The Agitators

Book excerpt: 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. In Auburn, New York, she entrusted passengers to Martha Coffin Wright, a Quaker abolitionist and leader of the women's rights movement, and Frances A. Seward, whose husband served as New York's governor and senator, and then as secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. The Agitators opens in the 1820s, when Tubman is enslaved in Maryland and Wright and Seward are young homemakers in upstate New York, bound by law and tradition, and it ends after the Civil War. Many of the most prominent figures of the era-William H. Seward, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 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. Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about and its lasting effects on the country. Profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history. Book jacket.