Dost thou know that, from the beginning to the end, not a word of compassion for him has fallen from thy pen?
Angelina Emily Grimké
The Public Record
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
gutenberg.org
Hast thou ever asked thyself, what the slave would think of thy book, if he could read it?
Why, that women are to exert their influence in private life, to allay the excitement which exists on this subject, and to quench the flame of sympathy in the hearts of their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.
It is, that the time will come, and at no distant day, when we shall be involved in all the horrors of a servile war, which will not end until both sides have suffered much, until the land shall everywhere be red with blood, and until the…
What then can we expect, but that the vials of divine wrath will be poured out upon a nation of oppressors and hypocrites? for we are loud in our professions of civil and ecclesiastical liberty.
Look at the condition of our country--Church and State deeply involved in the enormous crime of slavery: ah! more--claiming the sacred volume, as our charter for the collar and chain.
Like Noah, they may preach in vain; if so, the destruction of the South can no more be attributed to them, than the destruction of the antediluvian world to him. ‘In vain,’ did I say?
But I had thought the principal motives urged by abolitionists were not these; but that they endeavored to excite men and women to active exertion,--first, to cleanse their own hands of the sin of slavery, and secondly, to save the South…
Why may not abolitionists speak some things to their shame, as the Apostle did to the Corinthians?
Never was the heart of man so expanded; never were its generous sympathies so generally and so perseveringly excited.
It is producing the happiest influence upon the minds and hearts of those who are engaged in it; just such results as Thomas Clarkson tells us, were produced in England by the agitation of the subject there.
I believe the discussion of Human Rights at the North has already been of incalculable advantage to this country.