Archibald Henry Grimké: “My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing else.”

Our garb should be sack-cloth--our heads bowed in the dust--our supplications for the pardon and assistance of Heaven.

I am invited to occupy a broader field, and to engage in a higher enterprise; that field embraces the whole country--that enterprise is in behalf of the slave population.

It is a gangrene preying upon our vitals--an earthquake rumbling under our feet--a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe.

This sounds singular in this land of the free and it is singular, for of no other class of American labor could it be said that its right to migrate from one state to another is actually obstructed by law and would be resisted by force.