Eighteen nineteen was the last year of real peace for America before the debate over slavery became a public and national issue. In that year, there were eleven free and eleven slave states, a deadlock that ensured the safety of slavery where it existed. The most recent addition to the Union, Alabama, kept that delicate balance intact, though even then, just forty-three years after the birth of the Republic, storm clouds were forming on the horizon. In 1819, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams bought Florida from Spain for a paltry $5 million, a transaction that would surely add another star to the glittering slave constellation. But no one could have predicted how decisively, and how soon, the looming controversy would divide the country. Indeed, in 1819, the nation’s attention was focused on the “era of good feelings,” marked by the restoration of the White House (burned by the British in 1812), the popularity of President James Monroe, and the opening of the Mississippi Valley for settlement. America’s favorite sport was squirrel shooting, with teams of four contestants pitted against one another. The frontier moved west to Illinois. In America’s schools, children were fascinated by Parson Mason Weems’s Life of George Washington. In 1819, Abraham Lincoln was ten years old.
John Faucheraud Grimké disembarked in Philadelphia weakened by the strenuous voyage from Charleston and emaciated as a result of the unknown disease that was ravaging his body. A formidable presence in his early years and an imposing and commanding figure as a judge, John Grimké was now almost totally dependent on the wisdom and judgment of his twenty-six-year-old daughter, Sarah. The arrival of the judge and his daughter went unheralded, for while the Grimkés were well known in South Carolina, they were nearly anonymous in the north, especially in the young nation’s second-largest city, one of its most cosmopolitan centers. Sarah and her father came to Philadelphia alone, unattended by any of their servants—not that any were necessary: this was to be a short visit, for as Judge Grimké repeatedly assured his daughter, as soon as his condition improved, they would return to Charleston.
Within minutes of their arrival, Sarah tended to their belongings, shepherded her father to a Quaker-owned boardinghouse, and arranged for their meals. She urged her father to rest. Their hosts diligently ministered to their guests and made them feel welcome. Sarah, so long dependent on her father for guidance, realized that he was now incapable of giving her the support she needed. She took charge of the situation, issuing her father preemptory orders, seeing to his needs, and composing the rhythm of their days to fit his illness. Soon they called at the office of Dr. Phillip Synge Physick, the well-known surgeon, who was also an expert diagnostician and one of Philadelphia’s leading citizens.
Himself a Quaker, like their hosts, Physick was a kind and gentle man, both thorough and intelligent in his examination, but he could not work miracles. Over a period of several weeks, he attempted to find the cause of Judge Grimké’s increasing weakness, but he failed to pinpoint it. Other doctors might have experimented with the standard—if questionable—treatments of the day, but Physick was not a normal physician. Rather than depend on such methods, he prescribed little more than rest and sustenance for his patient and then, when there was no improvement, admitted that he was at a loss. He could find no reason for the judge’s illness, he said, and therefore could not prescribe a treatment.
In June, his options exhausted, Dr. Physick advised Sarah that she and her father should retire to Long Branch, New Jersey, on the Atlantic Ocean. Rest and the “sea air,” he suggested, might bring her father back to health. But beyond that, he refused to give her even a glimmer of hope for her father’s recovery: “His life is in God’s hands,” he said. Sarah understood then, just three weeks after their arrival, that her father’s condition was critical. Although she continued to ignore all signs of his impending death, she knew in her heart that it was very unlikely he would make the return journey with her to South Carolina. Once again, though now thoroughly frightened by the prospect of her father’s dying, Sarah made all of the arrangements for their stay on the Jersey shore. At the time, Long Branch was not yet the seaside resort that it would become by century’s end; instead, it retained much of its colonial character, despite the few vacationers who came out in mid-July and stayed until the end of August. During those six weeks, families traveled from Philadelphia and New York to rest, lie in the sun, and wade modestly in the ocean. Some homes in Long Branch were rented out to affluent professionals—mostly lawyers and doctors from the nearby cities who were not tied to the land and the endless cycle of planting and cultivation—but for the most part it was still a fishing village whose main attraction was its isolation. The local people prized their solitude and extolled the virtues of a small town built on simple values, where all neighbors were friends and any newcomer was a curiosity.
The Grimkés arrived in Long Branch at the start of the summer and took up residence in a quiet boardinghouse called the Fish Tavern. People came here summer after summer to enjoy the beach, the cool summer evenings, and the prayer meetings in the large common dining hall. While there were guests at the Fish Tavern other than the Grimkés, the tavern’s common room and dining hall remained uncrowded until the true beginning of the summer season, and Sarah and her father met few other boarders. Instead, from the day of their arrival, they worked together to defeat the looming threat of John Grimké’s unidentified disease.
