American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with Carol Berkin, part 1 of 3

So, I think you know, we're going to pick up the story in 1827, I was actually at an early toilet living home, but before we do that, I wonder if you could just tell me a bit about her background or circumstances growing up in the environment. Sure. Angelina grew up in probably one of the wealthiest homes in South Carolina among the South Carolina planters, I think her father had three plantations and of course I had a beautiful home in Charleston as most of the elite did. They were very high status, that is the family was very respected and they were weighted on hand in foot by servants. The story goes that each of them in the family had their own personal slave behind them when they ate dinner. And if the salt and pepper were next to the person sitting next to you, you didn't ask them to pass it. Your slave got it from his slave and gave it to you, that's pretty fancy living.

This is the world Angelina grew up in, this is the world that they expected her to stay in. She was an attractive young girl by all accounts and she would have married a very prosperous young planter and she would have become, as her mother did, the sort of domestic partner, entertaining, taking care of children, planning parties, Charleston was very sociable in the months in the summer when the planters moved there. And Angelina gave it all up, much to everyone's amazement I might add. We'll get there in a second of course, I wonder, you know we're going to be coming back again in films Charleston, when Garrison was there in April 65. And I wonder if you could just tell us about that neighborhood, that life. Well, the planters who did not like to stay on their plantations because of the weather,

as I always have to tell my students no air conditioning in the 19th century, the planters built beautiful townhouses, homes in town, and in fact today Charleston and the old neighborhoods is really quite beautiful, and they arrived with a panoplay of servants or slaves to assist them, and they engaged in a lot of social activities that centered in large part around marrying their children off to one another, so that there were a lot of balls and dances and parties that were designed really as a very elegant meat market for proper sons and proper daughters, meaning wealthy sons and daughters, to meet one another and to become engaged. And these kinds of activities were matched probably by cultural activities Charleston, unlike, say, Boston, which didn't allow a whole lot of culture, Charleston had plays

and concerts, and so they were really very attached to this idea that they were the crem de la crem of American society, they were the aristocrats of American society. The only other activity really that the women engaged in was charity work, church work, Angelina's mother, for instance, Mary, who had 14 children and sort of had her fill of mothering, did in fact go out to the poor and bring them food or give them charity, and so there was a lot of church-related activity that also Angelina abandoned to the horror of her mother. So this was sometimes though in the South that was slow-moving, this was a rather frenetic several months of socializing because when people went back to the countryside, when

they went back to their plantations, if they had to, life was really quite isolated and isolating, and so there was a kind of excitement and frenzy to this socializing that went on in the city. And you mentioned that Angelina was in the tractor-genway, and what she would presumably have been in the meat market in the East, and what she made for all of that. Angelina is such an interesting person. The girls have a friend who once said that the daughters of the upper class were the first leisure class in America, and it was certainly true, she was not burdened by domestic duties, at least her mother had to oversee servants and take care of children. So the girls socialized with one another, they paid calls with one another, and they talked about fashion and the latest bonnet and who was getting a new dress for this dance and who was getting.

And when Angelina decided to reject all of this, she's a rather like 1960s teenage rebels. You know, I don't want to live in the suburbs, my mother's life is too materialistic, that really is exactly what Angelina was like. If you read her diary, this contempt for her family's idleness, contempt for their interest in material goods, and she especially has contempt for the young women of her age, who only talk about frivolous things and who was so obsessed with romance and with fashion and how terrible all of this is, and Angelina at one point announces very dramatically to her friends that she is no longer going to wear silk and no longer going to wear fashionable bonnets. She's already beginning to take up this sort of quaker, plain clothing, and her friends are really quite shocked, and I, as I recall one of them points out to her, Angelina records

all of this in this diary. She's keeping friend pointed out that it was really sort of insulting for her to criticize her friends for doing what they had always done, to which of course she and her diary records. They don't understand that Christ is coming again any moment now, and his army is going to separate the righteous from the unrighteous, and they're all going to go to hell essentially. It is her assumption, so there's a kind of shock value to what, she's a teenager really. There's a kind of shock value to what Angelina does. She likes to stir up everybody with these very radical views, but with her friends they focus on fashion and men. How can you be engaged in this frivolous life? Can you only think about dances and parties, there are much more important things to think

