The Emancipation of Angelina Grimk�

By Katherine DuPre Lumpkin

For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469610399

Katherine DuPre Lumpkin

Dieter K. Müller is Professor in Social and Economic Geography, Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests focus on issues related to tourism and local and regional development in rural and peripheral areas in northern environments.

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The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké

Sarah M. Grimké

Angelina Grimké Weld

Theodore D. Weld

The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké

by

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

Copyright ©1974 by

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

ISBN 0-8078-1232-3

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-8914

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre, 1897-

The emancipation of Angelina Grimké.

Bibliography: p.

1. Grimké, Angelina Emily, 1805-1879. I. Title.

E449.G865L85 322.4’4’0924 [B] 74-8914

ISBN 0-8078-1232-3

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

I. Of Violence and Discord

II. When Can I Escape

III. Let It Come

IV. Like a Dark Cloud

V. Driven to Do Battle

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

A more unlikely social background could hardly be imagined than the one from which Angelina Grimké came to become a leading woman figure in nineteenth-century movements for the emancipation of slaves and of her own sex. She was born February 20, 1805, to a family of wealth and high station. Her South Carolina home was in the City of Charleston, a place where family name was expecially revered, and she never ceased to hold the name of Grimké high. John Faucheraud Grimké, her father, was Oxford educated, a distinguished lawyer, and a state supreme court judge. Several of her brothers became well-known professional men, learned in the law and highly regarded. Formal higher education was not available to a woman, though Angelina was self-educated to a high degree. She came of a people who were owners of many slaves. Her family lived in the city but drew their wealth from a plantation two hundred miles distant. Angelina saw little of the Grimké slaves, except for those who served the household on Charleston’s East Bay. It is true that she saw slaves by the hundreds on Charleston’s streets and those who served in the stately homes of relatives and friends. Thus what Angelina knew was luxury and ease, as these were made possible by ample means and numerous slaves, although as matters turned out she was far from protected from sights, sounds, and experiences that would come to haunt her life.

There were many children in the Grimké family, fourteen in all, with the three who died in childhood. Angelina was the fourteenth child. Of the eleven living children, only two among them turned actively against slavery—Angelina and a middle child named Sarah, who was twelve years older. Sarah, from the first, was Angelina’s mentor and became a strange and dubious kind of catalytic agent at times of major crisis for Angelina. At no time was this clearer than when Angelina was confronted with the clear-cut issue: could she continue to condone human slavery? Not that Sarah put the matter directly; it was put by certain Friends whom Sarah knew in her Philadelphia Friends Meeting. Angelina met the slavery issue head-on, with consequences that Sarah never dreamed could ensue.

The years that preceded Angelina’s career, beginning around the time she came of age, are rich in materials from Angelina’s and Sarah’s letters and diaries. There are also letters from their mother, Mary Smith Grimké and, at certain times, from others. Thus the record is full, explicit, revealing, and so extensive that only significant portions can be given. Of course all of the documents contribute to the author’s knowledge of Angelina’s development, motives, and character.

Since her early twenties Angelina Grimké had felt the pressures of her great potential gifts and the urgings of her ambitious nature, and these she expressed in perhaps the only terms open to a woman of her time and place. She experienced conversion, a religious upheaval that demanded a full and complete commitment. While in that day it was not at all unusual for a female—girl or woman—to experience conversion and become more religious in her devotion to her church, the conversion customarily brought no change in her traditional female functions. On the contrary, Angelina’s experience was unusual. In the language of her day, she, a woman, felt called to some great mission, but at the time she did not know where the call would lead her. The conviction that she was meant to do important work never left Angelina in the ensuing years, though she rarely expressed what she sensed it was that drove her on—the need to use her powers and to have them be of use—and when she spoke of freedom this was part of what she meant.

It was more than mere chance that the antislavery movement became for Angelina the means and symbol of her mission. When she settled in Philadelphia in late 1829, antislavery groups throughout the North and Middle West were moving ever closer to a merger of their members.¹ The founding convention met in late 1833 in Philadelphia, and from this time on, all through the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society was a vigorous, vociferous, controversial force that was confronted by an ever-rising hostile opposition. The more it was attacked, the more unyielding grew its principles—abolition of slavery, immediate emancipation. Many of the leaders were of outstanding qualities, men of various vocations, all of deep commitment, who, while they came to differ, remained devoted to abolition, and, in these first years, their differences were muted. With very few exceptions, they were religious people, so the abolition movement was religiously motivated. The leaders practiced prayer, they used churches for their meetings, and they called on fellow Christians to be consistent in their beliefs and to condemn human slavery as a sin in God’s eyes. The number of abolitionist publications showed a rapid increase: Garrison’s paper, the Liberator, was founded in the early thirties; the Emancipator was the official organ of the Anti-Slavery Society; tracts poured from the presses as the decade went on, with a wide distribution in local societies; abolitionist speakers began to move from place to place, meeting ever-growing interest and often violent hostility. Within the movement, the 1830s were a creative time-stimulating, exciting, and full of hope for the converted, who felt the thrill of belonging to this company of men and women so committed to a noble human cause.

