Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in reply to an essay on slavery and abolitionism, addressed to A. E. Grimké

by Angelina Emily Grimké

LETTER III.
MAIN PRINCIPLE OF ACTION.

Lynn, 6th Month, 23d, 1837.

Dear Friend:—I now pass on to the consideration of ‘the main principle of action in the Anti-Slavery Society.’ Thou art pleased to assert that it ‘rests wholly on a false deduction from past experience.’ In this, also, thou ‘hast not been sufficiently informed.’ Our main principle of action is embodied in God’s holy command—‘Wash you, make you clean, put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes, cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.’ Under a solemn conviction that it is our duty as Americans to ‘cry aloud and spare not, to lift up our voices as a trumpet, and to show our people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins,’ we are striving to rouse a slumbering nation to a sense of the retributions which must soon descend upon her guilty head, unless like Ninevah she repent, and ‘break off her sins by righteousness, and her transgressions by showing mercy to the poor.’ This is our ‘main principle of action.’ Does it rest ‘wholly on a false deduction from past experience?’ or on the experience of Israel’s King, who exclaimed, ‘In keeping of them (thy commandments,) there is great reward.’

Thou art altogether under a mistake, if thou supposest that our ‘main principle of action’ is the successful effort of abolitionists in England, in reference to the abolition of the slave-trade; for I hesitate not to pronounce the attempts of Clarkson and Wilberforce, at that period of their history, to have been a complete failure; and never have the labors of any philanthropists so fully showed the inefficacy of halfway principles, as have those of these men of honorable fame. The doctrines now advocated by the American Anti-Slavery Society, were not advanced by the abolitionists of that day. They were not immediate abolitionists, but just such gradualists as thou art even now. If I supposed that our labors in the cause of the slave would produce no better results than those of these worthies, I should utterly despair. I need not remind thee, that they bent all their energies to the annihilation of the slave-trade, under the impression that this was the mother of slavery; and that after toiling for twenty years, and obtaining the passage of an act to that effect, the result was a mere nominal abolition; for the atrocities of the slave-trade are, if possible, greater now than ever. I will explain what I mean. A friend of mine one evening last winter, heard a conversation between two men, one of whom had, until recently, been a slave-trader. He had made several voyages to the coast of Africa, and said that once his vessel was chased by an English man of war, and that, in order to avoid a search and the penalty of death, he threw every slave overboard; and when his companion expressed surprise and horror at such a wholesale murder, ‘Why,’ said the trader, ‘it was the fault of the English; they had no business to make a law to hang a man on the yard arm, if they caught him with slaves in his ship.’ He intimated that it was not an uncommon thing for the captains of slavers thus to save their lives.[1] Where, then, I ask, is this glorious success of which we hear so much, but see so little?

Let us travel onward, from the year 1806, when England passed her abolition act. What were British philanthropists doing for the emancipation of the slave, for the next twenty years? Nothing at all; and it was the voice of Elizabeth Heyrick which first awakened them from their dream of gradualism to an understanding of the simple doctrine of immediate emancipation; but even though they saw the injustice and inefficiency of their own views, yet several years elapsed before they had the courage to promulgate hers. And now I can point thee to the success of these efforts in the emancipation bill of 1834. But even this success was paltry, in comparison with what it would have been, had all the conspicuous abolitionists of England been true to these just and holy principles. Some of them were false to those principles, and hence the compensation and apprenticeship system. A few months ago, it was my privilege to converse with Joseph Sturge, on his return from the West Indies, via New York, to Liverpool, whither he had gone to examine the working of England’s plan of emancipation. I heard him speak of the bounty of £20,000,000 which she had put into the hands of the planters, of their mean and cruel abuse of the apprenticeship system, and of the hearty approbation he felt in the thorough-going principles of the Anti-Slavery Societies in this country, and his increased conviction that ours were the only right principles on this important subject. That even the apprenticeship system is viewed by British philanthropists as a complete failure, is evident from the fact that they are now re-organizing their Anti-Slavery Societies, and circulating petitions for the substitution of immediate emancipation in its stead.

