 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Dorothy Wickenden, author of The Agitators. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. Tomorrow of March 31st at 7 p.m. we'll bring a panel discussion titled Overcoming Challenges, Women in the Military. Journalist Soledad O'Brien will lead the discussion about the evolution of women's roles and responsibilities in the United States armed forces. Joining O'Brien will be former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, retired Brigadier General Kristin K. French, and Lieutenant Madison Hovron. And on Friday, April 2nd at noon, we'll hear from George William Van Cleave, author of Making a New American Constitution. In this book, Van Cleave explores flaws in the U.S. Constitution and proposes solutions for them. Archives and manuscript collections are often called treasure troves. Archivists, librarians, and curators take pride in seeing the materials in their care come to light and be used to share previously little-known episodes of history. In the case of our guest author, Dorothy Wickenden, an encounter with a collection of neglected letters unlocked a treasure of material leading to the story of three remarkable women. The letters written by Francis Seward, the wife of President Lincoln's Secretary of State, led Wickenden to Martha Wright and Martha's writings led to Harriet Tubman. These three, the agitators of the title, bring their own perspectives on the critical issues of their time, slavery, women's roles, and the rights of women and black Americans and the Civil War. 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 to 1995, and before that was the longtime executive editor of The New Republic. Now let's hear from Dorothy Wickenden. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, David, and greetings to our audience. I wish I could see you all out there. I am a journalist, not a professional historian, but I love prowling around libraries and that's something I did a lot of when I was working on this book. I thought I'd start with a few introductions because two of my protagonists have been basically lost to history. First, let me tell you a little bit about Francis Seward, a self-effacing bookish aristocrat from Auburn, New York, married in 1824 at the age of 19, to a man who became one of the most controversial statesmen of the century. Martha Cawthon Wright, Francis's closest friend, who lived around the corner, a funny, frustrated irreverent Quaker who yearned for meaningful work outside the house. She was one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. And Harriet Tubman, everyone knows about Tubman's heroic exploits on the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. But few people are familiar with the rest of her life, in particular her extraordinary friendship with Francis Seward and Martha Wright. They were co-conspirators in what turned out to be the Second American Revolution. These are the agitators. So, Francis thought she was marrying a local lawyer and that they'd live a quiet, peaceful life raising their children together in Auburn. But he was addicted to politics and quickly abandoned his legal practice. He turned out to be a gifted politician. Henry, as Francis called him, became the governor of New York at the age of 37 and went on to be a U.S. senator, then Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln. Southerners loathed and feared him. What they didn't know was that Seward's elegant, self-effacing wife had even more radical convictions than he did about women's rights and about slavery. Seward's biographers haven't written much about Francis, and I was curious about her. Her letters are archived at the Rush East Library at the University of Rochester. And two years ago, when I was in upstate New York, I went to read some of them. Even a quick look showed how revelatory they were about marriage, race, politics, and a country that was about to be upended. Francis wrote one incredible letter to Henry in 1833 when she was 27, furiously describing how her sister, Lisette, was being beaten by her husband. Francis described her brother-in-law as the brute she lives with and said that Lisette would cross the ocean to escape him if she could take her daughter with her. Men have framed laws to uphold themselves in their wickedness, Francis wrote. Women became their husband's property upon marriage, literally. Men had total control over their wives, including the right to batter them. Women couldn't sit on juries, make a will, sign a contract, or file a lawsuit. And of course, they couldn't vote. If a woman pursued divorce, she became a social pariah and lost her children. Any money she had inherited and her reputation. Francis' epiphany about women's powerlessness was followed two years later by her conversion into a full-fledged abolitionist. She and Henry were taking a long summer trip from Auburn to Virginia as they stopped at a tavern north of Richmond. They heard the sounds of weeping and moaning and saw ten naked boys tied together by their wrists and fastened by a long rope. They watched with horror as a tall white man holding a whip led them to a horse trough to drink and then to a shed where they lay down sobbing themselves to sleep. A slave trader was