By 1834 Angelina was awakened, and in the antislavery movement she recognized her call. In fact, as she began, she was merely a member of a small, local female antislavery society. The fact that her name became notorious within a matter of months is one of the more remarkable features of her career. Thenceforth she was swept into uncharted seas, in which, despite her womanhood and the time and place, she found the power somehow to steer a clear direction.

One strong force in the abolition movement came to Angelina’s aid at this crucial time, and it is not too much to surmise that it was an essential element. This was the company of female abolitionists. The American Anti-Slavery Society was composed of men and women, although the women, it must be said, were in an auxiliary position. At least they were in the men’s eyes, a fact that came to light in highly vocal terms once the question of woman’s status became acute within the movement—an issue, be it said, that Angelina and Sarah Grimké, more than any others, helped to precipitate. In the mid-1830s many women’s groups existed, usually called Female Anti-Slavery Societies. They were active and vocal, but they were separate from the men’s organizations. At the founding convention in 1833, there were only men delegates; women had no vote. A few well-known women were allowed in the hall. Lucretia Mott, a noted Hicksite Quaker minister and an outstanding abolitionist in Philadelphia and beyond, was permitted the floor to say a few words. Among the most active of the women’s abolitionist groups were those in Philadelphia, New York, and Massachusetts, though there were many local societies throughout the East and Middle West. These women gave of their energies in wide-ranging activities: they circulated petitions urging Congress to act; they sold antislavery tracts and subscriptions to their papers; they arranged public meetings to hear antislavery speakers; when a slave escaped and his case came before a northern court, they aroused public indignation for fear the fugitive would be returned to his slavery. Even at their own gatherings, hostile mobs sometimes would gather. These women expected danger and were known for their courage.

Angelina’s career did not trace a smooth course. It began, in sudden burst, with her incredible crusade. By late 1836 her direction was apparent—to become a platform lecturer for the abolition cause. At first she did not know the greatness of her powers or what it meant to her to give them full expression as she labored in a high and holy cause. She was swift to embrace her second human right, freedom for woman as well as for the slave, though clearly, during this period, she merely practiced equal rights, while she gave without stint for abolition of slavery. Her brilliant intellect and phenomenal voice found full expression by early 1838 as her mission reached its peak in great public triumphs. The full story of her amazing speaking journeys was recorded at the time in rich and full detail. Candid documents, once scattered, were somehow preserved, including full accounts from Angelina’s own pen. Nor were press and pulpit silent concerning these notorious women. For Sarah Grimké had come to Angelina’s side, become an abolitionist, joined her on the public platform, and also become a vocal advocate of woman’s rights.

Angelina was married in May 1838. Theodore Weld was a leading abolitionist who might have become a matchless figure in the abolition movement, but that time had passed by the wedding day. Angelina was thirty-three, Weld less than two years older. Angelina had expected to continue her public life, a fact well known to her closer friends whose support had upheld her in her tumultuous crusade: Lydia Maria Child, Maria Chapman, Anna Weston, Abby Kelley, all well known as fearless abolitionists and spirited advocates of woman’s freedom. In fact Angelina did not continue in public work. For at least a dozen years she remained aloof, an inexplicable withdrawal to the friends who knew her well. Weld had often said that he approved her public work and believed in woman’s right to be treated as an equal. Considerable mystery has surrounded these intervening years, and Angelina herself offered no explanation. She offered none even after she emerged and engaged once more in public activity. Again, there are documents that indicate what occurred in this home of hidden struggles. Chiefly these are letters written by Angelina, her husband Weld, and her sister Sarah, who lived with the Welds from the day of their marriage until her death at eighty-one.

