Just after noon on February 21, 1838, Maria Weston Chapman and Angelina Grimké emerged from a carriage on Beacon Hill and walked the short distance to the Massachusetts State House, overlooking the Boston Common. It was a bright but cold day, typical for New England in winter. It is likely that the two women walked arm in arm, for Angelina needed Maria’s support this day as never before. Sarah was ill and had decided not to come. When they turned in to the front of the building, they were greeted by the spectacle of a huge crowd pushing and shoving its way into the public gallery of the legislative chambers’ hearing room. Some in the crowd noticed them; there were a few catcalls, some jeers, and a smattering of applause.
The two women walked through the front door of the State House and into the legislative chambers, where a special committee had been called to hear Angelina’s testimony on the evils of slavery. The two women were forced to squeeze past the assembled legislators and the crowd of spectators. As soon as they entered, they were greeted by applause, scattered at first, and restrained, but then growing in strength. They took their seats near the front of the room as the onlookers strained to see them. A number of their friends were there to show their support and to celebrate the triumph of their cause. They were convinced that Angelina Grimké’s appearance here, and her being asked to speak out against slavery in public—before an official committee of the government, no less—marked a long-awaited formal recognition of their crusade. The abolitionist movement had come of age; it had entered the mainstream.
Angelina wore a simple gray dress, fittingly modest for the occasion. Behind her, the crowd continued to pour in, taking up every seat in the gallery, standing along the back wall, filling a staircase. The legislators were arrayed in the front of the room. The chairman of the committee called for order, but it took some time for the crowd to get settled. Angelina waited patiently, if nervously. She kept her eyes trained straight forward. “I never was so near fainting under the tremendous pressure of feeling,” she would later admit. “My heart almost died within me. The novelty of the scene, the weight of responsibility, the ceaseless exercise of mind thro’ which I had passed for more than a week—all together sunk me to earth [so] I well nigh despaired.” As the gallery finally grew quiet, Mrs. Chapman leaned over to speak in Angelina’s ear: “God strengthen you, my sister,” she said.
The chairman of the committee called on Angelina to come up and give her remarks. She rose uncertainly and stepped forward. There was a commotion in the hall, and a hiss sounded from the back of the room. The chairman called for order. Angelina was alone. She turned to face the audience and began to speak, but there was another disturbance—some applause, some jeering—and the chairman asked her to suspend her remarks until the hall was quiet. When she began speaking again, she was interrupted for a third time. Finally, so that she could be heard, but also so that her testimony would silence her detractors, she was invited to stand in the chairman’s place, facing the crowd. The platform was slightly elevated, and she stood quietly until the crowd grew silent. After a short introduction, she plunged into her text. She spoke forcefully, emotionally:
I stand before you as a southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and the piteous cry of the slave. I stand before you as a repentant slaveholder. I stand before you as a moral being and as a moral being I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave and to the deluded master, to my country and to the world to do all that I can to overturn a system of complicated crimes, built upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains and cemented by [the] blood, sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds.
Behind Angelina, the secretary of the committee attempted to blink back the tears from his eyes. Before her, in the hall, there was silence. She spoke for two hours, and when she finished, there was thunderous applause. Her friends in the abolitionist movement were overwhelmed. “[Her] testimony was not only the testimony of one most competent to speak,” Wendell Phillips later wrote, “but it was the profound religious experience of one who had broken out of the charmed circle, and whose intense earnestness melted all opposition.” Angelina herself put it more simply: “We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down,” she said.
Two days later, Angelina once again appeared before the committee. This time she was accompanied by her sister, who took a seat nearby. Her testimony again lasted for hours. The focus of her remarks, on both days, was slavery. But she was careful to present a unique message tailored for her Northern audience. Her intention was not to woo listeners to her side, or recruit them to her cause, but rather to speak the truth about an institution and a way of life that she had seen for herself and they could only begin to imagine.
At the heart of slavery, she said, was color prejudice; emancipation, once won, would not be the end of the battle. She larded her testimony with remarks on the importance of equality and provided biblical citations to prove her point. The fact of her appearance before the committee was far more important than what she actually said, but what she said nonetheless placed her in the forefront of the antislavery movement. Angelina was now not only its primary and most public organizer but also its chief social and political theorist. Nearly all who were in the audience on the two days of her testimony in Boston believed they were witnessing a historic event that would be remembered by succeeding generations. For them, Angelina Grimké’s appearance before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature was, as one participant suggested, as significant as Washington’s Farewell Address.
The Boston Gazette was less impressed: “She exhibited considerable talent for a female,” the reporter editorialized, “and as an orator, appeared not at all abashed in exhibiting herself in a position so unsuitable to her sex, totally disregarding the doctrine of St. Paul who says, ‘Is it not a shame for a woman to speak in public?’” Angelina ignored such comments. She was convinced that her appearance had been a triumph. She spent the next several weeks corresponding with her friends about her “adventure” and planning her spring crusade with Sarah. The two wanted to pick up where they had left off just months before, hoping to capitalize on Angelina’s notoriety as a means to bring more New Englanders into the antislavery movement. But of course, Angelina could no longer devote all of her time to the antislavery issue; she had other things on her mind.
Over the previous month and a half, Angelina and Theodore Weld had been secretly exchanging love letters between Brookline and Manhattan. Both expressed their feelings openly, unabashedly, but both also worried that their commitment to each other would harm their dedication to the abolitionist cause. Still, neither could stop the relationship, or really wanted to, and they gleefully planned to meet in Brookline in mid-March. Theodore was gushingly sentimental about his feelings, even after Angelina admitted to her attachment to Edward Bettles. “My heart’s desire,” he wrote, “you have knitted me to you still closer if possible by the free disclosure of your deep and tender affection for that loved one who was snatched from you by death. I love you the more Angelina that you loved and love him still.” Both were timid, inexperienced in such relationships, and fearful of intimacy. One exchange found Weld pleading for understanding. His was an exercise in indirectness, ambiguity, and double meaning—what one historian has termed “an orgy of self-restraint”:
From your knowledge of my natural impulsiveness, I have forboded almost everything as to your natural inferences from the state of mind which I fear was manifest in that letter. I pray you not to infer from that letter that I have lost self control and am drifting, helmless, before the mighty gust. No. I feel the steady helm in my hand and God’s strength in my arm to turn it withersoever he bids. . . . I had striven and resisted almost unto blood against my love for you. I had seized it and with violent hands had struggled to throttle it, and thus had violated the laws of my being and blindly resisted our Father, under whose ordering the absorbing feeling had taken possession of my soul and was doing there His own work.
