The Northern merchants and manufacturers are making their fortunes out of the produce of slave labor; the grocer is selling your rice and sugar; how then can these men bear a testimony against slavery without condemning themselves?
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.
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These are high charges, but I appeal to their hearts; I appeal to public opinion ten years from now.
Or perhaps like Pilate, thinking they could prevail nothing, and fearing a tumult, they determined to release Barabbas and surrender the just man, the poor innocent slave to be stripped of his rights and scourged.
Yes, my friends, thousands who are helping you to bind the fetters of slavery on the negro, despise you in their hearts for doing it; they rejoice that such an institution has not been entailed upon, them.
Why then, I ask, did they give their votes to enlarge the mouth of that grave which has already destroyed its tens of thousands?
Take those men, one by one, and ask them in their parlours, do you approve of slavery? ask them on Northern ground, where they will speak the truth, and I doubt not every man of them will tell you, no!
This monster of iniquity has been unveiled to the world, her frightful features unmasked, and soon, very soon will she be regarded with no more complacency by the American republic than is the idol of Juggernaut, rolling its bloody wheels…
Their violent expressions of horror at such accounts being believed may deceive some, but they cannot deceive me, for I lived too long in the midst of slavery, not to know what slavery is.
Southerners may deny the truth of these accounts, but why do they not prove them to be false?
Since that time, I have regularly taken the Liberator, and read many Anti-Slavery pamphlets and papers and books, and can assure you I never have seen a single insurrectionary paragraph, and never read any account of cruelty which I could…
Can you for a moment believe I would prove so recreant to the feelings of a daughter and a sister, as to join a society which was seeking to overthrow slavery by falsehood, bloodshed and murder?
Listen to me, then, whilst I endeavor to wipe from the fair character of Abolitionism such unfounded accusations.