Perhaps no period of Angelina Grimké’s life has more to say than these years of withdrawal. In no respect is her life more a mirror of her age and of subsequent times, for that matter, than in the painful, unrelenting conflicts and frustrations that she could not escape because she was a woman. In the day-to-day impact of person on person, she often failed to sense the subtle pressures to conform (pressures that often came in very strange guises), and she could not fully realize how pervasively effective were the laws and customs that treated woman as inferior. At no time was her drive for emancipation clearer, as she dealt with the obstacles, both within and without, that throughout this period she feared might defeat her.

Angelina took up her work again as she returned to activities in behalf of her causes. All was not as before; she was somehow changed, though the records of these years show beyond any doubt that if anything she was even more steadfast, more unyielding, as she continually upheld her principles of human freedom. This last, long period brought a different kind of triumph from the one she had known in her first great crusade.

Acknowledgments

Some twenty years ago I began my research on Angelina and Sarah Grimké. I had first learned of the Grimké sisters while I was reading extensively in southern social and economic history in preparation for writing my autobiographical study, The Making of a Southerner.a Merle Curti, at the time professor of history at Smith College, suggested that the Grimkés might be the subject of my next writing project, and I shall always be grateful to him for making the suggestion. A few years later my research on the Grimkés was underway.

Although most of my primary materials on Angelina Grimké and those associated with her were gathered in the 1950s, I have continued my research on into the 1970s. As matters turned out, I was obliged to wait until my retirement from college teaching to write The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké, but the extensive firsthand materials that I had accumulated were never far from my attention. I had not only many notebooks covering my research, but also some portions of the manuscript materials on microfilm, and a good many printed documents from the period in photostat. During these past years I have many times reviewed what I have collected, so when it came to the final writing I had a sense of close familiarity with the firsthand materials.

In carrying on my research I have worked in many libraries, and I am mindful of the assistance and advice of so many staff members in these institutions that it would be impossible to name more than a few.

The principal manuscript collection of Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah M. Grimké is in the Weld-Grimké Collection in the William L. Clements Library of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I spent several periods of time in this library and wish to express my very great appreciation to Howard H. Peckham, the director, for the opportunities afforded me as I carried on my research. Also I wish to say how greatly I am indebted to William S. Ewing, formerly curator of manuscripts, for his never-failing help and invaluable advice. I also wish to thank Mrs. Georgia Haugh, now curator of rare books, for the generous help she has given me recently.

I spent a substantial amount of time in a number of other libraries. The Boston Public Library had much to offer, especially in the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, where the Anna Weston and the William Lloyd Garrison manuscripts had many items of interest to me; I quote from manuscript materials by courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. I also used this library’s extensive collection of nineteenth-century newspapers, including antislavery papers. The Oberlin College Library collection of antislavery materials was especially helpful for publications of the period, as was the Samuel J. May antislavery collection in Cornell University Library. I have made use of the Library of Congress on a number of occasions, searching in the Manuscripts Division for Grimké letters, examining volumes in the rare book collection, and spending many hours in the collection of nineteenth-century newspapers. I am indebted to the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division for furnishing me with the photographs of Angelina Grimké, Sarah Grimké, and Theodore D. Weld which are found in this book.

Among the libraries where I spent short but rewarding periods, I wish to mention the following: the George Arents Research Library for Special Collections at Syracuse University, with its Gerrit Smith Collection, where I found some valuable letters from both Angelina and Sarah Grimké to Gerrit Smith; the Howard University Library, where Mrs. Dorothy Porter was of much help to me; Fisk University Library, where I explored various antislavery materials; Haverford College Library, especially the periodicals and books relating to the Society of Friends; The Massachusetts Historical Society Library in Boston with its manuscript materials on the Grimkés; also the Pennsylvania Historial Society Library in Philadelphia with its manuscripts dealing with the Grimkés. I made a visit to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and its library to learn of the university’s history and to inquire about material touching on Angelina Grimké’s visit in 1868.

In all of the libraries and other institutions in which I have searched for material, the staff members have been unfailingly generous with their time and of great help as I carried on my research. I wish I knew how to pay adequate tribute to all of them.

In my bibliography I mention my interview of several hours with Angelina Weld Grimké, daughter of Archibald H. Grimké, who spoke with much pleasure of being Angelina’s namesake. Although Miss Grimké died a number of years ago, I cannot refrain from expressing deep gratitude for the unique opportunity afforded me of talking with her, for the letters and other materials of her father’s that she shared with me, and for her perceptive comments on some of the people who had touched Angelina Grimké’s life.