So it went. The letters raced back and forth, with a feint here and a jab there until finally, consumed by their own passion, both took a step back. Both confessed that they loved each other, surely, but (yes! they had to admit it to each other) they loved God more. With that detail out of the way, they continued their long-distance courting until Weld arrived at the Philbrick house in Brookline on March 17. It was immediately apparent that Angelina was in love with him and that they must be married. That should have been good news to everyone in the antislavery movement, but it was not. The AAS leadership, in particular, feared that a union between Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld would further hobble Weld’s ambition, which had been sharply curbed, it seemed, since the end of the New York agents’ convention fifteen months earlier. From that time until his appearance in Brookline, Weld had not spoken in public, and he claimed he would never speak again.
Weld brushed aside the AAS leaders’ concerns. He said he much preferred working on the movement from the society’s offices in New York to being an agent anywhere else. It was there that he was needed most, he argued, to handle correspondence, edit publications, and help James Thome write a book on slavery. He was occupied every day with the business of the organization, he said, and he was an invaluable political strategist. The leadership was not convinced, fearing that Weld’s failure at Troy had been his “Golgotha” and had persuaded him that his public agency was at an end. Weld’s supporters disagreed. His defeat at Troy had had nothing to do with his decision to end his public career, they said, and reminded his detractors that he had hardly been able to speak above a whisper after the convention, that he had been mentally and physically spent, and that his health was not good.
If Weld was anxious about his own role, he did not show it. He was consumed by his relationship with Angelina. He was pleased to see her—overwhelmed, even. They chatted amicably, though uncomfortably, with the Philbricks before being given some time alone to say in person what they had until now said only in their letters. There were some embarrassing moments. At one point, with the Philbricks seated nearby, Weld had to rush from the room in order to keep his emotions (and presumably his desires) in check. In addition to spending time with Angelina, Weld worked with the two sisters on their antislavery message, taking great care in preparing them for a series of lectures at Boston’s Odeon Hall. With Weld finally at her side, Angelina was at ease; she spoke first at these appearances, then deferred to Sarah.
Sarah’s talks did not go well. At one point she criticized the governor of Massachusetts for promising to send militiamen to the South in case of a slave uprising. The controversy over her remarks did not deter her, however: she showed as much determination as Angelina had shown before the state legislature, and was more outspoken on the subject of women’s rights than her sister. Even so, Sarah was not the polished speaker that Angelina had become, and some abolitionists felt certain that her continued public appearances would dampen enthusiasm for the cause. She was monotonous and heavy as an orator, they said. Fearful of hurting her feelings, they told her that her true gift lay in her ability to put the antislavery message into words—written words. She should stay away from public events, they contended. After the first of the Odeon lectures, the AAS’s leadership consistently pushed Angelina into the public limelight and Sarah into the background. At last, seeing that Sarah was confused and hurt by this turn of events, Weld intervened and told her the truth. She had to work more diligently on her speaking style, he said; she was too erudite and too argumentative.
Once back in Manhattan, Weld expressed his views in a letter to Sarah. He did not spare her feelings. He began by saying that he had been told by a number of abolitionists that they would much rather hear Angelina speak at the remaining Odeon lectures than Sarah. But he added that “the lack of interest in your lectures was not at all for lack of excellent [subject] matter, but for lack of an interesting and happy manner of speaking.” This was damning her with faint praise, but Weld was concerned that the dissent he was hearing inside the AAS might become public. He was also worried that Sarah might decide to appear at the Odeon instead of Angelina. He did not dare say that, of course. “Now my beloved sister,” he wrote, “I am persuaded you will agree with me that the only question to be thought of for a moment in settling the question between you as to who should deliver the Odeon lectures is this: which of you will produce the best effect. Surely the object is to do not good merely, but the greatest amount of good.” There was almost a palpable pause in the letter before he went on, “The crisis is momentous in Boston and demands the highest effect.”
Sarah was hurt by Weld’s words, but she said little and deferred to Angelina, as she had so many times before. The Odeon series concluded at the end of March, whereupon Angelina turned her attention to planning her wedding. To both of the sisters, it must have seemed that a very special time was ending. Neither Sarah nor Angelina Grimké would ever again be so well known, or so celebrated, as she was during the first months of 1838. But both women were changing. It was not simply that Angelina was about to be married, or that her relationship with Sarah would be transformed: Weld had written to Sarah that he expected all three of them to live together, adding that he admired Sarah and felt great affection for her. No, that was not the problem. The problem was in the antislavery movement itself.
The fame of the Grimké sisters and their insistence on linking the rights of women to the rights of American slaves were dividing the abolitionist movement. Within a year of their lectures in Boston, the American Anti-Slavery Society would itself snap and break under the pressure of its two warring factions: the New England Garrisonians and the New York reformers. The debate was furious and intense, not least because of the stern and stubborn personalities involved. The contest was as old as the New World, pitting New England Puritans against New York revivalists and Philadelphia Quakers, and it reflected the nation’s short history, reprising the political battles that had once set New England antifederalists against mid-Atlantic nationalists. The issues were deeply felt and bitterly fought. Both sides believed they were absolutely and incontestably right. But to anyone who has ever been part of a large national movement, campaign, or organization, the fight that divided the American Anti-Slavery Society will sound familiar. This debate, in essence, was between political idealism and political realism (as the followers of the Tappan brothers might have stated it), or (as William Lloyd Garrison’s supporters would have put it) between those who would compromise their ideals for political gain (the Tappan faction) and those who would not (the Garrisonians).
