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Angelina and Sarah
Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters
by Carol Berkin
Professor of History, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
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| Appeal
to the Christian Women of the South, by Angelina
Grimke, 1836 (GLC 08642) |
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Angelina Grimke and her sister Sarah Grimke were legends
in their own lifetimes. Together these South Carolina
sisters made history: daring to speak before "promiscuous"
or mixed crowds of men and women, publishing some of the
most powerful antislavery tracts of the antebellum era,
and stretching the boundaries of women's public role as
the first women to testify before a state legislature
on the question of African American rights. Their crusade,
which was not only to free the enslaved but to end racial
discrimination throughout the United States, made them
more radical than many of the reformers who advocated
an end to slavery but who could not envision true social
and political equality for the freedmen and women. And
the Grimke sisters were among the first abolitionists
to recognize the importance of women's rights and to speak
and write about the cause of female equality.
What made Angelina and her sister Sarah unique within
abolitionist circles was neither their oratorical and
literary talents nor their energetic commitment to the
causes of racial and gender equality. What made them exceptional
was their first-hand experience with the institution of
slavery and with its daily horrors and injustices. Abolitionists
like William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of The Liberator,
and Theodore Weld, who Angelina married in 1838, could
give stirring speeches about the need to abolish slavery,
but they could not testify to its impact on African Americans
or on their masters from personal knowledge.
Angelina Grimke was born in 1805, the youngest of fourteen
children born to John Grimke and Mary Smith Grimke. As
the daughter of one of Charleston's leading judges, she
could look forward to a life of luxury and ease, her comfort
assured by the presence of slaves trained to respond to
her wishes. As an eligible young woman, she could have
enjoyed the lively social life of Charleston's planter
society with its balls and dinner parties that would have
led eventually to a good marriage and an elegant home
of her own. But Angelina Grimke chose a different path:
Like her older sister, Sarah, she left the South and devoted
her life to racial and gender equality. In the early nineteenth
century, the causes that the Grimke sisters espoused placed
them among the most radical Americans of their day.
Angelina's self-imposed exile from her family and her
hometown was not the result of a personally unhappy childhood.
Although her own mother was somewhat distant, her older
sister Sarah doted on her and, as the youngest member
of the family, she was often the center of attention.
But in the world around her, Angelina witnessed suffering
that disturbed her: a young slave boy who walked with
difficulty due to the whip-mark scars on his back and
legs; family slaves who were mistreated and abused; and
screams of pain from the nearby workhouse, where slaves
were dragged on a treadmill, suspended by their arms.
It was not in Angelina's character to remain silent about
these injustices. Under the guidance of a tiny local congregation
of Quakers, she renounced materialism and its comforts
and began a regime of austerity and moral and religious
introspection. But Angelina was not content to pursue
her own salvation quietly. Having reformed herself, she
set out to reform her family, eager to change the views
of her mother, sisters, and brothers, and anxious to enlighten
them as she believed herself to be enlightened. Compelled
to speak out, she antagonized her family by criticizing
their love of finery, their idleness, and above all, their
acceptance of slavery. Perhaps to her surprise, she could
not win over her mother or her siblings. "I am much tried
at times at the manner in which I am obliged to live here,"
she wrote in her journal. By 1829, she had resolved to
live there no longer.
In November of 1829, Angelina moved to Philadelphia, where
Sarah had already settled. While most Philadelphians did
not share Angelina's abolitionist sentiment, she did find
a small circle of antislavery advocates. Still, she was
uncertain what she could do for the cause of abolition.
She began attending antislavery meetings, encouraged by
some male abolitionists' call to women to become activists
in the movement. In 1835, she was disturbed by violent
riots and demonstrations against abolitionists and African
Americans in New York and Philadelphia, and by the burning
of antislavery pamphlets in her own hometown of Charleston.
When William Lloyd Garrison published an appeal to citizens
of Boston to repudiate all mob violence, Angelina felt
compelled to send the noted abolitionist a personal letter
of support. "The ground upon which you stand is holy ground,"
she told him, "never-never surrender it…if you surrender
it, the hope of the slave is extinguished." Agitation
for the end to slavery must continue, Angelina declared,
even if abolitionists are persecuted and attacked because,
as she put it, "This is a cause worth dying for…"
Garrison published Angelina's letter, never thinking to
ask permission to share her private thoughts with his
readers. Her friends among the Quakers in Philadelphia
were shocked and Angelina was embarrassed. But her career
as a public figure began on the day that issue of The
Liberator came out, a career both meteoric and pioneering.
Angelina and Sarah became the first women to serve as
agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In January
and February of 1837, the sisters toured New York State,
filling churches with the sympathetic, the curious, and
the hostile. Angelina proved to be a dynamic and persuasive
orator and was quickly acknowledged as the most powerful
female public speaker for the cause of abolition-unequaled
by many of the male orators who traveled the reform lecture
circuit.
From New York, the Grimkes went on to New Jersey. Back
again in New York, this time in Poughkeepsie, the sisters
spoke for the first time to a "promiscuous," or mixed-gender,
audience. Although skeptics had warned that two women
speaking in public on political issues would damage the
already controversial antislavery movement, the Grimkes'
first tour was widely regarded as successful. By May,
the sisters were prominent figures at the Anti-Slavery
Convention of American Women, held in New York City in
1837. Two weeks after the convention ended, they were
off to Boston to begin an exhausting speaking tour of
New England. There, on June 21, 1837, the sisters again
addressed a mixed audience of women and men, this one
far larger than the audience in Poughkeepsie. From that
evening on, there were no gender restrictions for their
talks.
