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The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
Written by Dorothy Wickenden
Narrated by Heather Alicia Simms, Anne Twomey and Gabra Zackman
4.5/5 (8 ratings)
13 hours
Also available as...Ebook
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An LA Times Best Book of the Year, Christopher Award Winner, and Chautauqua Prize Finalist!
“Engrossing... examines the major events of the mid 19th century through the lives of three key figures in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.” —Smithsonian
From the executive editor of The New Yorker, a riveting, provocative, and revelatory history of abolition and women’s rights, told through the story of three women—Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright—in the years before, during and after the Civil War.
“The Agitators tells the story of America before the Civil War through the lives of three women who advocated for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights as the country split apart. Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright, and Frances A. Seward are the examples we need right now—another time of divisiveness and dissension over our nation’s purpose ‘to form a more perfect union.’” —Hillary Rodham Clinton
In the 1850s, Harriet Tubman, strategically brilliant and uncannily prescient, rescued some seventy enslaved people from Maryland’s Eastern Shore and shepherded them north along the underground railroad. One of her regular stops was Auburn, New York, where she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker mother of seven, and Frances A. Seward, the wife of William H. Seward, who served over the years as governor, senator, and secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the Union Army in South Carolina as a nurse and spy, and took part in a spectacular river raid in which she helped to liberate 750 slaves from several rice plantations.
Wright, a “dangerous woman” in the eyes of her neighbors, worked side by side with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to organize women’s rights and anti-slavery conventions across New York State, braving hecklers and mobs when she spoke. Frances Seward, the most conventional of the three friends, hid her radicalism in public, while privately acting as a political adviser to her husband, pressing him to persuade President Lincoln to move immediately on emancipation.
The Agitators opens in the 1820s, when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young homemakers bound by law and tradition, and ends after the war. Many of the most prominent figures of the era—Lincoln, William H. Seward, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, John Brown, William Lloyd Garrison—are seen through the discerning eyes of the protagonists. So are the most explosive political debates: about the civil rights of African Americans and women, about the enlistment of Black troops, and about opposing interpretations of the Constitution.
Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.Read more
PUBLISHER:
Simon & Schuster Audio
RELEASED:
Mar 30, 2021
DWDorothy Wickenden
Dorothy Wickenden is the author of Nothing Daunted and The Agitators and has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995, and before that was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She lives with her husband in Westchester, New York.
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From the author of the New York Times bestseller Nothing Daunted, The Agitators chronicles the revolutionary activities of Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward, and Martha Wright: three unlikely collaborators in the quest for abolition and women’s rights.
In Auburn, New York, in the mid-nineteenth century, Martha Wright and Frances Seward, inspired by Harriet Tubman’s rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Maryland, opened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad.
Tubman was enslaved, Wright was a middle-class Quaker mother of seven, and Seward was the aristocratic wife and moral conscience of her husband, William H. Seward, who served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State. All three refused to abide by laws that denied them the rights granted to white men, and they supported each other as they worked to overturn slavery and achieve full citizenship for blacks and women.
The Agitators opens when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young women bridling against their traditional roles. It ends decades later, after Wright’s and Seward’s sons—and Tubman herself—have taken part in three of the defining engagements of the Civil War. Through the sardonic and anguished accounts of the protagonists, reconstructed from their letters, diaries, and public appearances, we see the most explosive debates of the time, and portraits of the men and women whose paths they crossed: Lincoln, Seward, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. Tubman, embraced by Seward and Wright and by the radical network of reformers in western New York State, settled in Auburn and spent the second half of her life there.
With extraordinarily compelling storytelling reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and David McCullough’s John Adams, The Agitators brings a vivid new perspective to the epic American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, women’s rights activism, and the Civil War. (less)
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Kathleen
Jul 15, 2021Kathleen rated it really liked it
Wickendon offers compelling biographies of three women that lived in Auburn, New York during the tumultuous period leading up to the Civil War. The most famous member is Harriet Tubman who not only served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad leading escaped slaves to freedom, but worked as a scout, spy, and nurse for the Union Army. Martha Wright and Frances Seward opened their homes to Tubman’s fugitives.
Martha Wright was the younger sister of Lucretia Mott and friend of the famous feminists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She was one of the founders of the Seneca Falls Convention, a supporter of property rights for married women and proponent of women’s suffrage. The third woman was Frances Seward, the wife of William Henry Seward whose political accomplishments included being governor of New York, senator of New York, and finally Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Frances was an insistent advocate for emancipation.
