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.
ByJane Kamensky
* NYT, 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.
*THE AGITATORS
Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights
*By Dorothy Wickenden
Illustrated. 384 pp. Scribner. $30.
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.
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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
<https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/books/good-chemistry.html?searchResultPosition=1>”
(2002) or Louis Menand’s “The Metaphysical Club
<https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/books/where-they-got-their-ideas.html?searchResultPosition=4>”
(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
<https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/the-peabody-sisters-reflected-glory.html?searchResultPosition=1>”
(2005) and Stella Tillyard’s magnificent “Aristocrats
<https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/18/books/fully-clothed-in-the-kings-bath.html?searchResultPosition=3>”
(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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Image
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
<https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/301989>,” 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 wespend a
$20 bill
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/us/politics/tubman-20-dollar-bill.html?searchResultPosition=3>.
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