about, and because she was an heir to the second great awakening and to a lot of people in the 19th century who believed that Armageddon was on its way, not unlike people today, as I recall in May the world was supposed to end, and the rap should take place. Because she really believed this, and as did many people, not many people in South Carolina, but many people, especially in northern states. She talked a lot in her diary about Christ coming with the sort of justice and she wanted to be in Christ's army and she wanted to slay the ungodly, and she seemed to feel that her family would be the first to go, I mean she seemed to really feel that if she didn't convert them, if she didn't make them see the era of their ways and it was not just slavery, it was idleness or frivolity or materialism or self-centeredness that she really thought

this souls were in danger, so she was preaching up a storm to her family and to her friends. You mentioned that she rejected the idea of marrying a planter because of the obvious infidelities in the interlace of things. Angelina saw with a very clear eye, as later the person who's most identified with this recognition is Mary Chasnott, who leaves this incredible diary in which she talks about planters' wives having to turn away from or not see the mulatto children on the plantation where the product of her husband's infidelities and that every southern woman faced this. This is why Mary Chasnott hated slavery so much, it wasn't the idea that black people should not be enslaved, it was the idea that it put so much temptation in the face of

husbands that they weren't faithful to their wives and the burden was on the wife to pretend that this wasn't happening and this is something Angelina saw as well. This is something she observed and she didn't want to be part of that because part of her religious extremism at the moment, her religious commitment at the moment, I should say, was for marriages that were based on respect and admiration, one partner to the other and certainly on fidelity and she believed that this was not possible in a world of so many temptations for men and so this troubled her as well. It's interesting that all of our characters end up with or have very powerful but idiosyncratic faith that they all, you know, as an ex-calonist and also where did Angelina fit into that? Well Angelina is very much this great religious revival that takes place in the early part

of the 19th century. What's interesting is how it came to her because really she grows up in a, go to church on Sunday, show that you're a member of the elite sitting in the right pew, a church of decorum is where she, she's been brought up and raised. Somehow she is bitten by this fever that is she comes to really believe that the end of the world is coming. This is a generation of Americans who are seeing incredible changes in their country, rapid changes, rapid growth of industry, a westward movement, a rise of a new week class. And they're not sure, they're not positive whether this is good or bad. They're going through the same kind of culture shock that say we went through with the introduction

of the internet and iPhones and all of this technology, technological development. And a lot of people thought that it was a sign of the end of times, that it was corrupting people, making them self-centered and somehow this becomes Angelina's belief in these years her teenage and early 20s in, in South Carolina. And the conviction is so strong that Christ is coming to judge us. And I think what's really important to understand about Angelina is that she, she's the attacked slavery, not in the beginning because she cared about the slaves. They were kind of abstraction to her, she knew them, they were in her household, but she was not really concerned about the fate of African Americans, the fate of black people.

She was really concerned about the fate of their white masters, because she believed slavery was a sin and that God would punish people who had slaves. And this was the original trajectory of her anti-slavery. And I think you can see that in the anti-slavery of other abolitionists as well. Because I think you, it would be a mistake to see them as deeply concerned so much about the souls of black folk as they were about the souls of white folk. And her very first public essay is a letter to the women of the South and it's all about the necessity of women ending slavery, forcing their husbands to end slavery so they will be saved. So this religious fervor that she has is not yet the kind of humane view that she will come to have later on about how important it is for African Americans that slavery end.

I think everybody in the audience thought to think about their teenage daughters. Angelina was a classic example. Nothing her mother did was right. She hounded her mother with that era of superiority that only teenage girls can have. Her mother, after all, had had 14 children. She could possibly have been a little bored with mothering at that point. And in fact, Angelina was raised by her older sister, Sarah, that close relationship that Sarah and Angelina always had, began when Sarah went to Mary, Grimke, and said, can I have her in effect?

Can I be her mother? And Mary, you can just picture going, sure it's okay with me, I've been there, done that. But I give Mary enormous credit. She was the most patient mother I have ever encountered in history because Angelina was relentless. You're a terrible mother. You lack maternal feeling. You're not a natural woman. What's wrong with you? You raised your children wrong. Everything you've done has been wrong. Your sons are idle and luxury loving, and it's all your fault. Everything was all her mother's fault. And to my knowledge, at least as far as I can find any information, Mary never turned around and said, would you shut up? And Angelina insists, when they're in the last years that she's in South Carolina, that her mother spend two hours with her all alone in quiet contemplation of her errors, right,

