The New Yorker Radio Hour - Three Women Who Changed the World

Episode Date: May 4, 2021

“The Agitators” is a book about three women—three revolutionaries—who changed the world at a time when women weren’t supposed to be in public life at all. Frances Seward was a committed abolitionist who settled with her husband in the small town of Auburn, in western New York. One of their neighbors was a Quaker named Martha Coffin Wright, who helped organize the first convention for women’s rights, at Seneca Falls. Both women harbored fugitives when it was a violation of federal law. And, after they met Harriet Tubman, through the Underground Railroad, Tubman also settled in Auburn. “The Agitators,” by The New Yorker’s executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, tells their interlocking stories. “These people were outsiders, and they were revolutionaries,” Wickenden tells David Remnick. “They were only two generations separated from the Declaration of Independence, which they believed in literally. They did not understand why women and Black Americans could not have exactly the same rights that had been promised.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We begin today with a story about three women, three revolutionaries who change the world at a time when women were not supposed to be in public life at all. The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery, the enforcement of a law to recapture a poor suffering fugitive, giving half of the territories of a free country to the curse of slavery, these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men. One of the women, a committed abolitionist, was Francis Seward. She'd settled with her husband in the small town of Auburn, New York,

and among their neighbors was a Quaker, a mother of six named Martha Coffin Wright. Although she dressed plainly and kept her house impeccable, She didn't take her family to church on Sunday or spank her children, who were regarded as rude and wild. Provoked by disapproval, Martha placed a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft's vindication of the rights of woman on her parlor table, where she said it was sure to shock guests. Frances Seward and Martha Coffin-Rite bonded over politics. Martha helped organize the first convention for women's rights at Seneca Falls, and both opened their homes to fugitive slaves when that was absolutely against federal law.

They were friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglas. But it was another neighbor of theirs in Auburn who got closest to Martha and Francis. We have been expending our sympathies as well as congratulations on seven newly arrived slaves that Harriet Tubman has just pioneered safely from the southern part of Maryland. One woman carried a baby all the way and brought two other children that Harriet and the men helped along. 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. The interlocking stories of Harriet Tubman, Francis Seward, and Martha Coffin Wright are told in the book The Agitators, and its author is by friend and colleague, Dorothy Wickenden.

Francis Seward grew up in the north. She was educated. She was married to William Henry Seward, who was Abraham Lincoln's future Secretary of State. And she and Seward agreed about slavery, but she'd never been South until she took a summer trip through Virginia with him and one of their sons. Tell me about that trip and why it was so important and essential to your book. It was a she had a real epiphany on that trip. Seward himself had been South, and so he had seen slavery firsthand. And she had not. She was a typical woman. She spent all of her time at home inside. So for her health, because her health was poor, they decided to take a long leisurely summer trip into the south. As they entered Virginia, they noticed that it was, you know, basically a hundred years behind the industrial north, which is what they were familiar with. And one day they pulled up in the afternoon outside a basically a country inn. And they heard the sounds of

moaning and crying. And they turned around and they saw 10 naked little boys tied together by a long rope and being driven forward by a white man with a whip. And he led them to a horse trough to drink. And then he shoved them inside a shed where they sobbed themselves to sleep. So Francis was devastated. She couldn't get this scene out of her mind. She wrote in her journal, slavery, slavery, the evil effects constantly before me. But I guess, Dorothy, what's so stunning to me in this book is that we, a modern audience, we take it for absolute granted, unless we're freakishly marginal or evil,

that slavery is horrific, a horrific evil inflicted on other people, and it's impossible almost to put yourself in the mindset of a person who had to experience it firsthand, and it came as a reverend. then it came as a revelation to her. How do you explain that? Well, for Frances had always, I mean, she was 19 when she married Seward, but one of the things that had drawn them together were their deeply moral beliefs, one of which was, you know, the rights of women, the other of which was, you know, sooner or later, slavery must

be overturned. That one of the remarkable things, though, that I noticed when I was writing the book, and even since it's come out, is that people still, don't find slavery such a terrible thing. Look, look at what we saw at the Capitol on January 6th. There are still people who are wedded to the lost cause theory of American history. You know, we saw people marching through with Confederate flags. This is very deeply part of what America is, and this is what they were fighting against. And they would be horrified but not surprised that even today this is an issue.

I'm talking with Dorothy Wickenden about her new book, The Agitators. We'll continue in just a moment. How did you settle on this as a subject and also the challenge of doing a three-cornered biography, as it were, which is a technical challenge, too? Yeah, and if I had anticipated quite how difficult that was, I probably wouldn't have taken it on in the first place. So the whole, the book came about serendipitously. I was actually working on my previous book, which was, as you know, about my grandmother who grew up in Auburn, New York. And she had told me that her grandparents lived next door to William H. Seward. And I thought, well, maybe she kind of made that one up. I don't know.