Sarah chafed at being away from home. Much though she loved and admired her father, she was caught up in her own problems and believed that her place was in Charleston, with her family, her Sunday-school students, and her church. She also sincerely felt that it would have been more proper for one of her brothers to make the journey north, as was customary in families such as hers. But no matter what reasons she gave for her hesitation, Sarah knew that her pleadings made her look like a hypocrite: after years of declaring her independence, she was now openly shunning such responsibility—and just at the moment when her father needed her most. Her feelings were mixed, her emotions confused. She felt unprepared and inadequate and feared the challenge that battling her father’s illness presented.
Years later, Sarah would concede what her father always knew. Of all of the family, John Grimké understood his daughter better than anyone. Not only could he trust her compassion and intelligence, he also valued her good judgment and her companionship. He was proud of his sons and their professional accomplishments, but Sarah was more like him than any of his other children. During the long hours aboard ship, or while fighting his illness, he needed someone who would tell him the truth about his condition, and if he was to endure a long convalescence, he would need someone to talk with. He had always been able to do that with Sarah, and he prized her quick mind and ready ear. John Grimké also knew that Sarah’s unwillingness to accompany him to Philadelphia had little to do with her own inadequacies. He realized that she was reluctant to leave Angelina, her “precious Nina,” with whom she had forged a special bond.
Nina, just fourteen years old, was now undergoing her own religious transformation, albeit one due not to long talks with a minister, but instead to the example set by her older sister, protector, and surrogate mother. Like Sarah, Angelina continually questioned the truth of her family’s religious beliefs even as she attempted to live the religious life bequeathed her by her mother and father. But unlike her sister, Angelina never felt inadequate to the task, never doubted her own devotion, and was never awed in the face of religious authority. Where Sarah shied away from religious controversy and judged herself imperfect in the face of others’ seeming godliness, Angelina sharpened her skepticism and looked askance at Charleston’s public displays of religious devotion.
Although the two were devoted friends and close sisters, aside from their chosen plain dress they looked little alike: Sarah was round-faced and short, with few distinguishing characteristics, while Angelina was slightly taller, and thinner, with sharp features. She looked stern and engaged. Sarah was shy and often withdrawn, though she could listen closely to others, a trait that reflected her deep intelligence. The distinctions between the two would harden over the years, with Angelina growing ever more assertive, more outspoken, able to make her voice boom over a crowd. Sarah was just the opposite: at times, even when she spoke in normal tones, her audiences would have to strain to hear her. She was more interested in listening, and her sister in convincing.
There were other differences between the two sisters. Like Sarah, Angelina grew up with slavery; like Sarah, she questioned it at a very early age; and for her, too, the reality of slavery was brought home with brutal poignancy. But unlike her sister, Angelina quickly concluded that slavery did not simply contradict her religious beliefs; it was an absolute wrong that needed to be condemned, an evil to be fought, and an institution that was sickening her family and her state. Even as a young girl, she believed wholly that it needed to be eradicated. At fourteen, Angelina came to a startling conclusion that Sarah, then twenty-seven, had yet to reach: slavery, she believed, was a political problem, not a religious one. The emancipation of black Americans was a matter of political will, not of divine intervention. But where other Southern women viewed the everyday brutality of slavery as an understandable part of life, both Sarah and Angelina were appalled by its practice and emotionally scarred by its presence.
One day, while attending classes at the Charleston Seminary, a private school for the daughters of the city’s elite families, Angelina was horrified to see raw, bleeding wounds on the back of a young slave boy who was ordered to open the classroom windows. The deep gashes in his skin, scabbed over and still bloody, ran all the way down his back and his legs. He walked with an uncertain and painful gait, his eyes fearfully darting from one student to another. As he reached for the windows, his face became a mass of pain. When he left the room, his chore accomplished, it was as a limping and frightened animal, humiliated at his status in front of the other children. Angelina fainted at the sight, then committed it to memory. She recounted the incident repeatedly over the years, to anyone who would listen.
It was no surprise, perhaps, that Angelina should share her sister’s abhorrence of slavery; after all, she had learned of its evils at Sarah’s insistence, as a young student learns from a caring tutor. But Angelina also learned from her older sister in other ways, by mimicking her actions and by showing her own independence. At the age of thirteen, like her father, mother, and siblings before her, Angelina had prepared herself for admission into the Saint Philip’s congregation. She spoke with the minister and spent hours in thoughtful prayer. But when the time for her confirmation came, she refused to accept the Episcopal doctrine, informing the minister that after reading the required pledge of obeisance in the Book of Common Prayer, she had become convinced that she did not agree with it. “If, with my feelings and views as they now are, I should go through that form, it would be acting a lie. I cannot do it,” she said. The minister was stunned by Angelina’s statement and appealed to her family to intervene.
