American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Julie Roy Jeffrey, part 4 of 5

All right, we are going. So as you know, we're picking up with Angelina around 1827. So she's still at home. And what was her background? Angelina Grimke was the daughter of a Southern planter, very prominent Charleston family, big house slaves, a large family as well. She was the youngest and had been to a large extent brought up by one of her older sisters, Sarah. She was a woman that didn't fit very well into her household by the mid-1820s, late-1820s. She was originally an Episcopelian, had changed to becoming a Presbyterian, and found that to be a spiritually empty and lazy religion, and then was drawn by the ascetic character of Quakerism. So she already disagreed with her family on religious issues,

and she disagreed with them on many other issues as well, and was not at all hesitant about telling them her criticisms of their way of life. She criticized their leisure, their love of luxury, the way they treated their servants or slaves, and by implication, I am sure they're lack of spiritual commitment. So was she a fun 20-year-old to live with? I think she was probably a really painful member of the household. I am sure that when she went north on her first trip to visit her sister, Sarah, who had relocated to Philadelphia that her family breathed a sigh of relief. How had she, either then criticizing them, how had she set herself apart from her friends and from Charleston's suicide? Well, she refused to engage in worldly amusements. She refused to wear appropriate clothes

for social activities. She adopted modest dress and demeanor, and I'm sure that whatever social activity she actually managed to attend, she would have been a rather disapproving presence. She really was very much an ascetic, very much someone who was troubled by the worldliness of her society and was really struggling at the same time to find out who she was. Why did she leave Charleston? She left Charleston for a variety of reasons. And slavery, her dislike of slavery was only one of them. She gained, had the same values as her family, and she didn't feel she fit into southern society. But as she launched into her denunciations of the worldliness of her family and their failure to live in ways that she found to be appropriate, she came to see slavery as the symbol of everything

that was wrong with her family. The lack of familial affection for slaves, the mistreatment of slaves, the excessive desire to have leisure time rather than productive time. So slavery was among the issues that encouraged her to leave her family. But it was not the only issue. It was a symbol of everything that was wrong. I get the impression she was obviously kind of being a teenager in some ways. But the religious searching seems to have been very genuine. Oh, her religious search was tortured, tortured, tortured. Her diaries filled with agonizing reflections on her spiritual state. And I think today some people might find that she would be in need of either spiritual or psychological counseling. But of course, she was more or less on her own. And she struggled with very deep and troubling issues

about herself and about her relationship to God. And why was she drawn to the Quakers? I think she was drawn to the Quakers because they were about as a steer, a group, as one could join in terms of their adoption of simple dress. I think she was attracted by the simplicity of their religion. It's non-ritualistic character, the fact that it wasn't heavily burdened with theology. It seemed to her more like the true primitive church of the early days. And so for a variety of reasons, she was drawn to that as her spiritual home. Her sister preceded her into the Quaker faith.

So I think that was also part of it. And Quakers were known to disapprove of slavery. And so that wasn't the main reason for her joining the Quakers. But it must have been part of the reasons why she was attracted to the society of friends. And it's interesting because she obviously slavery was one of the main reasons. I've Charleston, but in her five or six years in Philadelphia, she basically doesn't seem to have much interest in the abolition movement, which is starting to gain steam. Was that simply part of being a Quaker? Well, to back up just for a moment, when she was in Charleston, she began to work on some anti-slavery, what I would call projects. For example, she decided to examine the Bible and refute the ways in which the Bible had been used to defend slavery. And when she goes to Philadelphia and she becomes a member of a Quaker meeting,

she didn't write very much about her feelings about slavery and her diary. And it is also true that Quakers believed that one should not move outside the society to deal with reform issues in mixed groups. That is, one should work entirely within the society of friends for improvement of various social problems. But at the same time, she did join the Philadelphia female anti-slavery society. And she certainly was not forgetting about slavery. It was just something that she had not yet acted upon. It's as if she was still searching to find where she should go with her life. And what her causes should be. So pulling back to kind of around the time that she writes her letter to Garrison just before she gets them

