The Agitators

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Nothing Daunted,The Agitators chronicles the revolutionary activities of Harriet TubmanFrances Sewardand Martha Wright: three unlikely collaborators in the quest for abolition and women’s rights. In AuburnNew Yorkin the mid-nineteenth centuryMartha Wright and Frances Sewardinspired by Harriet Tubman’s slave rescues in the dangerous territory of Eastern Marylandopened their basement kitchens as stations on the Underground Railroad. Tubman was an illiterate fugitive slaveWright was a middle-class Quaker mother of sevenand Seward was the aristocratic wife and moral conscience of her husbandWilliam H. Sewardwho served as Lincoln’s Secretary of State. All three refused to abide by laws that denied them the rights granted to white menand they supported each other as they worked to overturn slavery and achieve full citizenship for blacks and women. The Agitators opens when Tubman is a slave and Wright and Seward are young women bridling against their traditional roles. It ends decades laterafter Wright’s and Seward’s sons–and Tubman herself–have taken part in three of the defining engagements of the Civil War. Through the sardonic and anguished accounts of the protagonistsreconstructed from their lettersdiariesand public appearanceswe see the most explosive debates of the timeand portraits of the men and women whose paths they crossed: LincolnSewardFrederick DouglassWilliam Lloyd GarrisonJohn BrownElizabeth Cady StantonSusan B. AnthonyHarriet Beecher Stoweand others. Tubmanembraced by Seward and Wright and by the radical network of reformers in western New York Statesettles in Auburn and spends the second half of her life there. With extraordinarily compelling storytelling reminiscent of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time and David McCullough’s John AdamsThe Agitators brings a vivid new perspective to the epic American stories of abolitionthe Underground Railroadwomen’s rights activismand the Civil War.