In conclusion, I wish to express my great appreciation to Mrs. Preston H. Pumphrey and Professor Dwight L. Dumond for permission to quote material from the following published work: Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (eds.), Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, 2 vols. (1934; reprint ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1970). Copyright © 1934by the American Historical Association. Copyright renewed, 1962, by Dwight L. Dumond and Elizabeth B. Pumphrey. Material quoted with the permission of the copyright owners.

Katharine DuPre Lumpkin

Note

a. The Making of a Southerner (1947; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971).

The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké

I. Of Violence and Discord

Mother is perfectly blind to how miserably she has brought us up. . . . She rules slaves and children with a rod of fear!

ANGELINA GRIMKÉ, Diary, 1828.

God is a God of order! & cannot approve of violence and discord.

MARY S. GRIMKÉ, slaveholder of Charleston, in a letter

to her abolitionist daughters, June 16, 1839.

1.

Dread of the work house reached back to early memory, though for a while Angelina could not have told what went on there. She was a child of seven or eight when a kind of comprehension forced its way into her consciousness. Mary Grimké was not one to permit her children to move in circles other than the elite; hence it might seem strange to find a Charleston first-family in close proximity to so unseemly a place. But for one thing the work house had once been something else: witness how the name sugar house had clung to it; for another, in the Charleston of the early nineteenth century, it appears that old families lived where it pleased them, especially if their homes had been in the family for generations.¹ Nina, the family name for Angelina, sometimes went on foot to visit a playmate who lived on a street near the building.² As her feet led her by those ugly brick walls, she said she had heard screams and, inquiring of her friend, was often given accounts of what the screams meant. One can guess at the scene, recapture its aura: the two little girls in a child’s pleasant bedroom playing, then listening to faint eerie sounds that came floating through the windows from the old sugar house, and whispering, as little girls do, forbidden things that repel and fascinate.

When Angelina, as a child, had learned of the work house and passed its drab walls, shivering at the screams, what clung to her mind could scarcely be termed knowledge; it was something so shadowy, so vaguely remote. She could have been aware that some slaveowners sometimes used the work house to have slaves punished, whether by the lash, the paddle, or the treadmill. Her first direct knowledge came when she was about twelve. This, like her earlier memory, was recorded in later years when, as an abolitionist, she described what slavery meant.³

The school Angelina attended was highly regarded, and to it nearly all the aristocracy sent their daughters. A man and wife of superior education conducted it. This couple, it appears, owned a few slaves to do the household work of their establishment. One of these slaves was a young boy about Angelina’s age, who was called into the schoolroom one day to open a window. His head had been shaved, and he was so dreadfully crippled that he could hardly walk across the room; on his face Angelina saw a heartbroken look. The school girls knew what had happened to the boy —that he had come from the sugar house, where he had been whipped. Angelina, remembering, said she fainted away.

She went on to tell of another school slave, the mulatto seamstress. Angelina soon learned—was she listening for it now, reluctantly impelled to seek out the young seamstress, busy at her sewing, where she sat on her low stool on a rear piazza?—that this slave woman had been sent to the work house more than once. She often told [me] secretly, how cruelly she was whipped when they sent her to the work house. From this time on, when Angelina passed those walls, her limbs, she wrote, would hardly sustain her.⁴

These experiences of slavery were but the first of many that sooner or later Angelina made known. Some that she recalled were of the work house, some had happened in friends’ houses, and others within the walls of her own home. A number of these experiences she recorded in her diary once it began—she was twenty-one at the time of her first entry—in October 1826. If all this disturbing knowledge meant what it seems to mean, a recurring fear of violence in the treatment of slaves, then it suggests that Angelina, unlike most slave-owners’ children, was not impervious to the grosser aspects of the system. Not that Angelina was then rejecting slavery. She lived with it and accepted it until well into her twenties.

The signs are clear that sometime in her childhood Angelina began to feel an estrangement from her mother, a feeling that persisted for a good many years and was openly expressed to certain members of her family.

Most of what is known of the mother, Mary Grimké, is found in the letters and diaries of Sarah and Angelina and in the letters that the mother wrote to them. The greater part of what was written (in the papers that were preserved) came out of a time when conflict and tension were apparent in the relationship between mother and daughter. Hence, while there is evidence of what the mother was like, how she spent her days, what she deeply valued, and how she spoke and felt when she was challenged on slavery, the image that emerges in Angelina’s story may be a warped picture, overclouded by emotion.

Mary Smith Grimké came of Charleston’s elite. She was a fit wife for John Faucheraud Grimké, a man who ranked high in the city’s aristocracy. Mary Grimké could claim descent from distinguished Carolinians, among them Thomas Smith, a landgrave of Carolina.⁵ She was known as a woman who took great pride in family name.

