in Philadelphia. Three days later Angelina made what was destined to be her last public speech.
Having had great difficulty in securing halls, the Pennsylvania abolitionists and other friends of free speech had formed an association and built a beautiful hall at a cost of forty thousand dollars, to be open for free discussion on all subjects not immoral. Most of the stockholders were mechanics or working men, and many were women. Pennsylvania Hall was opened on the week of Angelina's marriage. The first three days of the dedicatory exercises included addresses on slavery, temperance, the Indians, the right of free discussion and kindred topics. On the fourth day, speeches were to be made against slavery by prominent women. The mob rose — egged on secretly, it was said, by gentlemen of property and standing — and surrounded the hall with howls and uproar. Angelina spoke for an hour, standing calm and beautiful, while the yells and execrations increased without, and missile after missile crashed through the broken windows; and the crowded audience hung upon her words. The next night the hall was burned down, without any serious effort by the city authorities to save it.
An injury received soon after her marriage incapacitated Angelina permanently for public speaking, and her sister had already been obliged to give it up, owing to the failure of her voice.
Abby Kelley made her first public speech at the meeting where Angelina Grimke Weld made her last. Of all the pioneer women, she suffered the most persecution. She was a Quaker school-teacher, fair, comely, and of the noblest character. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1811, she studied and taught, by turns, like Lucy Stone, till she had gained the highest education then obtainable by a woman in New England. She became so deeply interested in the antislavery cause that she gave to the Anti-Slavery Society all her accumulated earnings, and her small inheritance from her father's estate, and even sold her most expensive garments in order to contribute their price. She finally resigned her position as teacher of the Quaker school in Lynn, Massachusetts, and devoted herself wholly to anti-slavery work. Again and again, some friend gave her a gold watch; but the gold watches always went straight into the antislavery treasury. Lucy Stone said, "She could no more have helped it than if her children had needed bread." Her path was made very hard.
She held several well-attended meetings at Washington, Connecticut, and was asked to stay and address another. Then the minister preached against her from the text, "I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach, and to seduce my servants to commit fornication." He drew a black picture of the original Jezebel and declared that another Jezebel had arisen, making high pretensions to philanthropy and Christianity, and with fascinations exceeding even those of her Scriptural prototype. He added: "Do any of you ask for evidence of her vile character? It needs no other evidence than the fact that, in the face of the clearest commands of God, 'Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak', she comes with her brazen face, a servant of Satan in the garb of an angel of light, and tramples this commandment under her feet." She went to the next prayer meeting, and stood near the door as the people passed out. With one exception, none of those who had attended her meetings, or had entertained her hospitably, gave her a word or a look. They passed her by as if she did not exist. Such things happened again and again. In 1845 she married Stephen S. Foster, a leonine abolitionist who out-Garrisoned even Garrison in his vivid and terrible denunciations of the sin of slavery and the wickedness of the clergy and the churches that countenanced it. After that, husband and wife lectured and faced the mobs together.
At the memorial exercises for Abby Kelley Foster, in 1887, Lucy Stone said:
"The open door for higher education (Oberlin) was the gray dawn of our morning. Its sure day came when the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimk6 and Abby Kelley Foster began to speak publicly in behalf of the slaves. Public speaking by women was regarded as something monstrous. All the cyclones and blizzards which prejudice, bigotry and custom could raise, were let loose on these three peerless women. But they held fast to the Eternal Justice. Above the howling of the mobs, the din of the press and the thunders from the pulpit, they heard the wail of the slave and the cry of the mothers sold from their children. Literally taking their lives in their hands, they went out to speak, remembering those in bonds as bound with them.'
"In 1838, Angelina Grimke spoke in the House of Representatives in Massachusetts. It was packed as it probably never was before or since. The great crowd had gathered, some from their interest in the slave, more from curiosity to hear a woman, and some intent on making an uproar. But this quiet woman arose, utterly forgetful of self; with anointed lips, and with eloquence rare and wonderful she pleaded for the slave. The curious forgot their curiosity; the mobocrat dropped his brickbat before the solemn earnestness of this woman who, for the slave's sake, had braved the mob and the fagot; who could neither heed the uplifted finger that cried shame nor cease for the texts and the sermons, or the odium of the newspapers. To herself, she was not 'flying in the face of Providence.' It was no hunger for personal notoriety that had brought her there, but a great, earnest purpose that must find expression.
"How great a debt the woman's rights movement owes to her! But one such speech, or many, could not kill the hoary prejudice of ages; and circumstances soon compelled the sisters Grimke to leave the lecture field. Abby Kelley remained to bear alone the opprobrium still heaped upon the woman who so far departed from her sphere as to speak in public. Whatever of tribulation any of us have known in the advocacy of this reform, it has been play compared with the long, unrelieved moral torture endured by Abby Kelley, in the battle which finally secured the right of free speech for every woman. A sharp onset with shot and shell is no trifle; but to stand year after year, as Abby Kelley stood, in the thick of the fight, while pulpit and press, editors and clergy, poured upon her vials of bitterness and wrath, to which falsehood always resorts, required the courage of a martyr and the faith of a saint. If she had been a weak woman, she would have yielded and fled. Think what it would be to live perpetually in the midst of scorn and reproach; to go to church and find the sermon directed against you, from the text denouncing Jezebel; and, with no chance to reply, to sit and hear all manner of lies told about you; at another time, to meet with intolerable insult under the very roof of the house where you were authorized to seek shelter, so that you fled from it, fasting for thirty-six hours. These things were actual incidents in her experience, and only a small part of what she endured. If she had been less noble, or more self-seeking, she would have abandoned the terrible pioneer's post and taken an easier way.
"The great service Abby Kelley rendered the slave is less than that by which, at such a price, she earned for us all the right of free speech. Long after this right was conceded, the effect of the old odium lingered, and she was regarded by those who did not know her as a pestilent person, no better than she should be. Even as late as the Worcester Woman's Rights Convention in 185o, the managers of the meeting conferred beforehand as to whether it was best to invite her to speak, 'She is so odious.' She was allowed to be present; and I shall never forget the thrilling voice in which she said, 'Sisters, bloody feet have worn smooth the path by which you come up here!' It was her own bleeding feet that had worn the way."
In those early days, it was considered improper not only for a woman to speak in public, but even for her to hold office in an association formed for a benevolent purpose. When Abby Kelley, in 1838, was appointed on a committee of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, it split the association in twain. Eight Congregational ministers withdrew immediately, and a new organization was formed by the seceders.
Lucy followed the controversy with the keenest interest. In 1838 she wrote to her brother Bowman:
"I would like to have you read John Q. Adams's remarks on the Misses Grimke. He says in the controversy that is begun he wishes them well; but Mr. Bartlett has 'S. M. Grimke on The Rights of Women' in pamphlet form, and if you could read that (and she says nothing but what she proves), I guess you would not think that I was too 'obstreperous.' I tell you, they are first-rate, and only help to confirm the resolution I had made before, to call no man master."
Lucy studied and taught by turns. She would teach
