American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Carol Berkin, part 2 of 3

Well let's go there right now. Our character is, we've isolated because it's a big historical important thing, their abolitionism, but they were, in and that, they were very eager to get some credit in their time, but they had all these other idiosyncrasies. And many of the abolitionists were part of this amazing age of reform between 1820s and 1840s. This sort of outburst of all kinds of cures for the body, all kinds of cures for the mind, all kinds of, they were torn in many ways. It's very interesting if you look at someone like Angelina, torn between believing the end of the world is nigh and believing that human beings could perfect society. There's this tension between those two notions. It always makes me think of it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That was how their minds worked and so they wanted to reform everything. They wanted to improve

everything, even as some of them continued to believe that the death knell of human society was on its way. But there's such amazing characters. Angelina and Theodore both believed in reading the bumps on people's head. That was a big, we would call it today a fad, but it was a big breakthrough idea. Some of them believed that you had an oversole they took. The transcendentalist, most erudite notions and they transformed it into literally, you know, I can see your aura. Today we would say you have a beautiful aura, they believed in things like that. They were advocates of the Sylvester Graham diet. We only know about them, about Sylvester Graham through Graham crackers and most people have no idea that they came from Sylvester Graham, but Sylvester Graham believed you are what you

eat. We have that slogan today, but he meant morally. He meant literally that there were moral foods and immoral foods. Most of the foods any of us would like were immoral. And if you put immoral foods into your body, it overstimulated you sexually. These were amazing foods. Theodore Well, I would be willing to stake my entire pension was a virgin when he got married. Very concerned about sexuality and overstimulating your sexuality, concerned about overstimulating your senses so that you would become a pigish at the table or so. You had to eat certain foods, and the number of foods you could eat were very limited. The center piece of the Graham diet was this whole grain bread sort of flat bread that you had to eat if you were a Graham. What they were addressing, he was not the only food

reformer, they were addressing the beginnings of commercial bakeries and processed foods. And so they had a point, it's very much like today when you go into a grocery store and it says no antibiotics were used or organic or free roaming or the spinach was picked by virgins or whatever it is that you think makes it non-commercialized food. Well, that's what they were responding to also. And so Graham had certain foods that you could eat that were not processed at all. New York bakers were very hostile to him by the way, people who earned their living making bread. And theatre weld was a ardent Grahamite and there were actually small hotels anywhere the abolitionists or others who were reformers traveled that would have signs up that said a Grahamite approved a bed and board. And so they would feed

you the Grahamite diet when you were there. The bad thing about the Graham diet was that it was not nutritious at all. And when Angelina and theatre weld get married and she's producing children every couple of years, Shalmas dies of anemia. I mean, she's desperately, desperately undernourished and desperately in need of protein and of calcium and of things that are in foods that have been forbidden by the diet and so finally she goes off the Graham diet. But they believed in water cures. Theatre weld had begun as I recall in education reform. One of the things he'd been involved in was educational reform and he believed that students in schools also had to engage in a lot of physical work activity. Antioch college image, you know, you studied part of the semester and you worked part of the semester but he meant literally worked

growing food or a physical labor. And so there are accounts of he even gives an account of himself in the letter to Angelina about how he jumps rope every morning. He insists on jumping rope because that's good for you physically and it reduces, I think, he's suggesting sexual tension in your body if you just swing that jump rope regularly. So if my parents had seen them, they would have said oh they're coops. And so what's interesting is that these beliefs were all geared toward the idea that you devoted all your energy to God and to God's desire that you end slavery. So it's almost as if everything in their life is designed to erase things that will distract you from this noble cause. And there's a, their abolitionism at least,

