(theme music playing) GRAHAM: Good evening and welcome to "Politics and Prose Live."

I'm Brad Graham, the co-owner of Politics and Prose, along with my wife, Lissa Muscatine.

And we have a very engaging event for you this evening featuring Dorothy Wickenden and her new book, “The Agitators.” Dorothy, of course, is a very experienced magazine editor.

She worked at “The New Republic” and “Newsweek” before becoming executive editor of “The New Yorker.” In “The Agitators,” Dorothy goes back in history, to the 19th century.

And the pathbreaking efforts then of three women.

Harriet Tubman, Martha Wright and Frances Seward, who were friends and coconspirators in fighting for the abolition of slavery and the advancement of Women's Rights.

Dorothy portrays the women in their times in vivid, compelling detail, illuminating the inspiring legacies of these activists whose stories resonate to this day.

In conversation with Dorothy this evening will be Jelani Cobb, who's on the faculty at Columbia's Journalism School and also is a staff writer at “The New Yorker,” where he covers race, politics, history and culture.

So please join me and Politics and Prose in welcoming Dorothy Wickenden and Jelani Cobb.

COBB: How are you?

WICKENDEN: I'm well, how are you Jelani.

Good to see you again.

COBB: You know, I've been a fan of this book from before it came out and I really think that it's fascinating and I'm looking forward to get into more detail about it.

WICKENDEN: We've had so many discussions over the years, Jelani, about social movements and how they form and how they develop.

And, you know, I thought maybe I could just start by talking a little bit about why I chose these three women to focus on.

And as Brad mentioned at the beginning, my first book was about Auburn, New York, which is where my grandmother grew up.

And while I was there researching that book, I happened to go to the Seward House Museum because that's where William H. Seward and his wife, Frances Seward, lived.

And while I was there, I got this a private tour, and I learned about Frances Seward, who has had basically been forgotten by history because her husband, who sort of overwhelmed everyone he, he ever met, was one of the great, as you know, one of the great 19th century politicians.

He aspired to the presidency.

He was a huge personality, big anti-slavery spokesman at a time when most people would not say a word about the subject.

But I think in that tour I started getting really I knew a little bit about him, fascinated by him.

But I started getting really interested in Frances Seward because I was told that down around the corner, her best friend, Martha Coffin Wright had a house where she lived with her husband and six children.

And it was a very conservative town to the early industrial town, thriving business center.

But people were extremely conservative.

And Frances Seward and Martha Coffin Wright were not.

And so they immediately became friends and saw each other all the time over tea.

They would talk, yes, they would talk about their children, but they would talk about politics and about the very early sort of eruptions of, of by women's rights advocates and about abolition.

And they read Frances was born to an aristocratic family.

She had a house full of servants.

She was quite introspective and shy, very unlike Martha.

But there their interests were very, very similar.

And she had a huge library she read all the time.

And so she would hand these revolutionary pamphlets to Martha.

Martha would read them and they talk about them.

So they became great friends in the early 1840s.

And it may seem unlikely that they would cross paths with Harriet Tubman of all people.

And so that's what I learned when I was at this museum that Harriet Tubman made Auburn, New York, one of her regular stops when she was an Underground Railroad conductor in the 1850s, and she became friendly with Frances Seward and Martha Coffin Wright.

So I thought, well, that's an amazing story.

And that so I had to finish the book I was working on at the time, which is about my grandmother.

But this is an earlier generation of women and they just it happened to be the same, same town.

And I just thought there must be an untold story here.

How many people how many Americans who have not who are not scholars and haven't studied Harriet Tubman?

I know that she spent 48 years of her life in Auburn, New York.

It just seems completely bizarre.

So in order to tell that story, I had to get to know more about Martha Coffin Wright.

And Frances Seward, because I wanted to know.

One of the things I wanted to find out was how the Underground Railroad worked.

And this seemed like a great way to do it.

So along the way, I got deeper and deeper into it.

And so it became kind of this triple biography as well.

COBB: Well, I mean, it's interesting because people don't really think of Auburn, New York, as a historical place of historical consequence outside of knowing the specific details that you know.

And but this book, it almost seems like the crossroads of the world, like there are also things happening there and these consequential conversations that people are having.

And I just wonder, you know, about how you approached researching this project, you know?

One, there's the part that's in Auburn but the story has tentacles that go throughout the country literally, and then you have Harriet Tubman, who is the person who did not leave a trove of correspondence, was not able to read and write, and she's a crucial part of the story as well.

So I wonder how that how you went about doing that.

WICKENDEN: Yeah.

So it was you're a writer, so, you know, and you're a biographer.

So, you know, the tricks you have to kind of develop tricks to kind of figure out how to assemble your story, and especially when you have three people to write about.

And each, and so and they were working together on the Underground Railroad and they, they talked all the time well, whenever Tubman came through town.