taking them to Richmond where they would be sold at auction, a few of the tens of thousands of people Virginia supplied to the cotton and rice fields of the deep south every year. After Seward was elected senator in 1849, he soon became known as the best host in Washington. He was convivial and charming. And even his political enemies in the Democratic Party attended his 10-course dinners. He was convinced that socializing was indispensable to his political success and as of 1854 to the future of the New Republican Party. So in those days it was Republicans who espoused the rights of black men and reactionary Democrats who defended white male supremacy. Francis, who was prone to migraine headaches and depression, loved Henry's optimism, but she really didn't share his confidence that he could persuade southerners to change their minds about that momentous issue confronting them all. She was revolted by Washington. It was a southern town where slavery was legal and men, women and children and chains were bought and sold at auction on the mall. In Henry's exclusive circles, a strict hierarchy determined one's social life. Francis, as the wife of the senator, was responsible for drawing up guest lists and menus for his lavish dinners and serving as his hostess. She dressed formally each day for receiving visitors and making calls and even more elaborately for his dinners. She estimated in her journal that dressing and socializing consumed two-thirds of the times of well-off women making them as vapid as they were presumed to be. She wrote to her sister Lisette in despair, it is the life to which I am doomed. Still she extracted an agreement from Henry. She would continue to live in their home in Auburn where she would carry on as she liked but she visited in Washington once a year during the winter social season to plan and run his parties. This unusual arrangement more or less worked until the late 1850s when pro-slavery and free-state men in Kansas went to war and the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision which described black men and women as beings of an inferior order and opened up the West to the spread of slavery. Early in the decade, Francis had converted her old basement kitchen into a station on the Underground Railroad and she did everything she could to help freedom seekers teaching people to read and write, donating money to help pay for the freedom of enslaved family members and helping job seekers find work. But her two lives, like the two sections of the country, turned out to be irreconcilable. In the waning days of 1858, Francis went to Washington as usual and prepared for Henry's New Year's Day reception. It was particularly important to him that year because he intended to be the Republican nominee for president in 1860. The Seward's daughter Fanny, who was just 15, watched the servants in the kitchen as they prepared for their father's reception. They set out a dozen lemons for a whiskey punch but her father came in to say that Mrs. Seward thought it best not to have it. Fanny, like her mother, supported women's rights, abolition, temperance, and even animal rights. She wrote earnestly in her diary, So the punch is dispensed with how glad I am. She was upset to see the cook scald to death as she put it. Eight unfortunate terrapins, poor things. If I could influence anyone by doing so, I would never taste animal food. But I cannot. At any rate, I will not eat turtle, terrapins, lobsters, eels, and frogs. By noon that day, the dining room table was laden with turkey, ham, tongue, and oysters. Chicken salad garnished with hard-boiled eggs and celery and delicacies from Henry's favorite bakery in New York, including a white-frosted plum cake decorated with a New York coat of arms and, what else, a banner emblazoned with Seward's name. To Francis, Henry's opulent entertaining and his hospitality towards slavery's apologists had never felt more offensive. He still stubbornly believed that a politician somehow got along outside Congress. They could overcome their ideological differences. After the final guest departed, Henry called the party a great success, complacently telling Francis that they must have entertained 400 people. That triggered a rebellion in Francis that had been gathering forests ever since he had run for office. She renounced her role as his hostess, and on her return to Auburn that spring, she ratchet it up for anti-slavery activities. My fascination with Francis led me to Martha, who encouraged Francis's growing activism. Nineteenth-century women were expected to stick to their separate spheres. While men went out into the world to pursue money and influence, women cooked, cleaned, produced babies, and cultivated the attributes of piety, purity, and submissiveness. Martha had six children, but she wasn't remotely pious or submissive. She envied her husband David, his challenging law cases, and his freedom to travel for work. Lacking Francis's large inheritance and her household of servants, Martha did all the cooking and housework and made all of the family clothes. She changed the hay and the mattresses, washed the windows, shook out the carpets. She made her own soap and candles, and canned berries, peaches, and tomatoes for the winter. One