Garrison and his followers, representing the movement’s “radical” wing, welcomed the Grimké sisters’ call for a national recommitment to “equality” for all Americans. They believed that abolitionists should follow any cause that would transform the nation’s spirit, whether it was “perfectionism,” pacifism, or women’s rights. This was not just some political fantasy or a dip into fashionable utopianism; Garrison was convinced that the nation actually could, and eventually would, be transformed through constant and diligent moral suasion. In fact, he said, true reform and real emancipation were possible only after a thoroughgoing change of heart, a purifying absolution of the soul. Garrison was uncompromising in his views. The stain of slavery was universal, he insisted, and touched every American. Those who could not see it were simply not looking. They were deluded.
Garrison had always been outspoken, but he became even more so during the Grimkés’ tour of New England. As the principles they enunciated touched off a storm of controversy, and as the crowds that came to greet them grew ever greater in size, Garrison rhapsodized in the pages of The Liberator about the moral transformation that was just then, he said, infusing the American spirit. He imagined the triumph of the righteous and the washing away of America’s sins, if only people would follow the banner of the abolitionists. “Be not afraid to look the monster Slavery boldly in the face,” he urged his readers. “He is your implacable foe—the vampyre who is sucking your life blood—the ravager of a large portion of your country, and the enemy of God and man.” Garrison’s purpose was to kindle a moral renaissance, so that America, once cleansed, could lead the rest of the world to a new Eden. Such a renaissance, he said, must start in the souls of individual Americans; from there it would sweep the nation. He angrily dismissed calls for political action, charging that the American political system itself stood guilty of allowing slavery in the first place. There was nothing sacred or honorable about the American experiment. The Constitution was not some great, soul-inspiring document that had inaugurated a new era; rather, it was “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth.”
The New York reformers, led by Lewis and Arthur Tappan, were horrified by such words. As the movement’s “conservative” wing, they saw it as their task to use the nation’s instruments, its political and legal system, to reform the Republic’s institutions. They scoffed at Garrison’s vision for a new America, labeling his views “wild” and “absurd.” The Grimkés were important, Weld had done a tremendous job, and the Lane Rebels had brought thousands into the crusade against human bondage. But the simple, awful, and unutterable truth about the antislavery movement was that two decades after first becoming a public topic, abolitionism was still viewed as a minor, a fringe, a marginal, cause. If Garrison was going to depend on “moral suasion” to free the slaves, the Tappans suggested, emancipation might never happen. Instead, they argued, the antislavery movement should transform itself from a church-based crusade into a political movement that would gain and use political power. Such a movement would compel the nation to fight slavery whether it wanted to or not.
James G. Birney, the rich and worldly Alabama slaveholder-turned-abolitionist, led the fight to shift the movement’s focus away from Garrison’s radicalism. “It is vain to think of succeeding in emancipation without the co-operation of the great mass of the intelligent minds of the nation,” Birney wrote. “This can be attracted, only by the reasonableness, the religion, of our enterprise.” Reasonableness? Garrison was enraged by such words. “Brethren, ‘cease from man,’” he wrote, mimicking Isaiah, “beware of a worldly policy; do not compromise principle; fasten yourself to the throne of God; and lean upon the arm of Omnipotence.” Put in its simplest terms, the division that split the abolitionist movement in 1838 was a fundamental one: Garrison wanted to change people’s values, while the Tappans wanted to win their votes. Garrison wanted to establish a new Eden, and the Tappans a republic of laws. Garrison wanted people to be infused with the Holy Spirit; the Tappans wanted them to be inundated with AAS mailings.
The Grimkés and Weld were caught in the middle of this fight. In the weeks and months prior to their wedding, Weld and Angelina exchanged expansive and detailed letters on their beliefs and on their roles in the battle. But it was not simply discomfort over the sisters’ appearance in public that bothered Weld (like so many others, he supported their activism but feared they would divert public attention from the abolitionist cause); it was also their adoption of some of Garrison’s views (including his “no government” argument and his condemnation of “vain” and “corrupting” human institutions). He told Angelina as much, and bluntly. In response, the sisters (Angelina was almost always the one who wrote to him, appending a shorter note from her sister) replied that they disapproved of some of his political viewpoints, and thought him “not a peace man.” Weld responded by reminding Angelina and Sarah of their own ties to Garrison. “Practically I have always been a ‘peace man’ in my sense of the word,” he argued. “Not a ‘no government’ man—that doctrine fills me with shuddering and I pray [for] you and all who are bewildered in its mazes and stumbling on its dark mountains ‘Father forgive them’ and open their eyes!” Weld’s criticism was pointed. He went on to imply that Sarah and Angelina’s heads had been turned by their public notoriety. This was a dicey topic, no less apt to inspire indirectness than the subject of intimacy. Weld had a talent in that area, and he used it well.
Both Angelina and Theodore believed it was time to leave the abolitionist movement, but not simply because they were getting married or because they could not agree on the most fundamental debate in the antislavery crusade. Deep down, they knew that the focus of the movement was shifting, and that the inevitable split between New Englanders and New Yorkers would spell the end of the public crusade for abolition. Both of them, and Sarah as well, could see it as clearly as they could the “War which hangs round the horizon of our country.” Weld welcomed this “irrepressible conflict,” but Angelina despaired for the future and worried about her relatives in South Carolina. “Sometimes the hope gleams across my mind that as we have labored so publicly in the cause of the slave, our services will be remembered in the hour of darkness and death and their lives will be spared—at least our Mother’s,” she wrote. “Are those vain and foolish hopes?”
Angelina Grimké and Theodore Dwight Weld were married on May 14, 1838, in the home of Angelina’s sister Anna Grimké Frost. Fewer than forty people attended the multiracial ceremony, which was conducted as a celebration of the unity of the two most outspoken antislavery voices in the nation. There was no minister present, for Weld and Grimké both believed that they could not “conscientiously consent” to be married by a clergyman; instead, they repeated those vows that occurred to them at the moment. Sarah memorialized the event in a letter to Catherine Beecher: “Theodore addressed Angelina in a solemn and tender manner. He alluded to the unrighteous power vested in an husband by the laws of the United States over the person and property of his wife, and he abjured all authority, all government, save the influence which love would give them over each other as moral and immortal beings. Angelina’s address to him was brief but comprehensive, containing a promise to honor him, to prefer him above herself, to love him with a pure heart fervently.”