But they also went their separate ways and they went about their, their, their mission, which was which was the same, which was to abolish slavery and procure equal legal rights for women.

And they wanted equal legal rights for black Americans to again, again these were, it's hard to emphasize enough to the audience that these were just unbelievably radical ideas at the time.

And it was particularly unusual for this aristocratic woman to sort of you know, decide that, no, she really her, her goal in life was to, you know, to, to convince her husband to be out from behind the scenes to do, to enact his beliefs, which was ultimately to abolish slavery.

So what I did when I finally decided in order to tell the stories was each what were the defining moments for each of these women?

And there were particular ones for each of them.

So Frances, who you know, huge reader, she had gotten for that era a very good education.

And so she had read a lot about John Stuart Mill she had read Mary Wollstonecraft, who many years earlier had, you know, had some of these same ideas in England.

And she so she read Wollstonecraft, who wrote about women and how women were you know, these benighted creatures who are expected to be at the beck and call of their husband, all the husbands, all the time that they were taught to be frivolous and not to have any serious ideas.

And so she was very much of that frame of mind.

And Woolston, Wollstonecraft's sister also was a victim of spousal abuse.

And so Frances had read about that, never imagining that this would be something she would encounter in her life, and in 1833, as I was beginning to do my research, I found this letter that Frances wrote to William H. Seward, her husband, who was in Albany at the time.

And it was just it was a an anguished cry for help and you know, so Lazette her, her sister lived around the corner and she was being beaten up regularly by her husband.

And there was nothing either one of them could do because at the time that was 1833, women had no legal rights at all.

And in fact, beating them up and sometimes killing them.

So she wrote, you know, this is an outrage.

And why are the divorce law why are the divorce laws the way they are this time when nobody talked about divorce and this is unjust, and why did these white men write these laws in a way that made when they put women in this impossible position?

So that just was her, her wake, her real awakening to her belief in women's rights.

And then a couple of years later, she was she had a lot of health issues and she and her husband took a long summer trip to the south.

And of course, she had read about slavery.

She was opposed to slavery, but she had never been south.

And they went to Virginia and they start they made a stop one afternoon and they heard the sounds of weeping and moaning.

And soon their carriage stopped and soon they saw a line of ten naked little boys being tied together by a rope led by a slaver who sent them to a slave trough to drink and then sent them into a shed.

And as she wrote in her journal about this, and then they sobbed themselves to sleep.

Frances was hypersensitive, extremely empathetic, and it affected her so deeply and she says she wrote in her journal, "Slavery, slavery," that the evil was you know, just kept, kept coming before me, you know, every day.

"I couldn't get it out of my mind."

So that was her awakening to her real awakening to abolition.

She had seen it and there was no going back for her.

So she in the course of I wanted to tell the story, the arc of her story was how she took her, you know, this very cerebral, shy woman who did not like the political life her husband was leading at all.

Seward was a United States Senator for, you know, in Washington.

She lived in Auburn.

She just didn't when she went down to Washington once a year to help him with his parties.

She hated the parties.

She hated the fact that Washington was a slave, a town where slavery was legal and she lived and again, this is a very odd thing for her to do, she insists on leading her own life in Auburn.

And once her father does, she lived in her childhood home.

And once her father died, she decided, I, I am now going to become more active in abolition.

And she converted their original basement kitchen into a haven for freedom seekers.

And Martha had done the same thing around the corner in Auburn in the early 1840s.

So both of them were active by then on the Underground Railroad.

And that was when Harriet Tubman liberated herself from slavery on the Eastern Shore, walked 100 miles to Philadelphia, got a job in Philadelphia, found a place to live and got to know all of the abolitionists in town, one of whom was Martha's older sister, Lucretia Mott, who, as you know, was this great early Human Rights advocate.

And she had been she was a Quaker minister.

So she had no compunction about speaking in public.

Otherwise, women, women didn't speak in public.

Forget it.

So she it was Lucretia Mott clearly, who one time when Martha went down to, to visit her on a family visit, introduced Martha to Harriet Tubman.

And then when Tubman the next time, probably she came through Auburn, Martha would have introduced her to Frances.

So this was kind of this was the, this was a networking opportunity for women who were able to go kind of under the radar because they were so dismissed they weren't worth, worth notice especially a black woman.

I mean, she could be and nobody really knew who she was in the early days.

So this was and once Tubman had met these two women, she had a very keen sense of whom she could trust and whom she couldn't, which she had to have on the Underground Railroad.

But she you know, abolitionists didn't work alone.

They were.

And this is the other thing that interested me so much when I was researching the book.

How did it work?

How did this system, the Underground Railroad, which worked so successfully for almost half a century, how did people actually do it?

So this was one of the ways, one of the ways they did it.

And there were New York you talked about New York state and people don't mostly don't know this now because so much of New York state, especially western New York state, was extremely conservative.

