South Carolina BAMFs* - Sarah and Angelina Grimke

  While many other notable South Carolinians paid lip service to the evils of slavery (I’m looking at you Mary Chesnut)** Sarah and Angelina Grimke were active participants in the abolition movement. Born into a wealthy Charleston family the sisters easily could have lived off the labor of the family slaves and spent their time sipping mint juleps. However, in true badass fashion, they rejected the easy life and later became the first women to act as agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society among many other accomplishments.

Learn more after the cut!

  Sarah Grimke was born in 1792 and her sister, Angelina, followed in 1805. Sarah detested the institution of slavery from a young age and ran away from home after witnessing a slave being beaten when she was only 5 years old. As a young woman, she defied South Carolina state slave code and taught her maid, Hetty, to read under the cover of night (like some kind of abolitionist ninja).

  Eventually the two sisters moved north, became Quakers and joined the antislavery movement. However, it wasn’t until Angelina wrote to prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison that the sisters became well known. Garrison published the letter in his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, without Angelina's knowledge or permission (so, kind of a dick move). Her family and friends were shocked and Angelina found the situation deeply embarrassing. In 1836 she went public on her own terms with her monograph, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. The publication was very popular but not, of course, in the south.  Police warned the sisters’ mother that should Angelina visit Charleston she would be arrested and imprisoned.

An Appeal to the Christian Women
of the South (1836)

 
  Sarah and Angelina progressed from speaking to small groups of ladies to filling large halls with both women and men (quite racy for the time). By the fall of 1837 their lectures had been attended by 40,000 people in over 67 towns throughout New England. Soon after, Angelina became the first woman in U.S. History to publicly address a legislative committee when she was invited to speak to the Massachusetts Legislature in Boston.

  While not as gifted a public speaker as her sister, Sarah excelled at writing. The first of her, “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,” was published in the New England Spectator in 1837. In this letter she asked that women be allowed, “ . . . to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy."

  As if all that wasn’t enough to make them badasses, Sarah and Angelina truly believed in equal rights for everyone regardless of race or gender. After learning their brother had fathered illegitimate children with one of his slaves, the sisters acknowledged their nephews and provided for their education. Augustus and Francis Grimke attended Harvard and Princeton, respectively, and Augustus was an active leader of the early NAACP.





Augustus Grimke

  Ill health plagued both sisters in their later years, but they both lived to see the end of slavery and were ardent supporters of the Union. In 1870 they made headlines one last time by marching down to the ballot box in Lexington, Mass and casting a vote (50 years before the 19^th Amendment was ratified). Sarah died in 1873 and Angelina in 1879.

 “I stand before you as a Southerner exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash, and the piteous cry of the slave. I stand before you as a repentant slaveholder. I stand before you as a moral being.”

- Angelina Grimke in her address to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1838 　

Author's Note:  I am so impressed by the levels of badassery exhibited by these two ladies that all future subjects of the "South Carolina BAMFs" series will be rated on scale of 1-5 Grimke sisters. One pair of sisters will equal only a slight level of badassery and five pairs will equal the awesomeness of the sisters, themselves!

If you would like to read more about Sarah and Angelina Grimke there is a great article by historian Carol Berkin HERE.

* South Carolina BAMFs (internet speak for Bad Ass Motherf - well, you get the idea) is series of articles celebrating truly awesome people from the palmetto state. 

** I love me some Mary Chesnut, but she gets a lot credit for writing about her dislike of slavery in A Diary From Dixie even though her family owned slaves and she was friends with some the largest slaveholders in the south.