In December, 1841, Martha and her husband invited Governor and Mrs. Seward to tea at their house, a large, plain saltbox several blocks from the Sewards’. The conversation turned to the Married Women’s Property Act, an extraordinarily controversial bill before the State Legislature. If passed, the bill would grant wives the right to their inherited property. It had a stunning ramification: women who owned property would pay taxes; if they paid taxes, they could legitimately claim the right to vote. As one alarmed legislator put it, the measure raised “the whole question of woman’s proper place in society, in the family and everywhere.”
Martha pointed out that the bill would be a boon to husbands who encountered business setbacks. To her embarrassment, David sharply contradicted her, saying that, in nine cases out of ten, when a man failed in business it was because of his wife’s extravagance. That night, in a letter to Lucretia, Martha tried to make light of the remark: “Now, I think it a great shame for David to make so ungallant a speech as that.” David shared her progressive beliefs on other issues, but, like most men, he thought the idea of women’s rights was preposterous. Henry, thankfully, agreed with Frances. A decade earlier, writing to him in anguish to report that Lazette was being battered by her drunken husband, Frances had said, “Men have framed laws I believe to uphold themselves in their wickedness.” As governor, Henry did his best to get the property act passed, but the legislature voted it down.
For Frances and Martha, the revolution began at home. They raised their children in keeping with Wollstonecraft’s dictum “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.” Martha sent her two youngest to an avant-garde boarding school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, which was integrated by race and sex. Martha told David, “The bigoted and narrow-minded chose other schools for their children—those who had not emancipated themselves from the prejudices of education & circumstances.” Frances homeschooled her daughter, Fanny, with a curriculum that included Herodotus, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, along with contemporary greats: Frederick Douglass, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Fanny grew up playing with children of both races. Emulating her mother, she supported abolition, women’s rights, and temperance. When a friend asked Frances about the difficulties of overseeing a young girl’s lessons while also preparing her for courtship, she replied that she was educating Fanny “not to be married.”
In the eighteen-thirties, many presumably open-minded abolitionists refused to allow women to join their political organizing, so women in Philadelphia, led by Lucretia Mott and her friends, formed a racially integrated anti-slavery society of their own. They travelled to other cities to hold meetings, and by 1837 there were a hundred and thirty-nine such societies, from Boston to Canton, Ohio. Their members inundated Congress with anti-slavery petitions, and demanded basic freedoms for themselves. One influential activist wrote, “All I ask of our brethren is, that they take their feet from off our necks.”
As Martha saw what Lucretia was accomplishing, she grew more restive. In 1848, forty-one years old and pregnant with her seventh child, she joined Lucretia, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and two other reformers to convene the first meeting in America devoted to women’s rights: the Seneca Falls Convention. It was attended by Frederick Douglass, the world’s best-known abolitionist and the publisher of a recently established newspaper, the North Star. Afterward, he expressed support for a resolution that the delegates had vigorously debated, writing, “There can be no reason in the world for denying women the exercise of the elective franchise.” Within days, an obscure rural village noted for making wheelbarrows was being vilified as the seedbed for women’s suffrage.
Martha’s burgeoning activism helped convince Frances that it wasn’t enough simply to oppose slavery. After Congress passed the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the question was not whether she would violate it but how. The new law allowed slave catchers to travel to free states to hunt down “runaways,” and required citizens and police to deliver suspected fugitives to federal commissioners, who held perfunctory hearings before returning them to the South. People who protected them could be fined a thousand dollars and sentenced to six months in prison.
The Fugitive Slave Act radicalized the North. Frances wrote to her son Augustus, “The public opinion against Slavery is daily growing warmer—It is impossible to see where it will all end.” Henry opposed the law, and kept up a brisk correspondence with abolitionists, but he was hamstrung by Congress. When a pen pal in Boston urged him to be more strident, Henry pleaded for patience, considering “what gales I have had to encounter from that quarter.” For Frances, the conundrum of her life was trying to act on her convictions without damaging Henry’s career, or appearing to be “extravagant or unwomanly.” She wrote to Lazette, “The Abolitionists & women’s rights women will act for us,” but “are we sure that we can join them & is it right for us to be silent?”
