Activism
The Grimké sisters joined a Philadelphia chapter of the Quakers. During this period, they remained relatively ignorant of certain political issues and debates; the only periodical they read regularly was The Friend, the weekly paper of the Society of Friends. The Friend provided limited information on current events and discussed them only within the context of the Quaker community. Thus, at the time, Grimké was unaware of (and therefore uninfluenced by) events such as the Webster–Hayne debates and the Maysville Road veto, as well as controversial public figures such as Frances Wright.
For a time in Philadelphia, Angelina lived with her widowed sister, Anna Grimké Frost. The younger woman was struck by the lack of options for widowed women, which during this period were mostly limited to remarriage. Generally, women of the upper classes did not work outside the home. Realizing the importance of education, Angelina decided to become a teacher. She briefly considered attending the Hartford Female Seminary, an institution founded and run by her future adversary Catharine Beecher, but she remained in Philadelphia for the time being.
Over time, she became frustrated by the Quaker community's lack of involvement in the contemporary debate on slavery. In the first two decades after the Revolution, its preachers had traveled in the South to preach manumission of slaves, but increased demand in the domestic market with the development of cotton in the Deep South ended that window of freedom. She began to read more abolitionist literature, including the periodicals The Emancipator and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator (in which she would later be published). Sarah and the traditional Quakers disapproved of Angelina's interest in radical abolitionism, but she became steadily more involved in the movement. She began to attend anti-slavery meetings and lectures, and joined the newly organized Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835.
In the fall of 1835, violence erupted when the controversial abolitionist George Thompson spoke in public. William Lloyd Garrison wrote an article in The Liberator in the hopes of calming the rioting masses. Angelina had been steadily influenced by Garrison's work, and this article inspired her to write him a personal letter on the subject. The letter stated her concerns and opinions on the issues of abolitionism and mob violence, as well as her personal admiration for Garrison and his values. Garrison was so impressed with Grimké's letter, which he called "soul-thrilling," that he published it in the next issue of The Liberator, praising her for her passion, expressive writing style, and noble ideas. The letter, reprinted in the New York Evangelist and elsewhere, gave Angelina great standing among many abolitionists, but its publication offended and stirred controversy within the Orthodox Quaker meeting, which openly condemned such radical activism, especially by a woman. Sarah Grimké asked her sister to withdraw the letter, concerned that such publicity would alienate her from the Quaker community. Though initially embarrassed by the letter's publication, Angelina refused. The letter was later reprinted in the New York Evangelist and other abolitionist papers; it was also included in a pamphlet with Garrison's Appeal to the Citizens of Boston. In 1836, Grimké wrote "An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South", urging Southern women to petition their state legislatures and church officials to end slavery. It was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Scholars consider it a high point of Grimké's sociopolitical agenda.
In the fall of 1836, the Grimké sisters were invited to Ohio to attend the American Anti-Slavery Society's two-week training conference for anti-slavery agents; they were the only women in the group. There they met Theodore Dwight Weld, a trainer and one of the Society's leading agents; Angelina and Theodore later married. During the following winter, the sisters were commissioned to speak at women's meetings and organize women's anti-slavery societies in the New York City region and nearby New Jersey. In May, 1837, they joined leading women abolitionists from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in holding the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, held to expand women's anti-slavery actions to other states.
Immediately after this convention, the sisters went by invitation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to Massachusetts. New England abolitionists were accused of distorting and exaggerating the realities of slavery, and the sisters were asked to speak throughout New England on their firsthand knowledge. Almost from the beginning, their meetings were open to men. Although defenders later claimed that the sisters addressed mixed audiences only because men insisted on coming, primary evidence indicates that their meetings were open to men by deliberate design, not only to carry their message to male as well as female hearers, but as a means of breaking women's fetters and establish "a new order of things." Thus, in addition to petitioning, women were transgressing social mores by speaking in public. In response, a state convention of Massachusetts' Congregational ministers, meeting at the end of June, issued a pastoral letter condemning public work by women and urging local churches to close their doors to the Grimkés' presentations.
As the sisters spoke throughout Massachusetts during the summer of 1837, the controversy over women abolitionists' public and political work fueled a growing controversy over women's rights and duties, both within and outside the anti-slavery movement. Angelina responded to Catharine Beecher's letter with open letters of her own, Letters to Catharine Beecher, printed first in The New England Spectator and The Liberator, and then in book form in 1838. Sarah Grimké wrote Letters on the Province of Woman, addressed to Mary S. Parker, which appeared first in the Liberator before being published in book form. Addressed to the president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, who in the wake of the pastoral letter wanted women abolitionists to withdraw from public work, Sarah's letters were a strong defense of women's right and duty to participate on equal terms with men in all such work.
In February 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts State Legislature, becoming the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. She not only spoke against slavery, but defended women's right to petition, both as a moral-religious duty and as a political right. Abolitionist Robert F. Wallcut stated that "Angelina Grimké's serene, commanding eloquence enchained attention, disarmed prejudice and carried her hearers with her."
On May 17, 1838, two days after her marriage, Angelina spoke at a racially integrated abolitionist gathering at the new Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. As she spoke, an unruly mob outside of the hall grew more and more aggressive, shouting threats at Angelina and the other attendees. Rather than stop her speech, Angelina incorporated their interruptions into her speech:Men, brethren and fathers -- mothers, daughters and sisters, what came ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? Is it curiosity merely, or a deep sympathy with the perishing slave, that has brought this large audience together? [A yell from the mob without the building.] Those voices without ought to awaken and call out our warmest sympathies. Deluded beings! "they know not what they do." They know not that they are undermining their own rights and their own happiness, temporal and eternal. Do you ask, "what has the North to do with slavery?" Hear it -- hear it. Those voices without tell us that the spirit of slavery is here, and has been roused to wrath by our abolition speeches and conventions: for surely liberty would not foam and tear herself with rage, because her friends are multiplied daily, and meetings are held in quick succession to set forth her virtues and extend her peaceful kingdom. This opposition shows that slavery has done its deadliest work in the hearts of our citizens. Rioters outside the building began to throw bricks and stones, breaking the windows of the hall. Angelina continued the speech, and after her conclusion, the abolitionist women left the building arm-in-arm, a white woman with a Black woman, for the latter's protection. Within hours, Pennsylvania Hall was destroyed by arson. Angelina was the final speaker in the Hall.
Angelina's lectures were critical not only of Southern slaveholders but also of Northerners who tacitly complied with the status quo, by purchasing slave-made products and exploiting slaves through the commercial and economic exchanges they made with slave owners in the South. They were met with a considerable amount of opposition, both because Angelina was a female and because she was an abolitionist.
