Angelina Grimké

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (February 20, 1805 – October 26, 1879) was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.

Although raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Angelina and Sarah spent their entire adult lives in the North. Angelina's greatest fame was between 1835, when William Lloyd Garrison published a letter of hers in his anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a speech to abolitionists with a hostile, noisy, stone-throwing crowd outside Pennsylvania Hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women's rights.

Drawing her views from natural rights theory (as set forth in the Declaration of Independence), the United States Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own childhood memories of the cruel slavery and racism in the South, Grimké proclaimed the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman.

Early years and religious activity

Both Mary and John Grimké were strong advocates of the traditional, upper-class, Southern values that permeated their rank of Charleston society. Mary would not permit the girls to socialize outside the prescribed elite social circles, and John remained a slaveholder his entire life.

Nicknamed "Nina", young Angelina Grimké was very close to her older sister Sarah Moore Grimké, who, at the age of 13, persuaded her parents to allow her to be Angelina's godmother. The two sisters maintained a close relationship throughout their lives, and lived together for most of their lives, albeit with several short periods of separation.

Even as a child, Angelina was described in family letters and diaries as the most self-righteous, curious, and self-assured of all her siblings. In her biography The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina, historian Gerda Lerner writes: "It never occurred to [Angelina] that she should abide by the superior judgment of her male relatives or that anyone might consider her inferior, simply for being a girl." More so than her elder sister (and later, fellow abolitionist) Sarah, Angelina seemed to be naturally inquisitive and outspoken, a trait which often offended her traditional family and friends.

When the time came for her confirmation in the Episcopal Church at the age of 13, Angelina refused to recite the creed of faith. An inquisitive and rebellious girl, she concluded that she could not agree with it and would not complete the confirmation ceremony. Angelina converted to the Presbyterian faith in April 1826, aged 21.

Angelina was an active member of the Presbyterian church. A proponent of biblical study and interfaith education, she taught a Sabbath school class and also provided religious services to her family's slaves—a practice her mother originally frowned upon, but later participated in. Grimké became a close friend of the pastor of her church, Rev. William McDowell. McDowell was a Northerner who had previously been the pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey. Grimké and McDowell were both very opposed to the institution of slavery, on the grounds that it was a morally deficient system that violated Christian law and human rights. McDowell advocated patience and prayer over direct action and argued that abolishing slavery "would create even worse evils". but she remained in Philadelphia for the time being.

Over time, she became frustrated by the Quaker community's lack of involvement in the contemporary debate on slavery. In the first two decades after the Revolution, its preachers had traveled in the South to preach manumission of slaves, but increased demand in the domestic market with the development of cotton in the Deep South ended that window of freedom. She began to read more abolitionist literature, including the periodicals The Emancipator and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator (in which she would later be published). Sarah and the traditional Quakers disapproved of Angelina's interest in radical abolitionism, but she became steadily more involved in the movement. She began to attend anti-slavery meetings and lectures, and joined the newly organized Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835.

In the fall of 1835, violence erupted when the controversial abolitionist George Thompson spoke in public. William Lloyd Garrison wrote an article in The Liberator in the hopes of calming the rioting masses. Angelina had been steadily influenced by Garrison's work, and this article inspired her to write him a personal letter on the subject. The letter stated her concerns and opinions on the issues of abolitionism and mob violence, as well as her personal admiration for Garrison and his values. Garrison was so impressed with Grimké's letter, which he called "soul-thrilling," that he published it in the next issue of The Liberator, praising her for her passion, expressive writing style, and noble ideas. The letter, reprinted in the New York Evangelist and elsewhere, gave Angelina great standing among many abolitionists, but its publication offended and stirred controversy within the Orthodox Quaker meeting, which openly condemned such radical activism, especially by a woman. Sarah Grimké asked her sister to withdraw the letter, concerned that such publicity would alienate her from the Quaker community. Though initially embarrassed by the letter's publication, Angelina refused. The letter was later reprinted in the New York Evangelist and other abolitionist papers; it was also included in a pamphlet with Garrison's Appeal to the Citizens of Boston. In 1836, Grimké wrote "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South", urging Southern women to petition their state legislatures and church officials to end slavery. It was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Scholars consider it a high point of Grimké's sociopolitical agenda.

