconstruction that has previously gone essentially unrecognized: long narrative verse that thematizes and analyzes the formation of Black citizenship. In laying claim to a form deeply linked with both national identity and whiteness, the chapter suggests that Black writers seized the cultural power of narrative verse to force a reckoning with the ongoing impact of slavery and the new mechanisms of racial hierarchy that replaced it. It draws attention to the form’s multiscalar cultural work as an analysis of, history of, didactic model for, and even enactment of modes of citizenship for Black Americans, and it illustrates the special role of the AME Christian Recorder in promulgating this poetry as an instrument of Black nationalism, attempting to counter attacks on black social and political life during Reconstruction and to theorize the conditions and components of freedom itself.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s 1869 serialized novel Minnie’s Sacrifice offers a critique of white feminism’s failures at antiracism. This chapter reads Harper’s critiques of white feminism within the historical context of her and other black women’s intersectional activism and the larger print context of the Christian Recorder. Harper’s work within the women’s rights movement made her familiar with white feminism’s failures, in which women like Harper’s character Camilla, the antislavery daughter of an enslaver family, prioritize their own interests, claim positions of victimization, and foist labor onto Black people, all while claiming to be allies. Harper’s novel is not a narrative of white feminist progress but demise, as her mixed-race Black characters distance themselves from white feminist ideals. Harper’s novel illustrates how – even while discussing the extreme anti-Black racism of slavery, disenfranchisement, and lynching – Black women activists were not fooled by insufficient forms of allyship.

Examining the evolving representation of military service in African American literature reveals how African American writers illustrate the possibility and the disillusionment of military service between the Civil War and World War I, adding individual perspective to the historical record. In The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), William Wells Brown expresses hope that African Americans would receive citizenship after fighting for their freedom. After Reconstruction, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote Iola Leroy (1893) and Paul Laurence Dunbar published The Fanatics (1901), works that reimagine the consequences of the Civil War in light of the nation’s institutionalized racism. Later, Victor Daly portrayed the experience of an African American soldier in a segregated army in Not Only War (1932). These books demonstrate that the complicated questions about African American military service and citizenship would take generations to resolve.