by Gail Collins
Pennsylvania Hall was a handsome new building the Philadelphia reformers had built at great expense to make sure they would have a place for their lectures and meetings. That evening, William Lloyd Garrison spoke to 3,000 abolitionists while a large, noisy crowd milled around outside. As Angelina was introduced, bricks crashed through the windows. Nevertheless, the new bride lectured for over an hour through the noise and the shower of stones and glass. The abolitionists survived their encounter with the Philadelphia mob, but their proud new meeting hall didn’t. The rioters burned it to the ground.
Angelina and her husband invited Sarah to live with them, and the Grimke sisters settled down to housekeeping, determined to show that women with “well regulated minds” were not “ruined as domestic characters.” Still, it was a good thing that Weld was as committed to Spartan living and good works as his wife and sister-in-law. Angelina and Sarah were fervent believers in the health reform movements of the era and adopted the diet of Sylvester Graham, which prohibited meat, butter, and cheese. They also continued to boycott slave-labor products like sugar, tea, coffee, and spices. They cooked hot food only once a week and served their bemused guests rice and molasses for dinner, and breakfasts of raw apples and cold water. Angelina gave birth to the first of three children in 1839 and was ever after something of an invalid. Sarah told a friend that her sister’s problem was a fallen uterus, so severe that it sometimes protruded from her body, causing great pain.
The sisters and Theodore founded a progressive boarding school, where gray-haired Angelina, clad in her bloomer costume, served meals in the chilly community hall. Despite their meager income, they entertained an exhaustive number of guests. They also supported a swarm of relatives and some ex-Grimke slaves, one of whom was afflicted with fits and a bad temper. In 1868, the sisters discovered they had black nephews, the sons of their brother Henry, who as a widower had been engaged in a long secret relationship with a slave named Nancy. (When he died, Henry directed his son and heir, Montague, to care for Nancy and her children as members of the family. Montague ignored the will and appropriated the boys—his half-brothers—as his servants.) Sarah and Angelina welcomed the young men into the family and paid for their college education. With their aunts’ help, Archibald Henry Grimke graduated from Harvard Law School and became a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, while Francis James Grimke graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and became a prominent Washington minister.
The Graham diet must have worked, for the Grimke sisters lived on far beyond the Civil War era. At age seventy-nine, Sarah was still marching up and down the countryside, selling copies of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women. In March 1870, an election day, suffrage supporters decided that a few brave women would attempt to vote, in the first of what would later become many thousands of such demonstrations. A fierce snowstorm arrived with the election, but forty-two women and their male escorts formed a procession and marched to the polling place amid jeers of the townspeople. At the head of the procession, first of the first pioneers, were Angelina and Sarah Grimke.
“PUTTING THEM ON AN EQUALITY
WITH OURSELVES”
In 1833, Lydia Maria Child, of frugal-housewife fame, wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. One of the first antislavery books to be published in America, it was also one of the boldest, arguing that the races should be able to mix freely when traveling, at the theater, in church, and when choosing marital partners. It shocked her traditional readers, and while she continued to write, the general public never again snapped up her books as they had before. “Her fine genius, her soul’s wealth has been wasted,” mourned Sarah Hale of Godey’s. (Hale’s magazine managed to ignore not only the abolition issue but also the entire Civil War.)
Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice—many female abolition societies refused to allow black members. In Fall River, Elizabeth and Lucy Buffum found that the other white women in their antislavery group were willing to let “respectable” black women attend the meetings but “did not think it was at all proper to invite them to join the society, thus putting them on an equality with ourselves.” (The Buffum sisters were always ahead of their time. As a child, Elizabeth recalled listening to her older sister Sarah read a futuristic essay she had written about twentieth-century America in which “she pictured the Negroes as in possession of the government and at the head of society” and “great consternation existed at the capital because the daughter of the President of the United States had married a white man.” Some of their friends, Elizabeth added, “did not like the paper very well.”)
Middle-class black women in the North were almost all deeply involved in antislavery work. The vast majority of African American families, however, were poor, and had neither the leisure nor the income to participate in outside activities. Still, some poor women made heroic efforts to contribute to the cause. Hannah Austin of Hartford, for instance, supported an invalid husband and four children by taking in washing, but she still managed to stay active in a local abolitionist society.
“THE MOST ODIOUS OF TASKS”
In the early 1830s, when the abolition movement was just beginning, the male leaders presumed that women would take part just as they had in the Revolutionary War—by rearing abolitionist children and by leading the boycott of slave-produced products. “How can you eat how can you drink,” asked an anonymous poet in The Liberator:
How wear your finery, and ne’er think
Of those poor souls in bondage held,
Whose painful labor is compelled?