morning, it took her three hours to bathe her three youngest children who were three, five, and seven, what with the hauling and heating of water from the well. I benefited enormously from Martha's letters, too, which are part of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She kept up a steady correspondence with her older sister, the famous Lucretia Mott, a longtime Quaker activist, minister, and human rights advocate. In one letter, Martha summed up the drudgery of her days in a single sharp line. The only way is to grub and work and sweep and dust and wash and dress children and make gingerbread and patch and darn. But mostly, she transformed her frustrations into a sardonic cereal of family life. Another housewife recommended whisking eggs with a quill, and she did try it. Beating the eggs with the feathers, she made a hideous mess, and she concluded to Lucretia that the idea must have been invented by a goose. My nice wire egg beater is good enough for me. Martha's early letters, too, provided a fantastic perspective on women's barely suppressed rage about their constricted lives. The kind of thing that male historians used to dismiss as social history. In the early 1840s, Martha began sheltering fugitive slaves in her basement kitchen. Actually, it was Martha who gave Francis the idea turning the symbolic heart of the domestic sphere where she made her mother's Nantucket into a place of political asylum. Martha loved breaking rules. Young men studying at the Venerable Auburn Theological Seminary, which trained Presbyterian ministers, according to strict Calvinist doctrine, often stopped by the house to proselytize. They warned her about the fate of children who failed to devote Sundays to God. Martha replied that she didn't believe in forcing her family to read the Bible or go to church, but only read their tracks if they would read her pamphlets from the American Anti-Slavery Society. She wrote to Lucretia, these ascetic skip religions, such a repulsive character, I wonder who was ever made better by the perusal of such nonsense. As such practices became known, the people of Auburn branded Martha an infidel. In 1848, Martha joined her sister, Lucretia Mott, and three others who were just as fed up as women, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth McClintock, to organize the Sack of Falls Convention, the first meeting in America devoted to women's rights. Lucretia expected her sister to speak there, but at the time, the only women who spoke in public were Quakers and participants in religious revival meetings. In any case, Martha knew she couldn't measure up to Lucretia, a brilliant orator, and she was terrified by the idea of speaking before a large audience. She was also six months pregnant with her seventh child, and she tried to make herself inconspicuous in the back of the room. But Lucretia made sure that Martha was heard. A few years earlier, Martha annoyed by an article on a Philadelphia newspaper that instructed women to fulfill their conjugal duty with obedience and a cheerful smile had written a lacerating essay in response titled, Words for Wives. While the liege lord she wrote of the house went off each day to the ever-varying scenes of everyday business, his wife spent all her time tending to their family. After the children were in bed, she was expected to delight her husband with the little arts of pleasing. In her essay she demanded, why is it not often are insisted upon that the husband should always return to his fireside with a smile and endeavor to soothe the perturbed spirit that has for hours been subjected to the thousand annoyances of the nursery and the kitchen. Lucretia, who lived in Philadelphia, arranged for Hence for Wives to be published, and at the Seneca Falls Convention she read it aloud. Frederick Douglass was there, the best known abolitionist in the world, and Francis was astounded when he introduced himself afterward, asking if he might republish the essay in his newspaper, The North Star, based in Rochester. Martha struck up a friendship with him, and with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the driving force of the convention. After Seneca Falls, Stanton enlisted Martha in the Incipient Women's Rights Movement, with Martha as her deputy. Keep your pen busy, Stanton wrote to her. They needed to organize legions of women to begin petitioning state legislatures for full legal rights. Stanton and Martha made the most outrageous demand of all the ones before the Seneca Falls, that women be granted the right to vote. Douglass drew Martha further into abolition. He frequently lectured across New York State, and whenever he was in the area, Martha invited him to the house. This alone was a small act of insurrection. Neighbors who already disapproved of Martha now saw her as a provocateur and promoted social equality between the races. So I had two of my protagonists, the reserved, irreproachably proper Mrs. William Seward, who nevertheless oddly chose not to live with her husband, and the very dangerous Mrs. David Wright. How did they come to collaborate with Harriet Tubman? Adolitionists were closely knit, but geographically scattered, and they depended on utterly reliable personal contacts across the country. Women who were