Frances was catalyzed most of all by a friend far removed from the reactionaries of Auburn and Washington: a freedom seeker from Maryland’s Eastern Shore who, at the age of twenty-seven, had walked out of slavery, leaving behind her parents and siblings and her free husband. Born Araminta Ross, she went by her mother’s first name, Harriet, and her husband’s surname, Tubman.
Harriet had begun planning her escape in the fall of 1849, when she learned that she was to be sold to a slaveholder in the Deep South. Her destination was Philadelphia, a city where people of both races sought to overthrow slavery, and where Blacks could find jobs for themselves and schools for their children. To her disappointment, her husband, John, refused to go with her. He had steady work and no desire to take his chances elsewhere. If he was caught fleeing with a fugitive slave, he was liable to be sold into slavery, shot in the back, or torn apart by bloodhounds. Harriet left alone, relying on her wits and on contacts in the Underground Railroad.
Slavers knew that abolitionists helped enslaved people vanish, but they couldn’t fathom how. As one of them said, fugitives were concealed “in a labyrinth that has no clue.” A loose network with no central office or command structure, the railroad was staffed by free and enslaved African-Americans, white businessmen and housewives, sailors and captains, ministers and farmers, Quakers, Unitarians, Methodists, and others who believed slavery was the worst of all sins. Freedom seekers sometimes dressed as members of the opposite sex or attempted to pass as white. They hid in cramped root cellars and rat-infested holds of boats, travelled on trains with forged papers, or by foot after dark, arriving at safe houses on moonless nights and leaving before the cows were milked.
Harriet made her way from Poplar Neck to Philadelphia, a distance of nearly a hundred miles. When she arrived, she was assisted by the city’s vigilance committee, founded by Lucretia Mott’s friend Robert Purvis to help “colored persons in distress.” As she began to plot a series of rescue missions into Maryland, she introduced herself to every abolitionist in town, and soon became close with Lucretia. It isn’t known how Harriet met Frances and Martha, but it is likely that Lucretia introduced her to Martha during one of her visits to Philadelphia. Martha, in turn, likely introduced Harriet to Frances in Auburn.
Very few people ever returned to the place they’d risked their lives fleeing, but, after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, Harriet began her incursions into the Eastern Shore, escorting out family members and other freedom seekers a few at a time. She told her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer; I brought them all clear off to Canada.” England had long since abolished slavery in its colonies, and in 1857 Harriet moved to the town of St. Catharines, where she had deposited numerous siblings, cousins, and friends.
Frances and Martha were transfixed by the story of Harriet’s life. She couldn’t remember her oldest sister, who was sold when she was three years old. Two other sisters had been leased away by their enslaver, as her mother pleaded for mercy. Harriet had scars on her neck from whippings at the age of six or seven by a sadistic woman who’d refused to instruct her about her chores, then thrashed her repeatedly for failing to do them to her liking. She had periodic blackouts from a head injury she’d suffered when an overseer hurled an iron weight at an enslaved man at a drygoods store and hit Harriet instead.
The trouble in her head, as Harriet called it, gave rise to visions that she considered prophetic. Although she could not read, she had memorized long passages of the Bible. To Frances, an observant Episcopalian, she brought to mind Isaiah: “Forget the former things; do not dwell in the past. I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
Whatever Frances’s and Martha’s frustrations with their husbands, it never would occur to them to strike out on their own. Harriet had made the solitary walk to Philadelphia expecting that, when she returned to Maryland, John Tubman would accompany her back North. Instead, he had taken another wife. Others subjected to such adversities would be embittered or broken. Harriet was wry, matter-of-fact, and undeviating. She finished one expedition only to plot the next. For Frances, this small, unstoppable woman, some eighteen years younger but apparently unafraid of the slave power of the South and the lawmakers in Washington, embodied the exigency and the potential of abolition.