But there were these pockets of and not New York City so much, which was highly conservative and pro-slave city.

But as you went west, people had through the second Great Awakening.

People had kind of come to terms with the idea that slavery was an evil and that it was like Quakers that you had to if you believed it was a it was an evil, you had to do something about it.

So there were these pockets of extreme radicalism across New York state.

And so that was the beginnings of this kind of burbling up of the beginnings of the second American Revolution.

COBB: Mm-hmm.

I mean, especially if you could stay with Frances for one second.

One of the things that's fascinating about the narrative you bring about her life and her the arc of her development, is the fact that she is attached to this person who history regards in these immense terms and his irrepressible conflict speech is thought of as a fundamental part of the rhetoric of anti-slavery and so on.

But time and time again in this story you see Frances intervening and almost stiffening his spine, and she seems to be to the left of him on the question.

And, you know, there are two really well-honed consciences about the issue of slavery, but hers is the one that seems to be the least patient with its continued existence.

WICKENDEN: Yeah, and this was one of the things that one of the things that interests me about, about women and also about African-Americans.

And because until very recently, these stories, whether they were of no interest to, to, to, to white male historians who were made up a large part of scholarship of the time.

And so these stories just weren't, they just weren't told.

And so when how do you recreate history when it doesn't when it's been basically overlooked by secondary sources where you go back to original sources.

And so that was why the letters both Martha Wright and Frances Seward were wonderful letter writers and they wrote all the time.

So Martha wrote to her sister, Lucretia.

She was incredibly funny and sardonic and sarcastic, and those were just great fun and also scathing about, you know, the injustices that she experienced and watched every day.

And Frances wrote all the time to Seward.

And as the years went by and she and Martha kind of bucked up each other's courage on these issues.

And as they got to know Harriet Tubman better and they listened to Tubman stories of what she had experienced in her first 20 years enslaved in in Maryland and what she was doing on her own going back.

Nobody did this, going back into the heart of slavery and taking people out.

I mean, these were just incredibly she risked her life each time to risk the lives of all of her passengers.

So Martha and Frances were basically kind of stuck at home and are constantly, constantly being told women are, you know, are, are just you know kind of decorative objects and black women you know, you know, are not worth anything.

They, they got to know this woman and they, they became very close to her.

And they saw every time she came through, they saw what this was.

And so they are becoming more and more radical.

While Seward the more time he spends in Washington and this is a familiar a familiar thing today, and as he begins to hope that he's going to run for President and then instead Lincoln becomes the President in 1860, the spot that Seward hoped he would hold, and he becomes Lincoln's Secretary of State.

And Lincoln and, and Seward had a much more at the beginning of the war in 1861.

And in trying to prevent the war before that, they had a more moderate position.

They were this was the Republican Party was very new.

And they wanted they hoped still, even though to Frances and all of these abol, Martha and all the abolitionist, it was clear that the country had completely split apart and there was no way to reach compromise with these southerners, politicians, you know, they were they cared about the union.

And so they both and they believed both, they were completely in complete sync on this, they both believed and said constantly in the early years, this is this is a war to save the union.

This is not a war to liberate the slaves.

And so Frances is writing, this is how she rebelled.

You know, she didn't go out.

And I can talk about how Martha did it.

She didn't go out in public and do it because her husband didn't want her to do that because it would hurt him politically.

But she wrote to him all the time and she said, you got to move more quickly on this.

There are four million people are being enslaved.

You're not, you're not fulfilling.

You are betraying your own conscience.

So this was and he would defend himself until there was this incredible back and forth in these letters.

And this is such a great revelatory way to begin to understand again how this, how abolition kind of moved forward to the extent it did and how that movement really brought on the Civil War.

COBB: Mhm, mhm.

You know, I mean, just talking about this connection between abolition and advocacy of women's rights, you know, there are points, the impediments, that they faced as women became impediments for abolition and one of the things you talk about early on, the best examples of that is of Antislavery Society Meeting in Philadelphia in 1838, I think it is.

WICKENDEN: The first meeting was 1833.

Is that the one you meant, or later, you're talking about the later one?

COBB: Yeah, I'm talking about the one where all hell broke loose.

WICKENDEN: Oh yeah.

COBB: Yeah.

And if you could just talk a little bit about that and how people forged this connection between those two causes.

WICKENDEN: Well, so the first I thought you mentioned that you were talking about the first meeting of the American Antislavery Society, which was William Lloyd Garrison crew.

And it was, of course.

COBB: Well, that one, too, right?

Yeah.

WICKENDEN: So that was that was all men and that at that meeting, Martha happened to be in Philadelphia at the time and Lucretia Mott again by then, 1833, she was a lot older than Martha and she had been working side by side with these men for many years on abolition.

So and they had, so at the last minute someone decided, oh, we'd better invite you know, Lucretia Mott.

