In May, 1838, Angelina married Theodore D. Weld, who was an earnest and eloquent abolition orator. After this marriage she spoke once again, and then was obliged to relinquish all public work on account of her health, while Mr. Weld’s loss of voice, prevented him from continuing his lecturing service. They never faltered, however, or relaxed in their principles. They were all three engaged in schoolwork and received colored pupils as readily as white ones. When the war came, and slavery was abolished, some peculiar family trials fell to the lot of the Grimké sisters, and old wounds were reopened. They bore these renewed sufferings with fortitude, and with patient and loving spirits. They succored their impoverished kindred, who had long been alienated from them, and they fulfilled some difficult and delicate duties which grew out of the old ties which their Southern relatives had discarded.
Lucretia Mott was a Quakeress, and a very beautiful woman. She exercised a singular power over people with whom she came in contact, influencing and inspiring them to all high and holy purposes. She became an Abolitionist in early life, and was sent as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840.[[215]] Like the other women who were delegates, she was refused admission to the body, and attended its sessions only as an outsider.
She was an eloquent and persuasive speaker in anti-slavery and religious meetings. She, with other Philadelphia women, used to attend the courts whenever a fugitive slave case was tried, in the hope that the silent protest of their presence, would have some effect on judges and juries, who were inclined to be subservient to the slave power. On one occasion, she and her companions sat all night in the court-room, the commissioner deferring his sentence, thinking that the women would be tired out, and would leave and, finally, unable to get rid of them, he availed himself of a legal quibble, and ordered the fugitive to be set free. Years later, when the Civil War came, the lawyer who acted in this affair on behalf of the slaveholder, and who had been an ardent supporter of the interests of slavery, wheeled around, and gave in his allegiance to the Union party. Some one asked him how he dared thus oppose all his former friends, and he replied that the man who had endured to sit all night before Lucretia Mott and knew what she was thinking of him all the time, would fear nothing else on earth.
She was herself brave, and once, when an old colored woman was refused a seat in a horse-car, and forced to ride on the front platform, exposed to a pelting winter storm, she went out and stood by her side, and rode for nearly an hour, in all the bitter weather.
She was very charming, and she retained her great personal beauty to the last, dying finally in 1880, at the age of eighty-seven.
Abby Kelley was a New England girl, a Quaker, and a school-teacher. She began her anti-slavery work by giving half of all she earned to the cause. Afterward she decided that it was her duty to lecture and talk to people about slavery. She received no salary from the anti-slavery societies for her labor, but went from town to town, staying with friends when it was possible, going by private conveyance if she could, getting up meetings, and everywhere, in season and out, pleading for the slave. When her clothes were worn out, she went to a sister’s and did housework, till she had earned enough money to get what she needed, and then she started again on her mission. She encountered great opposition from press and pulpit. Every epithet was hurled at her which was most calculated to wound the spirit of a sensitive woman. Nothing overcame her. The cry of the slave mother sounded in her ears and drowned the clamor about herself. She pursued her way, fighting, as it were, for every inch of the ground she traversed.
It is no exaggeration to say that what she did and suffered, has made the path easier for every woman, since her day, who has sought to work in any public manner in America. The Grimké sisters retired early from the field, and Abby Kelley bore the brunt of a long and painful contest with prejudice and opposition, which were directed not only against the anti-slavery cause, but against her personally, for doing what women had not till then done.
Abby Kelley married Stephen S. Foster, an Abolitionist, so resolute, unflinching and uncompromising as to be a fit mate for her. They established a home, but both of them often went from it on anti-slavery lecturing trips, until she had entirely worn out her voice, and was obliged to refrain from using it in public. Once in a while, however, in later life, she addressed some convention for a few minutes at a time, when the impulse to speak in behalf of something she thought right, proved too strong to be resisted. A hoarse whisper was all that remained to her from the young voice, with which she had once challenged the scorn of men and the timid contempt of women, but her listeners almost hushed their hearts to hear these faint breathings, remembering reverently all the sacrifice and pain she had endured.
Mrs. Foster lived in all respects a conscientious life. She was a careful housekeeper and a devoted wife and mother. She and her husband were ardent Woman Suffragists and they protested against the payment of taxes to a government which allowed her no representation. Their home was in Worcester, Mass., and they both lived to see slavery abolished. She survived him for several years, without abating her interest in the general principles to which their lives had been consecrated.
Sallie Holley was one of the later anti-slavery speakers. She was generally accompanied in her lecturing trips by a friend, Miss Caroline F. Putnam, and after the war the two went to Virginia to live and work among the freed people.