The Grimkés were embarrassed by Angelina’s decision, but no amount of arguing could induce her to change her mind. Polly Grimké was particularly angered and humiliated by her daughter’s unexpected pronouncement and came to believe that it had been prompted by the earlier, similar behavior of Sarah, Angelina’s godmother. Polly was now faced with the uncomfortable knowledge that two of her daughters had chosen to abandon the family religion. What was more, Sarah and Angelina’s actions had inspired gossip among Charleston’s population and cast a public eye on all the Grimkés—a scrutiny that had never fallen on the family before. Judge John Grimké and his wife were now the parents of one daughter, Sarah, who had turned to Presbyterianism and another who had done something considerably worse—for after refusing her Episcopal vows, Angelina remained firmly outside all of Charleston’s religious community.
Mary Smith Grimké’s anger and hurt were further deepened by Angelina’s announcement that she intended to convene an all-female prayer group comprised of women from all of Charleston’s denominations. Such an ecumenical meeting was more than merely unorthodox; it was unheard of. Polly protested and threatened to discipline her daughter, but Angelina refused to obey her mother’s dictates, continued in her ways, and called together her religious group. Unable to stop her, and perhaps pleased that Angelina was at least inclined toward religion in some form, her mother succumbed to her wishes, just as she had done with Sarah. But the seeds of future strife between Polly and her two daughters were planted. She was confused by their actions and sensitive to the talk about the strange Grimké daughters now making the rounds of Charleston’s leading families.
Angelina followed her sister in her deep belief in the value of leading a life free of sin; she followed her again when she judged the Episcopal Church inadequate to meet her religious needs; and she followed her, finally, in deciding to become a Presbyterian. But while she listened carefully, as a child, to her older sister’s condemnations of slavery, she took her own path and made her own decisions. Sarah may have condemned slavery as an injustice, but Angelina set out to right the obvious wrong, arguing constantly with her mother over the treatment of the family’s slaves and then, during their time at Belmont, their large Union District plantation, sneaking from her room in the middle of the night to take badly needed medicines to slave families. Sarah prayed for guidance on slavery and used the institution as a means of questioning the basic principles of southern Christianity, but she never really confronted the reality of slavery. Angelina, in contrast, put her prayers and doubts into action: she refused to own a slave and firmly rejected her mother’s suggestion that she take on a serving girl as a personal servant. When Angelina at last agreed to care for a young slave named Kitty, it was only because the girl’s behavior had sparked her mother’s anger, and Angelina feared for her safety. Unwilling to own the slave or receive wages on her behalf, but also unwilling to return her to her mother—who beat her—Angelina placed Kitty with a “good Christian family” known for being kind to its servants. When Kitty came back to the Grimké family, now more mature and a believing Christian, Angelina returned her to her mother. Kindness, she told Polly, was more than just a word used by well-meaning ministers in Sunday sermons.
Angelina may have learned from Sarah to abhor slavery, and she may well have inherited her religious rebellion from her older sister, but the two were quite distinct in other, more personal ways. While historians often group them together—as “the Grimké sisters”—Sarah and Angelina Grimké in fact looked at the world rather differently. Sarah was emotional, whereas Angelina showed extraordinary calm; Sarah was haunted by self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, whereas Angelina was self-confident, rebellious, and strong-willed. “[Angelina] was neither so demonstrative nor so tender in her feelings as her elder sister,” Catherine Birney later wrote, “and her manner being more dignified and positive, she inspired, even in those nearest to her, a certain degree of awe which forbade, perhaps, the fulness of confidence which Sarah’s greater gentleness always invited.”
Birney’s description of the differences between Sarah and Angelina, though insightful, is incomplete. For as Sarah nursed her father in Philadelphia and New Jersey, Angelina struck out on her own—without, however, having to journey anywhere. Finally free of her sister’s influence and emotional hold, Angelina set out on a path that, while influenced by Sarah’s in many ways, was also strikingly different. Sarah’s introspection and her search for personal salvation found opposites in Angelina’s impatience and frustration over her inability to change the world around her. Where Sarah always sought to correct herself—to be more devout, prayerful, and religious—Angelina was always correcting others. Slowly, inexorably, the two grew apart, even as they learned in a way to complement each other. While their public life as famous abolitionist sisters still lay many years in the future, the pattern of their collaboration was well established by the second decade of the nineteenth century. Even in Charleston, at this early date, Sarah and Angelina Grimké were known as “the Grimké sisters.” They were intelligent, strong-willed, and independent.
It is a common pitfall of historians to read meanings into the past that might not have been obvious at the time. Yet in 1819, Angelina’s maturity and complex personality began to emerge from the shadow cast by her sister. It would be many years before Angelina would fully take up Sarah’s former position as mentor, but the process had already begun. In time, Sarah Grimké would be acknowledged as one of the leading reform thinkers of her age, but her sister Angelina would always be remembered as a crusader.