I mean, it's kind of rude not to.

So they invited her and Martha stayed at home to write to her husband because she wasn't into this yet.

And Lucretia went to the meeting and the men were completely horrified that there was a woman there.

And she dared to, to change one of the resolutions that they, they suggested.

And, and after that, the American Anti-Slavery Society split in two because Garrison believed that women should be part of it and other more conservative members did not.

So Lucretia went home and she decided, all right, well, if we're not going to be allowed to join the men in their conventions, we're going to start our own society.

So she got together with her African-American free, free, free women in Philadelphia and other white women, and they, they, they created a an integrated group of women who would do the same thing that the male abolitionists were doing.

And at the same time a society was forming.

It actually was an all-black society was forming in Salem and there was another group forming in Boston.

So then the 1837 meeting you mentioned, I think that was in New York and I believe that Lucretia was the president that year and that that was when a mob assembled outside because they heard that William Lloyd Garrison was there.

And there was another very famous English abolitionist who had both of them had been invited to speak because they were friends and they all work together, even though they were part of the they couldn't, they couldn't assemble together the two sexes.

So this mob gathers the mayor comes to the meeting and he said, ladies, you have to disband.

This is you know, this is too dangerous.

You go home.

And they didn't want to go home, but they did because they realized they were shouting and the people were banging on the door and they're breaking into the building and Garrison sitting there writing a column for his newspaper and then he escapes through upstairs window you know goes into a I can't remember what it is and some shop next door.

And they find him.

They let him down, the mob, they, they let him down by a rope.

They lead him.

I think the rope is around his neck.

They lead him to Boston, the Boston Common, where they intend to tar and feather him.

And he saved by the police at the last moment.

But this was women's introduction to both to abolition and to their sense that, well, we want we want our rights, too.

We want to be able to speak in public.

We want to be able to join societies that men are able to join and we want legal rights.

So that finally came to be in 18... not until 1848 when Lucretia was in upstate New York and some of her friends from Philadelphia had moved to Waterloo.

And so they were having a little gathering to welcome Lucretia.

And so Lucretia and Martha went to Waterloo and the women and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was there was a little bit younger and the women all started talking about you know, this, this is this is really bad.

And they all talked about how they hated being housewives.

They, they needed their rights.

And they said, well, let's call a convention.

And they knew at that point sort of how to do it.

So they did.

Ten, ten, ten days later, they held a convention.

And this was the key, key turning point for Martha Coffin Wright.

So they because she's got six children, she's 41 years old.

She's pregnant with her seventh child.

She's completely exhausted, but she's also catalyzed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton who's like this complete dynamo.

And they, they organized this thing.

They write their manifesto.

One of them, Lucretia, knows Frederick Douglass, who has just started “North Star,” his, his newspaper in Rochester.

One of the women invites him to come.

He's the most famous abolitionist in the world, he's delighted to come.

He comes and he at, at the Seneca Falls Convention, he meets Martha and she was she was just bowled over by him she, she got she became his close friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw that Martha had all of these innate talents and this kind of spark and that she was a rebel by nature.

So she enlists her.

And so Martha goes home from that convention and she's got these two great friends, Frederick Douglass, who comes and stops at her house whenever he comes across on his lecture tour, shocking Martha's neighbors and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who says, you know, "Come on, you're going to you're going to work with me on this new movement."

And this is basically the start of the mostly white middle class Women's Rights Movement.

COBB: And it's just amazing the kind of connections that you uncover and explore, because obviously Martha Coffin has that, you know, close tie to these movements through her sister, Lucretia.

But just, you know, Frederick Douglass shows up here every time you go through another chapter, there's another kind of historic figure who's emerging on to the scene.

I do want to talk about another, you know, the third of these sistern, um, as we might call them.

Harriet Tubman and what you learned about her in the process of this, if there was anything you came away from like "Oh wow, I didn't know that about her."

WICKENDEN: Yeah, oh there was so much know, like most Americans, I think what I knew about Harriet Tubman was minimal.

You know, we, we all learned about her in grade school, basically all the great Underground Railroad conductor and of course, to this fabulous American hero.

But, but not but it was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty shallow.

And I think as I was working on the book, when I talk to people about Harriet Tubman, people tended to know that she was this great Underground Railroad conductor.

They didn't know that she had insisted on and found a way to go down to South Carolina, to Port Royal, which was occupied by 1862 by the union forces.

And she you know, she didn't want to stay back.

She wanted to take part in the war.

And so she had she was this incredible.

She was just basically a genius as a strategist.

That's kind of the way I came to think about her.

She had all of these gifts, but one of the things she knew how to do was to get what she wanted.

And one of her, she, she knew all the abolitionists and she made her business, know all the abolitionists in Philadelphia, and then quickly got to know those in New York state who could be useful to her, and in Boston, where there were all of these wealthy transcendentalists and abolitionists just looking to kind of give money to a good cause, she quickly saw that, got to know as many of them as she possibly could.