"It is wonderful," Angelina wrote, "how the way has
been opened for us to address mixed audiences." But opposition
to women in the public sphere had not vanished. Repeatedly,
Angelina found herself forced to defend a woman's right
to speak on a political issue. Each time she countered
criticism by pointing out that women were citizens and
had civic duties as serious as men's. Turning, as she
often did, to the Bible, she cited the active role of
women in civic and religious affairs in the text. However,
many New Englanders were not convinced. On July 17, in
Amesbury, Massachusetts, two young men challenged Angelina
to a debate over slavery-and over women's right to a public
voice. It was the first public debate of this type between
a man and a woman. An eyewitness described Angelina as
"calm, modest, and dignified in her manner," and declared
that she had "with the utmost ease brushed away the cobwebs,
which her puny antagonist had thrown her way."
Angelina and Sarah not only spoke but wrote about slavery
and about the rights - and responsibilities --of women.
Even before Angelina received the invitation to become
an antislavery agent, she had written an Appeal to the
Christian Women of the Southern States, calling on her
old friends and acquaintances in South Carolina to become
active participants in the movement to end slavery. "I
know you do not make the laws," she wrote, "but I also
know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and
daughters of those who do." She advised them to read on
the subject, to pray over it, to speak on it, and finally
to act on it. It was advice that echoed her own odyssey
to abolition. When copies of the Appeal reached Charleston,
the local police warned Mary Smith Grimke that her daughter
would be imprisoned if she ever set foot in the city of
her birth again.
Angelina addressed her next major publication to the women
and men of the North, especially those like the educator
Catherine Beecher who advocated colonization as the solution
to the racial problems of the country. In Letters to Catherine
Beecher, Angelina rejected what she called the exile of
African Americans and accused those who embraced colonization
of racism. Black Americans were entitled to "every privilege,
social, civil and religious" that white Americans enjoyed.
With passion Angelina declared that she was "trying to
talk down, and write down, and live down" the prejudice
that stood in the way of true equality. It was this frontal
attack on racial prejudice that marked Angelina Grimke
as far more radical than most of the nation's abolitionists.
Although Sarah was a poor public speaker - unlike Angelina,
who mesmerized audiences -- she was Angelina's equal when
it came to the written word. In July 1837, the first of
Sarah's remarkable Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
appeared in the New England Spectator, with its simple
but powerful demand: "All I ask our brethren is, that
they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit
us to stand upright on that ground which God designed
us to occupy." In combination with the sisters' abolitionist
activity, this feminist tract galvanized the opposition.
Before the month was over, the Congregational General
Association had approved and issued a "Pastoral Letter"
that denounced women who transgressed the boundaries of
their "proper sphere." Despite the letter, New England
crowds flocked to hear the Grimkes throughout August,
September and October, and the sisters kept up a grueling
pace, sometimes speaking at six meetings a week.
By the end of the fall, Angelina was gravely ill, weakened
by emotional as well as physical fatigue. But on February
21, 1838, she had recovered enough to make history once
again, becoming the first woman to speak before a legislative
body in the U.S. "I stand before you," she told the members
of a committee of the Massachusetts legislature as well
as a crowd of enemies and supporters in the galleries,
"on behalf of the 20,000 women of Massachusetts whose
names are enrolled on petitions [which] relate to the
great and solemn subject of slavery…" And, as she had
so many times before, Angelina pleaded the cause of the
African American, describing the cruelty she had seen
with her own eyes in her native South and the racial prejudice
she saw around her in the North.
Throughout the months of her work with the antislavery
society Angelina had come to know the idiosyncratic and
dynamic Theodore Weld, the abolitionist leader known as
"the most mobbed man in America." On Monday, May 14, 1838,
Weld and Grimke married. These two activists saw their
union as a coming together "not merely nor mainly nor
at all comparatively TO ENJOY, but together to do and
dare, together to toil and testify and suffer." Two days
after their wedding, Angelina and Theodore attended the
antislavery convention in Philadelphia. Feelings ran high
in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading
arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening
of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the
convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against
the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose
to speak out against slavery. "I have seen it! I have
seen it!" she told her audience. "I know it has horrors
that can never be described." Stones hit the windows,
but Angelina continued. For an hour more, she held the
audience's rapt attention for the last public speech she
would give. The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded
the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building,
ransacked the antislavery offices inside, and destroyed
all records and books that were found.
Angelina Grimke's career as an antislavery speaker ended
that night in Philadelphia. But she and Theodore continued
to write, producing American Slavery As It Is in 1839,
a documentary account of the evils of the Southern labor
system. Over the next few decades, the Grimke sisters
and Weld would earn a modest living as teachers, often
in schools that Weld established. All three kept abreast
of political developments and attended antislavery meetings.
When the Civil War came, Angelina strongly supported the
Union effort. She had hoped for a peaceful means of freeing
the enslaved but had come to accept the reality that force
was needed.
Sarah Grimke died at the age of 81 in December of 1873.
Angelina, who had been paralyzed for several years because
of strokes, died on October 26, 1879. Theodore Weld survived
until 1895. All three had lived to see the end of slavery
and the rise of a women's rights movement. In 1863, Angelina
had written: "I want to be identified with the negro;
until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours." Over
her lifetime her work had been guided by a vision that
both racial and gender equality would one day be realities.
Those of us who study the abolition of slavery and the
winning of the suffrage for women recognize her role in
achieving both.
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