But boycotting had been easier in an era when housewives could make most of their own food. The difficulties and deprivations that came with avoiding slave-labor goods were so great, only the Grimkes seemed capable of sticking to their principles. The boycott, one ardent abolitionist admitted, banned from the dinner table “almost everything good.” But women found other ways of getting involved. They went to lectures and joined sewing circles where people made items for fund-raising fairs while listening to one member read from an antislavery tract. The issue of whether something as unserious as refreshments should be featured at these gatherings sometimes took on epic proportions. The Dover Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle approved a motion to “retain the good old custom of having a social cup of tea,” and the next retracted it. At another point the members voted to fine anyone who served more than “one kind of cake.”
Women also began circulating abolition petitions, which they forwarded to John Quincy Adams, the crusty ex-president who had returned to Congress as an outspoken opponent of slavery. The petitions infuriated Southern legislators. The female petitioner was “the instrument of destroying our political paradise,” hyperventilated John Tyler of Virginia, the future president, “a fiend to rejoice over the conflagration of our dwellings and the murder of our people.” Collecting signatures involved braving slammed doors and racial slurs, and it was an enormous psychological strain for middle-class women, particularly since the job was never-ending. (Having collected signatures for the banning of slavery in Texas, the women would be sent out again to Washington, D.C., or Missouri.) Even the unstoppable Lydia Child called petitioning “the most odious of tasks.” But it was a powerful force in politicizing Northern womanhood. In 1836, 20 percent of the adult women in Lowell and 38 percent in Lynn, Massachusetts, signed antislavery petitions.
The abolition movement came to rely heavily on the money raised by women. Maria Weston Chapman, the merchant’s wife from Boston, was a particular genius at fund-raising and began what became a national phenomenon—antislavery fairs. Women made fancy scarves and doilies with antislave messages. They sold penwipers demanding their users “wipe out the blot of slavery” and needlework bags depicting a black man under the lash. Lydia Child made a cradle quilt for
one fair that was embroidered with the words: “Think of the Negro-mother when her child is torn away.” Embroidered linens boasted mottos like “May the points of our needles prick the slaveholders’ consciences.”
Maria Chapman was also the editor of antislavery magazines and newspapers, and such a fierce behind-the-scenes organizer that many regarded her as William Lloyd Garrison’s chief lieutenant. (Lewis Tappan, Garrison’s opponent in the battle for control of the abolitionist movement, called her “a talented woman with the disposition of a fiend.”) Chapman, who spent her life within the large circle of prosperous abolitionists in Boston, was never ostracized socially because of her activities. But she still felt uncertain, in private, about whether she was betraying her femininity or shortchanging her family. “How heretical, harsh, fanatical, moon-struck, unsexed I am,” she wrote a friend. She worked on, while raising three children. Her husband, who suffered from tuberculosis, gave her his full support. He died in 1842, whispering, “I leave you to the cause.”
The hyperpolitical atmosphere of the era also drew many women into traditional politics, especially in 1856 when John Charles Fremont became the first Republican presidential candidate. Many female veterans of the abolition movement were particularly enraptured with Fremont’s wife, Jessie, the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and a partner in all her husband’s activities. His supporters cried for “Fremont and our Jessie,” and women’s enthusiasm for the ticket was so intense that traditionalists worried they were going overboard. Julia Lovejoy, a Kansas minister’s wife, tried to deflect “little Misses and young ladies” into appropriately feminine modes of political expression, proposing that they sew “ornamental work for the parlor” with “the names of ‘Fremont and Jessie’ wrought in choicest colors.” Older women, Lovejoy suggested, might retire to the dairy room and “make a mammoth ‘Fremont cheese.’”
“I AM TRYING TO GET UNCLE TOM OUT OF THE WAY”
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The act made it easy for Southerners to reclaim former slaves who had fled to the North, or even kidnap free black people and drag them back across the border. It struck terror into the Northern black community. “Many families who had lived in [New York City] for twenty years, fled from it now,” wrote Harriet Jacobs. “Many a poor washerwoman who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada.” Although only a few hundred black people actually wound up being transported back to slavery under the law, those who did were given names and faces. The newspapers were full of stories about African Americans living in the North who had suddenly been wrested away from their homes and jobs and dragged down south by people who claimed to be their former masters. The stories were so pathetic that even Catharine Beecher was whipped into righteous wrath. “It did my heart good to find somebody in as indignant a state as I am about this miserable wicked fugitive slave business,” Harriet wrote to her sister. “Why I have felt almost choked sometimes with pent up wrath that does no good.” Another Beecher sister, Isabella, was equally roused. “Now Hattie,” she wrote. “If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”
The Fugitive Slave Law helped bring forth Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which did more than any other piece of literature to mobilize Northern sentiment against slavery. It was Stowe’s first novel, and it took several Beecher siblings to get it written. Catharine moved into Harriet’s home to take care of the children while Isabella copied the manuscript. (Calvin Stowe, although extremely supportive, doesn’t seem to have been much practical help.) “I am trying to get Uncle Tom out of the way,” Catharine wrote from the Stowe household. “At 8 oclock we are thro’ with breakfast & prayers & then we send off Mr. Stowe & Harriet both to his room at the college. There was no other way to keep her out of family cares & quietly at work & since this plan is adopted she goes along finely.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an extraordinarily powerful book. After decades of fiction about brave but deferential orphans whose fine character wins them a good husband, Beecher’s novel practically exploded with energy and passion. The characters were one-dimensional, but its depiction of the “peculiar institution” is still affecting. It tells the story of Tom, the faithful and religious slave, who is sold down the river by an impecunious owner and passes through the home of the saintly, doomed Little Eva and on to the plantation of the villainous Simon Legree. It was a woman’s book that saw slavery chiefly as a threat to families. When her master tries to sell her child, the slave Eliza is forced to flee across the Ohio River, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, in a scene that made theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin a favorite for generations.