The event was as political as it was social. The greatest lights of the abolitionist movement were in attendance, including William Lloyd Garrison, Henry B. Stanton, Abby Kelley, Jane Smith, Anne Warren Weston, John Greenleaf Whittier, Maria Weston Chapman, Gerrit Smith, Lewis Tappan, James Thome, and Weld’s disciples from the Oneida Institute and the Lane Seminary. After the marriage, two former slaves who had been given to Anna by her mother (and subsequently freed by her) delivered a short discourse on the slave life and bore testimony “against the horrible prejudice which prevails against colored persons, and the equally awful prejudice against the poor.” The wedding was unadorned, the ceremony simple; there was no drinking (of course) and no formal reception. Angelina knew that marrying Weld, who was not a Quaker, would get her barred from the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting; but she and Sarah had long since decided that they were lapsed Quakers, and over the last year they had openly criticized the Friends for their “quietist” stance on abolition. Angelina Grimké’s marriage to Weld thus only made official what was already an accomplished fact: neither Angelina nor Sarah would ever return to the Society of Friends.
May 14 was auspicious for another reason as well. As Angelina and Theodore were exchanging their vows, a group of Philadelphia reformers, including a large contingent of abolitionists (those, that is, who were not in attendance at the Grimké-Weld wedding), were dedicating Pennsylvania Hall, in downtown Philadelphia. The hall had been built by subscription, by an association led by men and women frustrated by their inability to find a facility for their meetings. After collecting forty thousand dollars over a period of two years, the group had erected the hall to serve as a safe haven for their activities. It was large but simply decorated, with a substantial conference area and several meeting rooms. The president of the association, a local businessman named Daniel Neall, gave the opening address and then turned the floor over to the secretary, William Dorsey, a prominent Philadelphian. Dorsey read the hall’s dedication statement: “A number of individuals of all sects, and those of no sect, of all parties, and those of no party, being desirous that the citizens of Philadelphia should possess a room wherein the principles of liberty and equality of civil rights could be freely discussed, and the evils of slavery fearlessly portrayed, have erected this building, which we are now about to dedicate to liberty and the rights of man.” The secretary then read letters of support from well-known abolitionists, including Theodore Weld.
Two days later, on May 16, the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women called a meeting to order in the new hall. The meeting had been well publicized, and the public invited to attend; as a further inducement, the convention had invited Angelina Grimké Weld and Maria Chapman to speak. Earlier that day, as placards had gone up around the city to announce the women’s public appearance, other notices were posted urging all Philadelphians to close the meeting—“forcibly if necessary.” The organizers ignored the threats. By the time the meeting began, late in the afternoon, the hall was jammed with more than three thousand people; hundreds of others had to be turned away. The organizers were overjoyed by the response.
The program opened with a short address by William Lloyd Garrison, whose thunderous voice overcame the scattered hissing and audible groans that punctuated his comments. When he had finished his speech, protestors attempted to end the meeting: catcalls and jeers came from the back of the hall, and there were disturbances in the aisles, with much pushing and shoving. A crowd of men endeavored to keep the speakers from reaching the platform. Maria Chapman finally made her way to the front of the room, where she tried to calm the crowd and continue the program. Just then, a shout from someone standing near one of the windows in back announced the arrival of an angry mob in the street in front of the hall. Stones flew, and then chairs, and the sound of windows breaking could be heard. In an effort to help Chapman, now besieged on the stage by an angry crowd, Angelina Grimké hurried up the center aisle and attempted to call the convention to order. The yelling subsided at the sight of her. She raised her voice to be heard and shouted above the boos; bricks came through the windows, but she went on with her address, undeterred. It was perhaps her finest moment. In spite of the din all around her, she held the crowd in the room, though many wanted to flee. She faced the mob, angrily raising her voice to ask, “What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? Any evidence that we are wrong, or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution? What if that mob should now burst in upon us, break up our meeting, and commit violence on our persons—would this be anything compared with what the slaves endure?”
Angelina next turned to the institution of slavery itself, linking the mob violence of Philadelphia to the violence she had witnessed growing up in South Carolina:
I have seen it! I have seen it! I know it has horrors that can never be described. I was brought up under its wing. I witnessed for many years its demoralizing influences and its destructiveness to human happiness. I have never seen a happy slave. I have seen him dance in his chains, it is true, but he was not happy. There is a wide difference between happiness and mirth. Man can not enjoy happiness while his manhood is destroyed. Slaves, however, may be and sometimes are mirthful. When hope is extinguished, they say “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
The noise from the mob outside grew, but the meeting continued. Angelina Grimké was followed to the podium by reformer Abby Kelley, then becoming nationally known for her views on women’s rights. After Kelley came Lucretia Mott, who gave an abbreviated speech. By then the crowd outside in the street had quieted, and most of the people in the meeting hall had taken their seats. The danger seemed to be over. Grimké’s words, the refusal of large numbers of attendees to abandon the hall, and the arrival of the police (late, even though the meeting’s organizers had asked for their protection) all combined to calm the protest. But the mob did not disperse. As the conventioneers filed out of Pennsylvania Hall, they were met by a cascade of jeers. The mob remained in the streets through the night, its leaders vowing to continue their protest into the next day.
May 17 dawned bright and clear. Early in the morning, a group of abolitionist women made their way to Pennsylvania Hall to continue the proceedings that had been suspended the night before. They fervently hoped that the mob would have disbanded by now, but when they arrived at the hall, they discovered that more than a thousand Philadelphians, many of them from the city docks, remained on the street outside. There were no policemen in sight. Undaunted, the antislavery women walked past the crowd, into the building, and began preparations for their meeting. Inexplicably, tensions eased throughout the day, and the proceedings were not interrupted. But toward evening, the protestors outside the hall were reinforced by a large group of workingmen. “The crowd around the building increased,” biographer Catherine Birney would later write, “and the secret agents of slavery were busy inflaming the passions of the rabble against the abolitionists, and inciting it to outrage.”
