from An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States
Younger sister of the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879) also left behind a life of privilege in the slaveholding upper class of South Carolina when she moved to Philadelphia in 1829 and joined her sister in the Quaker community there. Angelina’s antislavery writing first found expression in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, published in The Liberator in 1835, and then in her pamphlet An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836), which deliberately paralleled her older sister’s pamphlet addressed to southern clergymen the same year. In this excerpt from her much longer tract of 1837, she makes clear her potentially shocking thesis: “dear sisters, let us not forget that Northern women are participators in the crime of slavery.” Angelina married the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in 1838, with whom she had three children, and helped him compile his American Slavery As It Is (1839), to which Sarah also contributed. Thereafter the three of them lived and worked together as reformers and educators in New Jersey and Massachusetts, where Angelina died six years after her sister.
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II. WOMEN THE VICTIMS OF SLAVERY.
Out of the millions of slaves who have been stolen from Africa, a very great number must have been women who were torn from the arms of their fathers and husbands, brothers and children, and subjected to all the horrors of the middle passage and the still greater sufferings of slavery in a foreign land. Multitudes of these were cast upon our inhospitable shores; some of them now toil out a life of bondage, “one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that” which our fathers rose in rebellion to oppose. But the great mass of female slaves in the southern States are the descendants of these hapless strangers; 1,000,000 of them now wear the iron yoke of slavery in this land of boasted liberty and law. They are our country women—they are our sisters; and to us, as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue. Upon those of us especially who have named the name of Christ, they have peculiar claims, and claims which we must answer, or we shall incur a heavy load of guilt.
Women, too, are constituted by nature the peculiar guardians of children, and children are the victims of this horrible system. Helpless infancy is robbed of the tender care of the mother and the protection of the father. There are in this Christian land thousands of little children who have been made orphans by the “domestic institution” of the South; and whilst woman’s hand is stretched out to gather in the orphans and the half orphans whom death has made in our country, and to shelter them from the storms of adversity, O let us not forget the orphans whom crime has made in our midst; but let us plead the cause of these innocents. Let us expose the heinous wickedness of the internal slave-trade. It is an organized system for the disruption of family ties, a manufactory of widows and orphans.
III. WOMEN ARE SLAVEHOLDERS.
Multitudes of the Southern women hold men, women and children as property. They are pampered in luxury, and nursed in the school of tyranny; they sway the iron rod of power, and they rob the laborer of his hire. Immortal beings tremble at their nod, and bow in abject submission at their word, and under the cowskin too often wielded by their own delicate hands. Women at the South hold their own sisters and brothers in bondage. Start not at this dreadful assertion—we speak that which some of us do know—we testify that which some of us have seen. Such facts ought to be known, that the women of the North may understand their duties, and be incited to perform them.
Southern families often present the most disgusting scenes of dissension, in which the mistress acts a part derogatory to her own character as a woman. Jefferson has so exactly described the bitter fruits of slavery in the domestic circle that we cannot forbear re-quoting it: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in a circle of smaller slaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” We wish this picture applied only to the “commerce between master and slave;” but we know that there are female tyrants too, who are prompt to lay their complaints of misconduct before their husbands, brothers and sons, and to urge them to commit acts of violence against their helpless slaves. Others still more cruel, place the lash in the hands of some trusty domestic, and stand by whilst he lays the heavy strokes upon the unresisting victim, deaf to the cries for mercy which rend the air, or rather the more enraged at such appeals, which are only answered by the Southern lady with the prompt command of “give her more for that.” This work of chastisement is often performed by a brother, or other relative of the poor sufferer, which circumstance stings like an adder the very heart of the slave while her body writhes under the lash. Other mistresses who cannot bear that their delicate ears should be pained by the screams of the poor sufferers, write an order to the master of the Charleston work-house, or the New Orleans calaboose, where they are most cruelly stretched in order to render the stroke of the whip or the blow of the paddle more certain to produce cuts and wounds which cause the blood to flow at every stroke. And let it be remembered that these poor creatures are often women who are most indecently divested of their clothing and exposed to the gaze of the executioner of a woman’s command.
What then, our beloved sisters, must be the effects of such a system upon the domestic character of the white females? Can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit? Can such despotism mould the character of the Southern woman to gentleness and love? or may we not fairly conclude that all that suavity, for which slaveholding ladies are so conspicuous, is in many instances the paint and the varnish of hypocrisy, the fashionable polish of a heartless superficiality?
But it is not the character alone of the mistress that is deeply injured by the possession and exercise of such despotic power, nor is it the degradation and suffering to which the slave is continually subject; but another important consideration is, that in consequence of the dreadful state of morals at the South, the wife and the daughter sometimes find their homes a scene of the most mortifying, heart-rending preference of the degraded domestic, or the colored daughter of the head of the family. There are, alas, too many families, of which the contentions of Abraham’s household is a fair example. But we forbear to lift the veil of private life any higher; let these few hints suffice to give you some idea of what is daily passing behind that curtain which has been so carefully drawn before the scenes of domestic life in Christian America.