on, what was the role of women in the movement generally? The role of women in the movement by 1835 was not as important as it would eventually become, but it was a strong indication that women were going to play a very significant role in immediate emancipation. Garrison had started in his liberator newspaper, a special ladies column in 1832. And he realized that recruiting women might be a very good thing for the cause, partly based on the important role that women in England had played in the great anti-slavery campaigns in that country. As organizers went out from the state societies and from the American anti-slavery society, lectures gathered together in female anti-slavery societies and then men in their own anti-slavery societies. And Garrison claimed, before Grimke actually joined the movement that there were thousands of men and women

who were members of anti-slavery societies. The first female anti-slavery society was probably 1832, black women in Salem formed an organization. And soon after both Boston and Philadelphia, ladies formed anti-slavery societies. Now, in their anti-slavery societies, women, first of all, educated themselves about the slavery issue. And they bought newspapers and books that revealed to them what the character slavery was, what the best arguments against slavery might be, and so on. And they slowly became more and more active in doing things like not only subscribing to anti-slavery newspapers and tracks, but actually carrying them around and distributing them to raising money for the anti-slavery cause, to hiring lecturers, to lecture not only to their own society, but to others. And eventually, they moved into ever more active roles in the immediate emancipation movement.

I think I would compare the activities of anti-slavery women for the entire period to the role that African-American women played in the civil rights movement. They were really the grassroots and backbone of activism. Great. Now, why would the anti-slavery society have been eager to sign Angelina up as an agent? Well, Angelina's letter praising Garrison after his interaction with the mob and saying to him that not only was he a hero and not only was his cause just, but that this was a cause worth dying for, that letter was published without Angelina's consent in the liberator, and then Garrison actually issued it as a pamphlet. And when Angelina and her sister Sarah

began their career as anti-slavery lecturers, which at first was a modest beginning, speaking to groups of women in private homes and in very restricted spaces, it became apparent that they, Angelina particularly, were very effective speakers, so effective that eventually, they had to move out of parlors into larger spaces like churches, and so effective that men got wind of these amazing female speakers and decided that they wanted to hear the speakers as well. And once that happened, the door was open to these women to be speaking to mixed audiences. And that was a very radical thing indeed for the 1830s. Right, right. How did she, I mean, what was she advocating beyond abolitionism?

Initially, Angelina was justifying and explaining the necessity for immediate emancipation and the necessity of people taking a stand, but as she was attacked for her speeches in public, she became more and more adept at defending the right of women, not only the right of women to speak about this political issue in public, but arguing that abolitionism was a peculiarly female obligation and duty, and arguing that women's moral natures and moral duties were the same as men. Those are not, don't sound very consistent, but she was arguing in a way both sides of the coin. And increasingly arguing that women had

to immerse themselves in activities like petitioning because that offered them a political voice, and that was the only political voice they had. And in arguing that women had a special obligation to reject prejudice because racial prejudice was something that upheld the institution of slavery and crushed opportunities for free blacks. So their argument expanded way beyond the original message that both sisters had to become focused on women's special obligations to defend their duties to be abolitionists and then to suggest various areas of activism. How did she get there? I mean, you mentioned before that her religious search was very tortured, and does that play into it?

You know, for so many of her colleagues' abolitionists and was what it was and they had their differences, but she really seems to go down quite a different path. It's being driven by different logic. Well, like Garrison, who found in the course of action his cause, I think Angelina Grimke, who had been struggling for many years to find out what was her cause or what was her justification for her life found as she entered into this lecturing career, not only that she could do it, but that she could do it very well. And so for her, it was the realization that this was a vocation that met so many of her needs, her religious needs, her spiritual needs, her needs to leave the kind of world that she had known in South Carolina behind her. So it's brought things together in a highly focused way. And then she had always at her side, her sister,

who was not as good a public speaker, but was a staunch abolitionist as well. And so she had a lot of emotional support as she tried out these most surprising things. And one of the most surprising things I suppose she tried out was delivering a speech before the Massachusetts State legislature, unheard of activism for a woman and doing it very well. Right, right. How had her religious views changed by this point? Well, over the long course of her life, I think she moved away from commitment, denominational commitment to a looser kind of religiosity. For one thing, as a quaker, she was doing something

