A few years later, her sister Angelina joined her in Philadelphia. They both became members of anti-slavery groups and began speaking out against the treatment of African Americans.
Both booklets argued against slavery. Leaders in the South were so offended by their ideas against slavery, that they burned the booklets and warned Sarah and Angelina that they would be arrested if they ever came back to South Carolina. Sarah and Angelina kept writing even though it was dangerous.
Now living in New York, Sarah wrote about the poor treatment of women and enslaved people. She continued to speak in front of large crowds with her sister. When her sister decided to marry an abolitionist named Theodore Dwight Weld, the Quaker religious group kicked them out because Weld was not a Quaker. Shortly after, they moved to New Jersey and began working in education. They started taking in students to live with them in , and by they were the leaders of a boarding school.
They opened a second school in Eagleswood, New Jersey and taught students until During this time, the American Civil War broke out over the issue of slavery. The boys were the sons of their brother Henry and a woman he enslaved named Nancy Weston. Instead she settled into Philadelphia Quaker life, teaching at the infant school. After reading about the struggles of the abolitionists, she wrote a moving letter to Garrison, which was published without her permission in his abolitionist journal, The Liberator.
This letter catapulted Angelina into the public realm, and was followed in by her Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States. The Appeal was written in a personal tone, addressing Southern women as friends and colleagues. In , Angelina and Sarah moved to New York against the advice and without the permission of the Philadelphia Quakers to begin work as agents for the abolitionist cause.
Within weeks of the training, they began offering public talks for female anti-slavery meetings in New York. In their talks they advocated practical ways that Northerners could influence slavery regulations, but also urged their audiences to locate and root out race prejudice in their own lives and communities. According to their analysis, race prejudice in the North and the South was a major support of the slave system. They understood this from their own experience with slaves and free blacks in the North, as well as through discussions with one of their mentors, the leading abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld.
They helped organize the New York Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women which strengthened their bonds with other women activists in the anti-slavery cause and in began touring Northern cities, giving talks to packed audiences. Their work was very successful and led to the creation of more female anti-slavery associations and thousands of signatures on anti-slavery petitions. However, in every city they visited, the fact that they were women speaking before a mixed male and female audience created an uproar, even among abolitionist sympathizers.
Many religious leaders hotly rejected the idea that women should speak from pulpits and public stages. In her essay Beecher advocated gradualism instead of immediate emancipation, and also called women to remember their subordinate role in society. Angelina responded in the summer of , publishing Letters to Catherine Beecher, defending immediate emancipation of slaves, as well as the right and responsibility of women to participate as citizens in their society.
During this same period, Sarah also began writing Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. Their speaking tour ended in late with Angelina very ill and both sisters exhausted from their grueling traveling and lecturing schedule.
Instead of withdrawing from the public stage, Angelina and Sarah went on to achieve even more notoriety when, in , Angelina testified at a Committee of the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts, becoming the first American woman to testify in a legislative meeting.
They continued to write and work to support abolitionist causes. Weld and both of the sisters withdrew from active participation for a short time; when Theodore resumed his activist work in , Angelina and Sarah were overwhelmed with caring for the young children and maintaining the farm.
Even before Angelina received the invitation to become an anti-slavery agent, she had written an Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States , calling on her old friends and acquaintances in South Carolina to become active participants in the movement to end slavery.
It was advice that echoed her own odyssey to abolition. When copies of the Appeal reached Charleston, the local police warned Mary Smith Grimke that her daughter would be imprisoned if she ever set foot in the city of her birth again.
Angelina addressed her next major publication to the women and men of the North, especially those like the educator Catherine Beecher who advocated colonization as the solution to the racial problems of the country. In Letters to Catherine Beecher , Angelina rejected what she called the exile of African Americans and accused those who embraced colonization of racism.
By the end of the fall, Angelina was gravely ill, weakened by emotional as well as physical fatigue. But on February 21, , she had recovered enough to make history once again, becoming the first woman to speak before a legislative body in the United States.
Feelings ran high in the city as rumors spread of whites and blacks parading arm in arm down city streets, and by the first evening of the event, a hostile crowd had gathered outside the convention hall. Sounds of objects being thrown against the walls reverberated inside. But Angelina Grimke rose to speak out against slavery. I have seen it! The next morning, an angry mob again surrounded the hall, and that evening, set fire to the building, ransacked the anti-slavery offices inside, and destroyed all records and books that were found.
But she and Theodore continued to write, producing American Slavery As It Is in , a documentary account of the evils of the Southern labor system. Over the next few decades, the Grimke sisters and Weld would earn a modest living as teachers, often in schools that Weld established.
All three kept abreast of political developments and attended anti-slavery meetings. When the Civil War came, Angelina strongly supported the Union effort. She had hoped for a peaceful means of freeing the enslaved but had come to accept the reality that force was needed. Sarah later recalled that her father, the wealthy Judge John Fauchereaud Grimke, held his 14 children to the highest standards of discipline and sometimes required them to work in the field shelling corn or picking cotton.
In Sarah accompanied her father to Philadelphia so he could receive medical treatment. There she encountered members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who helped her care for her dying father.
I was as one in bonds looking on their sufferings I could not soothe or lessen….
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