In the fall of 1836, the Grimké sisters were invited to Ohio to attend the American Anti-Slavery Society's two-week training conference for anti-slavery agents; they were the only women in the group. There they met Theodore Dwight Weld, a trainer and one of the Society's leading agents; Angelina and Theodore later married. During the following winter, the sisters were commissioned to speak at women's meetings and organize women's anti-slavery societies in the New York City region and nearby New Jersey. In May, 1837, they joined leading women abolitionists from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in holding the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, held to expand women's anti-slavery actions to other states.

Immediately after this convention, the sisters went by invitation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to Massachusetts. New England abolitionists were accused of distorting and exaggerating the realities of slavery, and the sisters were asked to speak throughout New England on their firsthand knowledge. Almost from the beginning, their meetings were open to men. Although defenders later claimed that the sisters addressed mixed audiences only because men insisted on coming, primary evidence indicates that their meetings were open to men by deliberate design, not only to carry their message to male as well as female hearers, but as a means of breaking women's fetters and establish "a new order of things." Thus, in addition to petitioning, women were transgressing social mores by speaking in public. In response, a state convention of Massachusetts' Congregational ministers, meeting at the end of June, issued a pastoral letter condemning public work by women and urging local churches to close their doors to the Grimkés' presentations.

As the sisters spoke throughout Massachusetts during the summer of 1837, the controversy over women abolitionists' public and political work fueled a growing controversy over women's rights and duties, both within and outside the anti-slavery movement. Angelina responded to Catharine Beecher's letter with open letters of her own, Letters to Catharine Beecher, printed first in The New England Spectator and The Liberator, and then in book form in 1838. Sarah Grimké wrote Letters on the Province of Woman, addressed to Mary S. Parker, which appeared first in the Liberator before being published in book form. Addressed to the president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, who in the wake of the pastoral letter wanted women abolitionists to withdraw from public work, Sarah's letters were a strong defense of women's right and duty to participate on equal terms with men in all such work.

In February 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature, becoming the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. She not only spoke against slavery, but defended women's right to petition, both as a moral-religious duty and as a political right. Abolitionist Robert F. Wallcut stated that "Angelina Grimké's serene, commanding eloquence enchained attention, disarmed prejudice and carried her hearers with her."

On May 17, 1838, two days after her marriage,</blockquote> Rioters outside the building began to throw bricks and stones, breaking the windows of the hall. Angelina continued the speech, and after her conclusion, the abolitionist women left the building arm-in-arm, a white woman with a Black woman, for the latter's protection. Within hours, Pennsylvania Hall was destroyed by arson. Angelina was the final speaker in the Hall.

Angelina's lectures were critical not only of Southern slaveholders but also of Northerners who tacitly complied with the status quo, by purchasing slave-made products and exploiting slaves through the commercial and economic exchanges they made with slave owners in the South. They were met with a considerable amount of opposition, both because Angelina was a female and because she was an abolitionist.

Major writings

Two of Grimké's most notable works were her essay "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South" and her series of letters to Catharine Beecher.

After walking through the seven-step theological argument against slavery, Angelina states the reasons for directing her plea toward Southern women in particular. She acknowledges a foreseeable objection: that even if a Southern woman agrees that slavery is sinful, she has no legislative power to enact change. To this, Grimké responds that a woman has four duties on the issue: to read, to pray, to speak, and to act. While women do not have the political power to enact change on their own, she points out that these women are "the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do." Her vision, however, was not so simple as what would later be called "Republican Motherhood." She also exhorts women to speak and act on their moral opposition to slavery and to endure whatever persecution might result as a consequence. She dismisses the notion that women are too weak to withstand such consequences. Thus, she proposes the notion of women as empowered political actors on the slavery issue, without even touching on the question of suffrage.