For the safety of the participants, the meeting scheduled for that evening was canceled, and the leaders of the association that owned the hall called on Philadelphia’s mayor, John Swift, for protection. The mayor duly appeared and attempted to persuade the crowd to leave, announcing that the meeting had been canceled and that there was thus no reason for anyone to stay. His effort, however, was perfunctory: at times he bantered with members of the crowd whom he recognized, and when he was done speaking, he bid everyone to “have a good evening.” The crowd gave him three cheers (“Hooray for the mayor”) and then broke into the hall. The police did not intervene.
Looting began. The hall’s “repository” of papers and books was ripped from its shelves and tables and thrown into the street. A gang climbed the interior stairs to the meeting rooms, piled papers and books on the podium, and lit the whole thing on fire. Within minutes, the main meeting room was ablaze, the flames visible through the windows. The mob below, now estimated at some ten to fifteen thousand people, cheered in triumph. The fire company appeared, but its attempts to extinguish the flames were halfhearted. Less than three hours later, before the clock struck midnight, all that was left of Pennsylvania Hall was its outer walls; flames had gutted its interior. It was a total loss.
After the Pennsylvania Hall riot, Philadelphia’s abolitionist community went into self-imposed internal exile. The abolitionists feared for their lives. The fire unleashed the white community’s rage at “amalgamation,” which was then spurred on by wild rumors, including one spread by mob leaders who said they had seen a black man escorting a white woman in downtown Philadelphia. This rumor turned out to be true, at least in part: the black man was Robert Purvis, and the woman his light-skinned wife. William Lloyd Garrison did not linger in Philadelphia to learn the outcome of the subsequent investigation into the fire; he was spirited out of town, against his will, by an abolitionist committee for public safety. His life was repeatedly threatened, and no one took those threats lightly.
Several weeks after the fire, and the attacks that followed on the black community, a special investigatory committee blamed both the mob and the Philadelphia abolitionists for the troubles. The antislavery movement, the commission concluded, had been responsible for the violence because it promoted “doctrines repulsive to the moral sense of a large majority.” The commission’s report did not mention any abolitionist by name, but if it had done so, it might well have singled out Sarah Grimké. At a key moment in the convention’s proceedings, Sarah had urged the antislavery women to adopt a resolution calling on all abolitionists to work for both emancipation and racial equality. They could do this, she said, if only they would choose to “identify themselves with these oppressed Americans, by sitting with them in places of worship, by appearing with them in our streets, by giving them our countenance in steamboats and stages, by visiting them at their homes and encouraging them to visit us, receiving them as we do our white fellow citizens.”
Three weeks after the Pennsylvania Hall fire, Angelina, Sarah, and Theodore moved from Philadelphia to Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Weld had bought a small farm. They intended to continue their work in the abolitionist movement, but from a distance, and primarily through their writing. Weld still insisted that he would never speak in public again, that his voice was too impaired from years of lecturing. Sarah, who had never really mastered the art of public speaking anyway, now decided to follow a new vocation: she would become an essayist on women’s rights. Angelina, for her part, was bent on being a good wife and mother and helping her husband in his writing. Together, the couple planned a book on slavery in America, a work that they hoped would be even more effective in recruiting Americans to the antislavery cause than any of their public appearances had been.
Angelina and Sarah’s move with Theodore to Fort Lee marked as much of a shift in their lives as their journey from Charleston to Philadelphia. Just as the sisters’ move north had foreshadowed their work in the antislavery movement (and in their new cause, equal rights for women), so now their decision to live wholly private lives signified the end of their public careers. In the years leading up to the Civil War, neither Angelina nor Sarah would ever again speak in public on the subject of slavery. From time to time over the next three decades, Sarah, Angelina, and Theodore would be urged to reignite and restoke the passions they had fired in the 1830s, but in each instance, they would turn down the invitation.
The Grimké sisters were now the Grimké family. The three—Sarah Grimké, Angelina Grimké Weld, and her husband, Theodore Weld—left Philadelphia to take up a life “in retirement” that would be a simple reflection of their beliefs in self-sustenance and intellectual and religious independence. Their Fort Lee farm was perfectly suited for such a life. The house was small but functional and placed well back from the bluffs overlooking the Hudson River. There was room for a large vegetable garden, and the farm’s orchards were a constant source of fresh fruit. Sarah, now forty-six, helped her “dear Nina” with the chores and spent her free time reading and writing. Angelina, thirty-three, struggled for a while with her new responsibilities but took pride in her little accomplishments, writing friends that her situation proved that her public career had not “spoiled” her for “domestic life.” Both sisters were happy, perhaps happier than they had ever been. But neither they nor Weld forgot who they all were and why they had met, and none wavered in his or her antislavery views. In the parlor, just inside the entrance to their home, they hung a picture of a kneeling slave. “It is just such a monument of suffering as we want in our parlor,” Angelina wrote in a letter to a friend. “We want those who come into our house to see at a glance that we are on the side of the oppressed and the poor.”
All three followed the diet then fashionable among the Eastern Seaboard’s educated classes. The “Graham diet” was the brainchild of Sylvester Graham, a well-known Boston nutritionist and the first American to start a “health fad.” The sisters had heard him lecture in Boston and had become convinced that adopting his diet would help them lead healthier lives. The Graham diet emphasized simple but nutritious foods such as apples, crackers, asparagus, potatoes, rice, stewed fruit, milk, beans, tomatoes, and the ever-present “Graham bread,” which we now know as Graham crackers. Left out were all condiments, meat, alcohol, tea, and coffee. All three lost weight and increased their strength, as Weld continued his daily walks and jogs, an unusual form of exercise for the time (he was not one of America’s first joggers, but nearly so). All three were poor: Angelina had brought her five-thousand-dollar inheritance to the marriage, and Weld was paid a thousand dollars a year by the American Anti-Slavery Society, but they had no other income; Sarah kept her own accounts and contributed to the household expenses by handing over a small monthly sum. They lived frugally but without want.
