Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt Julie Husband Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. By Nancy A. Hewitt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xvi + 413 pp. $39.95 cloth/$26.49 eBook. Amy Kirby Post housed self-emancipated people fleeing slavery for Canada, helped Harriet Jacobs find an editor and publisher for her slave narrative, organized fairs and subscriptions to sustain Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, and followed Susan B. Anthony by attempting to register to vote in 1872. She forged many of the interracial, cross-gender, and cross-organizational bonds that drove social changes in the nineteenth-century United States; and yet, until recently, historians have paid little attention to her. In the course of recounting her extraordinary work, Nancy A. Hewitt builds a case for Post’s universal reform philosophy as well as her generous practice of opening her home and life to others. This philosophy and practice made Post, according to Hewitt, into a “conductor” across radical movements (5). For contemporary readers, Post emerges as a model for what it meant in the nineteenth century to be an anti-racist ally, one who need not be in the front, defining an injustice and its solution, but might more effectively work as a part of a team, amplifying the voices of those who speak for themselves. The first three chapters perform considerable world-building, as readers see how the Quaker communities of Jericho (Long Island), Ledyard (central New York), and the boom city of Rochester, New York, fostered a spirit of independent judgment and, for women, an unusual freedom to speak publicly. These communities, too, supported interracial education, which contributed to Post’s later sensitivity to the often fraught interracial dynamics within antislavery communities. White-dominated antislavery organizations welcomed the testimony of fugitive slaves but often rejected African American leadership. The issue could be magnified in the ladies’ antislavery societies where much of the fund-raising took place. Post’s own leadership in the Western New York Antislavery Society provides a model for interracial alliances. She hosted in her home Black abolitionists, including Douglass, his friend and fellow journalist William C. Nell, self-emancipated writer Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth, and became lifelong friends with them all. She facilitated Truth’s speaking career and Jacobs’s writing and speaking career by connecting them to her extensive reform network. She resourcefully established a reading room above Douglass’s offices at The North Star that marketed antislavery products. At one time, it was managed by Harriet Jacobs, thereby giving Jacobs both an income and a place to write. Meetings for the Western New York Antislavery Society also took place at the meeting room, making it easy for Jacobs to participate. [End Page 175] Nonetheless, Post recognized the need for autonomous Black organizations. As Hewitt explains, “Given black women’s relationships with white women—for whom they often worked as servants, laundresses, or seamstresses—and their well-earned distrust of white men, it is not surprising that they chose to labor in a separate society” (121). Hewitt claims that Post’s unique ability to bridge racial and gender divides owed much to her Quaker upbringing. Quakers hold each individual’s reflections on truth and justice—their “inner light”—sacred (3). Post resisted the kind of infighting that poisoned relations between political abolitionists and Garrisonian abolitionists, who rejected voting, public office, and political action. One limit to this strategy was her difficulty surmounting prejudices that made her a less successful fund-raiser than Julia Griffiths, Frederick Douglass’s English friend who became his greatest asset in making his newspaper a success in Rochester. Confident, extroverted, and status-conscious, Griffiths emerges in Hewitt’s telling as an antihero to Post. Griffiths offended many, most especially Frederick Douglass’s wife, Anna, but she likely saved Douglass’s paper from bankruptcy by forging connections with the wealthy and influential in Rochester. One area that remains somewhat under-explored in the biography is Amy and Isaac Post’s leadership within Spiritualism. They were central to popularizing this belief in communication with the dead, promoting the famed “rappers” Kate and Margaretta Fox and...