The agitators : three friends who fought for abolition and women's rights

Author

Dorothy Wickenden

Call Number

• 920 W6363.1 (CEN)

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Edition

First Scribner edition.

Publication Information

New York : Scribner, 2021.

Physical Description

xiv, 384 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Summary

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 slave rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Maryland, opened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad. Tubman was an illiterate fugitive slave, 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 a slave 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, settles in Auburn and spends 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.

Contents

• Part one: Provocations (1821-1852)
• A Nantucket inheritance (1833-1843)
• A young lady of means (1824-1837)
• Escape from Maryland (1822-1849)
• The Freeman trial (1846)
• Dangerous women (1848-1849)
• Frances goes to Washington (1848-1850)
• Martha speaks (1850-1852)
• Part two: Uprisings (1851-1860)
• Frances joins the railroad (1851-1852)
• Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852-1853)
• Harriet Tubman's Maryland crusade (1851-1857)
• The race to the territory (1854)
• Bleeding Kansas, bleeding summer (1854-1856)
• Frances sells Harriet a house (1857-1859)
• Martha leads (1854-1860)
• General Tubman goes to Boston (1858-1860)
• The agitators (1860)
• Part three: War
• "No compromise" (1861)
• A nation on fire (1861-1862)
• "God's ahead of Master Lincoln" (1862)
• Battle hymns (1862)
• Harriet's war (1863)
• Willy Wright at Gettysburg (March-July 1863)
• A mighty army of women (1863-1864)
• Daughters and sons (1864)
• Part four: Rights (1864-1875)
• E pluribus unum (1864-1865)
• Retribution (1865)
• Civil disobedience (1865)
• Wrongs and rights (1865-1875).