underrated as a matter of course were less likely to fall under suspicion. In 1849, Tubman walked out of slavery in Poplar, Maryland to Philadelphia, a distance of almost 100 miles, leaving behind her parents and siblings and her husband, a free black man who had steady work and no desire to take his chances elsewhere. If he was caught fleeing with a fugitive slave, he was likely to be sold into slavery, get shot in the back, or be torn apart by bloodhounds. Tubman made herself known to every abolitionist in Philadelphia, and she became close to Lucretia Mott. It isn't known how Harriet met Frances and Martha, but a few historians have speculated, and I agree, that Lucretia introduced her to Martha during one of Martha's visits to Philadelphia, and then Martha introduced Harriet to Frances and Auburn. It was a convenient underground railroad stop midway across New York State on Harriet's way to Canada. Frances and Martha, like everyone who met Tubman, were transfixed by the story of her life. Lacking the privilege of literacy, she created an indelible oral history by telling the defining episodes over and over to northern friends and eventually to large audiences who took down what she'd said. Her performances were totally unlike the dry Lyceum lectures that white audiences were used to. One of her Boston friends, the reformer Edna Dow Cheney, wrote that Harriet played all the parts, and the scenes rise before you as she saw it, and her voice and language change with her different actors. Harriet couldn't remember her oldest sister, who was sold into slavery when she was three years old. Two other sisters had been leased away by their enslaver as their mother pleaded for mercy. In a recurring nightmare, Harriet heard the thought of horses hooves and the shrieks of women as men rode in and tore children out of their mother's arms. Harriet was sent away to work at the age of six or seven, and she had scars on her neck from a sadistic woman who thrashed her repeatedly for failing to do her chores to the woman's liking. She had periodic blackouts from a head injury she suffered when an overseer hurled an iron weight at an enslaved man in a dry goods store, and it hit Harriet instead. Harriet recounted, the weight broke my skull and cut a piece of that shawl clean off and drove it into my head. To Francis, this woman, 18 years younger than she was and barely five feet tall, embodied the urgency and the potential of abolition. They were so different, but they shared a deep religious faith, and Harriet brought to mind Corinthians. God had chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. She was unstoppable, unafraid of the slave power of the South and impatient with the lawmakers in Washington. Harriet told Martha about her final Underground Railroad extraction, explaining that she had gone to Dorchester County, hoping to rescue her only sibling left in slavery, her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children. She'd waited in vain throughout the night in a blizzard at the agreed-upon location in a wood. She later learned that Rachel had died just a few days before. Her fourth sister lost a slavery. Adding to her sorrow, she couldn't take Rachel's two children, Andrewine, who was 13, and Ben, 11. She told Cheney that she had to leave them there for want of $30, the cost of paying someone to bring them to her. She did manage to spirit away a couple and their young children. At one point, sensing they were being followed, Harriet guided them through a swamp with small island where they hid amid wet grasses. Around twilight, a man appeared in Quaker clothing, slowly walking along a path at the edge of the swamp. Harriet thought he was talking to himself, but as he drew closer, she heard him say, my wagon stands in the barnyard of the next farm along the way. The horses in the stable, the harness hangs on a nail. That journey took more than a month. Martha wrote about it to her daughter, Ellen, who was away in boarding school to impress upon her the torments faced by freedom seekers on the run. She said that Harriet Tubman had just pioneered six people safely from southern Maryland. One woman had held her baby in her arms the entire way while Harriet and the men helped along the other two children. Martha wrote, they walked all night carrying the little ones and spread the old comfort on the frozen ground in some dense thicket where they all hid while Harriet went out foraging and sometimes could not get back till dark, considering she would be followed. Then, if they crept in further and if she couldn't find them, she would whistle or sing certain hymns, and they would answer. As I put these women's lives together, I also saw how meaningful Francis' relationship with Harriet became for both of them. In Auburn, in the spring of 1859, just after Francis told Seward she would no longer be the handmaid at his Washington parties, she began to think more daringly about her life. Martha by then was organizing conventions for women's rights and for abolition, bringing hecklers and mobs. Harriet Tubman had returned to the eastern shore some dozen times, rescuing about 70 people, including even her elderly parents and taking them all the way to Canada. Harriet's father had rheumatism. Her mother