The hopes of the world depend, under God, upon the success of your cause.
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
The more the subject of slavery is agitated, the better.
I was among those who thought (and honestly too) that there was no more moral guilt attached to the holding our fellow beings in bondage, regarding them as property, than to the holding of a mule or an ox.
Though I made every effort to turn my mind away from the subject, my conscience in spite of me began to awake, and to be troubled.
I determined, let others do as they would, to meet the subject, to examine it in all its bearings, and to abide the result; and if it should be found that God regards slavery as an evil, and incompatible with the gospel, I would give it up.
In the very nature of God’s dealings with men, this subject must and will be agitated, until conviction shall be brought home to the heart and conscience of every man, and slavery shall be banished from our land.
While so many at the North are opposing, I wish to cheer you by one voice from the South.
If it is unpopular to plead the cause of the oppressed negro in New York, how dangerous to be known as his friend in the far South, where, as a correspondent in the Evangelist justly observes, a minister cannot enforce the law of love…
The very little leaven which you have been enabled to introduce, is now working with tremendous power.
One instance has lately occurred within my acquaintance, of an heir to slave property--a young man of growing influence, who was first awakened by reading a single number of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, sent to him by some unknown hand.
A family of slaves in Arkansas Territory, another in Tennessee, and a third, consisting of 88, in Virginia, were successively emancipated through the influence of one abolition periodical.
The great fundamental principle of Abolitionists is, that man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property.