So I had never been to Auburn before. I went there. I went to the Seward House Museum, and I asked the director, did the Woodruff's like live next door? And he pointed out William H. Seward's study window. And he said, yep, the house was right there. And then there was this young education director who sort of took me under her wing. And she wanted to give me a private. tour. And she takes me down these dark and narrow steps into the original basement kitchen. And she's talking not about the famous, amazing William H. Seward, but about his quiet, recessive, rather sickly wife, Francis Seward. And she was pretty mad because she had been reading some letters by Francis Seward to her husband. And she thought that all of the Seward biographers had really undersold his wife. So she took her. So she took her. So she took a

takes me into this basement kitchen. She said, this is where Francis Seward harbored fugitive slaves on the underground railroad. And I thought, well, that's kind of amazing. And she said, and furthermore, around the corner, her best friend lived, who was another outlier in very conservative Auburn. Her name was Martha Coffin Wright. And she, like Francis Seward, believed that women should have equal rights and that slavery needed to be abolished. And both of those ideas were completely ridiculous at the time. This was the early, you know, late 1830s, early 1840s. Francis and Martha were some of the earliest feminists in the country. What was the relationship between the early feminist movement, the women's rights movement, and the abolitionist movement?

It was not always in sync, and there were tensions. There were tensions from the beginning, including when women asked if they could join William Lloyd Garrison's group, the American anti-slavery society, and they were roundly told they could not. So they started their own female anti-slavery societies. However, these women learned a lot from their male abolitionist colleagues. They learned how to organize. They learned how to hold conventions and invite speakers. They learned how to petition Congress. And then they would invite people like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison to speak at their conventions, which those who believed in women's rights were very happy to do. However, there were always racial tensions, kind of simmering under the surface.

So say, when Lucy Stone, who was one of Martha Coffinwright's friends, she was a paid speaker for Garrison's group, she decided to go south to speak to slaveholders because in her view, this was a good thing to do, open their minds. And Frederick Douglass was really angry. He said he did not think this was a moral thing to do. So anyway, all of this was kind of simmering. Usually they were able to keep a lid on it, but it eventually broke right out into the open in an incredibly ugly way. But that was much later after the war in the 1860s and the debate around the 15th Amendment. Now let's bring the person that I think everybody will have heard of when they encounter this book. And that's Harriet Tubman. How does Harriet Tubman fit into this?

picture. So, and this was one of the things that I, that made me really want to write the book because, you know, we're told stories and we learned a little bit about Harriet Tubman in grade school, usually. Oh, she was the great conductor on the Underground Railroad. All true. Total American hero. But we didn't learn that much more about her. And when I learned that she had spent almost the last 50 years of her life in Auburn, New York, I thought, you know, how did she end up in Auburn? And of course she ended up in Auburn through her two contacts on the Underground Railroad, which was these other two women. And she would stop. They became regular stops on her railroad, underground railroad journeys.

And she became very close to them both. Here's what I don't understand. And maybe you're going to blame me for being too New York City centric. But why in God's name was Auburn, New York, of all places, a kind of Greenwich Village of its time, this kind of crossroads of politics. and culture and the way the Greenwich Village was. And how could that happen? You are betraying your parochialism, actually. And I wish Auburn was not remotely like Greenwich Village.

If only it were, yes, there were these. But it's incredibly lively. Or at least it is in the agitators. Yes, because it was on the Lyceum circuit. But actually, Auburn was peopled by, as were many of these towns in Western New York State, by conservatives. These were bankers and industrialists and, you know, people pushing the railroads. Francis was very sub-rosa about her activities. Martha was incredibly outspoken. And at Seneca Falls, she met Frederick Douglass, and she immediately befriended him. And he did speak on the Lyceum

circuit across New York State, and he often stopped in Auburn. She would invite him to her house to dinner and sometimes to spend the night because usually hotels were not welcoming to black men. For this, she was completely reviled by her neighbors who already thought she was just outrageously, you know, subversive. And she was at dinner once in Auburn, and she hears this woman whispering to another woman, that is Mrs. David Wright. She is a very dangerous woman. And that's because she was socializing with people like Frederick Douglass. Well, how did Auburn, New York take to a woman like Harriet Tubman's arrival? Well, but Harriet Tubman, you have to remember, in the 1850s, all of this was completely

unknown. If her neighbors had known that she was sheltering fugitive slaves and that Francis was doing the same, you know, they would have reported them to the authorities. This was completely against the law. The Fugitive Slave Act required Northern States to return fugitive slaves to the South, and that was one of the big precipitating factors of this growing activism. It actually got, even many of these conservatives in New York State, really riled up about slavery. These are people who had never thought of it before.