Wickendon is the executive editor of the New Yorker and scoured the letters, diaries and those of family members for insights into the stories of Martha and Frances. Harriet Tubman was illiterate and left no written record; but there were published interviews, and the letters and diaries of people who knew her.
While the movement toward abolition of slavery is the primary focus of the book, it also covers the embryonic feminist movement. Readers of the Civil War era will recognize many key historical figures—from John Brown, to Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, and many more. Wickenden’s assessment of the era—“The nation never had been so politically engaged—or so divided.”
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Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship
May 18, 2021Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship rated it liked it
Shelves: nonfiction, biography, 3-stars, history, united-states, historical-women
This is a fairly interesting group biography, providing a history of the American abolitionist and women’s rights movements in the 19th century through the stories of three women involved in them. Wickenden devotes just over half the book to Frances Seward, wife of Lincoln’s Secretary of State, Henry Seward. The rest is split between Martha Wright, Lucretia Mott’s younger sister, and underground railroad legend Harriet Tubman.* The book begins with each of their childhoods and traces the lead-up to the Civil War and the war itself, finishing shortly afterwards.
The subject matter is interesting, if slightly dry; the author leans more toward recitation of facts than much analysis of events or personalities. But it’s an interesting look at the abolitionist and women’s rights movements, and also provides engaging personal stories of the Civil War, including the stories of the principals’ relatives and close friends.
This is not the first book I’d recommend if you’re most interested in Harriet Tubman, who obviously has much more name recognition than the other two, but gets the least page time here. Unfortunately there isn’t a really great adult biography of her available, but Bound for the Promised Land isn’t bad, and was also relied upon heavily by this author. Wickenden does seem to have done some of her own research on Tubman, but since Tubman was illiterate throughout her life there just aren’t a lot of sources. (I was surprised to see Wickenden nevertheless contradicting other Tubman biographies in some of the details. For instance, she ascribes Tubman’s continued illiteracy after reaching freedom to her head injury, a conclusion other authors did not seem ready to make.)
Seward and Wright are lesser-known figures whose stories I had not read before, and they were certainly interesting, though it’s clear they were also fairly minor figures in their movements; this book would perhaps be most rewarding to those who’ve already read about the best-known players, though all these folks knew each other so many of them appear briefly here. Following her sister’s lead, Wright was primarily involved in women’s rights organizing, and seems to have been an energetic and well-liked figure.
Seward seemed most interested in abolitionism but was involved mostly behind the scenes, in deference to her husband’s political career. I didn’t know much about Henry Seward, a well-known national politician widely expected to be nominated for president in 1860; he lost the nomination to Abraham Lincoln in a surprise move at the convention. Nevertheless, he went on to join Lincoln’s cabinet and was severely assaulted himself (along with two of his and Frances’s sons) on the same day Lincoln was assassinated. Henry Seward seems to have enjoyed the bustle and acclaim of politics and wanted to accommodate the South despite personally opposing slavery, a compromise the more ideologically committed Frances found repugnant. She also ran an underground railroad stop out of their house (with his quiet approval) and pushed him in her letters to be harder on slaveholders, while trying to avoid public life herself.
I can’t help suspecting Wickenden really wanted to write a book about Frances Seward, or a joint biography with her husband, because these are the book’s most in-depth sections. The connections between the three women she ultimately settled on feel relatively tenuous; they were friends, yes, but they all had plenty to choose from. But while not quite what I was expecting, it’s all interesting material. I do think the publisher could have made it a bit easier to read, by not printing on deckle edge pages (UGH) and by including family trees of the Wrights and Sewards (5-7 kids each are a lot to keep track of). Nevertheless, this is a perfectly fine history including some information I hadn’t seen before, and worth a read if you’re interested in the material.
* After finishing the book with the sense Wickenden was much more interested in Seward than the other two, I counted the pages to check my instincts. Out of 282 pages of text (excluding blank pages between chapters and a few pages of general history not through the eyes of any of the protagonists), Seward gets 144 (or 51%), Wright 75 (or 27%) and Tubman 63 (or 22%). (less)
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Rachel
Dec 27, 2020Rachel rated it it was amazing
The Agitators by Dorothy Wickenden is an excellent nonfiction that weaves together the stories of three friends or “Auburn agitators”: Frances Seward, Harriet Tubman, and Martha Wright. This was an excellent book!
