Stone, you are not half emancipated! "
She was teaching school in North Brookfield in 1837, when the General Association of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts held their Quadrennial Conference there, and issued a "Pastoral Letter" to the churches under their care, warning them against discussing slavery, and especially against letting women speak in public. This remarkable document called attention to "the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with wide-spread and permanent injury." It especially deplored "the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Such proceedings, it predicted, would open the way to "degeneracy and ruin."
In those days, the Orthodox Congregational Church was supreme in Massachusetts, and the word of its clergy carried immense weight. The Pastoral Letter was read in all the churches. At the Conference in North Brookfield the floor of the church was black with ministers, and the gallery was filled with women and laymen. While the Letter was read, the Reverend Doctor Blagden walked up and down the aisle, turning his head from side to side and looking up at the women in the gallery with an air that seemed to say, "Now! Now we have silenced you! " Lucy sat in the gallery with her cousin. She said, in after years, "I was young enough then so that my indignation blazed. My cousin said that her side was black and blue with the indignant nudges of my elbow at each aggravating sentence; and I told her afterwards that, if I ever had anything to say in public, I should say it, and all the more because of that Pastoral Letter."
This Pastoral Letter, which was satirized by Whittier in a stirring poem, was called out by the lectures of Sarah and Angelina Grimke against slavery, and the deep impression they made.
The Grimke sisters were the first American women to lecture against slavery or for woman's rights — almost the first American women to open their mouths in public at all, outside a Quaker meeting. They and Abby Kelley Foster were the three women who did the most to break down the barrier debarring women from public speech. They opened the way for Lucy, and for all who came after her. Their names should always be held in grateful remembrance.
Daughters of one of the first families of South Carolina, brought up to wealth and luxury and the service of slaves, Sarah and Angelina had become convinced that slavery was wrong, and Angelina had entered into correspondence with Garrison. In 1836 she was invited by the American Anti-Slavery Society to come and give talks against slavery, to women only. She declined the offered salary, but came and brought her sister. They spoke in New York and New Jersey, and then came to New England. It had been the intention that they should speak to women in church sewing circles and at parlor meetings, but no parlor would hold all the women who wanted to hear. Anti-slavery ministers offered the use of their session rooms. It was thought a great scandal that women should speak in so sacred a place. The interest grew. One or two men began to slip into the rear seats. At first they were turned out. Later they refused to go. Although brought up as High Church Episcopalians, the sisters had become Quakers, and did not think it wrong for a woman to speak when men were present. Before long they were lecturing to mixed audiences, largely made up of men. Then the storm broke, — a storm of tremendous violence.
The texts that were always quoted against the women were the words of St. Paul, "Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak", and "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."
The opposition to the women who spoke against slavery was due in part to the belief that their action was contrary to Scripture, in part to the usual dislike for any innovation, in part to the anger of men against any encroachment upon their exclusive privileges, and in part to the belief that the textile industries of New England could not be carried on without the slave-grown cotton of the South. The economic objection was not the least powerful.
Even while the sisters spoke only to women, their meetings had been ridiculed in the proslavery press, which included almost all the Northern newspapers. With the issuing of the Pastoral Letter, the opposition became fiercer; but they continued to lecture to audiences that overflowed the largest halls. Angelina was beautiful, and had a calm, simple and magnetic eloquence. Wendell Phillips said, "She swept all the chords of the human heart with a power that has never been surpassed, and rarely equalled." Sarah, though an able writer, was not so good a speaker; but both sisters had the great advantage that they could tell of the facts of slavery from actual experience.
If the wrath that they aroused was great at the North, it was still greater in the South. Angelina wrote "An Appeal to Southern Women against Slavery." Many copies were mailed to South Carolina. Most of them were publicly burned by postmasters. When she wished to make a visit to her mother and sisters, the Mayor of Charleston sent her word that the police had orders to prevent her from landing or from communicating with any person while the steamer was in port; and that, if she succeeded in coming ashore, she would be put in prison. Friends warned her that she would almost certainly become the object of mob violence.
Shortly before the issuing of the Pastoral Letter, Sarah had begun to publish in the New England Spectator a series of articles on "The Province of Woman." She had long had the woman question very much at heart. She grieved for the sufferings not only of the slaves, but of white women and children under the unjust laws; and she had felt strongly on the subject of equal educational opportunities for women ever since, in her girlhood, her father, Judge Grimke, had refused to let her study Latin with her brother, although he declared that, if she were a boy, she would make the ablest jurist in the country.
Sarah's letters in the Spectator made a commotion and greatly intensified the opposition. Garrison and Phillips backed the women to the utmost; but most of the abolitionists did not yet believe in the general doctrine of equal rights for women, and, of those who did, many thought it a mistake to mix up the antislavery cause, which was intensely unpopular, with the question of woman's rights, which was more unpopular still. Angelina wrote:
"We have given great offence on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of the storm, if we can only be the means of making a breach in the wall of public opinion, which lies right in the way of woman's true dignity, honor and usefulness. Sister Sarah does preach up woman's rights most nobly and fearlessly; and we find that many of our New England sisters are prepared to receive these strange doctrines, feeling, as they do, that our whole sex needs emancipation from the thralldom of public opinion."
In reply to further remonstrances, she wrote:
"I am still glad of sister's letters, and believe they are doing great good. Some noble-minded women cheer her on, the brethren notwithstanding. I tell them that this is a part of the great doctrine of Human Rights, and can no more be separated from emancipation than the light from the heat of the sun; the rights of the slave and of woman blend like the colors of the rainbow. However, I rarely introduce this topic into my addresses, except to urge my sisters up to duty I am very glad to hear that Lucretia Mott addressed the Moral Reform Society, and am earnest in the hope that we are only pioneers, going before a host of worthy women who will come up to the help of the Lord against the mighty."
The protests were so many and so earnest, even from men who themselves believed thoroughly in equal rights, that Sarah finally discontinued her articles in the Spectator. They were published in pamphlet form, however, and widely circulated.
A committee of the Massachusetts Legislature was appointed in 1838 to consider the petitions that were pouring in on the subject of slavery. Hearings were held, and Angelina was among the speakers. It was the first time that a woman's voice had been heard in the Boston State House.
In the same year, she married Theodore D. Weld, a noble and valiant abolitionist. The wedding took