Theodore Welts and Angelina says, always encased in this heavily religious notion that you're doing God's work, not your own work. Theodore Weld always says to her, don't have vanity, don't have pride. This is not about you. This is about the slave. This is about anti-slavery. This is about ending a sin in America. So they're very, it's almost as if everything that they, all the ways they choose to lead their life, which seem to us a little eccentric, are geared toward keeping them on this one path of abolition. Oh yes. Angelina's success, she's really a charismatic speaker. And what happens is more and more people come to hear her. And men begin to slip into these

talks that she gives. It's interesting. She gives a talk in Pukipsi, New York to a mixed audience of black men and women. Nobody cares about that. It doesn't matter if you talk in front of black people who are mixed. But white men start to come to her talks partly out of curiosity. And she knows this. She's very frank about the fact. She says they come out of curiosity to see the spinster sisters from South Carolina. And the abolitionists are very upset by this. They are ardent desires of respectability for their movement. They are obsessed with fear that she will become scandalous, like Fanny Wright, that she will be a target for people who say abolitionists are ruining women or they're doing outlandish things. So when men start to come to her

talks, the tap and brothers in particular, their antenna go up. And she makes a terrible mistake. Young man in the audience raises his hand and sort of taunts her. And he says, I've seen slavery and it's not that bad. And she answers him. Proper women aren't supposed to do that in public. And she answers him. And he challenges her to a debate. And in the sort of heat of the moment, she says, yes, I'll debate you. Not a good idea. So everybody comes down on her. They've been waiting for a reason to come down on her anyway. Because Angelina is a great deal, more radical than most of the abolitionists. And when it put to follow that, how is she becoming more radical? And I get the impression that she's she's garrisoned around parallel paths.

Yes. And what I found most admirable and most interesting about Angelina is how her understanding of what she was involved in deepens and changes and becomes more humane. Not really concerned about the lives of black people when she's in South Carolina. Slavery as a kind of cause for her anti-slavery, a cause for her that is not really related to the fate of black people. But in the 1830s, as she begins to give these lectures, as she begins to know more, she not only believes that we have to end slavery in this country, but she says publicly, ending slavery is just the first step. We have to have racial equality. That's not what most abolitionists advocated. Most abolitionists got a little vague when it came to what would happen to black people once they were freed. She constantly begins to make this

statement. We have to fight for racial equality. That puts her really on the fringe. And where garrison could get away with things like this, a woman could not get away with it. She also begins to defend her right to speak and in public. And so when they tell her to stop talking to men, she says no. She says no, I have a right. A woman has as much moral right to speak on moral issues as a man does in public. She's not advocating the vote. She's not talking about equal pay for equal. She's talking about the right of women who have a moral sense to speak about moral issues. Well, between her advocacy of women's rights to speak in public and her advocacy of racial equality, the abolitionists feel that they have let loose an uncontrolled female in the world. So they ask Theodore Weld, her mentor and her advisor to lay down the law to her,

which he does. You can never say these people were not verbose. He sends long letters and they all criticize her. Why are you talking about women's rights? That's foolish and unimportant when the great issue of our day is ending slavery. You're just being selfish and you're distracting people. Why are you talking about racial equality? The issue is ending slavery. And then he begins to attack her. This is all vanity. This is all your sense of self-importance. This is all pride. You have to set aside all of these things and pay attention to what your mentors are telling you. And he writes this in letter, at the letter, at the letter. And she writes back and defends herself. And finally, he sends a letter that is so in her mind, critical and hostile to her. And she writes back to him and she says, I never realized you disliked me so much. I never

realized you thought so ill of me. And he writes back to her. The first two or three pages are still all about your young and you have too much pride and you dump this and you're not helping the cause. And then as you're turning the pages of the letters, all of a sudden you come to a page where he says, Angelina, sister, they call each other sister and brother in the movement. Sister Angelina, how could you say that I don't love you? And then in great big letters, three times the size of the rest of the letter, he writes, I have loved you from the first moment I met you. I'm sure Angelina had the same response. I had them reading, you're terrible, you're prideful. I love, I what? I love you. And then he proceeds in classic form to say, I can't imagine that you could ever return my love. I really, you have no obligation. I really apologize for putting

