The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights by Dorothy Wickenden

Scribner 400 pp.

By Ann Fabian

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. 

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.