The mother lived a life filled with duties. Overburdened was the way she described her days,⁶ nor could her husband’s wealth do much to ease her responsibilities. Never since her marriage had she known much leisure. She had married at twenty, and John, her first child, was born ten months later. Within twenty years she had borne fourteen children. Three died, two in infancy, and while these losses themselves must have taken a great toll, there still remained eleven to be reared. Angelina was her youngest child.⁷

Mary Grimké’s duties mounted as the years went by. Of first importance was the management of her large household. In general she oversaw the rearing of her children: her children must be clothed and in the height of fashion, given Grimké standards, which meant materials to purchase and slave seamstresses to supervise, though sometimes she would put out the tailoring for the male members of the family. Yet the slave always came between her and the care of each young child. She had a slave mauma and several nursemaid helpers; and when nursery days were over, she had assistance still, since each child was given a slave servant. The number of slaves in the Grimké household can only be surmised by comparison with similar homes.⁸ The house was very large, a handsome Georgian structure, its three stories rising above a street-level basement. The spacious rooms were numerous, the furnishings luxurious. It required many servants to man such a dwelling: cook, kitchen helpers, butler and footman, mauma and nursemaids, chambermaids, waitingmaids, male members’ body servants, coachman and stable boys, seamstresses, washers, and even slave children, once they were old enough for various little tasks. These were not the only slaves the Grimkés owned. The principal wealth of the father, Judge Grimké, lay in his plantation and his numerous slaves there. But Bellemont—as the country place was called—was distant from Charleston, in the Carolina upcountry on the edge of Union County.⁹ Mary Grimké had no responsibility for the slaves on the plantation; her duties lay in managing the Charleston household. Not only must the household slaves be fed and clothed, their manners and morals overseen to some degree, and decisions made when she thought they should be punished, but there was also the never-ending, thankless task of keeping them busy with the work of the household. Her People, as she called them, could be trusted just so far; her eye must be ever and always on the slave.¹⁰

With all this, Mary Grimké was a leader in the manner a lady was expected to lead. She was devout, all testified to it, and she leaned heavily on strict Episcopalian teaching, the creed, and man’s duty towards God, as this was set down in the Book of Common Prayer. Also, Charleston had its Ladies Benevolent Society, and Mary Grimké was foremost in benevolent enterprises, thus fulfilling the other duty laid down in her prayer book, her duty to her neighbor, Charleston’s white poor. Somehow she found time to visit the needy, the destitute sick, the sinful woman prisoner, and she expected her daughters to conform to this practice as they grew old enough to join her missions of mercy.

Time also had to be found for another weighty duty, the social obligations of a Charleston first family. Angelina more than once described the high estate from which she came, the small elite of the wealthier class. Once her diary began in the late 1820s, it frequently referred to her mother’s entertaining and to her own and her brothers’ social life.¹¹ Mary Grimké was a leader in this elite society, a position she held by right of birth and marriage, and also by the power of her pride and condescension. Even her own children often found her unapproachable.¹²

Mary Grimké’s preoccupation with her full, absorbing life may be a chief reason that she seemed inaccessible; it may have helped to raise the barrier that Angelina felt, indeed was aware of before she reached her teens. One memory of this time Angelina called up long years later, well after her marriage, in writing to her husband of the problems of family life, and the tone was charged with excessive emotion, as if that early trauma could still give pain.¹³ Judge Grimké was ill at the time of this event, and the decision was taken, most certainly by the mother, to place her youngest child in that fateful academy in which Angelina was to gain firsthand knowledge of the work house. The reasons for the step were obvious enough. The mother had no time for her youngest child, weighed down as she was by distressing anxiety and her duties of supervising both household and children. When her children were young, a slave mauma was in charge; not so when her daughters stood on the threshhold of their teens. A young girl must be trained for her social position. The school Angelina attended was not distant from her home. While apparently she was sent somewhat earlier than usual, how can one account for the child’s feelings of acute deprivation? Thirty years later Angelina could term it being violently wrenched. She could write to her husband, I felt so troubled, cried so bitterly at being torn from the bosoms to which my heart clung, and was made to become independent of those props which my childish heart so deeply needed. The family called her distress foolish weakness—the words an echo surely of the mother’s stern tones. This stirred Angelina’s pride, and she felt she would be miserable if she did not make great effort to wean herself from that dependence that each member of a family ought to feel ... on all the others. Angelina at the time felt her mother had failed her in forcing on her an unfeeling separation.