Angelina was intent on practicing good housekeeping. To this end, she kept William Andrus Alcott’s Young Housekeeper close at hand, as it recommended the most efficient ways for a young wife to clean and cook, leaving her time for the more important duties of a woman: moral elevation, religious training, and self-reflection. Everything, according to Alcott, was to be closely monitored and scheduled; if done properly, he confided, the endless tasks of cooking, washing, and cleaning would consume only one quarter as much time as they took up in a normal (un-Alcottized) household. Angelina, Sarah, and Theodore were convinced Graham and Alcott disciples, and the strict regimens they followed seemed to pay dividends, at least according to Sarah. “We believe it [the Graham-Alcott regimen] is the most conducive to health,” she wrote, “and, besides, it is such an emancipation of woman from the toils of the kitchen and saves so much precious time for purposes more important than eating and drinking.”
The three got along well. There was mutual respect among them, and a full and open relationship between Angelina and Theodore. If the new bride had any difficulty acclimating to married life, she never mentioned it in any of her writings. They worked together on Weld’s numerous writing assignments for the AAS, and several times each week he went into New York to work at the society’s offices. Having broken their ties with the Quakers of Philadelphia, the sisters seemed astonishingly unconcerned with religion, such an obsession for both of them just a few years earlier. They were comfortable in their Christian beliefs, in their dedication to leading a moral life, and in their conviction that no church, no minister, and no professed public belief was more important than their own unmediated relationship with an all-powerful and all-forgiving deity. There they let the matter rest.
By the end of the year, Weld had announced to Sarah and Angelina that he needed their help on his newest project, an exhaustive study of American slavery that would recount its actual horrors through the testimony of slaves, slave owners, and overseers, and through reliance on public records. He wanted it to be the most detailed account of slavery ever written. He and Angelina and Sarah spent weeks deciding how best to do the research for the book, then carefully composed extensive questionnaires to be mailed to Southern abolitionists, newspaper editors, newly freed slaves, public and religious officials, and members of Congress. The study they designed would, Weld hoped, result in the first comprehensive and empirical survey of the “peculiar institution.”
The purpose of the project, Weld said, was not merely to condemn slavery. Rather, it was to provide a full overview of slavery’s impact as related by those intimately engaged in it—to show its day-to-day practice, and to do so through “the testimony of slaveholders in all parts of the slave states, by slaveholding members of Congress and of state legislatures, by ambassadors to foreign courts, by judges, by doctors of divinity, and clergymen of all denominations, by merchants, mechanics, lawyers and physicians, by presidents and professors in college and professional seminaries, by planters, overseers and drivers.” Weld also involved the leadership of the AAS in his project: not trusting the results of the questionnaires alone, he persuaded James Birney, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Henry Stanton to check every testimonial, every article, and every anecdote to make certain they were factual.
To aid his study, Weld purchased the newspaper files of the New York Commercial Reading Room for the period from 1837 to 1838 and turned them over to Sarah and Angelina. Every day for the next several months, nearly from dawn until dusk, the sisters cataloged articles about slave sales, punishments, court proceedings, and the passage of penal codes, as well as birth and marriage announcements, notices about runaway slaves, and anything else of value from newspapers in Charleston, Vicksburg, New Orleans, Montgomery, Mobile, Memphis, Richmond, and Raleigh. They compiled the most extensive picture of slavery then in existence. From the newspapers, the sisters gleaned a vivid overview of everyday life in the slave South, as well as details about the common and ruthless abuse of particular slaves. Southern newspapers apparently had no qualms about reporting the whipping, lashing, beating, mutilation, execution, and even murder of black slaves by their white slaveholders. The testimonials were vivid and horrifying.
What Weld intended to do—condemn slavery through the words of slaveholders and slaves—he accomplished. The finished book, American Slavery as It Is, was begun in late 1838 and published in the summer of 1839. It was a labor of love that contained the testimony of one thousand witnesses—including the two Grimké sisters, who in sparse but powerful prose told of their experience with slavery in South Carolina. Weld, who offered his own trenchant analyses on the public testimonies, wrote the introduction to the book, laying out the evidence that he and his wife and sister-in-law had gathered through their months of detailed work. His words painted a dark picture of the life of American slaves.
[That] they are overworked, underfed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and have insufficient sleep; that they are often made to wear round their necks iron collars armed with prongs, to drag heavy chains and weights at their feet while working in the field, and to wear yokes, and bells, and iron horns; that they are often kept confined in the stocks day and night for weeks together, made to wear gags in their mouths for hours or days, have some of their front teeth removed or broken off, that they may be easily detected when they run away . . . that their ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken, their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are maimed, mutilated and burned to death over slow fires. All these things, and more, and worse, we shall prove.
American Slavery as It Is was ignored by the national press, went unreviewed in most of America’s major publications, and was passed over without comment by the nation’s political and intellectual elite. Its grim portraits, its “ghoulish” details, and its vivid sketches were decried in the North, laughed at in the South, and summarily dismissed in the halls of Congress. But in its first year of publication, American Slavery as It Is sold one hundred thousand copies. Its success came almost solely by word of mouth.
In faraway Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe—a daughter of Weld’s old nemesis and friend Lyman Beecher, and the wife of Calvin Stowe, a professor at the Lane Seminary during the time of the Lane Rebellion—read American Slavery as It Is, put it down, and then immediately picked it up again and reread it. She was overwhelmed by the book. The depictions of individual suffering that Weld and the Grimkés provided would stay with her for years. Later she would incorporate what she had read into a number of scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When asked how she had created such vivid incidents, Stowe would answer that they had been supplied her by Theodore Dwight Weld. American Slavery as It Is and Uncle Tom’s Cabin would become, and remain, the twin Bibles of the abolitionist crusades.
The Grimké sisters were attacked by their Southern relatives for their testimony in American Slavery as It Is. By now this was hardly new to them, but they were stung by the continuing claim that they had betrayed their family and friends, their state and region, and even the principles that their father had held dear. Angelina defended the work to her sister Anna Frost, who was in Charleston looking after their ill mother, by insisting Sarah’s and her views could not be censored simply because they made people in Charleston uncomfortable. “It cost us more agony of soul to write those testimonies than any thing we ever did,” she wrote, “but the Lord required it and gave us strength to do it, leaving all the consequences in HIS holy hands.” Northern abolitionists praised the book but added their own unique criticism, suggesting that if the Grimkés really wanted to do something useful for the antislavery movement, they could set off on a new speaking tour and leave Weld to his own designs.