John Faucheraud Grimké died on August 8, 1819, in a small room in the Fish Tavern, overlooking the beach at Long Branch, New Jersey. It was a painful and difficult death, brought on by a debilitating and unknown disease. His body wasted away, his strength slowly ebbed, and his walks with his daughter through the fishing village of Long Branch became shorter and shorter, until they ended altogether and John Grimké was forced to stay in bed. After just a few weeks in New Jersey it was clear that his recovery was beyond hope, as he himself certainly must have known. He waged a valiant battle for life, but years later, in thinking back over this period, Judge Grimké’s family would come to the uneasy understanding that when Dr. Physick had recommended that he “take the sea air,” it was because he knew that his patient was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was also at that moment, his family realized, that John Grimké must have concluded that his fate was decided. While he could not know exactly when death would claim him, he resolved to follow his doctor’s advice, though it meant he would never set foot in his beloved South Carolina again. He made his choice: he would die not with his family but with his daughter, his most beloved child, by his side.
John Grimké’s decision to die in Long Branch, New Jersey, instead of Charleston, South Carolina, was extraordinary. But in understanding why he made this choice, we find clues as to why Sarah and Angelina eventually shunned their native society and its customs to make their own journey north. The world that John Grimké had known was changing. Most of his sons had already left home and begun their own careers. Thomas was now a prominent lawyer in Charleston, John was a doctor, and Benjamin was in Ohio, where he had embarked on a distinguished career as a jurist. The rest of the boys would surely follow in their footsteps. Everyone was well cared for. John Grimké’s other daughters were also leading their own lives, marrying and raising their own families. He did not worry about them. His only concern was for Sarah, the daughter he loved most of all. He had once observed that of all of his children, she had the sharpest mind—that if she had been a man, she would have made a great lawyer. John Grimké loved his wife, and he missed her during his time in Philadelphia, but their last years together had been a trial. Polly seemed less and less capable of handling the demands of everyday life. The constant responsibility of raising children and managing a household had taken its toll on the marriage, and she and her husband had grown apart.
John Grimké may have determined to break, finally, with his past—or perhaps he simply wished to spend his last weeks alone with his own thoughts and with a daughter who could share them. Yet in his decision to spend the final months of his life away from his family, we can see a prefigurement of Sarah and Angelina’s own search for freedom, and of their own intellectual independence. While scholars, historians, and family chroniclers have been puzzled by the stark break that would divide Sarah and Angelina from the rest of the Grimkés in the years that followed, the sisters’ commitment to public service did not emerge full-flowered from the seeds of their own experience; rather, their independence was the result of what they had learned from their father.
John Faucheraud Grimké was a man of great accomplishment and prodigious intellect. Like most other white men of his time and region, Judge Grimké was a landowner, a slaveholder, and a defender of a system that he not only got rich off but also had helped to establish. He never rejected the system or publicly questioned it, but neither is there any hint that he ever defended it as unstintingly as his peers. A believer in the Republic, he did defend the creation of a strong federal structure when others in South Carolina viewed themselves as separate and distinct, a nation unto themselves. John Grimké was proud to be a South Carolinian, but he thought of himself first as an American. He had shared in the birth of the Republic, he had been there to watch Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown, he had befriended Benjamin Franklin, he knew a bit of the world, and he saw America as a unique experiment that, in all crises, must remain united as one nation.
John Grimké was a nationalist in an era when American nationalism was seen by Charleston’s intellectual elite as merely a clever conceit that was already becoming passé. The city’s aristocracy viewed its privileges and status as special, even God-given, but John Grimké was an exception: he knew better. His grandfather had been a man with a German accent from a French province who came to America with nothing. John Grimké remembered him and would not deign to believe that somehow, out of all others, the Grimkés had been born special. His family was wealthy because its members had worked hard, and he was among the leaders of Charleston’s society because that was where his hard work had placed him. Heredity and good breeding meant a great deal, but he knew that riches, possessions, and status were not God-given; they were earned. It was because of this that Judge John Grimké was uncomfortable with the sectionalism preached by Charleston’s hereditary upper class, whose philosophical basis—the notion that the elite was chosen by God—was becoming a political fad among the city’s leading families. In fact, we can detect in Sarah’s father a hint of the same despair that haunted Thomas Jefferson, a man of the same generation, experience, and upbringing.
Grimké shared Jefferson’s “extraordinary capacity to sound like an enlightened reformer while upholding the interests of the slave class” (in the words of a twentieth-century historian). The charge is true as stated, for like Jefferson’s, Grimké’s views on slavery were stereotypically racist. He undoubtedly agreed with Jefferson’s judgment regarding what Southerners called the “peculiar institution”: “My opinion has ever been that, until more can be done for them [the slaves], we should endeavor with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from all ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, & be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them,” Jefferson wrote in defense of his position. “The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good: and to commute them for other property is to commit them to those whose usage of them we cannot control.”