And one of them, I think it was Ednah Dow Cheney said, you know, Harriet Tubman and this is how you, this is how I began to piece Harriet Tubman life together by seeing what other people said about her.

And many of them wrote down the stories she told, including Martha, so that I could even though she couldn't read or write, I believe that she, she created her own oral history by telling these stories over and over again to the people whom she loved and trusted and she want, she wanted to be known.

And so what I tried to do here was create the kind of her kind of story about her in a narrative form I think she wanted us all to understand.

So one of the things that Edna Dow Cheney said was, you know, she has all the qualities of a great leader and she really did.

She knew how to she knew the right people to get to know she knew how to, she told a great story.

And when she spoke in public, she did it with incredible fervor and, and wit.

I didn't ever think of her as a witty person.

She was really quite funny, very matter of fact, about the troubles she suffered and extremely uncomplaining.

But whatever she set out to do, she figured out how to do it and she got people to work for her.

And that that's a great politician.

And so I thought that was just really fascinating that here with someone who is completely outside the political system as far away as you could possibly be.

And yet she figured out how to use it to her advantage.

And so her friendship with, with Frances Seward was extremely important because she knew that Frances had a direct line to the most powerful antislavery statesman in the country.

So she knew that her story, she would tell her stories to Frances and that and that Frances would take them in and that she would become she would help push to Senator and then Secretary of State Seward in the right direction.

COBB: Now, of course, you know, because of the time period you're writing about the politics of this era, all of the accumulatively, all the dynamics that are going on.

And you know when Stephen Douglass shows up and Chief Justice Taney shows up and all these consequential figures who are pushing the country to the brink, irreconcilable brink of the Civil War.

Can you talk about how this played out and the activities of these three different women in the course of the war?

WICKENDEN: Yes, so the for Tubman and talking about these catalysts and how, how each of them kind of got it really drove, how each drove herself to do what she ended up doing.

So for all of them, I would say, and for the as for the country at large, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was, was probably the biggest political catalyst.

It was.

And this was what radicalized it radicalized the whole north and it really radicalized New York state.

So even for, so this was the law for people who aren't familiar with it that passed in 1850 is part of the Compromise of 1850.

It required free the free states of the, of the North to return into bondage.

People who had people who had become free had been freed for years and were, you know, had their own lives and families up north and people, so even conservative northerners, many of them found this atrocious.

There states had had abolished slavery years ago.

What right did these people have to come in?

And they didn't care that this was a federal law.

They thought it was completely unjust.

And so there were these, you know these, these movements sprang up.

And so when, when slave catchers came from the south and landed in one of these cities and took one of these and one of these, there were often young men and intending to take them back into slavery, quickly, these cities in the north figured out that they all had their little band of abolitionists and they knew how to get the word out.

And the word got out immediately and they got together and they, they, they orchestrated these incredible rescues.

So Harriet Tubman happened to be in Troy when this happened with, with a young man named Charles Now, he was a slave, he, he had escaped from slavery in Virginia.

He was working at a I can't remember he was a carpentry shop or something.

And he was arrested at his place of work.

The word went out, Tubman was there.

And so immediately a huge crowd, he's taken to the US commissioner's office crowd assembles.

She's in the crowd.

And it is the story in the book, and I won't tell the whole story, but she is a central figure in the rescue of Charles Now.

And so people it's that that did not go without notice.

There were reporters in the crowd.

They said there were many newspaper stories about this, this woman who was known as, as "Moses" and it was just a miracle that she appeared on the scene at just that time.

And when, when Now is led down the stairs and he is about to be taken off.

Tubman rushes and she's five feet tall.

I mean, she's a tiny woman.

She rushes, and she grabs Now by the arm.

She fends off the blows of the constables.

The crowd gathers around them sort of protectively.

And they, they she helps them escape.

It's just unbelievable.

So that that story I was able to assemble from, from newspaper accounts.

So, you know, there are contemporaneous ways to do this, as you know.

And it's a bit of a trick narratively.

But you can it can be done.

And it was a great it was just a great way to see how she did what she did.

COBB: It's an amazing story, yeah.

And I often think that the kind of experience that Frances Seward had when she saw slavery up close with her own eyes and just was completely, undone by the evil of it and the Fugitive Slave Act really did that in reverse because people who disagreed with slavery or even hadn't thought much about it, all of a sudden it was in their neighborhood and people were so local, you know, those that time, but that it automatically just says, well, you know, "What do you think about this issue?"

"I don't know."

"I haven't thought very much about it."

"Well, I'm going to stick this issue right here, I'm going to take this person who, you know, who's part of your local network of people and we're going to send the federal government into yank that person out and..." WICKENDEN: And yeah.