blamed her for depositing them in a remote frigid foreign town, then rushing off repeatedly with no guarantee that she would return. Francis had inherited some land in Auburn from her father. One parcel, about a mile from her house on South Street, included seven acres of farmland, a new-frame house, a barn, and a few outbuildings. She decided Harriet should have it. It's really hard to emphasize just how subversive this was. To relentless lobbying, the women of New York had finally convinced the state legislature to change the law to allow wives to have control over their own property. But women still rarely engaged in real estate transactions, let alone with fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 required northern states to return fugitive slaves to the south. If you were caught assisting a freedom seeker, you were subject to a $1,000 fine and subject to a possible jail sentence. Francis would be flouting that law just as Seward was beginning a bid for the president. Yet he opposed it as much as she did and he approved the sale, which conveniently took place while he was off on an eight-month tour of Europe, Egypt, and Palestine. As we know, Henry lost the 1860 Republican nomination and the election to Lincoln. His appointment as Secretary of State was something of a consolation prize. In February 1861, Seward gave his final speech as senator. He spoke about Lincoln's policy on slavery, which was to save the Union, not to emancipate the slaves. Citing Thomas Jefferson, he said, in political affairs we cannot always do what seems to us absolutely best. Francis was appalled, accusing him of abandoning convictions he'd held his entire life. She wrote, Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of nearly 4 million human beings cannot be right. A year later when the North appeared to be losing the war, badly, Harriet told a friend, Lydia Malaria Child, that there would be no Union victory in the Civil War until the president ordered emancipation. She said, God's ahead of Master Lincoln. God won't let Master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Harriet wanted to join the war herself, and in the spring of 1862, she persuaded Northern officials to sanction a new profession. She would go to Union-occupied Port Royal, South Carolina, and become a freedom fighter for the Army, an idea she described to Martha as a kind of secret service. The Union Army had barely begun emitting black men, little-known black women, but Harriet would not be deterred. She explained her mission to a friend by setting the Book of Exodus. The good Lord has come down to deliver my people, and I must go help him. Frances and Martha saw the war just as she did as a holy cause. Frances wrote to Henry that there would be no peace without a promise of liberty to all. Martha told her son Willie, a second lieutenant before he left Auburn, to die before ever helping to return a slave to the South. He fought at Gettysburg. Frances' son, Will, fought at Cold Harbor, Virginia, and in the Battle of Monocacy in Maryland. So in the agitators, I showed the evolution of these three women over three and a half decades from abject dependence into dissidents. They were part of something far bigger than they were, the most shattering period of social and political change in America, but they also profoundly affected the course of those events. The kinds of injustices that Frances Seward, Martha Wright, and Harriet Tubman fought against are still with us, and the battles they fought continue. As John Lewis wrote just before his death last year, ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting into what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Harriet Tubman, despite the lasting injuries inflicted on her by slaveholders and the countless risks she took on behalf of others, outlived Frances and Martha by decades, and she never stopped working on behalf of black Americans and women. She became close to the children of her original friends, especially to Martha's daughter, Eliza, who carried on her mother's work for women's suffrage. In 1902, Eliza invited several women to her house at 99 South Street in Auburn to discuss the next stage of the movement. Her guests included her sister Ellen, Susan B. Anthony, and two younger activists. After more than 50 years of organizing, women were no longer their husband's property, and they could attend college and become doctors, lawyers, and ministers. They still hadn't achieved the vote nationally, but they were speaking and marching in growing numbers. Eliza and her guests said they would carry on until every woman in every state could go to the polls. Nearly two decades later, they succeeded in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified. One guest arrived a little late, 80-year-old Harriet Tubman, a figure from another age, who walked over from her house almost a mile away. As they all greeted her, she sat in her fond frank way that it was the last time they would all be there together. She had undertaken a long-term project that would outlive her, which she called her final work, the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes. It was on the property she had bought all those years earlier from Francis Seward. Thank you so much.