ABSTRACT
It would be easy to read past the complexity of Harper’s poetic image, in particular, to miss the temperance fi gures amid the more obvious racenational jeremiad in her poetic eulogy for the late Radical Republican leader. “Lines to the Hon. Thaddeus Stevens” afforded Harper the opportunity not only to mourn the death of her political ally, but also to gauge the political promise of the Radical Revolution of 1865,in which an uneasy interparty hegemony was formed around an agenda of national free labor and civil rights for African Americans.The poem poses a series of questions to the deceased. Evoking the postwar ethos of a nation obliterated by “the cinders of God’s wrath,” Harper asks Stevens’s ghost if it is possible that, despite the ruination, the nation might not have learned the lesson of millennial democracy. Stevens’s “bright and glowing visions” of civil rights were stifl ed, in Harper’s phrase, by the “timid counsels” of a Republican Party (Complete Poems 81), which was, as historian Sean Wilentz has phrased it, “veering ever rightward” (120). In her address to Stevens’s transcendent consciousness, the penultimate inquiry casts the “negro question” in a didactic fi guration of production and consumption. This ambiguous image of black labor, paradoxically producing “the nation’s scorn and hate,” suggests the uncertainty of Reconstruction’s legacy. This makes a stark contrast with the celebratory poem “President Lincoln’s Proclamation of Freedom,” in which the legislative power of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, fi gured both by Lincoln’s voice and sunlight, transforms the state of Southern labor: “And the sun-kissed brow of labor / With lustre new shall shine” (Poems 104). By contrast, “Lines to the Hon. Thaddeus Stevens” recognizes a bitter irony, one acknowledged among abolitionist rhetors: African American labor continued to empowered a nation seemingly bent on the disenfranchisement of African Americans. The synecdochal conceit of the poem, which fi gures the “national scorn and hate” of
the post-Reconstruction moment as the distillation of liquor itself, a “fearful vintage” with destructive effects, provides a key to Harper’s synthesis of free labor and temperance reform agendas in the second half of her career.