very unusual by being active in what quakers considered to be secular societies, anti-slavery societies, to which people of many denominations belonged. So she was in a sense already moving away from the strict quaker path, which other women like Lucretia Mont did as well. But as with many abolitionists over time, she became aware of the ways in which all Protestant churches, all churches, in fact, had supported slavery or failed to condemn it. And she, like many others, eventually moved to a position that was less denominational, but not less religious or less spiritual. Right, right. How did the leaders of the anti-slavery society feel about her by the time she was kind of wrapping up this tour? Well, many anti-slavery leaders were delighted with her

because she had the novelty card, just the way Douglas had a novelty card, being a former black slave, he drew crowds. Angelina drew crowds because she's a woman speaking to mixed groups. So that was a plus for many abolitionists and, of course, many women supported her very strongly as she, especially in Massachusetts, attracted a lot of nasty clerical opposition for her public role. But some anti-slavery leaders worried that she was a distraction, just the way they worried that Garrison's embrace of reforms beyond abolitionism was a distraction from the cause. And they were worried that her violation of conservative gender norms would just make the whole abolitionist cause more contentious

and difficult than it already was. Sounds like they had enough enemies already. Yes. In one respect, one thing that she had in common with Garrison was that she felt that racism was the root of the problem that changing the laws wouldn't be enough as we discussed earlier. Did she walk the walk in that respect? Yes. One thing about Angelina Gromke that was different from the most abolitionists is that she did come from the South and she grew up with black people and she felt comfortable around black people. And so when she moved to Philadelphia, she actually had social friends who were black people and urged black women to attend the conventions of American abolitionist women and made a very, very strong argument against racial prejudice. And she could do this and she could have these relationships

with black women because she felt comfortable with them in a way that as I said, many, many white abolitionists did not in their heart of hearts feel comfortable. Which brings us to her wedding? Yes, which brings us to her wedding. Her wedding was unorthodox in about every respect that you can think of. First of all, she was marrying a nonquaker. So she could not have a quaker wedding. And she had a mixed group of friends, and I mean racially mixed group of friends who attended her wedding. She had prayers said by a white clergyman and a black clergyman. And she and Theodore had vows that were almost revolutionary for the time. Theodore rejected all his power as her legal husband over her. He said that the only power that would be active in their marriage was the power that love had over them both as moral beings.

And Angelina very clearly left out the word obey in her marriage vows. So all together, it was a wedding that violated many social norms and many people found to be entirely shocking. Am I right in thinking that they weren't married by a minister? They had to a black and white kind of... I'm not sure. They probably married each other the way Quakers do, even though Theodore wasn't a quaker. Okay, I didn't know. I'm not sure about almost the calories of it. No, no, it was just, it was one of the things that struck me about it. I didn't rise, that was a quaker thing. And what was Theodore Wellenbite? Theodore Wellenbite was one of the great lectures of the early movement of the 1830s and a very gifted, not only a very gifted speaker, but a gifted writer who realized that the source of strength of abolitionism

was not going to be in the cities, it was going to be in the countryside. So he really provided a lot of direction for that early abolitionist movement, the 1830s and the organizing of the 1830s. He was someone who wore himself out in the cause and this seems a little bit hard for modern people to realize, but when you were a speaker and you spoke sometimes every day of the week in a situation without a microphone, as we always have microphones for these events, you could actually wear yourself out physically and you could wear your voice out in the cause. And that's exactly what happened to Theodore Wellenbite by the time he and Angelina got married, he was ready to retire from, I guess you could say, active duty. He was also someone who took all the moral issues and religious anxieties of Angelina as seriously as she did and I suppose you could call it their courtship letters

are filled with agonizing debates about whether they are allowing their love for each other to crowd out their love for the sacred and whether the feelings they have are legitimate or impure, it's quite a tortured kind of correspondence. Yeah, they don't know flirting, you know abolitionism. You mentioned that he recognized that the strength of abolition was in the countryside. Why was that so? Strength is in the countryside because it was in the city where you found merchants and bankers and industrious living who had all kinds of ties, economic ties with the south. And it was in the countryside that you could reach an audience who had only tangential maybe knowledge of slavery but also tangential ties with the slave economy and who in those small communities