this burden on you. And of course you couldn't love me. I'm unworthy. It must have been an amazing moment for her to get this letter. And she writes back and she says, well, I didn't know but I'm really rather glad that you do. And then there proceed to be an exchange of letters between the two of them that would be incomprehensible to a person in the 21st century. He now lists every fault he has and why he is unworthy of her. They are the, the man has almost no vices, you know, he has no vices. But he lists, I'm grumpy in the morning. I don't comb my hair all the time. I don't comb my beard, my clothes are sometimes dirty. I'm impatient with people who do X. And it's just a lie. And she responds with, oh, no, that's nothing. I'm this. I'm that. I do this. I do that. It's

almost, you know, the world championship of faults is going on between the two of them. And this goes on for several months, several letters. No, I'm worse than you. No, I'm worse than you. And when they're done talking about how horrible they are, then they proceed to say we can't, we can't love each other more than we love Christ. We have to be very careful. We can't, we can't let physical love and human love into fear, Christ must always be the person we love the most. And so then they go back and forth about whether they're checking the feelings, did they love Christ more than they loved one another. And finally, and then should they get married and engage in physical romance, will that distract them? And then finally, they decide that their marriage will enable them to use both their skills, you know, together, pull their skills in fighting

for Christ against slavery. And then they're sort of, okay, then it's okay to get married. She hasn't seen him. She's been on tour, right? And she says, when will I see you? Now begin the letters. I can't see you. I can't see you because I'll be overwhelmed by passion. It's not good. I can't, you know, I can't come to see you. And that goes on for several. And finally, Angelina, who in the end turns out to be a little more practical. She writes to him and she says, look, it's been three or four months. I really think you should come to see me. And he says, okay. And then he sets up their meeting. They're going to meet in the parlor of a friend of theirs who's an abolitionist. And the friend and his family are going to leave for one hour. And then they're

going to come back after an hour, right? So they'll only have an hour alone during which time he's supposed to control his temptation. He apparently shows up. He rushes to her side. He embraces her and then he runs out of the house because he's so overcome with his back. He comes back. He holds her hand again and tells her he loves her and then he runs out of the house. So he is clearly, clearly deeply concerned about this being overwhelmed by by human needs and human desires and human concerns. It's just it is I with all due respect to them the funniest courtship. I think anyone will ever encounter an American history. And they do, in fact, finally get married much I'm sure to the people reading their letters great relief. Excuse me. My favorite bit at the end

of that is that there's the invitation to their wedding. Oh yes. They now make their marriage. They can't just say, gee, I love you. You love me. Let's get married. Let's have a family. They have to elevate their marriage into a gesture for the anti-slavery movement. For young women who are about to get married who fuss over what kind of wedding invitation they're going to issue, they should see Angelina's. Angelina's wedding invitation has the picture of the slave in chains on his knees. That's the wedding invitation. Not exactly a upbeat. Joyous. And everything about their wedding is symbolic. Everything. He agrees in the wedding vows that fundamentally he will have an egalitarian marriage which

sadly he really can't live up to. And that she can keep her, she has inherited money. That's what keeps her going throughout her whole life is that she's inherited money from her father. And he says, your money will be your money which is quite radical in the early 19th century. And then they invite some African-American abolitionists to the wedding. And the whole thing is a display of what upright moral dedicated abolitionists believe in. She doesn't know this until later but when he has announced to his friends that he's going to marry her, his friends in the movement, they all say to him, oh no, you can't marry her. She's spoken in public and so she's ruined as a woman. So you see this extraordinary radicalism on the one hand and this gender conservatism on the other hand. Just because they are radical

about slavery does not mean that they're willing to alter the gender roles and the gender ideals of their society. I think in the 1960s a lot of women who were involved in the civil rights movement discovered the same thing that their job was to run the memograph machine and bring coffee to the men. And that's part of the reason a women's movement arose out of that movement. And of course the women's movement arises out of abolition in the 1930s and 40s as well. Of course the first women's movement in the 1840s arises out of the abolitionist movement as well. There's something about men whose radicalism does not carry over to the idea of gender that leads women to start to organize their own movement. That's where radicalism