Inevitably, a whispering campaign—charging that the Grimkés were now firmly ensconced in a way of life they had once rejected, that they had settled down to a conventional life-style for which they were ill suited, and that they luxuriated in their own comforts while their former colleagues in the movement toiled unceasingly in the fields of reform—made the rounds, scurrilously, accompanied by winks and knowing smiles (what were the three of them, two women and one man, doing up there on the New Jersey bluffs, anyway?). Eventually word of it reached the Weld home in Fort Lee. Taking up her pen, Lydia Maria Child did not ask quite so blunt a question, but still still chided Sarah and Angelina for the choice they had made: “I began to think it was with you as with a girl, who being met by a person with whom she had formerly lived at service, was asked, ‘Where do you live now, Nancy?’ ‘Please ma’am, I don’t live anywhere now; I’m married.’” An old abolitionist friend, Deborah Weston, put it even more boldly: “The Grimkés, I think, are extinct,” she told a friend.
Weld reacted angrily to such whispers and criticisms. He viewed American Slavery as It Is as difficult and hard work that had been necessary for the cause and that could not be put aside in favor of public posturing. It was the same position he had taken years before in turning down invitations to speak at conventions and meetings. “Enough of that,” he had said then. Now he played a variation on this old theme. “The great body of Abolitionists seem to be mere passengers on a pleasure sail,” he wrote to his fellow New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “They are willing to take the helm, or handle the speaking trumpet or go up aloft to see and be seen, but to bone down to ship work as a common sailor, especially in the hold, is a sort of business that cometh not with observation, and they are off.”
What Weld did not say was that he and Angelina and Sarah also had other responsibilities to meet just now. The battles of the abolitionist movement seemed far away and much less important than they had a year before. After the publication of American Slavery as It Is, Mary Smith Grimké had fallen ill in Charleston. She was old and tired and missed her husband and children. In August 1839, she died. Anna Frost wrote from Charleston to inform her sisters, and noted that their mother had died without knowing of the appearance of American Slavery as It Is (Anna had kept it from her in her last days); she had thus been “spared,” in Anna’s words, the “bitter cup” of this “last infamous publication.”
The sorrow that the sisters felt at their mother’s passing was mitigated by the birth, that December, of Angelina and Theodore’s first child, Charles Stuart Faucheraud Weld, named for his father’s closest friend. Charley, as they would sometimes call him in the years to come, was raised according the principles laid down in Andrew Combes’s Physiological and Moral Management of Infancy, one of the standard child-rearing texts of the era. He was fed, laid in his crib, and bathed by the clock. But the infant was not healthy and suffered from colic until Sarah intervened. She ignored Combes’s advice that infants be fed only five spoonfuls of formula at each feeding and allowed the child to eat his fill, whereupon he grew fat and happy. Sarah was horrified by the baby’s “gluttony” but could think of no reason that he should not eat, so she kept feeding him as Angelina fretted over her inability to nurse him. These minor (and hardly unusual) problems aside, the sisters were overjoyed by Charley’s arrival. Angelina looked on him as a “little teacher sent from God,” and Sarah took much the same view, though for her the infant also provided a respite from her loneliness. “Oh, the ecstasy and the gratitude!” she exclaimed in her diary. “How I opened the little blanket and peeped in to gaze, with swimming eyes, at my treasure, and looked upon that face forever so dear!”
In April 1840, a national nominating convention of antislavery delegates (officially named the National Convention of Friends of Immediate Emancipation) met in Albany, New York, to form a political party opposed to slavery. The convention, organized by upstate reformers, members of politically active AAS chapters, and Tappan allies, crafted a strong immediate-emancipation party platform and then nominated James G. Birney to run for president. Thomas Earle of Pennsylvania, a well-known abolitionist, was chosen as his running mate. The new political movement was dubbed the Liberty party by New Yorker Gerrit Smith. The party’s formation was a watershed for the abolitionist movement, for it drew an uncrossable line between the Tappans and their Garrisonian adversaries. Garrison had counseled abolitionists against polluting themselves with political work, but his words went unheeded in New York, where the Tappans braced for the predicted Garrison backlash. Garrison, they knew, wanted to either take over the AAS or dissolve it, so that its two wings could go their separate ways.
The long-anticipated showdown between Tappan’s New York reformers and Garrison’s New England “ultras” took place on a bright Tuesday afternoon in May 1840, at the annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The meeting was held in the large Fourth Free Church at the corner of Madison and Catherine streets in Manhattan. The nearly one thousand people who crowded into the church (and the many observers and allies of Garrison and the Tappans who stood outside in the street, jostling for the best spot to hear about the proceedings) expected the clash to be short but bloody. Each side drew up strategies to defeat the other. Looking out over the crowd, Lewis Tappan realized that Garrison had successfully packed the church; Tappan’s reformers were outnumbered. The Garrison faction included trainloads of pro-labor activists from the textile mills of Lynn, Massachusetts, a group of prominent radical women, and more than the usual handful of black males. Garrison surveyed the same scene and was exultant, seeing a veritable “Gideon’s Army” ready to do battle with “the slave power.”
The stage for the great battle had been set a year before, at the 1839 national meeting, when the convention defied the Tappans and gave women the right to vote in AAS proceedings. To add luster to that victory for Garrison, James Birney’s resolution condemning the “no government” and “nonresistance” strains of the AAS had ignominiously failed by a wide margin of votes. At that moment, the Tappans had realized that they no longer controlled the movement they had founded. They had maneuvered to win more support in the intervening year, but their efforts had been unsuccessful. Now, in 1840, the two questions before the convention were much the same ones that had been raised the year before: Should the AAS give women the right to vote in its proceedings? And more important, would the AAS endorse the nonpolitical strategy of “moral suasion” to gain new adherents, or would it turn its attention to building a political movement?
