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This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric's queer extracurriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.
I often think when people has a chance to have a Education why will they throw it away they have lost golden opportunities.
-Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus (June 20, 1866)
Addie Brown wrote to Rebecca Primus about the golden opportunities of education within what was a romantic letter.1 This 1866 letter is just one of well over a hundred extant letters from the women's same-sex, cross-class romantic correspondence, which they maintained before, during, and after the Civil War (1859-1868). The correspondence of these African American women was not merely romantic but explicitly erotic, as detailed by African American studies scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin and historical sociologist Karen Hansen. Yet as much as Addie and Rebecca's epistolary exchange was motivated by erotic desire, it was also fueled by desires for educational opportunity (Grasso 259). Addie worked primarily as a domestic, and in spite of having little access to formal education, she avidly pursued selfeducation whenever she had "a chance." Indeed, in this same letter, Addie references Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and, across the letters, offers commentary on texts ranging from Grace Aguilar's domestic novel Women's Friendship to books such as Practical Christianity for Men, and on the work of figures from Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet to Henry Ward Beecher and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Addie's letters to Rebecca offer a rich record of these educational pursuits. Just as significantly, the romantic correspondence itself played a key role in both women's learning and teaching. In contrast with Addie, Rebecca was from a family prominent in Hartford, Connecticut. Trained as a schoolteacher, she went south to Royal Oak, Maryland, following the war to help the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society start a school for formerly enslaved children and adults. While her epistolary responses to Addie are unavailable, Rebecca's letters to family during this time suggest Addie was an important support for Rebeccas work to bring the "golden opportunities" of education to fellow African Americans.
In many...