of hers. And Angelina would put her head in her mother's lap and want her mother to stroke her hair. And all the while, telling her, you're just a terrible mother, you're really awful. How could you have done this to your family? It's all your fault. So nothing was ever enough as it often isn't with teenage daughters and mothers. And when Angelina leaves, she's still handing her family, her brothers who live at home, often get up from the dinner table and run to their room and lock their door to get away from Angelina. I mean, she must have been really, even though we all know that what she was saying was correct. And her slavery was bad, italeness is bad. She must have been the most obnoxious person in the world. And she would write in her diary that her brother and his wife had gone to their room and

locked their door and she stands outside their door, still lecturing them. And then she goes back and she writes in her diary, I don't understand what's wrong with Charles. I was telling him all of this for his own good and he doesn't seem to listen to me. So when she, I'm sure the whole family breathed a sigh of relief when she left. As she's leaving one of the last conversations with her mother, her mother says, I understand everything you've said to me. I understand what you're trying to get me to do. But I don't agree with you and I'm not going to change. It's probably the only retort her mother ever gave to her after several years of what would have required an awful lot of anacin or a leave to get through this daughter's relentless haranging of everyone in the family.

She never sees her mother again, she's banned from South Carolina and she never sees Mary again. Though when she goes north and she's going to travel for the abolitionist movement, Sarah is reluctant. Her sister is reluctant to do this and her mother writes and says, you've got to go, Angelina is an unmarried woman. She needs a chaperone, she needs an escort, you have to go with her. Now Mary is still looking out in her mind for what proper female behavior is, worried about her daughter and of course when she declares she's getting married to Theodore Weld, her mother not knowing Theodore Weld, reads this big sigh of relief and says, oh thank goodness you're going to get married, you'll stop all this public display of yourself. You'll be a housewife and a mother.

I'm sure had she met Theodore Weld who was a little idiosyncratic, I think she would have been horrified, it's probably a good thing she never did meet him but I would say that those last years of Angelina's in Charleston were the greatest trial her mother ever went through. Oh sorry, did she leave Charleston just because of slavery? No, I don't think she left Charleston just because of slavery. I don't think Angelina left just because of slavery. I think she felt finally as she got a little older, I think she felt very much alone. She had a minister in Charleston who she had formed a very close relationship with.

He was married. I don't think anything really happened between that as I have no smoking gun but I think there was definitely a tension of love between the two of them. When he finally reprimands her for being too extreme, I think she feels, well she writes that her dearest friend has abandoned her so I think she felt terribly alone and terribly isolated from people, excuse me, and I think that the fact that Sarah was in Philadelphia and had joined the Quaker meeting there and Angelina had actually joined this little teeny tiny Quaker meeting in Charleston and they had read her out of the meeting. They had asked her to leave because she was so, I don't want to give it, but she was so obnoxious, they were not radical enough, they were not pure enough, they wish she was

really a one woman crusade and so they finally sort of asked her to go away. So I think she felt really isolated and she wanted to be with Sarah who, as I said, she really thought of as her mother in what turned out to be an extremely bizarre and unhealthy relationship between the two. If you want to use fancy psychological language, separation, individuation had not fully taken place between Sarah and Angelina, they were too much identified with each other. So she wants to go to Philadelphia and I think it's to be among in her mind people who would be just like her, there's that longing to be someplace where people are like you and it didn't really have very much to do with slavery.

Thank you. So she gets to Philadelphia and in the first several years that she's there, she doesn't really pay attention to the Abelistian agreement. Now the main meeting house in Philadelphia is extremely conservative. One of the things I learned in studying Angelina is that a lot of the myths that I lived with turned out not to be true. I always thought, oh, all Quakers, all Quakers are Abelistianists, all Quakers believe in, not true at all, the main meeting house that she joined with Sarah. Yes, the main Quaker meeting house that she joined. The main Quaker meeting house that she joined in Philadelphia, the most important one, the most established one was very conservative on the issue of Abelistian, whatever some

of its members may have felt they did not want to make waves in the community. And they were very unhappy with Lucretia Mott and Abelistianists who split from the main meeting house who were talking about anti-slavery policies. And she discovered this very ironic thing. She discovered that the rules and regulations that she thought were smothering her in South Carolina. That is how to behave like a proper southern bell, what was expected of you, what the gender roles were. She discovered that the Quaker meeting house had even more stringent rules than South Carolina plan to society had. That there was even greater and tighter regulation of your behavior. There were formalities about courtship. There were formalities about it was actually forbidden for you to leave Philadelphia and go anywhere as she discovers without permission from the meeting house.