And these were their neighbors.

COBB: Right?

WICKENDEN: And they went to their places of work.

And, you know, it was just and why Henry Clay and the others thought that this was going to put to rest all of the problems once and for all.

And it was just preposterous.

COBB: Yeah.

WICKENDEN: Daniel Webster, you know, if you're trying to give a talk in Syracuse, which was completely radicalized town and everywhere, that, you know, everyone even further against him.

COBB: Yes, it's, it's, it's amazing.

And you can kind of kind of read and I think we talk about this when, you know, when I first saw the manuscript, that you can really read the history of the era through the lives and reactions of these three people and, you know, how they intersect and how they interact and so on.

I know where that went by really quickly, we're supposed to have... did you get any sense in doing this book about other key women whose stories have been overlooked?

WICKENDEN: Yes, there were quite a few of them and.

Well, yes, well, most obviously black women whose stories had been overlooked.

And so this was one of the reasons the female antislavery societies were so interesting, because you could see how active they were and played an enormously important role in all of this.

So they and they worked, Lucretia Mott, it must be said that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who also plays a role in the book, obviously, she did not have the most enlightened views on race, and it was so that movement was largely, largely became a white movement and later, later on you know she became Stanton became quite, quite overtly racist.

Lucretia Mott, though, and there were a few others, really, including the Grimke sisters who were, who came from a slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, and converted to Quakerism and were also out on the lecture circuit quite early.

They, they believed absolutely in integrate full integration.

And so there's this incredible scene in the book, too, about the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, which was this great building that the abolitionists built so they could actually hold their meetings because most people who rented halls out did not want to rent to abolitionists.

And so these, these female anti-slavery societies met there the night before the burning of Pennsylvania Hall.

And both Lucretia Mott and one of the Grimke sisters gave these incredibly powerful speeches while the stones were being hurled at the windows, shattering all around them.

And you know these women were saying, don't be afraid of just, you know, this this this seeming danger.

You know we are completely safe.

I very, very courageous.

And at the end of the meeting, the, the white women and black women walked and there are thousands of men and boys outside with the intent to kill them.

And they just they walk out black women and white women arm in arm and they don't quite, the crowd doesn't quite dare to attack them.

They hurl all kinds of insults at them, but they don't they don't really hurt them.

But then after they're gone, they actually follow Lucretia Mott intending to burn down her house and that doesn't happen.

But they burn down Pennsylvania Hall.

So, again, the mob violence was just incredible.

And that was... COBB: That was the incident I was asking about, actually.

WICKENDEN: Oh yeah.

COBB: Pennsylvania Hall.

That's in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that's what I meant to say.

All right.

WICKENDEN: Yes anyway, they're there and now and these women stories the black women were absolutely pivotal in petitioning Congress for the abolition of slavery.

And many of them did it on their own.

Often they did it with their white friends like Mott and the Grimke sisters.

And they spoke there were many of the more speakers to.

Ellen Watkins Harper, I'm sure you've heard of her Jelani, this fabulous, fabulous character, and she was at one meeting later on, 1866, I think, and she it was Elizabeth Cady.

This was after the war.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was trying to bring the abolitionists and the women together again because she really wanted to push for the women's right to vote.

Very big issue.

And this is a time when, when black men really, really, really needed the vote because of what was happening in the South.

And so Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted this to be her great day.

And Ellen Watkins Harper got up and she totally lit into Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

"You white women, you talk about rights.

I'm here to talk about wrongs."

Oh she was just so great.

So it's really it's really good to go back and read some of these stories that have been so neglected.

COBB: So are so funny that kind of anticipating the question, which was whether other black women in New York involved an abolitionist and or women's right, women's rights movement.

WICKENDEN: Yes so, well, Sojourner Truth is the most obvious one.

She was quite a bit older than Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, for that matter.

And she had been an enslaved woman in New York, New York when slavery was still legal.

And she had I think every child of hers was sold.

And she was a remarkable figure.

She was just as tall as Harriet was short and a wonderful speaker herself.

And so she was.

And again, she was speaking in public at a time when it sort of wasn't done and was really a formidable figure.

And so she spoke, the abolitionist to the American Antislavery Society would often ask people like Ellen Watkins Harper and, and Sojourner Truth to come and speak.

So there was a real lecture circuit and they made themselves heard that way.

COBB: Hmm.

WICKENDEN: And I can't remember the town Sojourner Truth was from Ulster County, I think.

COBB: Yeah.

I didn't know she was from she was enslaved in New York and she was under the gradual, gradual emancipation amendment.

Yeah.

Here's a here's a really interesting question.

I have a kind of personal curiosity about how does doing a deep historical dive for a book like this influence how you edit “The New Yorker?” WICKENDEN: Wow.

I had never thought about that.

You know, I think it actually has made a difference.

I and I sort of alluded to this at the beginning, Jelani and I, well I have a podcast every week.

