num_pages: 384
description: From the author of the New York Times bestseller Nothing Daunted The Agitators chronicles the revolutionary activities of Harriet Tubman Frances Seward and Martha Wright: three unlikely collaborators in the quest for abolition and womens rights. In Auburn New York in the mid-nineteenth century Martha Wright and Frances Seward inspired by Harriet Tubmans rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Maryland opened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad. Tubman was enslaved Wright was a middle-class Quaker mother of seven and Seward was the aristocratic wife and moral conscience of her husband William H. Seward who served as Lincolns Secretary of State. All three refused to abide by laws that denied them the rights granted to white men and they supported each other as they worked to overturn slavery and achieve full citizenship for blacks and women. The Agitators opens when Tubman is enslaved and Wright and Seward are young women bridling against their traditional roles. It ends decades later after Wrights and Sewards sonsand Tubman herselfhave taken part in three of the defining engagements of the Civil War. Through the sardonic and anguished accounts of the protagonists reconstructed from their letters diaries and public appearances we see the most explosive debates of the time and portraits of the men and women whose paths they crossed: Lincoln Seward Frederick Douglass William Lloyd Garrison John Brown Elizabeth Cady Stanton Susan B. Anthony Harriet Beecher Stowe and others. Tubman embraced by Seward and Wright and by the radical network of reformers in western New York State settled in Auburn and spent the second half of her life there. With extraordinarily compelling storytelling reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwins No Ordinary Time and David McCulloughs John Adams The Agitators brings a vivid new perspective to the epic American stories of abolition the Underground Railroad womens rights activism and the Civil War.
language: English
title: The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights
publisher: Scribner