Hence it appears, that so far from our resting ‘wholly upon a false deduction from past experience,’ we are resting on no experience at all; for no class of men in the world ever have maintained the principles which we now advocate. Our main principle of action is ‘obedience to God’—our hope of success is faith in Him, and that faith is as unwavering as He is true and powerful. ‘Blessed is the man who trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.’

With regard to the connection between the North and the South, I shall say but little, having already sent thee my views on that subject in the letter to ‘Clarkson,’ originally published in the New Haven Religious Intelligencer. I there pointed out fifteen different ways in which the North was implicated in the guilt of slavery; and, therefore, I deny the charge that abolitionists are endeavoring ‘to convince their fellow citizens of the faults of another community.’ Not at all. We are spreading out the horrors of slavery before Northerners, in order to show them their own sin in sustaining such a system of complicated wrong and suffering. It is because we are politically, commercially, and socially connected with our southern brethren, that we urge our doctrines upon those of the free States. We have begun our work here, because pro-slavery men of the North are to the system of slavery just what temperate drinkers were to the vice of intemperance. Temperance reformers did not begin their labors among drunkards, but among temperate drinkers: so Anti-Slavery reformers did not begin their labors among slaveholders, but among those who were making their fortunes out of the unrequited toil of the slave, and receiving large mortgages on southern plantations and slaves, and trading occasionally in ‘slaves and the souls of men,’ and sending men to Congress to buy up southern land to be converted into slave States, such as Louisiana and Florida, which cost this nation $20,000,000—men who have admitted seven slave States into the Union—men who boast on the floor of Congress, that ‘there is no cause in which they would sooner buckle a knapsack on their backs and shoulder a musket, than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South,’ as said the present Governor of Massachusetts, which odious sentiment was repeated by Governor Lincoln only last winter—men who, trained up on Freedom’s soil, yet go down to the South and marry slaveholders, and become slaveholders, and then return to our northern cities with slaves in their train. This is the case with a native of this town, who is now here with his southern wife and southern slave. And as soon as we reform the recreant sons and daughters of the North,—as soon as we rectify public opinion at the North,—then I, for one, will promise to go down into the midst of slaveholders themselves, to promulgate our doctrines in the land of the slave. But how can we go now, when northern pulpits and meeting-houses are closed, and northern ministers are dumb, and northern Governors are declaring that ‘the discussion of the subject of slavery ought to be made an offence indictable at common law,’ and northern women are writing books to paralyze the efforts of southern women, who have come up from the South, to entreat their northern sisters to exert their influence in behalf of the slave, and in behalf of the slaveholder, who is as deeply corrupted, though not equally degraded, with the slave. No! No! the taunts of a New England woman will induce no abolitionist to cease his rebuke of northern slaveholders and apologists for slavery. Southerners see the wisdom of this, if thou canst not; and over against thy opinion, I will place that of a Louisiana planter, who, whilst on a visit to his relatives at Uxbridge, Mass. this summer, unhesitatingly admitted that the North was the right place to begin Anti-Slavery efforts. Had I not been convinced of this before, surely thy book would have been all-sufficient to satisfy me of it; for a more subtle defence of the slaveholder’s right to property in his helpless victims, I never saw. It is just such a defence as the hidden enemies of Liberty will rejoice to see, because, like thyself, they earnestly desire to ‘avoid the appearance of evil;’ they are as much opposed to slavery as we are, only they are as much opposed to Anti-Slavery as the slaveholders themselves. Is there any middle path in this reformation? Or may we not fairly conclude, that he or she that is not for the slave, in deed and in truth, is against him, no matter how specious their professions of pity for his condition?

In haste, I remain thy friend,

A. E. GRIMKÉ.