LILLIE B. CHACE WYMAN.
Prudence Crandall, a Quaker school teacher in Canterbury, Conn., was the woman whose name we encounter in the earliest records of anti-slavery labor in this country. She took counsel with Mr. Garrison in 1833, and opened a school for colored pupils, which she bravely maintained for over a year, although she was subjected therefore to a great amount of persecution. She was arrested, and even thrown temporarily into jail, and her house and its inmates were made the mark for every species of insult and outrage which her neighbors dared to perpetrate. She married the Rev. Calvin Philleo, and still survives him, living in Kansas. The Legislature of Connecticut, a few years ago, granted her a pension in atonement for the wrongs she formerly suffered in that State.
Hatred of slavery was the motive which first called women in this country into public life. Sarah and Angelina Grimké were two sisters belonging to a prominent slaveholding family in South Carolina. As a child, Sarah was shocked by the cruelties practised upon the slaves around her, but her first deep interest in early life was in religious questions. The family were Episcopalians, and she remained for many years of the same faith. She made a visit to the North, came under Quaker influences, and finally joined the Society of Friends, and this led to her going to live in Philadelphia, in 1821. Angelina, who was twelve years younger than Sarah, remained in Charleston. She manifested, like Sarah, a tendency to extreme asceticism in dress and manner, and she became a Presbyterian. She detested the evils of slavery, but she does not seem to have thought slaveholding sinful in itself, till after she had visited Philadelphia in 1828, when she was twenty-three years old. After that, she grew to feel more and more keenly that she was living amid a great wrong, and she suffered intensely at the participation in it of her family. She entreated and argued, begged her brother to be merciful to his slaves, besought her mother and sisters to feel as she did. In May, 1829, she wrote in her diary, “May it not be laid down as an axiom, that that system must be radically wrong, which can only be supported by transgressing the laws of God.” A little later, she determined to leave her home, because of her inability to do any good there in regard to the slaves, and she writes, “I cannot but be pained at the thought of leaving mother.... I do not think, dear sister, I will ever see her again until she is willing to give up slavery.” In the autumn of 1829 she left Charleston and her mother, whom she never saw again.
She went to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends. After some years of comparatively quiet life, Angelina wrote in 1835 a sympathetic letter to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, which he published in The Liberator. She wrote next “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” a pamphlet which “produced,” says Mrs. Birney, “the most profound sensation wherever it was read.” Not long afterward “the city authorities of Charleston learned,” writes Mr. Theodore D. Weld, “that Miss Grimké was intending to visit her mother and sisters, and pass the winter with them. Thereupon the mayor called upon Mrs. Grimké and desired her to inform her daughter that the police had been instructed to prevent her landing while the steamer remained in port, and to see to it that she should not communicate, by letter or otherwise, with any persons in the city; and further, that if she should elude their vigilance and go on shore, she would be arrested and imprisoned until the return of the vessel.” Threats of personal violence were also made, should she come.
A year later Sarah published “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States,” and the sisters began to address meetings of women on the subject of slavery. They proposed at first to hold parlor meetings, but found it necessary at once to engage the session room of a Baptist Church in New York. The gathering there was “the first assembly of women, not Quakers, in a public place in America, addressed by American women.” Two clergymen performed the opening ceremonies, offered prayer and made an address of welcome, and then left, so that none but women should hear women speak. Similar assemblies were held afterward, and in a letter dated “second month, 4th, 1837,” Angelina writes, that one man had got into the last meeting, and people thought he must be a Southern spy. She says, “somehow, I did not feel his presence embarrassing at all, and went on just as though he had not been there.”
After this, the sisters went to New England to pursue their labors. In Dorchester two or three men “slyly slid” into the back seats of the hall and listened to the speakers, and one of them “afterward took great pains to prove that it was unscriptural for a woman to speak in public.” From this time a few men were generally present at the gatherings, and on the 21st of July, 1837, Angelina wrote, “In the evening of the same day addressed our first mixed audience. Over one thousand present.” “The opposers of abolitionism, and especially the clergy, began to be alarmed,” says Mrs. Birney. The sisters were denounced, halls were refused them, the Society of Friends condemned their course, and violence was threatened; but Sarah writes, “They think to frighten us from the field of duty; but they do not move us.” Even some of the Abolitionists doubted the propriety of their labors, and the question of Womans’ Rights was fairly launched on the tide of the anti-slavery movement.
The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts passed a resolution censuring the sisters, and issued a pastoral letter, containing “a tirade against female preachers.”
Sarah next published letters on “The Province of Woman.”
In February, 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature on the subject of slavery. She wrote of this memorable occasion, “My heart never quailed before, but it almost died within me at that hour.” She was given two hearings, and she says “We abolition women are turning the world upside down, for during the whole meeting there was sister seated up in the speaker’s chair of State.”
Angelina was the more eloquent of the two sisters, and although Sarah spoke, she preferred to serve the cause by writing.