Letters & Appeals

Sarah (1792–1873) and Angelina (1805–1879) Grimké were born into wealth, comfort, and the daily fact of slavery. Their father was a judge and a large slaveholder in Charleston, South Carolina, and they grew up waited upon by people they were taught to call property. What set them apart was that they could not make peace with it. One after the other they left the South, left the Episcopal church of their upbringing, and became Friends in Philadelphia — and from that new ground they turned and spoke against the system that had raised them, with an authority no Northern reformer could claim.

This volume gathers the writings that made them famous and infamous. Angelina’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) is addressed, sister to sister, to the very women among whom she had been raised, calling them to read, to pray, to speak, and to act against slavery — a book so dangerous to the slaveholding order that it was publicly burned in Charleston and its author warned never to come home. Sarah’s Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States turns to the ministers who defended slavery from the pulpit and answers them from the same Scriptures. The Letters to Catharine Beecher — Angelina’s reply to a celebrated woman who had urged the abolitionists to be silent and the women among them to keep their place — defend at once the immediate emancipation of the enslaved and the right of women to lift their voices in public at all.

Read together, these letters and appeals show a testimony being forged in real time: the recognition that the case against slavery and the case for the equality of women were, at bottom, one case — the case for human rights. This Friends Illuminated edition presents the sisters’ texts in lightly modernized English, with the plain speech of Friends preserved where they used it, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.