Fifty years ago intelligent people, everywhere in the United States, were beginning to talk about two remarkable women, destined not so much to shine in historic annals, as to aid in shaping the moral destiny of their age. Thousands of readers thank Catherine H. Birney for her Life of the Sisters Grimke, Sarah and Angelina, published by Lee and Shepard. In some parts of the country their names are nearly forgotten; but in Massachusetts their memories are green,—not merely because of their reformatory service, but because they passed their last ten or twenty years in Hyde Park, near Boston, where they became personally known to hosts of friends, to whom they had previously been but abstract names. This may be said also of Theodore D. Weld, that loyal servant of Right, who was Angelina's husband.
The career of these sisters was indeed remarkable. Born of aristocratic lineage, in South Carolina, where the large family always resided, these girls grew up as slaveholders and Episcopalians; yet they became, successively, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Liberals, antislavery pioneers and forensic agitators. In early womanhood they removed to Philadelphia, on their own motion. Between their ages there was the difference of a dozen years, and Angelina long called Sarah her Mother. When Sarah was in the forties, and Angelina in the thirties, they drifted out of Quakerism, chiefly through their activity as the first, and for sometime the only women, who appeared in public as the opponents of Slavery (having freed the few slaves who came to them by inheritance) and as advocates of woman's right to speak and work in every reform. Not satisfied with the championship signified by their place on the platform, they united in an outspoken adherence to both causes, Freedom and Woman's Rights. Before Angelina's marriage to Mr. Weld, in 1838, his opposition to this mingling of the two reforms (though he endorsed each separately) was the occasion of a sharp correspondence between them.
Mr. Weld lost the use of his voice for public speaking, through over-exertion. "Died Abner as the fool dieth!" he used to say Scripturally, when people asked him about it. Mrs. Weld also found herself unable to engage much in public work, partly because of loss of strength, through an accident which came soon after her marriage. Sarah had already withdrawn from the platform, feeling that her sister could do so much better work than herself. Ever after the marriage the three made one family, to which children were presently added. Would that the biographer had told us more about these children, of whom only one is mentioned by name. So, too, one could wish to know more of the heart-trial which beset Sarah in Philadelphia, when she was thirty-five years old.