Unfortunately, Jefferson’s words and Grimké’s thinking projected emancipation far into the future, when slaveholders would of their own will first educate and then free their slaves. Pressed to predict when exactly the slaves would be freed, Jefferson said he could do nothing but hope for the future: “The concerns of each generation are their own care,” he maintained. It is unlikely, of course, that Judge Grimké spent his last weeks reflecting on the nature of slavery; yet there is a sense, unspoken but clearly intimated in the diary kept by his daughter Sarah during her father’s long illness, of his dissatisfaction with his own life—as if he understood that something was left undone. If that is true, he was likely the only one who believed it. From relatively modest origins as the grandson of a silversmith, John Grimké had risen to the highest court of his state. He was a widely respected, even beloved, friend and companion to all he met, and a prudent, humble, and well-spoken leader of his community. He was a political giant among his peers, one of the leading men of his state and time.
But he was also independent-minded, and he set out along his own path. While he accumulated wealth and earned his position, his children’s lives testified to his values. Tenacious in his religious beliefs, dedicated to his family, and imbued with the values of his culture, John Grimké subtly broke with his peers when he debated points of law with his daughter, refused to punish her for reading and learning, and diligently scolded her for and then ignored her wish to teach slaves the alphabet. Four months after Grimké’s death, at the age of seventy, his compatriot Thomas Jefferson (six years Grimké’s senior) wrote to John Adams to query him on whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a slave state or a free state. The question was then being debated nationally, raising the “awful specter” of civil war. The Missouri controversy reawakened in Jefferson a sense of the betrayal of American idealism that was manifest in slavery; it was, he said, like hearing a “firebell in the night.” There is little doubt that Judge John Faucheraud Grimké—lawyer, planter, civic leader, and slaveholder—heard that same bell.
Up to the very moment of her father’s death, Sarah Grimké desperately attempted, as if through sheer force of will, to nurse him back to health. She planned and prepared his meals; she monitored his exercise; she attended to his every need. When he could no longer feed himself, she fed him. She changed his sheets and his clothes; she bathed him and prayed with him. In early August 1819, when he slipped into a coma, she still refused to give up hope for his recovery and devoted herself to prayer with a greater fervor than ever before. Her father, regaining consciousness only for fitful periods during the last week of his life, saw her in continuous attendance. He cautioned her against hoping for miracles: “Do not indulge vain hopes my child,” he said. “I no longer expect recovery nor do I desire it.” These words brought an overwhelming end to Sarah’s hopes, though throughout the trial she retained her faith.
Two days before his death John Grimké regained consciousness for long enough to talk with his daughter and urge her to leave his bedside, if only to have some respite from her constant attention. At first she refused to go, but he insisted. She walked away from the boardinghouse distraught, but she was finally convinced that her father’s death was imminent. Judge Grimké died as he wished, honorably and without complaint, slipping into death in the midst of sleep, with his daughter at his side. In his last weeks, he reaffirmed his religious faith, expressing his belief to his daughter that the flight of his soul would give him his final rest. He was an exhausted man, ravaged by ill health but drained also by his responsibilities.
John Grimké was buried in Long Branch, without the services that would have been accorded him by Saint Philip’s Church. In Charleston, Judge Grimké’s casket would have been accompanied by his family, all dressed in mourning black. The cortege would have been followed by South Carolina’s political leadership, and then by the heads of the families of the upper class to which he belonged. His slaves would have remained at home, except for those few attending to the family at the funeral. A smaller and more private service in the slave church would have remembered the master as a good and kindly man. In Charleston, John Grimké would have been interred alongside his father and mother in the family plot, his grave adorned by a simple headstone. One week after his death, his life would have been extolled in a funeral oration that would be recalled, and repeated, for years after. His sons would have been seated in the front row at the Old Exchange Building as Judge Grimké’s colleagues memorialized his service to them, their city, their state, and their country.
The funeral in Long Branch was quite different. Sarah Grimké had made a few friends during her short time in Philadelphia and New Jersey, and they helped her through the burial, but she was otherwise alone. John Grimké was buried, modestly and with little public comment, in the small graveyard of the Long Branch Methodist Church. A local minister uttered words of kind assurance and quoted Scripture, but the ceremony lacked pomp and stature. Few present had known her father. As his casket was lowered into the freshly dug grave, a hot sea breeze blew over the town. The service was short and simple, and when it was over, Sarah retired to the Fish Tavern alone. A few days later, having notified her mother in South Carolina of her husband’s death, Sarah Grimké returned to Philadelphia, where she again took up residence at the Quaker boardinghouse. She could have booked immediate passage to Charleston, but instead she stayed in Philadelphia for a time to gather her thoughts and mourn in private.
