Sarah Moore Grimke

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Grimké, Sarah (1792–1873) and ANGELINA (1805–1879), reformers.Born into the antebellum aristocracy of Charleston, South Carolina, both sisters had household slaves in their youth. After a spiritual and moral transformation as young adults, however, both became active in the antislavery crusade and other reforms.

Sarah, visiting Philadelphia in 1819, was drawn to the Quakers’ moral‐reform interests. Moving to Philadelphia, she joined the Society of Friends; Angelina followed in 1829. Engaging in local benevolent activity, the sisters emerged as antislavery activists with two 1836 tracts: Sarah's Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States and Angelina's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. The latter was banned in the South and led to threats of imprisonment in South Carolina. Angelina, recruited by William Lloyd Garrison, lectured and wrote for the American Anti‐Slavery Society in 1836–1838. In Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolition (1838), she denounced gradualism and called for immediate abolition.

When Massachusetts Congregational ministers denounced their public lectures in 1837, the Grimkés responded forcefully. In Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837), Angelina argued that women shared with men the nation's moral guilt over slavery. Sarah's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women appeared in 1838. Along with antislavery and women's rights, they also embraced the temperance and peace movements.

The sisters stopped lecturing after Angelina's marriage to the abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld in 1838, but they continued to circulate antislavery petitions, and Angelina collaborated with Weld on an influential documentary collection, American Slavery as It Is (1839). Angelina's extensive correspondence with Weld comments insightfully on the economics of slavery and the political realities of abolition and offers shrewd observations on politicians and antislavery leaders. Sarah's correspondence, too, with family members, antislavery associates, and leaders in reform and religion, including the evangelist Charles G. Finney, illuminates her moral and religious views.

After years in Belleville and Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where they operated a school, Angelina and Theodore Weld, with Sarah, moved to West Newton, Massachusetts, in 1863, where for several years they were associated with a school conducted by the physical‐culture advocate Dioclesian Lewis.
See also Antebellum Era; Feminism; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings 1835–1839, 1989.
Gerda Lerner , The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition, 1998.

William H. Brackney

Grimké, Sarah Moore(1792–1873) and Angelina Emily(1805–79), daughters of a wealthy South Carolina planter, converted to the Quaker faith and its opposition to the slavery of blacks. Moving to Philadelphia in their twenties, they never returned to the South, but their writings for the American Anti‐Slavery Society were addressed in part to readers in their ancestral region. These included An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) and Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837) by Angelina and Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836) by Sarah. Their pamphleteering and public lecturing next led them into the field of women's rights, a cause for which Sarah wrote Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838). Sarah married the antislavery orator Theodore Dwight Weld, moving with him to New Jersey and then to Massachusetts. The two compiled American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), used by Harriet Beecher Stowe as a source for Uncle Tom's Cabin.