comes into your own movement. Yes. And into your intimate life if you change the relationship between men and women it has an impact on your most private life. Whereas if you change slavery as an economic system or a moral system you don't necessarily as many of the abolitionists would tell you have to go to church with black people or have them live in your neighborhood or have them come to your school or you could still have isolation from them even though you've done something radical to help them. Yeah, couple of things. So she had left the Quakers, I mean officially left the Married. What she remained a very religious person, I wonder if you could characterize her religiously?

Angelina, after she gets married. We'll go back and say at the height of the controversy because one of the, as I understand, one of the controversies was that she was anti, not clerical, but anti... Yes, she was. Angelina was attacked by ministers for speaking about slavery. She had, I think, thought that the churches, whatever their denomination would welcome this moral stance. But in fact the congregation was ministers of New England signed an agreement that she would be forbidden to speak in their churches. She was called devilina in the New England press.

And this was really a kind of awakening in Angelina that the clerical hierarchy, that is the ministers who ought to be participating in this moral crusade were in fact trying to silence them. At the same time her sister Sarah has been told to shut up in the Quaker meeting. And so the two of them, the anti-claricalism of the two of them, from their very diverse experiences, comes together in a kind of synergy and they become really critical of ministers and religious leaders all across the Northeast. They're openly hostile to what I guess we would call organized religion at that point. This does not help her in the abolitionist movement.

But I think it's also true that Angelina drops out of public speaking because she's exhausted from fighting. In the end the ministers and the tapens win because really she's so tired of defending herself. And she so feels that her energy is caught up in defending herself instead of speaking for the cause. That when she marries theater well she drops out entirely from public life. She says she's going to try to be a perfect wife and mother to prove that a woman who's been in public life can be a good wife and mother. But she fails terribly. She hates cooking. She hates homemaking. She doesn't like mothering. Sarah actually raises her children. She's so miserable and she's very depressed through much of her marriage really depressed because life has no cause for her. And in the height of this depression in the 1840s she becomes enamored of the Millerites.

You're not going to go that far. We're going to jump ahead actually. She alienated herself with her anticlericalism and all these other the promiscuous audiences from people at the tapens. But as I understand it, Garrison was a pretty steady supporter through at least that time. But Garrison does support her. Support Angelina. But she and Theater have a terrible time figuring out which wing of the abolitionist movement they're going to support. Remember Garrison does not believe in engaging in politic politics. That is he wants to steer clear of participation with political parties. He doesn't want to engage in trying to get abolitionist part of a platform in either of the political parties. He wants to only use moral swation. That's what he believes is the abolitionist role. But there are other abolitionists who begin to think, instead of being on the outside banging on the door and on the window, we ought to try to engage in politics with whatever political group is willing to accept abolition as a part of its platform.

Angelina and Theater don't know which group to support. They don't know which argument to support. They also don't know what they think about war. They're both pacifists. That's another one of the big movements of the era. They're both pacifists. They have hoped that killing bloodshed will be avoided. For instance, John Brown is a big turning point in their lives because this has been bloodshed. Yet they view him as an enormous hero, as a kind of saint in the movement. Eventually, they come to an understanding that there will be blood that this is going to have to be a war. Southern planters are not going to give up slavery without a fight.

So both of these questions, whether there should be a war and whether you should engage in politics, are wrenching questions for the two of them. In Theater World, of course, eventually becomes an advisor to the Republican Party. That is, he eventually throws in his lot with the idea that you've got to engage in what I guess today we would call the real world. You've got to engage in politics. So there's attention about being a Garisonian because he insists on staying on the outside and the two of them are beginning to see that you can have more impact if you engage in politics. Rather, you should engage in politics.