Angelina also states, in a reply letter to Catharine E. Beecher, what she believes to be the abolitionist's definition of slavery: "Man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property. Therefore, we affirm that every slaveholder is a man-stealer; To steal a man is to rob him of himself." She reiterates well-known principles from the Declaration of Independence regarding the equality of man. Grimké argues that "a man is a man, and as a man he has inalienable rights, among which is the right to personal liberty ... No circumstances can ever justify a man in holding his fellow man as property ... The claim to him as property is an annihilation of his rights to himself, which is the foundation upon which all his other rights are built."

The essay also reflects Angelina's lifelong enthusiasm for the universal education of women and slaves. Her Appeal emphasizes the importance of women's educating their slaves or future laborers: "Should [your slaves] remain [in your employ] teach them, and have them taught the common branches of an English education; they have minds and those minds, ought to be improved."

Angelina's Letters are recognized widely as an early feminist argument, although only two of the letters address feminism and woman's suffrage. Letter XII reflects some of the rhetorical style of the Declaration of Independence and is indicative of Grimké's religious values. She argues that all humans are moral beings and should be judged as such, regardless of their sex: "Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being ... and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights—I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female. It is my solemn conviction, that, until this principle of equality is recognized and embodied in practice, the Church can do nothing effectual for the permanent reformation of the world."

Although Weld was said to have been supportive of Angelina's desire to remain politically active after their marriage, she eventually retreated to a life of domesticity due to failing health. Sarah lived with the couple in New Jersey, and the sisters continued to correspond and visit with their friends in the abolitionist and emerging women's rights movements. They operated a school in their home, and later a boarding school at Raritan Bay Union, a utopian community. At the school, they taught the children of other noted abolitionists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In the years after the Civil War, they raised funds to pay for the graduate education of their two mixed-race nephews, the sons of their brother Henry W. Grimké (1801–1852) and an enslaved woman he owned. The sisters paid for Archibald Henry Grimké and Rev. Francis James Grimké to attend Harvard Law School and Princeton Theological Seminary, respectively. Archibald became a lawyer and later an ambassador to Haiti and Francis became a Presbyterian minister. Both became leading civil rights activists. Archibald's daughter, Angelina Weld Grimké, became a poet and author.

Sarah Grimké died in 1873. The following year, Angelina suffered a paralyzing stroke, which afflicted her until her death. Her grave is unmarked, apparently at her own request.

Archival material

The papers of the Grimké family are in the South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, South Carolina. The Weld–Grimké papers are at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Legacy

In 1880, Theodore Weld published a volume titled In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld.

The Grimké sisters and Theodore Dwight Weld are featured prominently in the juvenile fiction book The Forge and the Forest (1975) by Betty Underwood.

Angelina Grimké is memorialized in Judy Chicago's 1979 artwork The Dinner Party.

In 1998, the Grimké sisters were inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

The Grimké sisters appear as main characters in Ain Gordon's 2013 play If She Stood, commissioned by the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia.

In 2016 Angelina Grimké was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame.

"The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (1838)" is a poem by Melissa Range, published in the September 30, 2019, issue of The Nation.

In November 2019, a newly reconstructed bridge over the Neponset River in Hyde Park was renamed for the Grimké sisters. It is now known as the Grimké Sisters Bridge.

The Grimké sisters are remembered on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

In 2024, a play recounting her speech was performed in the space where Angelina spoke to the Massachusetts Senate chamber; A Light Under the Dome was written by Patrick Gabridge and directed by Courtney O'Connor, and starring Amanda Collins as Angelina.

References

Notes

Bibliography

In Memory. Angelina Grimké Weld (1880)
The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (1974)
Arguing About Slavery (1995)

External links

Materials on Angelina Grimké at Project MUSE
An article from Cyberspacei.com
An entry from the Columbia Encyclopedia
The Abolitionists – The Abolitionists, Part One, Chapter 1 (about Angelina Grimké). American Experience, PBS - Preview
Angelina Grimke Weld: Address at Pennsylvania Hall, 1838; in google books, Chapter 3 (no pagination)
Michals, Debra. "Angelina Grimke Weld". National Women's History Museum, 2015.