Frances began her revolt modestly. In Washington, she allied herself with Emily Howland, the daughter of an Underground Railroad conductor near Auburn, who had moved to the capital to teach at the Normal School for Colored Girls, founded by another abolitionist. Frances gave money to the school, and she and Fanny often visited with gifts of books and mittens. She also helped Howland develop a private aid channel for freedom seekers. Howland assisted one woman who needed to raise nine hundred dollars to buy her children out of slavery; the “owner” had set a price and then doubled it. Howland commented acidly, “The market value of humanity must have risen in Virginia.” Frances, who had helped the woman once, made a second donation.
The death of Judge Miller, in 1851, freed Frances to take direct action. She had always followed his rules in Auburn, just as she did Henry’s in Washington. Now, with the Married Women’s Property Act finally passed, Frances became the legal owner of her father’s house, as well as considerable property he’d bought up around town. The original basement kitchen and dining room were empty after an extensive remodelling, and she turned the rooms into a haven for freedom seekers. Henry approved of the idea. In a speech in Cleveland in 1848, he had advised extending a “cordial welcome to the fugitive who lays his weary limbs at your door,” and defending him “as you would your paternal gods.” He also rather enjoyed the subterfuge. Who would suspect the proper Mrs. Seward of being a dangerous dissident?
On cold nights, Frances kept a fire going downstairs, and, when someone knocked at the back door, she had bedding and a hot meal prepared. In the spring and summer, she used the woodshed behind the house as a shelter that she called her dormitory. On one occasion when Henry was at home and Frances was off visiting a friend, he couldn’t resist writing to her about a pair of unexpected guests: “The ‘underground railroad’ works wonderfully. Two passengers came here last night.” The Sewards’ bulldog, Watch, mistaking them for intruders, bit one of the men. Henry remarked, “I am against extending suffrage to dogs. They are just like other classes of parvenues.”
In December, 1858, Frances found herself dreading the New Year. It was not only the looming obligations of the Washington social season. The United States had been moving ineluctably toward self-annihilation, as the westward expansion became a source of bitter debate. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act enabled voters in the Western territories to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. A large migration of settlers, subsidized by abolitionists in the East, set out to insure that Kansas entered the Union as a free state. They found themselves facing off against pro-slavery militias, led by David Rice Atchison, a recently retired U.S. senator from Missouri. The militias, dubbed Border Ruffians by the Northern press, vowed to “lynch and hang, tar and feather, and drown every white-livered Abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil.”
Martha told an Auburn friend that she expected the pioneers to “maintain their ground manfully, and not be driven off by the idle threats of the Missourians.” But Atchison and his men meant what they said. Kansas’s first legislative elections, in 1855, empowered the new legislature to write a state constitution, which would determine the state’s position on slavery. The day before the polls opened, a thousand well-armed militia members crossed the border, intent on voter suppression and fraud. Carrying preprinted ballots, they fanned out to free-state towns, stuffing ballot boxes and accosting voters and election judges. When the Ruffians’ candidates won, the besieged free-staters refused to accept the results of a patently fixed election. Rejecting what they called the “bogus legislature,” they established a rival government and set out to write their own constitution.
“Bleeding Kansas” further inflamed the national frenzy over slavery. On May 19, 1856, Frances’s friend Senator Charles Sumner, an intemperate abolitionist from Massachusetts, gave a speech titled “The Crime Against Kansas.” In it, he eviscerated Democratic colleagues and President Franklin Pierce for their complicity in the “incredible atrocity of the Assassins and of the Thugs.” Two days later, the Border Ruffians sacked the free-state town of Lawrence. The day after that, the South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks approached Sumner in the well of the Senate, where he sat bent over his desk franking a stack of printed copies of his speech, to be mailed to sympathizers. Before Sumner could stand, Brooks began striking him with his cane, with such force that it splintered. “I wore my cane out completely,” Brooks remarked, “but saved the head which is gold.” Sumner was carried home unconscious. Frances, aghast at the near-fatal attack on her friend and the savagery of the Missourians, wrote that the events had “deepened that furor in my soul.”