Your book starts with a quotation from Harriet Tubman, and it says, God's ahead of Master Lincoln. God won't let Master Lincoln beat the South until he does the right thing. And there's a feeling in the book that the Civil War was, in a way, towards the military battle, with the Confederacy and a moral battle against slavery. And that winning the military battle required winning the moral battle at the same time, is that how these women saw the entire conflict? Harry Tubman and the other two all saw the civil war. They called it a holy war, a holy war as of old. Each one of them believed deeply that God meant for slavery to be abolished. The difference between them and Francis Seward's anti-slavery husband and Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the war.

Those two were politicians. These people were outsiders, and they were revolutionaries. And it's worth remembering that they were only two generations separated from the Declaration of Independence, which they believed in literally. And they did not understand why women and black Americans could not have exactly the same rights that had been promised in the Declaration of Independence. So, Dorothy, it's got to be said that these women made very different contributions to the causes of freedom. Francis and Martha raised awareness and money and, in a sense, lobbied powerful men for change.

And that was very important, no doubt. But meanwhile, Harriet Tubman was putting her life on the line, helping people escape slavery, and she even took part in some military operations. How did you come to think about the different ways that these women worked? Well, for one thing, David, I think it's important to put Harriet Tubman in a category all her own. There's no one who did anything like what Harriet Tubman did. The mere fact of her going back into the place where she had been enslaved for 27 years of her life

a dozen times putting her life in danger and the life of those she was helping to escape from slavery and taking them all completely safely, sometimes all the way back to Canada, was just something that other people did not do. So that was one thing. I think it's important to see that everyone had his or her part to play. And Martha, with her outgoing, very blunt personality, she threw herself into both movements, the abolitionist movement and the women's rights movement, and she became one of the great leaders of both. And she spoke before mobs. I mean, you'd stand up on the platform

and people would throw bibles at you and, you know, hiss. And it took a lot of courage. Francis was very cerebral, very retiring, but she became more and more and more enraged by all of these injustices. She was her husband, her very liberal-minded husband, And even though he believed in women's rights, he would not allow her to sign petitions, do any of the things that a lot of the other activists were doing.

So instead, she channeled her rage into her letters to him. And boy, those letters are really something, especially as the war gets underway. And he is resisting, you know, the abolition of slavery. And she accuses him of betraying every ideal he's ever stood for. She said, you will go down in history like Daniel Webster, you know, who'd, died a dishonored death. That was a pretty cruel blow. So all of these efforts together were what, over the course of the 1850s, created the Second American Revolution, which was these two great movements of the 19th century, the women's rights movement and the abolition movement.

Do you finally, the figures in this book, do they serve as inspiration to any modern political activists or figures, do you find? Yeah, so one of my, on my desktop here, I have a photograph that one of my friends, actually one of our writers took early on because we were in a conversation about the book and she was interested in Tubman. And you know those Army Green mail collection boxes? She took it on the streets of New York. She took a picture of one and plastered all over it were these decals with a photograph of Harriet Tubman. And under each one it said Harriet Tubman, total badass. And I just love that. it so shows how people continue to relate to her. And what I kept realizing over the years as I was writing the book

is that these women and all of their friends, men do, were organized, showed how to organize a major social movement. How do you do it? Well, it's grassroots organizing. And we are seeing versions of the exact same thing play out today.

So there's a lot of, in my book, there's a lot of wife battering. And so when the Me Too movement suddenly sprung up, I thought, well, it's about time. I mean, this has been going on for a very long time. And of course, Black Lives Matter, look at the political effects that Black Lives Matter has had in recent years. And one hopes that it will continue to have. Dorothy Wickenden, thank you so much. The book is wonderful.

It's The Agitators. Thanks a lot, David. Great talking to you. Darthy Wickedendon is the author of The Agitators, three friends who fought for abolition and human rights. It's out now. And in her free time, Dorothy is executive editor at The New Yorker. That's our program for today, and I want to thank you for listening.

Next time, we'll tag along with critic Hilton Alls, visiting his first museum show since the pandemic started more than a year ago. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNM. MyC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avae Carrillo, Riannon and Corby, Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putuguele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Meng Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. This week's episode features additional music by Pablo Vergara, and we had additional help from Harrison Keith Lyne. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.