Grimké, Angelina Emily

Life Span
to
Full name
Angelina Emily Grimké
Place of Birth
Birth Date Certainty
Exact
Death Date Certainty
Exact
Gender
Female
Race
White
Sectional choice
North
Origins
Slave State
No. of Spouses
1
No. of Children
3
Family
John Faucheraud Grimké (father), Mary Smith (mother), Sarah Moore Grimké (sister), Theodore Dwight Weld (husband, 1838)
Occupation
Educator
Writer or Artist
Other
Other Occupation
Lecturer
Church or Religious Denomination
Episcopalian
Quakers (Society of Friends)
Presbyterian
Other Affiliations
Abolitionists (Anti-Slavery Society)
Women’s Rights

Angelina Emily Grimké (American National Biography)

Scholarship
Increasingly drawn to a more vigorous form of antislavery activism, [Angelina Grimké] wrote a letter in 1835 to William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the radical abolitionist magazine The Liberator, encouraging him in his work. To her dismay, Garrison published the letter on 19 September. It caused a storm of protest, not only among the slaveholders of her own state but among the Philadelphia Friends, including her sister, who urged her to recant. But by now the demure southern belle was thoroughly committed, and instead of recanting she wrote a 36-page pamphlet, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836), calling on her sex in the strongest terms to "overthrow this horrible system of oppression and cruelty, licentiousness and wrong." With this and a subsequent pamphlet, An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837), urging reform in the North, she became publicly linked with the abolition movement. As the first white southern woman to speak up forcefully against slavery, she was enthusiastically welcomed by Garrison and his followers. She was also bitterly reviled in South Carolina, where her pamphlets were publicly burned.
Dennis Wepman, "Grimké, Angelina Emily," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00819.html.
Chicago Style Entry Link
Beecher, Catharine E. An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837. view record
Child, Lydia Maria Francis, Angelina Emily Grimké, and Grace Douglas. An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States. 2nd ed. Boston: I. Knapp, 1838. view record
Earle, Jonathan. “The Making of the North's 'Stark Mad Abolitionists': Anti-Slavery Conversion in the United States, 1824-54.” Slavery & Abolition 25, no. 3 (2004): 59-75. view record
Foletta, Marshall. "Angelina Grimke: Asceticism, Millenarianism, and Reform." New England Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2007): 179-217. view record
Grimké, Angelina Emily. Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. New York, 1836. view record
Perry, Mark. Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders. New York: Viking, 2001. view record
How to Cite This Page: "Grimké, Angelina Emily," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/12734.