I loved learning more about Frances, Martha, and Harriet and their quests for not only personal accomplishments, survival, and concern, but also for their selfless devotion to abolition and to advance women’s rights.
I learned so much more about their involvement and additions to the advancement of these causes, their involvement with the Underground Railroad, and also more about the societal problems and political atmosphere during the 1840s-1910s.
I loved the addition of a few other famous advocates: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (National Woman Suffrage Association) , Lucy Stone, Fredrick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, and many others. I had no idea how intertwined all of these figures were.
I have to say my favorite aspect was learning even more about Harriet Tubman. She is truly one of the most amazing women in modern history. I am stunned with each new thing I learn about her. I loved it!
This book is well-written, well-paced, and thoroughly researched. It is clear the author did her due diligence in all of her listed sources. What she was able to create was a book that is breathtaking and unforgettable. I have already purchased this as a preorder and will recommend this to everyone I know.
Well done! 5/5 stars
Thank you to the Author and Scribner for this stunning ARC and in return I am submitting my unbiased and voluntary review and opinion.
I am posting this review to my GR, Instagram, Bookbub, Amazon, and B&N accounts upon publication. (less)
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Viola
May 13, 2021Viola rated it liked it
Shelves: feminism, direct-action, http-www-solidarityforeverbook-com, slavery, mutual-aid, black-lives-matter, abolitionist
The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
by Dorothy Wickenden .
The fact cannot be stressed enough that in the 19th Century, the anti-slavery and women's rights campaigns were interrelated and interlocking movements. This book shines further light on this history.
May 12, 2021 Ann Fabian THE NATIONAL BOOK REVIEW
Scribner
ISBN 13: 9781476760735
Dorothy Wickenden begins the acknowledgements that conclude The Agitators: Three Friends who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights, writing “I am a journalist, not a historian, but for any writer, ideas can take a long time to germinate, and they start with the passions and discoveries of those who precede them.” I’ve been puzzling over Wickenden’s disclaimer and trying to imagine how the slow-working historian, the writer Wickenden says she is not, would have approached this compelling story of three women who lived through and helped to define the moral turmoil of an America moving toward a war to end slavery.
I’ll put my cards on the table: Wickenden is an historian.
The Agitators tells the story of three women: Frances Miller Seward, Martha Coffin Wright, and Harriet Tubman, whose paths crossed in Auburn, New York, during the tumultuous middle years of the nineteenth century. Seward, Wright, and Tubman were co-conspirators and intimate friends, Wickenden tells us, plotting “insubordination against slavery and the oppression of women.” They each played parts in the events that remade the nation.
The book opens with Martha Coffin Wright, daughter of an old Nantucket family and younger sister of activist Lucretia Mott. Martha was born in Boston in 1806. Three years later, the family settled in Philadelphia. Bristling at the strictures of Quaker life, Martha married a dashing military man and moved with him to the Florida territory. He died not long after, leaving her a widowed mother at age 19. She had the good luck to find a second suitor, a lawyer David Wright. The Wrights moved to Auburn in 1839.
In Auburn, Martha met Frances Miller Seward, the town’s “only other known outlier” and the two become friends. Martha and Frances had a lot in common: “Quaker roots, older sisters willing to resist social norms, a passion for reading, an antipathy to pretentiousness, and a burgeoning interest in social reform.” They also had ambitious husbands and houses full of small children.
Seward was the wealthy daughter of one of the town’s leading citizens, a man who had grown rich on the fevered land speculation that followed the American Revolution. Her money and family position helped support her husband’s political career. William “Henry” Seward served two terms as governor of New York, two terms in the US senate, helped launch the Republican Party, and joined Lincoln’s cabinet as Secretary of State.
In the early years of their marriage, Wickenden writes, it seemed to Frances that Henry was “contributing to a dynamic new America,” while she was stuck at home. A trip through Virginia in the 1830s gave her a gut-wrenching view of the horrors of slavery, and she became Henry’s “private counselor and his political conscience,” as the two began to work, in their different ways, to bring an end to American slavery.
