Are we indeed to succumb to a corrupt public sentiment at the North, and the abominations of slavery at the South, by refraining from asserting the right of Americans to plant a literary institution in New Haven, or New York, or any where…
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
Are we to select ‘some retired place,’ where there would be the least prejudice and opposition to meet, rather than openly and fearlessly to face the American monster, who, like the horse-leach, is continually crying give, give, and whose…
I cannot help thinking how strange and unaccountable thy soft excuses for the sins of prejudice will appear to the next generation, if thy book ever reach their eye.
And so, thou thinkest that abolitionists are accountable for the outrages which have been committed against them; they are the tempters, and are held responsible by God, as well as the tempted.
Were I a mobocrat, I should want no better excuse than thou hast furnished for such outrages.
Wonderful indeed, if, in free America, her citizens cannot choose where they will erect their literary institutions and presses, to advocate the self-evident truths of our Declaration of Independence!
They employed the most offensive terms on many occasions, and the sharpest rebukes, knowing full well that there are some sinners who can be reached by nothing but death-thrusts at their consciences.
Now, I believe this nation is rotten at the heart, and that nothing but the most tremendous blows with the sledge-hammer of abolition truth, could ever have broken the false rest which we had taken up for ourselves on the very brink of…
We are striving to purify public opinion, first, because as long as the North is so much involved in the guilt of slavery, by its political, commercial, religious, and social connexion with the South, her own citizens need to be converted.
Second, because we know that when public opinion is rectified at the North, it will throw a flood of light from its million of reflecting surfaces upon the heart and soul of the South.
All who see the path of duty plain before them, are bound to walk in that path, end where it may.
The great fundamental principle of Abolitionists is, that man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property.