Sarah did not sail for Charleston until November, three months after her father’s death. It was a momentous journey. During her passage, she befriended a Quaker family and a charismatic and articulate Quaker minister named Israel Morris. She was drawn to Morris’s powerful personality and impressed by his success as a Philadelphia businessman, devout Christian, father of eight, and influential thinker. His ideas, which paralleled her own, were compelling and simply stated. He appeared to have no vices, spoke and dressed modestly, and adhered to a discipline of self-denial and service to others, a hallmark of the Society of Friends. Outgoing without being forward, he was unfailingly polite and listened quietly to the opinions of others. Most important, he seemed to care about Sarah’s ideas and found in her a ready intellectual companion and avid listener.
While drawn to Morris’s ideas and complimented by his attention, Sarah was initially repelled by his religion and struggled to understand why it so appealed to him. She admired the Quakers’ adherence to their social principles (their simplicity of manners and dress, their refusal to argue or proselytize) but questioned their religious doctrines. They were exotic, hard to comprehend, complex and alien. Sarah seemed most put off by the Quaker tenet that spiritual truth could be obtained through self-examination—even though it was precisely the same doctrine she had adopted for herself, as evidenced by her years of personal searching. Sarah was also intimidated by the Quakers’ belief in public demonstrations of spiritual devotion and by the fact that personal, spontaneous “utterances of spirit” were required during their weekly meetings. She had never spoken in public or been overwhelmed by religious inspiration, and she could not imagine a woman’s being expected to testify publicly to her most private religious views. Not only was the tradition alien; it seemed improper, a contravention of the customs and strictures of proper society.
Despite these qualms on Sarah’s part, during the week-long journey to Charleston, she and Israel Morris became friends. He did not expect her to become a Quaker, of course, but he asked her to think about the subjects they had talked about and elicited a promise from her that she would write to him from time to time. He told her that if she ever returned to Philadelphia to visit, or to stay, she was welcome in his home. Near the end of the journey, Morris gave her a copy of the memoirs of John Woolman, a Quaker minister known for his outspoken criticism of slavery and his apostolic message of salvation through personal liberation. Sarah promised Morris that she would read the book and then write to him with her impressions.
The home to which Sarah returned in Charleston had been transformed by the death of its master. It was only after his loss that his family realized how much he had been at the center of their lives. Sarah’s mother was unable to cope with his death or manage the disposition of the family property. Her impatience with the house servants had not abated, and she was more temperamental than ever. The Grimké brothers, many of whom had their own families and concerns, were of little help.
The strangeness of Sarah’s homecoming, though she had been gone for only six months, was matched by the distance she felt from Angelina. While the young girl still referred to her as “Mother,” she was less dependent on Sarah now and insisted on making her own decisions. She had struck out on her own in her sister’s absence. The two remained close, but distance, time, and the death of their father had changed their relationship. Angelina was still a young girl, only fourteen, while Sarah’s nursing of her father through his darkest moments had matured her in ways that she could not have imagined before. Ironically, Sarah’s childhood companion, Thomas, seemed to be the only one in the family capable of giving her the guidance she needed as she continued to wrestle with her religious beliefs.
Thomas and Sarah would talk for hours after her return from Philadelphia, just as they had as children. Many of their discussions revisited their most cherished subjects: the nature of God, society, the future of the South, and the terrible crucible of slavery. Sarah was disappointed that Thomas’s ideas had not changed; he still argued that slaves were not prepared for emancipation and that to give them their freedom while they retained an inferior economic and social status would be a horrific cruelty. He did not defend slavery, or Southern nationalism, but like many Southerners of his generation, he was incapable of envisioning a society without servants, plantations without field hands, or a democracy without an educated, rich, landed, and white elite.
After many hours of discussion, however, Thomas pledged to his sister that he would try to do something about slavery, even if he could not agree with her contention that the South’s slaves should be freed. He had already taken steps in this direction, he told Sarah proudly: while she was in Philadelphia, he had helped to organize the Charleston chapter of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 to purchase slaves and resettle them in Africa. The society commanded national attention both through the stature of its founders, who included Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, Kentuckian Henry Clay, and President James Madison, and because of its then-progressive goals. Thomas Grimké became one of its chief defenders and a firm believer in its central philosophy, which held that the slaves should eventually be freed, but also that free blacks and whites could never live side by side in America in peace. By 1820, when Thomas and Sarah were consumed by their conversations on the subject, the American Colonization Society was the most widely accepted vehicle for antislavery sentiment in the nation. Its organizers printed thousands of educational pamphlets, solicited donations from leading philanthropists, recruited a wide-ranging network of supporters, gained the endorsement of legislatures, churches, and Southern planters, and hired relocation agents to begin the work of resettlement.
Sarah’s response to Thomas’s defense of the American Colonization Society is not known, but it is likely that after hours of discussion with her brother, she began to form a critical response to the society’s central idea that whites and blacks could not live together. She believed then, and later, that this tenet was no more than an expression of simple “color prejudice,” as she called it. Blacks and whites could live together; slavery, no matter how unjust, proved that. Moreover, the prospect of the separation of the races was un-Christian.
