Introduction February 21, 1838, was a bright and sunny day in Boston, though the burgeoning metropolis remained gripped by a winter chill. Such frigid temperatures were hardly unknown to the city's residents, who had endured a heavy snowfall just weeks before, and they weren't enough to keep the city's most important families, as well as the merely curious, from gathering at the Massachusetts Statehouse. There, during an afternoon session, a woman was scheduled to address a committee of the State Legislature, an event so unusual as to be unprecedented.1 Many of our century would be surprised to learn that the women of our early republic were confined to their own spheres of home and family, but this was the tradition in nineteenth-century America, and had been so for as long as anyone could remember. Then, too, not only were women expected to remain silent in public, it was considered inappropriate for them to speak out on any political issue, and particularly on slavery-the most contentious issue of the era. But that is precisely what Angelina Grimké, not only a woman but a Southerner, planned to do on that sunny Wednesday. Which explains why so many of the good citizens of Boston, and others from as far away as Springfield and Worcester, crowded the pavement in front of the statehouse, packed themselves into the legislative hearing room and even, several hours before Grimké's appearance, clung to the railings of the legislature's stairwells. "The attendance of so many people at a legislative hearing was quite out of the ordinary," historian Gerda Lerner tells us, "especially since no public notice had been given, but news of this kind could be trusted to travel speedily by word of mouth.

"2 And so it did: By two o'clock the statehouse, and the courtyard and steps leading to it, were so packed with onlookers that arriving legislators had to fight their ways through the crowd to take the seats reserved for them in the hearing room. Angelina Grimké knew that her appearance would draw attention, but when she alighted from her carriage just minutes before she was scheduled to appear, she was shocked by the sheer number of people who'd come to hear her. For a moment she felt unequal to the task. "I never was so near fainting under the tremendous pressure of the feeling," she later remembered. "My heart almost died within me. The novelty of the scene, the weight of the responsibility, the ceaseless exercise of the mind thro' which I had passed for more than a week-all together sunk me to the earth. I well nigh despaired." Fortunately, Angelina was escorted to the statehouse by Maria Weston Chapman, a native Bostonian, wife of a well-known New England merchant, and an uncompromising abolitionist.

Chapman was that most unusual of nineteenth-century women: She refused to be silenced-enduring catcalls during abolitionist rallies attended by the smattering of men who not only loathed the abolitionist movement but were equally scandalized by the fact that women had founded and led it. Maria was on Angelina's arm as the two climbed the statehouse steps, reassuring her that her appearance before the legislature would be a triumph. "God strengthen you, my sister," Chapman said.3 A hush fell as the two entered the hearing room, and soon thereafter the committee chairman called on Angelina to speak. Whatever rustling there was in the gallery ceased then, and a hush fell on the hearing room as the Charleston, South Carolina, woman stood to face the legislators. At first her voice was so soft that many in the room had to lean forward to hear her, but then it took on a surprising strength, so that her words rang out for all to hear. 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 moral being .

and as a moral being I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave, and to the deluded master, to my country and the world, to do all that I can to overturn a system of complicated crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood and sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds.4 Angelina Grimké spoke for two hours on that February day in 1838. A silence greeted her last words as she defiantly eyed the legislators seated before her. But then, and much to her own surprise, those in the seats behind her, and in the galleries, rose in a thunderous applause. Angelina Grimké's speech to the Massachusetts legislature made headlines across the nation and was a turning point for the abolitionist movement, the moment from which we can date the remarkable growth that culminated, more than two decades later, in the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. But as important as Angelina's Boston appearance was, it would not have been possible without the support of her older sister, Sarah. Born in 1792, the third year of George Washington's first term as president, Sarah was Angelina's lifelong teacher, guide, and intellectual mentor. Sarah and Angelina spent their formative years in South Carolina, the daughters of Judge John Faucheraud Grimké and his wife, Mary, who were the owners of a large plantation in South Carolina's up-country, called Belmont, and a spacious home in Charleston.

When John wasn't managing Belmont, he and his family spent their time in the city, then the nation's fourth largest, where "the Judge" and Mary, known affectionately as "Polly" to her husband, could be seen, every Sunday, leading their fourteen children (Sarah was the eighth child, Angelina the last) to St. Philip's Episcopal Church. John Grimké, a devout Episcopalian, supported his family through the sale of cotton, sea rice, beef, and vegetables, and led them in prayers each afternoon and evening. The Grimkés owned hundreds of slaves, housing them under the stairway of their Charleston house and in the extensive slave quarters at Belmont. One of these slaves was Hetty, an eleven-year-old house servant who was Sarah's playmate and (or so Sarah believed) her equal. That belief lasted until the day that her father discovered that Sarah had been teaching Hetty to read, in violation of South Carolina's strict slave codes-which he'd helped write. Hetty was punished, and the two were separated, with the Judge's daughter given a strict lecture. The incident marked a turning point in Sarah's development.

Her father had been angrier than she'd ever seen, and his discipline nearly as harsh. He threatened to beat Hetty if he ever found her reading. Sarah was enraged and, in defiance of her father, vowed to continue her instruction of the Grimké slaves, albeit in secret. Years later she identified the event as planting the seeds of her antislavery activism. "I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my locks," she later wrote. "The light was put out, the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the law of South Carolina."5 The relationship with Hetty transformed Sarah's thinking on slavery, as did the books in her father's library. In addition to scolding her for teaching Hetty how to read, Sarah's father also barred her from his library when he caught her reading one of his law books.

Even so, it didn't take long for John Grimké to conclude that Sarah was a different kind of a child. Bookish, reflective, inquisitive, and uncomfortable in social settings, he grew to admire his daughter's rebellion, and so, eventually, he began to purposefully overlook her indiscretions, steering himself away from his library when he knew she was in there. If she had been born a man, he once remarked, "she would have made the greatest jurist in the country." The law books, and Sarah's religious views, had an impact. She became an abolitionist before the movement got its name, openly questioning her father on the state's slave codes, confronting her religious teachers on their defense of the institution, and regularly condemning her mother's harsh treatment of the family's servants. And so it was that on Sunday afternoons Sarah gathered the slave children, with Hetty in the lead, to read from the Bible. The Judge was disturbed by this practice, but he felt powerless to discipline his daughter. What Sarah was doing was a secret subversion of all that he and his family stood for.

Yet how could he punish a child for teaching others about God? Sadly, the year that Sarah turned twelve, Hetty died of an identified childhood ailment and was laid to rest in the slave cemetery of Charleston. Sarah was nearly inconsolab≤ it was for this reason that she celebrated the birth, in 1805, of Angelina, convincing her parents that she be named the child's godmother. She stood proudly before the font in St. Philips as her "precious Nina" was baptized. As she later wrote: "I had been taught to believe in the efficacy of prayer, and I will remember, after the ceremony was over, slipping out and shutting myself up in my own room, where, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I prayed that God would make me worthy of the task I had assumed, and help me to aid and direct my precious child."6 The two Grimké girls were inseparable. Sarah took charge of Angelina's religious training, monitored her daily chore.