And so I have the freedom to, to do whatever I want.

And I often as I was writing the book, Jelani is really interested in radical social movements and social movements of all kinds.

And so was I, obviously.

And so one of the things that I've been exploring in, in articles and in the podcast in recent years is how to think about what we have lived through in the past, well, let's just limit the past four or five years and some of the social movements of today that have grown up so Black Lives Matter, Me Too and one of the remarkable things about writing this book was how relevant it felt.

And disturbingly, it was disturbing that we haven't gotten further ahead on some of these things.

And so Jelani and I are always talking about, Just yesterday we were talking about the Derek Chauvin trial and about what we're seeing in Georgia as a, as a backlash against the election of two Democratic senators.

So voter suppression, I mean, voter suppression is, is once again a major issue.

So I hope that when I'm editing my pieces, the pieces that we write and that we run in “The New Yorker” and bringing this historical background and kind of helping to try and deepen them to us so that people understand that this stuff has a very, very long history.

Look at the assault on the Capitol on January 6th.

These, these white supremacists beating down the doors of the Capitol, wander around through the rotunda with Confederate flags.

It is sickening.

How is this possible?

Well, there's a direct line from the 18th, well way back from the founding of the country all the way to today.

And it just well, I'd love to hear I'd love to hear Jelani talk about this, just how these phases, these cycles that this country goes through.

COBB: I mean, it is, it is fascinating.

Just in the context we were talking about you know there is a question that says, "can you compare the division in our country now to the division in our country in the mid-1800s?"

And I mean, it's the division we have now is genealogical, it's a descendant of that division in conflicts that have never been fully reconciled.

And even just a couple of hours before we started this conversation, you know, Major League Baseball announced that they were yanking the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest over the voting law there.

And, you know, this is just the outset looking at these things, which are astounding.

But the questions you mentioned, the dire need for the vote in the time period that you wrote about and we are looking at a battles, full blown political battles for access to the vote.

150 years, more than 150 years afterward.

WICKENDEN: Yeah, absolutely it is um, you know you recently wrote a piece about for “The New Yorker,” and again, this is where some of the stuff just, just kind of dovetails your piece about how parties die.

And that was a piece that was particularly interested in because, you know, this earlier in our and I recommend it to everybody because the Whig Party plays a big role in my book, because that was what William Seward was a big, important member of the Whig Party.

And then and he was quite reluctant, actually, to see it go.

And Frances Seward saw way before William H. Seward, saw it was hopeless because the Whig Party was completely divided over slavery.

It had southern members it had northern members.

It just was defunct and wasn't going to work.

She knew it.

He just clung on and clung on.

And she kept saying, why can't you listen to what your abolitionist friends are saying?

Because Frederick Douglass was writing to them saying it's time, it's time sir to start a new party.

And that was the birth of the Republican Party, which, of course, at the time was a very different party from what it is now.

COBB: Is a very different party than what it is now.

I mean, it's interesting to, to see, you know, all those themes emerge in, I mean, it's also terrifying.

You know, there's a question that someone has, which is, as you know, we in Arlington, Virginia, are trying to rename Lee Highway after John Mercer Langston.

Who's, interesting footnote, grandfather of Langston Hughes and Reconstruction era legislator, African-American legislator, legislator, actually post reconstruction was when he was, elected to do you know if there was any interaction between the agitators and Robert E. Lee?

WICKENDEN: No, I don't believe there, I don't believe there was he was on the other side and one of the I will be right up front about this.

And I thought about this a lot when I was writing.

There's you have to make you have to stop somewhere.

I mean, there's so many rabbit holes you can go into with the Civil War.

And so I did give short shrift to, to the South because my characters are they're northerners, they're New Yorkers.

And I wanted to tell it through, through their through their experiences and their, their opinions.

So, no, they're the closest it came was Martha's writes one of her sons, her youngest son thought at Gettysburg.

And there's, there's a and I was able to kind of piece together he was very, very badly wounded and at Little Round Top.

And so I was able to piece together that.

So Lee makes a you know kind of quick appearance.

But there was no, no there was no direct, direct connection.

COBB: You know, there's an interesting epilogue part of it, which I mean, I read lots of history and lots of narratives.

And I found myself really moved you know by that last section where you're talking about the end of these women's lives and kind of what all they had accomplished and what work was left to be done.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, like they've come together, they brought together by these tidal forces in history and they do this work.

And how do things turn out for these women at the end of their lives?

WICKENDEN: Yeah, well, and tell, that was one of the tricks, too, and how to finish the book, because Tubman she's just unbelievable.

She lived into the 20th century.

She didn't die until 1913.

So that's one of the reasons I wanted to tell more of her story.

I mean, ten years she spent on the Underground Railroad, then she, she, she played this incredibly we didn't even have time to talk about what she did during the war.