Courtship was extremely ritualized and what she was allowed to do was very gender discriminatory. It is they wanted her to teach Bible school, a teach school, some form of religious school for little young kids and Angelina never liked teaching. She didn't want to do that. The truth is Angelina didn't much care for children, even her own, not that she didn't love them, but she didn't have a lot of that maternal impulse that she kept demanding her mother half for her. She was a little more like her mother than she ever suspected and she didn't want to do the things that they wanted her to do, but it was demanded of her. Eventually she's going to feel that the Quaker way of life is as much a straight jacket as the southern planter way of life is.

And I think that that was, I know from her writing, terribly demoralizing and sent her into a kind of depression that abolition is going to take her out of. She had an enormous amount of energy. She was very articulate and she needed something bigger than herself to be part of. And the abolitionist movement gave her that. Quakerism did not give her that. How did she meet theodore Welton and what did she think of him? Angelina had written a private letter to William Lloyd Garrison who had just begun to publish the liberator.

She had become interested in anti-slavery while she was still a Quaker in Philadelphia. And it began to read a lot about the treatment of slaves and a lot about what the abolitionist movement stood for. And so she read the liberator. And she heard that or discovered that Charles Wright, an English abolitionist, was going to come speak in Boston for William Lloyd Garrison and they were threatened by crowds. They were told they were going to be killed, murdered. Another great revelation for me about abolition that you usually picture, southerners against abolition, white southerners and white northerners all for abolition. And then you realize that all of the violence committed against abolitionists was by northeners and Midwesterners. All those rocks thrown at them, those buildings burned down, Elijah loved Joy killed. All of that happened in the north and you realize what a minority abolitionists were

and how they were viewed as fanatics and freaks and crazy people by their neighbors. So she writes this private letter to William Lloyd Garrison and she says, this is a cause worth dying for, don't abandon inviting this English abolitionist. Well as a proper young woman, private letters were okay. But William Lloyd Garrison knew something fabulous when he had it. Here was a southern woman from a big slave owning family who is writing, this is a cause worth dying for. And so he publishes it in the liberator and that transforms her life and leads her to Theodore Weld because the anti-slavery society immediately gloms onto her. I mean, she's golden and here's another interesting thing.

Most of them had never been in the south. They had never actually seen slavery in operation and here was someone who had lived with slaves. So they immediately solicit her to come and be trained in New York by Theodore Weld, who is known as the most mobbed man in America. He had been the most charismatic speaker for abolition and had the most rocks thrown at him of any abolitionist. And he was suffering from, he had lost his voice. He was suffering from a kind of not total laryngitis, but he couldn't project his voice. And so he had abandoned going on the road as the abolitionist wanted him to or he had done before. And now he was training. He was running a kind of training school for abolitionist speakers.

And they invite Angelina and she says to Sarah, you have to come with me. Sarah is not really interested so much in abolition. She wants to become a Quaker minister. She wants to take a leadership role in the meeting. They of course dash her hopes. One day she stands up in the meeting to speak and they say sit down and be quiet. So Sarah has a very unhappy, very disappointing life. So Angelina says, Sarah, you have to come with me and marry rights from South Carolina. You have to go with her. And so she says, we're a team and they go to New York and they're trained back there to well. A theater welled. Angelina thinks he walks on water. She thinks he is the most amazing man. She thinks he's brilliant. She thinks that he is filled with a passion of abolition. She just is, as my son would say, blown away by theater well.

Old trains them, teaches them a lot of the facts about slavery, the hard evidence about slavery. And then they send them off to give talks. Of course, since they're women, they have to give their talks in parlors or in church meeting rooms and only to women because to speak in front of a mixed or as they called a promiscuous audience of men and women was absolutely forbidden for women's speakers. For all the information that theater well gives her, that's not what made her charismatic speaker, what made her, her audience riveted by her. And these people could talk for three, four hours. There was no television, no video games, so this was entertainment in a way.

They could talk extemporaneously what got her audience on the edge of their seats where she would say, I have seen it, I have seen it. And then she would talk about slavery as she knew it in Charleston and on the plantations. And it was amazing because nobody else, no other abolitionist speaker except Frederick Douglas, could make those kinds of statements. And she still wrote regularly to well to get advice and help. So I would say in the beginning she saw him as her idol and her mentor.