The third woman, Harriet Tubman, is the most memorable of Wickenden’s agitators. Tubman is the conscience of the story, a woman whose extraordinary efforts helped build the dynamic new America that Seward imagined. Tubman, born in Maryland in 1822, was a generation younger than Wright and Seward. And her life could not have differed more from theirs. Tubman engineered her own escape from slavery in 1849, and over the next decade, returned to the Delmarva Peninsula to lead others north along the route of the Underground Railroad. Allies in Philadelphia, including Wright’s sister Lucretia Mott, likely suggested to Tubman that friends in Auburn, a small city on the north end of Lake Owasco, would shelter fugitives. Wright and Seward opened their kitchens to people heading north to Canada. In the 1850s, they welcomed Tubman herself and helped finance her purchase of an 8-acre farm.
In summarizing the book, I’ve come to appreciate the challenges Wickenden faced in assembling the pieces of this story. Each of the women offers a perspective on the country’s mounting tensions, particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Frances Seward, with her politically connected husband, serves as an eye-witness to high politics.
She had little liking for the social conventions that governed life in Washington, and she abhorred the slavery still visible on the city’s streets. Seward was a step removed from the rough and tumble world of party politics, but she worked her ideas into the speeches that helped sustain Henry’s reputation as a leading anti-slavery spokesman in the Senate. Their correspondence has left us a record of her thoughts.
Wickenden uses Wright to capture the long struggle for women’s rights. Wright was a witty woman, a gifted organizer, a good writer, and the long-time collaborator with movement leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Pregnancy sometimes kept Wright in the background, but allies appreciated her sharp pen and “pungent wit.” Wickenden uses her life to give us an insider’s access to the fight for women’s rights and, after the Civil War, to the debates over the 15th amendment that set some of those committed to women’s suffrage against others ready to extend the vote to Black men.
For contemporary readers, Tubman’s story is probably the most compelling. In the 1850s, Tubman, turned “guerilla operative” by the fugitive slave law, led some 70 enslaved people to freedom. She was an activist in the fight against slavery. During the war, she used her contacts among those still enslaved to spy for the Union Army. She used her knowledge of botany to nurse wounded soldiers. After the war, she worked to support the aged and elderly among the formerly enslaved.
Tubman’s actions are the easiest to see, but in some ways, her voice is the hardest to hear. Seward and Wright left us their own records. But Tubman could not write, so she recruited allies to record her stories, and her history comes to us second hand, already molded to some extent into legends she knew would garner support for her work. These uneven sources can vex ambitious journalists and dogged historians.
With uneven sources, the friendship Wickenden calls out in the book’s title remains somewhat elusive. Wright and Seward corresponded with family members but rarely with each other. They met when they were both in Auburn and, Wickenden suspects, they must have commiserated when their sons went off to war. Occasionally, Wright mentions Tubman.
But Wickenden as a journalist and historian has another source. The Black community of Auburn “handed down the story of Frances’s friendship with Harriet, and of her obdurate advocacy for Black education, emancipation, and equal rights.” Tubman’s contemporary chroniclers did not celebrate her friendships with Seward and Wright. The relations among the three, the friendships that inspired the book, can be hard to trace, and one could imagine a historian making the claim that women’s friendships run beneath the surface, changing the world, like routes on the underground railroad.
Uneven sources might help explain why The Agitators is sometimes hard to follow. We simply know more about some pieces of the story than we do about others. Big names compound the problem. When Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass appear on the stage, can we still pay attention to Frances Seward and Martha Wright? Can we hear new-born babies, ailing children, and aging parents when pro-slavery border ruffians wage war in Kansas, when Frederick Douglass takes the stage, when John Brown conjures a war against slavery, and white men shout themselves hoarse on the Senate floor?
Of course we can. But it isn’t easy.
So with challenges of voices and sources how does a journalist approach the past? And when does a journalist become a historian? Obviously, Wickenden can’t pick up the phone and find someone to tell her what her story means—the journalist’s sleight-of-hand that shifts the need to say why it all matters to an expert on the line. A historian, I suppose, would have drawn generalizations from the lives of Tubman, Wright, and Seward, offering a glimpse of other women who made different choices and confessing the things that we cannot know about the protagonists. A journalist, on the other hand, steers the past into a narrow channel and lets her actors come alive.