that were often very dominated by their particular churches who would respond to the real strong message that slavery was a sin and that as Christians they had to do something about that sin. That's great. Jumping three days forward from the wedding, what did Pennsylvania Hall represent to the abolitionists? Well, Pennsylvania Hall was, wait, was there ever? Abolishists often had trouble getting places to have their large meetings, their conventions and even places where an individual lecturer could give a lecture. Frequently churches were close to them. People who own public halls did not want to rent their spaces to them because they feared that there might be trouble or they just disapproved of the cause. So money was raised to build this new hall

that was going to be devoted to those organizations and speakers who, I suppose, basically were just impopier. Had an unpopular message as opposed to be a place where free debate and free speech could actually take place where abolitionists would be safe as they held their meetings and gave their speeches. And would you describe the scene as Angelina is giving her speech? All right, this was the day after Angelina's wedding in which she came to the hall to speak to the abolitionist's meeting. And between her wedding and her appearance at the hall, all kind of rumors had been flying around Philadelphia about the wedding and the guest list and the social amalgamation or mixing that had gone on there. So there was already an angry mob gathered around the hall and when Garrison gave his speech,

the mob actually broke in and tried to break up the meeting. That did not succeed, but when Angelina arrived to give her meeting, the mob grew ever more threatening outside. And Angelina, you said meeting instead of speech when Angelina arrived? Oh, when Angelina arrived at the meeting to give her speech, the mob was ever more threatening outside and she said, if anyone, something like if anyone doubts where slavery is in the North, just let them listen to what's going on outside. In other words, she was drawing the connection between the hostility of the anti-abolitionists and the support of slavery and the ways in which the North was implicated in slavery. She was drawing all that to the attention of her audience. Her physical bravery is astonishing. Yes, well, all these abolitionists had to be brave. Even the Boston women who were promised that they would be safe when they left their meeting,

they had to walk through a jeering crowd. And this was not uncommon in the 1830s that there was really the threat of physical violence. Most women like Angelina and women of the Boston anti-slavery society hoped that social norms about women and the delicacy of women would prevent an actual physical attack. But they could never be sure. Brick comes through the window. Yeah, Brick comes through the window and someone is hit by a piece of glass. When there were male abolitionist lecturers in threatening situations frequently, the women would try to rescue them and surround the male lecturer when they left the church or the meeting house or link arms with the lecturer, hoping again that gender would save them and whoever they were trying to protect. So very quickly after this amazing glorious moment of her is at Pennsylvania Hall,

she kind of disappears from at least the public struggle or what happened. Well, it's hard to know what exactly did happen that caused her to disappear. And there were various theories and ideas about her removing herself from the movement. For one thing, of course, her husband was physically worn down and was no longer able to fulfill the active role that he had for most of the 1830s. And she, some would argue, wanted to prove that having had a public career as an abolitionist did not mean that she could not be a proper wife and a proper domestic partner. And so that she was trying to prove that she was not unsexed by her activism. It's also true that she had a very difficult pregnancy and was in fragile health after her first pregnancy

and then had several children that kept her fairly occupied. But I've also read accounts that say that or suggest that she was somewhat emotionally fragile and troubled that one can look back and see this troubled aspect of her personality when she was criticizing her family at home and that one can see it throughout the life up until the point in which she got married. And it just might be, and her husband said somewhat mysterious things after she died, that she was not strong enough psychologically to embrace a life as a female reformer. What were you going to do, Tick, Tick? Can I just give a little pick up before we go? Would you mind just repeating a line about Angelina drawing crowds because she's a woman? Oh, right. Angelina drew crowds because as a woman,

she was a novelty. And as a woman speaking before a mixed audience, she was not only a novelty, but a first. And people just thronged to see what she was like and whether she was going to be able to speak effectively and whether she was able to answer criticisms. So curiosity drew them as much as an interest in abolitionism itself. Thank you. Thank you.