The meeting opened with a raucous call for order, the seating of the delegates, and preparation for the arrival of the convention’s chair, Arthur Tappan, who was scheduled to open the meeting. But the two o’clock deadline for opening the convention came and went, and still Tappan did not appear. The crowd was restive but then fell silent in anticipation of a full boycott of the meeting by the AAS’s most important supporter and his followers. Nothing happened for many minutes, though each camp eyed the other warily. A few delegates believed that William Garrison himself (editor of The Lie-berator, as Tappan’s followers had taken to calling his paper) would take the chair and order the organization dissolved. But word eventually came that Arthur Tappan would not attend the meeting and had decided instead to resign the presidency of the AAS. The rumor flew through the church before the news was announced peremptorily from the pulpit. Tappan’s resignation began a stampede. A Garrison ally seized the podium, and within a few short minutes, New Englander Francis Jackson (a Garrison partisan) had been elected as the new AAS president. In one moment, it seemed, power over the society had passed from the Tappans to the Garrisonians.
But the Tappans were not yet defeated and, as Garrison’s followers carefully noted, had not left the meeting. In fact, while Garrison and his followers had had the votes to elect a new AAS president, it was not at all clear that they had enough to unseat the Tappans or any of their followers, much less denounce the brothers and Birney for their attempts to shift the organization’s goals. From the rostrum, Jackson moved to quell an embarrassment for the Garrison forces by announcing that the first order of business was to approve the nomination of the AAS “business committee.” A slate of nominees was offered that included Lewis Tappan (Arthur’s brother was still present, waiting to see what would happen) as well as the “sober, serious and prayerful” Amos Phelps, a New Englander but a Tappan ally. Jackson quickly proposed that two others be added to the committee: Abby Kelley and Charles Burleigh, both outspoken Garrisonians.
The problem, of course, was over the seating of the Quaker Abby Kelley, a courageous and articulate former Worcester, Massachusetts, schoolteacher who had followed the same path as the Grimkés in lecturing to “mixed audiences” on the slavery question. She had become almost as famous as Angelina and insisted on journeying into the most dangerous parts of New England to spread the AAS message. Like the Grimkés, however, Kelley had begun mixing her call for black emancipation with other reformist impulses, including women’s equality. Her most stirring message sparked the bitterest of responses: when she shouted at the women who attended one meeting, “We are manacled ourselves,” newspapers called her a harlot, an Amazon, a sorcerer, and a temptress. Angelina Grimké might be outspoken, Lucretia Mott tough-minded, and Maria Chapman, Prudence Crandall, and Lydia Maria Child well known (and respected), but Kelley was a true radical. She helped Garrison organize the nonresistance wing of the AAS and was even the subject of a Garrison editorial on courage.
The Kelley test vote came after the convention approved, without objection, the seating of Tappan and Phelps on the business committee. At first it seemed that her nomination had been overwhelmingly carried, for when the voice vote was called for, the crowd gave a thunderous “aye.” But then someone in the back of the church (undoubtedly a Tappan ally) asked for a full and recorded count of every vote. Jackson acceded to the request, though he certainly knew it would divide the membership, pitting the Garrisonians on one side against the Tappans on the other. He had no choice. He asked those in favor of Kelley’s nomination to stand. The church was so full that the clerks had difficulty making their count and had to go over and over their numbers to make sure they had counted everyone in every pew as well as all those standing along the church walls, but after a quarter of an hour, Jackson announced that there were 571 in favor. He then asked for those opposed to stand, and as one half of the hall sat, the other stood. There was then an open question from the floor: Could women vote on this point? Amos Phelps maintained that they could not, a remark that was greeted with hisses from Garrison’s allies. It would not have mattered anyway: 571 delegates had voted in favor of seating Kelley, and 451 against. The Garrisonians had prevailed.
The process had taken most of the afternoon. Jackson, anxious to keep the AAS from splintering, attempted to gain control of the meeting as thunderous applause greeted Kelley’s victory. Garrison called for order from the back of the church and endeavored to mollify the Tappan forces, but then Lewis Tappan rose from his seat and shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear, that he would never serve on a “promiscuous” committee “in defiance of Scriptures.” His allies stood up one by one to support him. Kelley had her own view: “In Congress the masters speak while the slaves are denied a voice,” she proclaimed. “I rise because I am not a slave.” She glared across the church at Tappan, who ignored her. Jackson finally regained control of the floor, gaveled the convention to silence, and quickly announced that the meeting was adjourned until the next morning. The crowd filed from the church, voices still raised in argument. But for all intents, the American Anti-Slavery Society had been, in Whittier’s word, “exploded,” and Abby Kelley had been the bombshell.
That evening, at his home, Lewis Tappan met with three dozen of his friends to announce his plans for a new organization. Its first meeting, he said, would take place the next day, in the room below the hall where the AAS was holding its convention. The new American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society consisted of Arthur and Lewis Tappan’s political friends and organizers and a core group of Birney supporters from the new antislavery Liberty party. Its greatest support came from New York reformers and from Christian moderates wedded to the idea of political action shorn of the controversy that Garrison, the “nonresisters,” and women had brought to the AAS. Upstairs, the American Anti-Slavery Society, now fully under Garrison’s control, elected a new executive board comprising three women, one free black, and three New England Garrisonians, including Garrison himself. His triumph was complete. “We have made a clear work of everything,” he wrote to his wife.
Just across the Hudson River, Angelina and Sarah Grimké and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, could hardly bring themselves to read about the convention. They viewed its proceedings with distaste, not simply because the antagonists had split the movement, but because they understood that abolitionism as they had known it was dead. When William Lloyd Garrison and his followers captured the American Anti-Slavery Society, they conquered a shell. The great crusade of the 1830s was over, and its leaders (the Grimkés, Weld, the Lane Rebels, the Tappans, even Garrison himself) were in eclipse. The movement was entering a new phase. The future of abolitionism was being placed in the hands of political activists who were interested less in shifting public opinion than in forcing a confrontation with the South.
The old abolitionist societies would live on, but their work of building a movement was over. Their epitaph would be written, three years after the AAS’s schism, by an Illinois politician who served as Benjamin Lundy’s editorial assistant: “The Societies have done a good work in their day,” he would note, “and we can cherish them still, for the love of old associations, if we choose, without any detriment to the work they have so successfully built up.—But the advanced state of the cause, the political aspect which it has taken, require a different organization, as one which has not the stiffness and sluggishness of age upon it.”