Sarah Grimké’s ideas were not new. The nascent abolitionist movement saw the American Colonization Society’s program as nothing more than an extension of slavery’s central crisis: white Americans simply did not believe that black Americans were equal. At best, the society was a well-intentioned monstrosity that in practice would amount to little; at worst, it was a thin veil designed to cover the guilt-ridden consciences of slaveholders. The master-slave relationship, the abolitionists believed, was not the result of a complex economic formula that could somehow be made right through the eradication of black faces in a white population, but a reflection of America’s fundamental intolerance. The problem was not that there were black people in America, but that there were slaveholders here.
The disagreement over the American Colonization Society’s mission was not, then, merely a dispute about the institution of slavery, or even about whether black people should remain in America. At its heart, the controversy over the program was about national identity; it was about who Americans really were. Black people were different, the society’s founders believed, and so should be returned to their native lands. As Sarah later stated it, the trouble with the leaders of the American Colonization Society was that they refused to see what was obvious to her and had been nearly all her life: African Americans were not Africans at all, they were Americans. The formulation for Sarah was therefore quite simple. Shipping black Americans to Africa compounded the evil of slavery. It erased the evidence of the sin but not the sin itself; it legitimized the idea that one class of Americans could actually eradicate another.
Thomas and Sarah also engaged in long discussions about religion. Sarah’s return to South Carolina reignited the crisis in her beliefs—a crisis that had only been exacerbated by the death of her father, her introduction to the Society of Friends, and the transformations that had taken place within her family. While she firmly put aside the “frivolities” that had so plagued her as a young woman, she was more confused and distracted than ever about her convictions. She felt inadequate, lonely, and incapable of making the simplest decisions. She knew that she had much to offer, but she was unable to find her life’s work. Now well past the accepted marrying age, she was trapped by Southern custom, which dictated that an unmarried woman remain with her family—in her case, a family that she now looked on as a group of strangers. She feared she would never be at peace with her religious beliefs, though she questioned them obsessively. At first she believed that the death of her father had solidified her faith, but as time went on, she realized that this was not so. She plunged again into self-doubt and despair, an unhappy woman consigned to the life of a matron in an alien culture. She would later recall of this time:
Tears never moistened my eyes; to prayer I was a stranger. With Job I dared to curse the day of my birth. One day I was tempted to say something of the kind to my mother. She was greatly shocked, and reproved me seriously. I craved a hiding-place in the grave, as a rest from the distress of my feelings, thinking that no state could be worse than the present. Sometimes, being unable to pray, unable to command one feeling of good, either natural or spiritual, I was tempted to commit some great crime, thinking I could repent and thus restore my lost sensibility.
Soon after Sarah’s return from the North, Polly Grimké became so worried about her daughter’s mental state that she advised her to spend some time away from the family. She made arrangements for Sarah to live with her relatives in North Carolina, far from Charleston and its prying eyes. Sarah agreed to the change of scene, believing that by moving away, if only for a short time, she might well find the solace she so desperately needed. As she explained to her mother, she wanted to reflect on her life and plan what to do next. It had been ten years since Sarah began her prayerful search for the way of life that would suit her best, but despite these devotions, she had failed to find an answer. Now, in the wake of her father’s death, the question of what she would do loomed larger than ever.
To the members of her family, who were witnesses to her ongoing spiritual crises, Sarah’s trip to visit relatives in North Carolina provided a welcome respite from her disturbing emotional swings. They had tried everything they could think of to cheer her up, but nothing worked. When they told her that she should begin to enjoy life, she answered by saying that “by the sadness of countenance, the heart is made better”—an exasperating answer for a family that was desperately attempting to build a new life after the loss of its most constant guide. Her brother Thomas made light of her persistent self-doubt and her almost obsessive reflections on religion, but he, too, was disturbed by her behavior: “Thee had better turn Quaker, Sally; thy long face would suit well their sober dress,” he teased.
Sarah Grimké arrived at her uncle James Smith’s plantation on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina in the autumn of 1820, and was welcomed openly and lovingly by the Smith family. The plantation, in a then-rural part of the state, was cut off from nearly any settlement. The closest church was a Methodist meeting house where local parishioners gathered each Sunday for prayer and hymn singing. With this one exception, the concerns of Charleston’s insulated upper-class society seemed far distant. Because of the small size of the Smith family and the routine of plantation work, Sarah was left with an enormous amount of time on her hands. Her only companion was her cousin Robert Barnwell Rhett, a highly intelligent, outspoken, and confident man whose political celebrity and controversial reputation were still many years off. Rhett and Sarah became friends, but his attentions were not constant. Sarah thought this was just as well; she needed time to think about how to shape her own future.