And now, dear sisters, let us not forget that Northern women are participators in the crime of slavery—too many of us have surrendered our hearts and hands to the wealthy planters of the South, and gone down with them to live on the unrequited toil of the slave. Too many of us have ourselves become slaveholders, our hearts have been hardened under the searing influence of the system, and we, too, have learned to be tyrants in the school of despots. Too few of us have replied to the matrimonial proposals of the slaveholder:
“Go back, haughty Southron, thy treasures of gold
Are dimmed by the blood of the hearts thou hast sold;
Thy home may be lovely, but round it I hear
The crack of the whip and the footsteps of fear.
Full low at thy bidding thy negroes may kneel,
With the iron of bondage on spirit and heel;
Yet know that the Northerner sooner would be
In fetters with them than in freedom with thee.”
But let it be so no longer. Let us henceforward resolve, that the women of the free States never again will barter their principles for the blood-bought luxuries of the South—never again will regard with complacency, much less with the tender sentiments of love, any man “who buildeth his house by unrighteousness and his chambers by wrong, that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him naught for his work.”
And there are others amongst us, who, though not slaveholders ourselves, yet have those who are nearest and dearest to us involved in this sin. Ah, yes! some of us have fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, who are living in the slave States, and are daily served by the unremunerated servant; and for the enlightenment of these we are most solmenly bound to labor and to pray without ceasing. Vast responsibilities are rolled upon us by the fact that we believe we have received the truth on this subject, whilst they are in ignorance and error. Some Northern women too, are the wives of slaveholders, and of those who hold mortgages on the slaves of the South.
IV. WOMEN USE THE PRODUCTS OF SLAVE LABOR.
Multitudes of Northern women are daily making use of the products of slave labor. They are clothing themselves and their families in the cotton, and eating the rice and the sugar which they well know has cost the slave his unrequited toil, his blood and his tears; and if the maxim in law be founded in justice and truth, that “the receiver is as bad as the thief,” how much greater the condemnation of those who not merely receive the stolen products of the slave’s labor, but voluntarily purchase them, and continually appropriate them to their own use.
We frequently meet with individuals who, though very particular in not using sugar which has been raised by the slave, yet feel no compunction in purchasing slave-grown cotton, and assign as a reason, that there is not that waste of life in the culture of cotton, which attends that of sugar. But is there less waste of blood? We copy the following description of the whip which is made by Northern men, and used by Southern overseers on cotton plantations. “The staff is about 20 or 22 inches in length, with a large and heavy head, which is often loaded with a quarter or half a pound of lead, wrapped in catgut, and securely fastened on, so that nothing but the greatest violence can separate it from the staff. The lash is 10 feet long, made of small strips of buckskin, tanned so as to be dry and hard, and plaited carefully and closely together, of the thickness in the larger part of a man’s little finger, but quite small at each extremity. At the furthest end of this thong is attached a cracker, nine inches in length, made of strong sewing silk, twisted and knotted, until it feels as firm as the hardest twine.
“This whip, in an unpracticed hand, is a very awkward and inefficient weapon; but the best qualification of the overseer of a cotton plantation, is the ability of using this whip with adroitness, and when wielded by an experienced arm it is one of the keenest instruments of torture ever invented by the ingenuity of man. The cat-o’-nine-tails, used in the British military service, is but a clumsy instrument beside this whip, which has superseded the cowhide, the hickory, and every other species of lash on the cotton plantations. The cowhide and the hickory bruise and mangle the flesh of the sufferer; but this whip cuts, when expertly applied, almost as keen as a knife, and never bruises the flesh nor injures the bones.” What then do our sisters say to using cotton which is raised under the keen and cutting lash of this whip, by the mancipated mothers, wives and daughters of the South? Can these sufferers really believe we are remembering them that are in bonds as bound with them, whilst we freely use what costs them so much agony?
And has the Lord uttered no rebuke to us in these fearful times? Is there no lesson for us to learn in recent events? Who are the men that now weep and mourn over their broken fortunes—their ruined hopes? Are they not the merchants and manufacturers, who have traded largely in the unrequited labor of the slave? Men who have joined hand in hand with the wicked, and entered into covenant to rivet the chains of the captive?
We are often told that free articles cannot be obtained; but why not? Our answer is, because there is so little demand for them. Only let the moral sense of the free States become so pure and so elevated as to induce them to refuse to purchase slave-grown products, and the manufacturers, and merchants, and grocers, will soon devise some plan by which to supply their factories and stores with free labor cotton and goods. But we may be asked what are we to do until the market is supplied? We unhesitatingly reply, suffer the inconvenience of deprivation, and then will you, dear sisters, become the favored instruments in the Lord’s hand, of producing that change in public feeling which will lead to such action as will bring the desired supply into our market. We find that those who really wish to obtain such articles, are almost universally able to do so, if they will pay a little higher price, and be satisfied to wear what may not be of quite so good a quality; but it is frequently the case that even this trifling self-denial is not necessary.
We would remind you of the course pursued by our revolutionary fathers and mothers when Great Britain levied upon her colonies what they regarded as unjust taxces. Read the words of the historian, and ponder well the noble self-denial of the men and women of this country, when they considered their own liberties endangered by the encroachments of England’s bad policy. Look, then, at the influence which their measures produced in making it the interest of the merchants and manufacturers in Great Britain to second the petitions of her colonies for a redress of grievances, and judge for yourselves whether the Southern planters would not gladly second the efforts of the abolitionists, by petitioning their National and State Legislatures for the abolition of slavery, if they found they could no longer sell their slave-grown produce.
(1837)