The book became the most popular novel of the nineteenth century. Its sequel, Dred, sold over 100,000 copies in a single month—the equivalent of perhaps a million today, given the difference in population. “Mrs. Stowe, who was before unknown, is as familiar a name in all parts of the civilized world as that of Homer or Shakespeare,” wrote Putnam’s Magazine in 1853. It may have been only a legend that Abraham Lincoln called her “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” But she was definitely the little woman who mobilized the antislavery sentiments of average Americans, particularly other women. On New Year’s Day in 1863, when abolitionists gathered at Boston Music Hall to celebrate the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the crowd chanted “Harriet Beecher Stowe! Harriet Beecher Stowe!” until Mrs. Stowe stood up, with tears in her eyes, and acknowledged their cries.
“I CRAWLED ABOUT MY DEN FOR EXERCISE”
Stowe had almost no firsthand knowledge of slavery, but she had access to plenty of abolitionist reports, including one in an antislavery magazine about a woman named Eliza, who carried her daughter to freedom across the frigid Ohio River. The real Eliza had six children. When she learned that she was about to be sold, she took her youngest girl and escaped in midwinter, crossing the Ohio by leaping from one ice floe to the next. Miraculously arriving at the other side, she was sheltered at the home of the Rankin family, one of the most active stations on the Underground Railroad that aided fugitive slaves. Cutting her hair to disguise herself and her daughter as boys, she made her way to Canada. But the following year, she reappeared at the Rankins’, once again disguised as a man and determined to rescue the rest of her family. She made her way back to the old plantation and returned to the river with her five children. They stood in the shallows all day to throw the bloodhounds off the scent. At twilight Mr. Rankin, disguised in women’s clothing, distracted the slave catchers. Eliza and her children were ferried across the river and made their way back to Canada.
Perhaps because stories of female slaves who ran to freedom were relatively rare, they captured the imagination of the public. Ellen Craft, a light-skinned slave in Georgia, became a celebrity in the North when she escaped with her husband, William, by disguising herself as a young white man who was traveling north with his slave. Ellen bandaged her right hand so that hotel registrars couldn’t tell she was unable to write, and pretended to be deaf to avoid long conversations. She wrapped her head, as if she had a toothache, to cover her beardless chin, and donned green glasses. After a series of close calls they arrived in Philadelphia in 1848, where abolitionists sheltered them, and Ellen recovered from a near breakdown resulting from the stress of the trip. Meanwhile, people flocked to shake the hands of the couple who had pulled off such a dramatic flight. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, the Crafts feared they might be recaptured, and their friends helped them make their way to England, where they went to school and raised a family. After the Civil War they returned to Georgia, purchased a plantation, and established a school for black children.
Lydia Maria Child helped an escaped slave named Harriet Jacobs turn her experiences into one of the frankest and most astonishing memoirs of African American life in bondage. Jacobs w
as the granddaughter of a free black woman who made a modest living selling baked goods to her neighbors. Harriet’s owner refused to let her grandmother purchase her freedom, but her mistress did teach the girl to read, and Harriet believed she would be set free her in her mistress’s will. Instead, Jacobs was bequeathed to a three-year-old niece, along with a bureau and worktable. Jacobs, who was sexually harassed by the little girl’s father, eventually ran away. But she was unable to get out of the area and wound up hiding for seven years in an attic in her grandmother’s home. “The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide,” she wrote. “The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air…. It was impossible for me to move in anerect position, but I crawled about my den for exercise.” Finally, she had an opportunity to escape to the North.
Jacobs’s story, like most of the fugitive slave memoirs, was directed at the female heart, which responded to the mother torn from her children, the young girl sullied by a lecherous old man. Child, the editor, wrote that she hoped it would rouse Northern women “to the sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of slavery.” Not every writer was as generous with her assistance as Lydia Child. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Jacobs first approached for help with her story, not only ignored the plea but sent Jacobs’s letter to her former employer, asking for corroboration so Stowe could include it in her own upcoming book.