the request for an end to slavery should not be perceived as a lofty goal.

The poet uses the image of herself, unquiet in her coffin, perceiving injustices above, as a vehicle to list a number of atrocities common under slavery, such as "the lash," "babes torn from [a mother's] breast," "bloodhounds seizing their human prey" and girls "bartered" as if they were animals. Slavery, the poem emphasizes, is something so self-evidently atrocious and inhuman that to call an end to it would allow countless others to sleep in peace. For as long as slavery continues, even the dead cannot escape its evils.

Frances Harper (1825-1911) was an African-American poet who was involved in the movement to abolish slavery.  Her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" is clearly an anti-slavery statement.

The speaker in the poem says that she is willing to be buried anywhere, even among "earth's humblest graves," as long as she is not buried "in a land where men are slaves."

The speaker describes some of the horrors of slavery: lashings, "babes torn from [their mother's] breast," bloodhounds seeking fugitives, and young girls being sold "from their mother's arms...for their youthful charms."

The speaker says that she could not rest in a place where such things take place; if she saw them from her eternal resting-place, her "eye would flash with a mournful flame, / [Her] death-pale cheek [would] grow red with shame."

Similar to the outlook of many slaves, the speaker does not see any practical solution to the slavery problem.  Rather, she seeks refuge from the problem in the afterlife. 

This poem is largely about the cruelties of slavery, framed as an appeal, on the part of the poet, that she not be buried in a place where slavery is legal. Note, that the poem was written in 1858, before the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment. In essence, this poem is a kind of plea looking forward toward the future, calling for the end of slavery.

In the poem, Harper says that her spirit would not be able to find peace so long as it must constantly bear witness the cruel realities and indignities which slavery represents, and the poem describes those cruelties in detail: the violence, the grief, the sense of helplessness and dehumanization which slavery imposes upon its victims.

The predominate theme in "Bury me in a Free Land" is that of the horrors of slavery. Harper claims she could not rest in peace if she knew that she was buried in a land where people were subjected to these indignities:

I could not rest if I heard the tread                                                   Of a coffle gang to the shambles led                                               And the mother's shriek of wild despair                                          Rise like a curse on the trembling air. 

Harper repeatedly evokes slavery's terrors and abuses, using images of blood, shreiking, moans, and death. She juxtaposes this with freedom, her other central theme, only possible in a land where "bloated might/Can rob no man of his dearest right." Harper's poem makes a simple request, only asking that she not be buried in a land where slavery exists. In doing so, she seems to argue that the issue of slavery itself is not complex. Slavery is inherently evil, and just as she could not be buried in a land of slavery, so Americans should not rest easy knowing that the institution exists in their midst.