“If They Kill Me”: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Black Boatmen and the Legacy of Civil War Heroism

Abstract: In 1863, in Washington, North Carolina, a Black boatman gave his life to save Union sailors from Confederate bullets. The anecdote, reproduced in the daily press and abolitionist texts, struck a chord with Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Between 1869 and 1895, Harper retold the tale in two novels, one speech, and two poems. This article considers each retelling, paying special attention to the poems, as it argues that in Harper’s versions of the story, the ship—a popular nineteenth-century metaphor for the nation—becomes instead the site of a transnational struggle for racial justice. Thus, Harper’s decades-long interest in this tale of maritime sacrifice amplifies ideologies of Black political agency that threaten to upend, rather than uphold, the American state. This threat is especially significant amid Reconstruction-era justifications of Black citizenship anchored to the question of military service. In this context, Harper’s interest in the heroism of unenlisted Black men points beyond familiar ideas of patriotic duty toward a more destabilizing vision of Black political potential shaped by the hetero-topic nature of maritime spaces.