Among the many books she had brought with her to North Carolina was John Woolman’s memoirs, given to her by Israel Morris. While she still rejected Quakerism (when her mother wondered if she might become a Quaker, she answered her firmly, “Anything but a Quaker or a Catholic!”), she remembered her time with Israel Morris fondly and appreciated the kindness shown her by the Quakers she had met in Philadelphia. For many days, then, she read from Woolman’s memoirs. Slowly but certainly, the power of his message began to take hold of her. The more she read, the more she began to suspect that membership in the Society of Friends might provide a perfect outlet for her religious views and personal ambitions.
Woolman’s memoirs tell the story of an exceptional man, one of the great progressive activists of early American history. Born into modest circumstances, Woolman was convinced of the evils of slavery and opened a tailor’s shop in Mount Holly, New Jersey, to support himself and his family while he preached abolition. He traveled throughout the colonies, from New Hampshire to North Carolina, calling for an end to human bondage. His was a radical doctrine: he believed in the equality of all, regardless of color. The stark, almost shocking simplicity of his message commanded the attention of thousands of people. He was not always welcomed warmly in slave societies, but wherever he went, the passion of his beliefs and the intensity of his message drew crowds of listeners. Woolman’s central theme was derived from the Gospels: he preached that slavery was incompatible with Christianity, that it was a sin. At the age of thirty-five, he began a journal of his travels, noting his frequent successes and even more common failures. Sarah was entranced by Woolman’s simple words, which might well have been inscribed by her. His journey mirrored hers, his doubts were her doubts, his triumphs gave her hope.
Woolman worked diligently to bring his antislavery message into the Society of Friends, some of whose members were slaveholders. By 1761, the message had begun to take hold. In that year, the Quakers expelled slaveholders from their ranks and promulgated a prohibition barring slave owners from their religion. One of the eighteenth century’s true reformers, Woolman also worked to ban the sale of liquor to Native Americans, refused to eat sugar because it was a product of slave labor (a group of his disciples followed his example, launching one of the nation’s first boycotts), and wore clothing made from undyed materials (fabric dyes, he said, were unhealthy for the textile workers who handled them). When his writings were published, they were adopted by the handful of organized abolitionists in the American colonies as their official testament, and they would remain, throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, a touchstone for early antislavery activists.
Woolman’s book had a profound effect on Sarah Grimké. As a young man, Woolman admitted, he had fallen into “dark entertainments” (as Sarah would have described them) and been attracted to “wanton company.” Eventually, however, he wrote, “I was brought seriously to consider my ways; and the sight of my backslidings affected me with sorrow.” Woolman described his youth as a rejection of religion, though he knew in his heart that while he rejected God, “I was humbled before him.” Every one of Woolman’s words seemed aimed at Sarah, who had had many of the same experiences and feelings herself. As he wrote:
In a while I resolved totally to leave off some of my vanities, but there was a secret reserve in my heart of the more refined part of them, and I was not low enough to find true peace. Thus for some months I had great trouble, there remaining in me an unsubjected will which rendered by labours fruitless, till at length through the merciful continuance of heavenly visitations I was made to bow down in spirit before the Lord.
Unlike Woolman, though, Sarah Grimké had not experienced the mystical, personal revelation that would forever turn her heart to the service of “His word.” Still, she longed for the revelation, for a calling, and she began to believe that she might follow in Woolman’s footsteps. She would leave her family, her home and state, and set off down the road to sermonize on the evils of slavery, just as he had done many decades before, when he left his business, wife, and children to become a “traveling minister of Jesus Christ.”
After two months of reading and rereading Woolman’s memoirs, Sarah felt revived. She returned to Charleston and immediately began attending Quaker services. Her mother was, of course, embarrassed by her actions and by the ridicule they sparked among family friends. But Polly did nothing to stop her daughter and even attempted to keep her criticism in check. Her daughter was well beyond her control, a grown woman who could make her own decisions. Sarah’s brother Thomas supported her. He gave her books on Quakerism and talked with her about her new religion. Seeking answers to her deeper questions, Sarah wrote to Israel Morris, and they began a lively correspondence. When she wrote him that she might come to Philadelphia, he was enthusiastic and responded that he would gladly open his home to her. She was overjoyed at the prospect of leaving Charleston and increasingly convinced that she should become a Quaker. The Friends’ simple rituals, the long and reflective silences of their services, and the personal testaments all had a powerful effect on her own religious views.
At last, when she least expected it, the personal call that Sarah had always hoped for came. Seated quietly in her room, by herself, she heard a voice calling to her, distant and indistinct at first, but then clearer and clearer, and speaking to her at any hour of the day. Finally, the voice gave her a command, instructing her to become a Quaker. She heard the same voice again and again, talking to her and giving her advice, guidance, and confidence. One day the message was overpowering: “Go north,” the voice said. “Go north.”
She obeyed.