The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women's Rights (Bestselling Women's History)

by Dorothy Wickenden

“God’s ahead of master Lincoln. God won’t let master Lincoln beat the South ’til he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he’s a great man, and I’m a poor Negro, but this Negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the Negroes free.” —Harriet Tubman, January 1862

The following year, Sarah Grimké wrote a book, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, in which she said, “All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks.”

Most Philadelphians were scandalized by Pennsylvania Hall, where men and women would meet together, and whites would conspire with Blacks to overturn the social pecking order.

Martha and Frances had much in common: Quaker roots, older sisters who resisted social norms, small children, a passion for reading, an antipathy to pretentiousness, and a burgeoning interest in social reform. Frances’s sister, Lazette Worden, often visited, and Martha became close to her, too.

Women had no legal recourse even when their husbands threatened their lives. They had no access to their inheritances. They could not sit on juries or on their church vestries. They could not make a will, sign a contract, or file a lawsuit. They could not vote. If a woman pursued divorce, she became a social pariah and lost everything: her children, any financial support, and her reputation.

Virginia enslaved 470,000 people—nearly half its population. The legislature had become even more punitive after Nat Turner’s armed revolt in 1831, forbidding slaves to hold religious meetings, leave the property without a written pass, and to read and write.

The bill had just passed the House, 109 to 76. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the effect of the Fugitive Slave Act among citizens in the North, calling it “a sheet of lightning at midnight.” In the months that followed, arrests mounted. One man who had been living in Auburn for two years was returned to slavery, leaving behind his wife and child. Free Blacks, too, were caught in the dragnets and sent south to be sold. The transaction was so abhorrent, Frances wrote, it had roused even “the most phlegmatic.” Hundreds of people who lived in Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo fled to Canada.

As Henry had warned, many northerners refused to abide by the new law. Abolitionist groups and entire jurisdictions fought back. Vigilance committees sprang up in cities that didn’t already have them, protecting Black people from arrest and organizing rescue operations when necessary. Black citizens bought guns to protect themselves and their families. In Auburn, Frances took on a new role, as Henry’s go-between, keeping him fully apprised of the political mood in New York. She wrote to Augustus, “The public opinion against Slavery is daily growing warmer—It is impossible to see when it will all end.”

Slavery apologists, like so many other men in power faced with insurgencies, underestimated the will and the sophistication of the people they set out to subdue.

In May 1851, Webster traveled to Syracuse, a city he denounced as a “laboratory of abolitionism, libel, and treason.” Gripping the iron railing of a narrow balcony overlooking the yard in front of City Hall, Webster called out: “Those who dare to oppose the law are traitors! traitors! traitors!” As he recalled the response, listeners below shouted, “Yes, yes!”

A member of the Syracuse Vigilance Committee, May punctuated his sermons with reminders that his home was a station on the underground railroad and requests for clothing and money. Speaking to his congregation about the Fugitive Slave Act, he said, “We must trample this infamous law underfoot, be the consequences what they may. It is not for you to choose whether you will or not obey such a law as this. You are as much under obligation not to obey it, as you are not to lie, steal, or commit murder.”

The railroad tightly guarded its secrets, and no one recorded how Harriet Tubman got to know Martha and Frances, but they came together around this time, almost certainly through Lucretia.