That is what Wickenden has done with The Agitators—told a story that captures both the small world of women’s households and the big events unfolding in Philadelphia, Washington, Seneca Falls, Kansas, and Harper’s Ferry. The historian in me bristled a bit when I first read the book: I wanted Wickenden to step back and tell me what it all means. But no. That’s not her job. She’s a reporter working on the past, and she’s taken us back to her discovery of three women buried in Auburn’s cemetery.
Read her book and come along on my post-pandemic pilgrimage to Auburn, New York. We can all set down our Lincoln-head pennies as small tributes on Harriet Tubman’s grave. Enough of our pennies, I figure, and we’ll get Tubman the place she deserves on the twenty-dollar bill.
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Ann Fabian is Distinguished Professor of History, emerita, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is the author of The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America forthcoming in Raritan.
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Becks
Mar 13, 2022Becks rated it liked it
A cool concept for a book, weaving these three women's lives together. There were some flaws though. I'll say, it did make me want to read a biography on Harriet Tubman.
Hear more of my thoughts in my 2022 BookTube Prize Octofinals wrap up: https://youtu.be/L8O7ngkpgkA (less)
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Joseph J.
Apr 16, 2021Joseph J. rated it really liked it
Recommends it for: 19th. century American history buffs, women's history/African Am history
Having read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals I was especially interested in the story of Frances Seward among the three focused on in this book. While she emerges in a more complete and appreciated way, I was surprised that my index search revealed Mary Lincoln missing, especially since Mary so notoriously snubbed Frances and the entire Seward family. Disappointing, although Frances' impatience with D.C. and that social scene was touched upon. The detail of Harriet Tubman's slave life, the cruelty and the escape was especially impacting. This is an admirable addition to both mid-nineteenth century and women's history. (less)
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Michelle Abramson
Jun 16, 2021Michelle Abramson rated it liked it · review of another edition
This book was a slog. Unfortunately, I don’t think there was enough material to put together a coherent interesting story. It did make me want to read a biography of Harriet Tubman.
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Kate Lawrence
Sep 15, 2021Kate Lawrence rated it it was amazing
Shelves: american-history, social-justice, women-s-issues
I've read quite a bit about the 1850's, my favorite decade in American history. But Dorothy Wickenden, besides being a fine writer, has uncovered details through her meticulous research that I've never read elsewhere, all while focusing on leading activist women.
I'd never heard of Martha Coffin Wright, although her sister Lucretia Mott is much better known. (The book made me want to read an entire book just about Lucretia.) Martha's story is worth telling as well; here was someone, like the two other women featured--Frances Seward and Harriet Tubman--who held firmly to the highest ideals of human freedom despite laws and politicians attempting to ridicule them, limit that freedom or deny it completely.
I also now want to know more about Harriet Tubman--what a heroine! Despite risking her life countless times to free enslaved people, and working hard all her life with very uncertain income, she lived to age 91, far longer than the other two who were much better off.
From Frances Seward's story we see in detail the life and career of her husband Henry, Lincoln's competitor for the 1860 presidential nomination and later Secretary of State, and thus of Lincoln himself. Frances was less willing to compromise her ideals than was her husband, but was limited in her activism by not wanting to damage his career.
If you admire women of conviction who weren't willing to cave to the stifling limits of their contemporary society, who worked hard for women's rights and abolition, this is definitely a book to seek out. (less)
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Diana
Aug 03, 2021Diana rated it it was amazing
These women are the very definition of "squad goals" and I loved learning more about them.
Choose Your Fighter:
Martha Wright - Quaker, Underground Railroad stop runner, Abolitionist, and Women's Rights Activist. I loved her earthy sense of humor and her fierce arguments with her husband via letter. She was bold and unapologetic. Her pragmatism helped reign in some of the crazy impulses of her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Her daughter Eliza continued on her legacy of activism (and her friendship with Harriet Tubman).
Frances Seward - First Lady of NY State and the quiet supporter of the underground railroad and abolitionist. She reminded me a lot of Eleanor Roosevelt - like ER, Frances was more liberal than her husband and urged him to fight harder for progressive principles.
Harriet Tubman - "She Moses" underground railroad conductor, raider and scout during the Civil War, and suffrage campaigner. She never learned to write or read, but had an amazing and powerful impact on the world.
While I didn't always feel like the connection between these three women was obvious, there were enough points of connection that the book came together for me and painted a picture of life for these women and their intertwining friendships. So fascinating to learn about some of the unsung heroes of the pre- and post-civil war human rights campaigns.