It was Angelina’s fate to find a substitute mother, her sister Sarah, who was twelve years older. Sarah, it appears, was a lonely child, full of vague, hidden fears, and she no doubt sought to banish these by finding people who would love her. Very probably she too had found her mother wanting, but the case was different with her father. Sarah spoke of him as strict, prudent, economical, perhaps remote, and possessing high standards of conduct and character. As his children grew older, he showed concern for their upbringing, and he had singled out Sarah as a favorite among his daughters. Sarah had responded with devotion and adoration. Her needs and affections were deeply focused on her father. Angelina’s advent was a memorable time for Sarah. Apparently she told the story directly to Catherine Birney who, in her 1885 biography of the sisters, quoted Sarah freely, often using Sarah’s words.¹⁴ Sarah announced that she wished to be Angelina’s godmother. Her parents were amazed at this strange request. To the mother, especially, it made no sense. She dismissed Sarah’s notion as a childish whim and objected to it on grave grounds, the duties of a sponsor, the heavy obligations. The latter meant a great deal to Mary Grimké, for whom baptism by Episcopal rite was a requisite condition for the soul’s salvation: a sponsor must be surety for the helpless infant. But Sarah felt driven—this was how she later told it—by the yearning tenderness of a mother toward this baby or, as she also said, by mysterious affinity. She waged a daily, unremitting campaign, pleaded, wept, argued, prayed—without a doubt making certain that her family knew she prayed. When her father said she was too young, she argued sensibly that she would not be too young when her vows must be fulfilled. So Sarah came to stand at the font in old St. Philip’s, renouncing the Devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world ... the sinful desires of the flesh, all these on behalf of her baby sister Nina. And having done it—she told it this way—she slipped apart, shut herself in her room, and fell on her knees, tears coursing down her cheeks. She prayed to be made worthy of her task, she prayed for help to guide my precious child, she prayed to be good so that her own life would always be a blessing to this little sister.

It can be imagined with what childish fantasies twelve-year-old Sarah regarded her new baby sister. For what developed reflected Sarah’s principal attachment, the one to her father that she so strained to enhance, the only one that apparently brought her some feeling of safety in a threatening world. What Sarah did was to adopt Angelina, to absorb her as her own, so that as years passed, by the time the youngest was emerging from the nursery and the mother would have begun to replace the slave mauma, Angelina was markedly clinging to Sarah, showing preference for Sarah, even calling Sarah mother She sometimes still called Sarah mother as late as her mid-twenties.

Here then was the beginning of Sarah’s special claims that would haunt Angelina through all her days. There is an 1828 letter of Angelina’s that bears on its face the story of these years. Angelina was twenty-three when she wrote, still living in Charleston, although absent from home. The letter opens Dear Mother yet remarks further on, I think I shall write to Mother tomorrow. The letter is bewildering in another regard, since, throughout the pages that begin Dear Mother, Angelina speaks freely from her inmost thoughts, something she never could do with her real mother. The frayed and yellowed sheet had been folded and addressed, as was the custom then, on the back of the letter, so the name of the addressee is there to be read. The Dear Mother of the letter is none other than Sarah. There is another letter, perhaps more revealing, this one written some six months later. Angelina opened this letter to her sister, Thou art Dearest my best beloved. Sarah was the mother, the best beloved.¹⁵ Mary Grimké would have found this very odd; it might have wounded her pride, not to say her mother love. Also it might have made her more withdrawn than ever, since she would hardly have wished to become a rival of her daughter. Hence the overburdened mother would not have stood in the way, not in Angelina’s early years and, as it turned out, not in the later years. Mary Grimké was at hand, but she was busy, distracted, hard to find when her youngest reached out for reassurance. This is not to suggest that Sarah ever assuaged Angelina’s painful sense of estrangement from her mother, as is amply shown in ensuing years, but Angelina had felt the pull of Sarah’s warm and hovering love and had given herself up to be Sarah’s child.

2.

In 1811 Angelina’s family was faced with a grave and unexpected crisis. Despite his great prestige, Judge Grimké was threatened with impeachment as a state supreme court judge. The charges and complaints, as given in the Charleston press, implied that the judge was an imperious man, almost arrogantly secure as to the rightness of his judgments and sometimes inconsistent in interpreting the law. The accounts suggested that he had made enemies. The Committee on Impeachment could not agree, so the House of Representatives was asked to vote on each article, and most of the votes were disturbingly close.¹⁶

The mother was the