She came back and she devoted the rest of her life to, to persuing human rights sort in various ways.

And what so she lived until she was 93.

She was active until the very end, until she got very sick a year or two before she died.

She was one of the things that Frances did in 1859 was sell Harriet Tubman a house in Auburn, and we won't get into that because that's another whole story.

But remarkably, I thought Frances died relatively, relatively young.

Harriet Tubman came back from the war in 1865.

She settled in this house that Frances Seward had sold her remarkably.

But she didn't she, she didn't stop.

This woman could not stop.

She wasn't made to be either a farmer and she worked her farm but or you know a housekeeper.

She continued to raise money for the freed people of South Carolina.

And she decided the greatest people in need were elderly, impoverished African-Americans.

And she devoted the probably the last decade of her life to raising enough money.

She had no money herself.

She worked for three years during the war for the US, for that, for the union army.

She was not paid for any of that work.

She was really close to being penurious, but she totally selfless.

So she raised enough money.

She bought, she added to the property she had bought from Frances Seward and she built with this money she raised from her friends in Boston, all these other people that she knew, she built this very small, humane nursing home for impoverished elderly African-Americans.

And just recently, the National Park Service has taken over that property and it's renovating it.

And so people are once COVID has you know, left the scene, people can go can go visit it and get a real sense of.

And then a mile away is the Seward house.

So just how close they lived.

All three women are buried together in that cemetery.

Beautiful Fort Hill cemetery.

So and then Martha, she died relatively young, too.

She lived longer than Frances did.

She lived long enough to see all the terrible divisions between the abolitionists and the women's rights advocates and all their tensions over the 15th Amendment.

And race tormented her.

But she handed down this legacy of activism through generation after generation after generation.

And so her descendants are still they're, very active in prison reform.

So the Osborne Association is today one of the great prison reform movements, and it is run by, I now get the generations wrong, one of her, great, great, great granddaughter, something like that, and I have one extra great in there, Lucretia Mott Osborne Wells, the great great granddaughter.

WICKENDEN: Only the great, great.

COBB: Yeah, I had it in my notes, yeah.

You know, that's really a kind of interesting I interacted with the Osborne Association in New York when I was writing about prison reform and criminal justice and had no idea that they were connected to Martha Coffin Wright.

And that long legacy of progressive activity in that family.

WICKENDEN: Yeah.

And it just shows me, too, how important it is, even when you feel that you're not getting anywhere, you just have to kind of keep at it.

And that was Harriet Tubman was completely dogged.

And so they all were actually as long as they lived.

And Martha, in one of the women's rights, that's the 10th annual Women's Rights Convention, which came after the war, she gave this speech and she knew it was going to be generations before women got the vote.

She knew it, but she, she wanted to kind of rev up the crowd and she said, you know, "Soon people are going to say, here come the women who are going to do something."

And I love that because it didn't happen right away.

But women kept at it generation after generation and, and eventually, long after even Susan B. Anthony was dead, they got the 19th Amendment.

So and that's why it's important now just to keep remembering that you have to, you have to keep, you have to keep fighting.

COBB: So we have time for one more question to sneak in here, which is another good question.

When you wrote your first book, you were inspired to write this one.

So what's next?

WICKENDEN: Oh, I hate it when people ask me that, right now, I'm on a book tour.

I have I don't actually have a fully formed idea yet.

I'll be completely frank.

And if I did, I probably wouldn't tell everybody because writers at the beginning of the projects are very you know, they hold their secrets very tightly.

But I hope it won't take me quite as long as this book took to write, which was more than twice as long as the Civil War took to fight.

But I just want to add one final story, because I just I just love it.

And I've got it on my desktop here.

When I was writing the book, a friend of mine who I had talked to about it, who writes for “The New Yorker,” she was walking down some street in New York and she saw one of those green army green postal collection boxes and plastered all over it were these decals.

And it was it was they were photographs of Harriet Tubman, a very lovely photograph that actually was relatively recently discovered of Harriet Tubman.

And underneath it was typed, "Harriet Tubman, total badass," and I just loved that and just showed, again, this contemporary it just goes on, you know, it goes on.

And it's important to remember that.

COBB: Well, I mean, that is a great note for us to conclude on.

And, you know, I have a copy of this rather handsome book jacket here.

Dorothy, it's been great talking to you.

WICKENDEN: You too as always Jelani.

Thanks so much for doing this.

GRAHAM: Jelani, great, great moderating and thanks for the plug.

And Dorothy.

Such a revealing book you know it not only deepens our appreciation of total badass Harriet Tubman, but and our understanding of the abolition women's rights movements, but also illuminates the important contributions previously overlooked of Martha Wright and Frances Seward so fascinating history.

Thanks again for tuning in.

And from all of us here in Politics and Prose, stay well and well read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations or online at politics-prose.com (music playing through credits)