One of my favorite quotes was from Martha Wright: "...Here come the women who are going to do something" (page 148). While she wasn't talking about herself (but about future activists), the quote could accurately apply to all three women. (less)
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Danaw
Mar 30, 2021Danaw rated it it was amazing
Wickenden helps complete the story of the fight for women’s rights and abolition through the eyes of three incredible women. This refreshing view is knitted together through meticulous research and correspondence that provides new details and insights about a difficult time in our history. Wickenden’s storytelling is compelling and would intrigue readers interested in a good story, even if they aren’t interested in the history of the time.
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Carol Simmons
Apr 23, 2021Carol Simmons rated it really liked it
Fascinating account detailing the involvement of Martha Coffin Wright, Harriet Tubman and Frances Seward in both the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements. This account is especially interesting to me as much of this happened in my hometown of Auburn,NY. Even though I grew up there and have visited Seward’s home, the details of Seward’s role leading up to the Civil War are things I did not know
An Unlikely Alliance in Upstate N.Y. and the Fight for Black and Women’s Rights
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From left: Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward and Martha Coffin Wright. Entwining these three asymmetrical lives as deftly as Dorothy Wickenden does in “The Agitators,” proves illuminating.
From left: Harriet Tubman, Frances Seward and Martha Coffin Wright. Entwining these three asymmetrical lives as deftly as Dorothy Wickenden does in “The Agitators,” proves illuminating.
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By Jane Kamensky
March 30, 2021
THE AGITATORS
Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights
By Dorothy Wickenden
In the spring of 1860, when she addressed the 10th National Woman’s Rights Convention at Cooper Union in New York City, Martha Coffin Wright felt certain that the “great world” would soon say, “Here come the women who are going to do something.” Born to a prominent Nantucket Quaker family — her sister was the abolitionist Lucretia Mott — Wright possessed what Dorothy Wickenden calls a “mutinous mind.” She kept a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” on her parlor table.
But shortly after her speech in Lower Manhattan, the Union she had long worked to perfect fractured, burned and bled. Wright would survive long enough to see the cause of women pitted against the cause of the formerly enslaved. Following the passage of the 14th Amendment, which added the word “male” to the Constitution, she compromised, sticking with Susan B. Anthony as she allied with a white supremacist would-be presidential candidate who promised to put “woman first, and Negro last.”
One of three figures at the swirling center of “The Agitators,” Wickenden’s epic and intimate history, Wright wound up stymied by history and has largely been hidden from it since. Frances Seward, Wright’s friend and neighbor in the reformist hotbed of Auburn, N.Y., likewise chafed against the bonds of antebellum white womanhood. A wealthy judge’s daughter, she leveraged her position as the wife of the politician William H. Seward to fight for women’s rights and Black freedom.
Harriet Tubman is the third subject of what Wickenden calls a “joint story of insubordination against slavery and the oppression of women.” Born enslaved in Maryland, Tubman freed herself and then liberated hundreds more, exercising moral and tactical leadership for which she became known as Moses, or General Tubman. She struggled for the wherewithal to sustain her great work: not only asserting rights but reclaiming lives from social death. Seward, who had inherited property from her father — property she was able to retain during marriage thanks to reformist efforts like her own — deeded Tubman a house in Auburn, which was close enough to Canada that it made a natural stop along the 500-mile route she traveled between slavery and freedom.
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Collective biography is a difficult business. The voice of each character needs to emerge distinctly, yet the ensemble should be richer than the sum of its solos. In towering works like Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men” (2002) or Louis Menand’s “The Metaphysical Club” (2001), the protagonists, public men, engaged in collective projects that drew on their disparate talents. No less when the lead actors are female, as in Megan Marshall’s meticulous “The Peabody Sisters” (2005) and Stella Tillyard’s magnificent “Aristocrats” (1994), the best such books rest on a web of documentation, chiefly letters, connecting individuals roughly equal in education, passion and profile — people who shared experience if not blood.
