Angelina Grimké

Who Was Angelina Grimké?

Angelina Grimké was born into a slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, and became, alongside her sister Sarah, one of the first Southern-born women to speak publicly against slavery in the North. Raised within the Episcopal church of her family's social standing, Grimké broke from that inheritance in stages, first toward Presbyterianism and then toward the Society of Friends, each step accompanied by a widening conviction that the religious culture surrounding her had accommodated itself to slaveholding rather than opposed it.

Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) addressed itself directly to women of her own former class, arguing from Scripture that slavery violated the law of God regardless of any legal sanction granted to it by the state. The pamphlet was publicly burned in South Carolina, and Grimké was warned she would face arrest if she returned. She and her sister went on to lecture across the Northern states to mixed audiences of men and women, a practice that drew condemnation from clergy who considered public speaking by women itself a violation of scriptural order, quite apart from the abolitionist content of the speeches.

Grimké belongs in this archive as a writer who argued from within an inherited theological vocabulary against the institutions that vocabulary's own culture had built to accommodate slavery. The argument essay linked below reads her Appeal against the archive's account of borrowed vocabulary turned against its own borrowers, a pattern distinct from the secular case studies examined elsewhere in this batch.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Appeal to the Christian Women of the South – 1836
• Letters to Catharine Beecher – 1837

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