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Wickenden confronts steeper obstacles. In no account of their own lives would Wright, Seward or Tubman have made one another principal characters. And the documentary record upon which “The Agitators” rests is uneven and sometimes precarious. Wickenden’s commitment to keeping her trio in the frame and in focus showcases prodigious narrative control. “The Agitators” is a masterpiece, not least, of structure, as each of the title characters dons her mantle, takes the stage and does a turn, usually at arm’s length from the others. Their stories first cross nearly a third of the way through the book, and even then, only speculation plaits the braid: Lucretia Mott “likely” connected Tubman to Wright, who “must” in turn have introduced Tubman to Seward. “The railroad tightly guarded its secrets,” Wickenden notes, explaining why her three subjects are sometimes difficult to connect.
There are other reasons, too. The wordiest of the agitators, Frances Seward, threatens to make away with their “joint story.” She had the evidentiary advantage — and the domestic challenge — of a husband whose breathtaking ambition took him to Albany, as governor of New York, and Washington, first as a United States senator and then, almost fatally, as Lincoln’s secretary of state. Frances traveled back and forth, and the miles spawned letters. In Washington, she witnessed history, from debates over the Compromise of 1850 to the opening scenes of the Civil War. She makes a plucky heroine, cleareyed and brave. She sheltered fugitive slaves in her basement in Auburn, and pressed her husband to fight for Black equality. At the same time, we learn that on the first day of 1863, “as the country prepared for the announcement of a national proclamation that would begin the process of overturning 244 years of slavery,” the Sewards’ daughter, Fanny, “made her debut in Washington society,” wearing (Fanny wrote in her diary) a “light blue silk gown and a white hat trimmed with navy-blue flowers.” It can be hard to peer over Fanny’s hat.
For all the sparkle and fizz of the Sewards, the agitator we most yearn to know is Tubman. A tiny woman who achieved mythological stature during her lifetime, Tubman could neither read nor write. She chose action, making repeated trips back to Maryland, on pain of death, to free kin and neighbors. During the Civil War, she worked for the Union as a scout and spymaster. She led one of the conflict’s most daring expeditions: a raid along South Carolina’s Combahee River that liberated some 750 men, women and children.
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But though Tubman’s deeds greatly eclipsed Wright’s and Seward’s, her voice remains muffled by intermediaries who ventriloquized her to varied ends. Racist reporters remade Tubman’s infrequent speeches as tabloid spectacle. “Her words were in the peculiar plantation dialect and at times were not intelligible to the white portion of her audience,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said of her lecture to an “immense” mixed-race crowd in 1865. She appeared with a bandaged hand, the result, as she explained, of an incident during a trip by rail, when she refused to give up her seat, anticipating the Montgomery bus boycott by nearly a century. But the reporter gave short shrift to Tubman’s protest, instead mocking her use of “Negro phrases” which “elicited shouts of laughter.” Wickenden paraphrases the news item; she notes that even abolitionists who cherished Tubman’s message “conveyed Harriet’s words in dialect,” which she quotes sparingly.
Tubman sometimes traded on her story, much as the formerly enslaved orator and women’s rights thinker Sojourner Truth marketed her likeness. (“I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance,” ran the caption below Truth’s famous portrait.) In 1868, after the war for Union and Black freedom in which Tubman had served so valiantly, she collaborated with Sarah Bradford, an Auburn resident, on an as-told-to memoir, a “little story” published with “the single object of furnishing some help” to its subject, whose “services and sufferings during the rebellion” merited a pension that had not materialized. Bradford proved a lesser Stowe, her tale as treacly as Tubman’s life was bracing. Tubman had heard “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” read aloud, and she hated it. “I’ve seen the real thing,” she told Bradford, “and I don’t want to see it on no stage or in no theater.” Yet money woes forced hard choices. To support her missions, General Tubman sometimes performed herself in pantomime, a one-woman show in which she “played all the parts.” In Auburn, she remade herself as the genial “Aunt Harriet,” selling her memoir at a Christmas fair alongside “aprons, pincushions and rag dolls”: a glorified bake sale.
Entwining these three asymmetrical lives as deftly as Wickenden does proves illuminating. Tubman’s actions reveal the existential stakes of Wright’s and Seward’s agitations. Her freedom journeys made their words flesh. But for all the excellence of “The Agitators,” there is monumental work yet to be done about the “She-Moses,” the hundreds she wrested from Pharaoh’s grip and their thousands of descendants. That work will require an anthropologist’s talent for sifting tainted evidence, a historian’s doggedness, an agitator’s conscience and a journalist’s gift for narrative. It will take time. In the meanwhile, may we be reminded of Tubman’s great American story every time we spend a $20 bill.
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