American Experience (1988–…): Season 25, Episode 2 - The Abolitionists: Part 1 - full transcript
Shared beliefs about slavery bring together Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a Charleston plantation family, who moves north and becomes a public speaker against slavery; Frederick Douglass, a young slave who becomes hopeful when he hears about the abolitionists; William Lloyd Garrison, who founds the newspaper The Liberator, a powerful voice for the movement; Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose first trip to the South changes her life and her writing; and John Brown, who devotes his life to the cause. The abolitionist movement, however, is in disarray and increasing violence raises doubts about the efficacy of its pacifist tactics.
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As the daughter of one of South
Carolina's first families,
Angelina Grimké lived in almost
unimaginable luxury.
In the 1820s,
Charleston's aristocracy
was one of the wealthiest
societies on earth,
but Angelina found it almost
unbearable, an empire of sin.
The story goes that
each of them in the family
had their own personal slave
behind them
when they ate dinner.
And if the salt and pepper
were next to the person
sitting next to you,
you didn't ask them to pass it.
Your slave got it from his slave
and gave it to you.
There was nothing
that you had to do
that there wasn't a slave
who took care of it for you.
Did you hear last night?
Hear what?
Really?
Angelina, what are you
talking about?
You know!
Henry!
He whipped John again!
I told you before, dear:
that's Henry's business.
Angelina attacked slavery
not in the beginning because
she cared about the slaves.
It is Henry's business.
She was really concerned about
the fate of their white masters.
I asked you to leave him alone.
He's my brother!
Yes, I know.
She believed slavery was a sin
and that God would punish people
who had slaves.
Mother, it is my duty
to bear testimony against...
Angelina,
mind your own business.
It is my business,
and it's your business too!
How can you stand in church
every week...
You must let it be.
I can't let it be!
Have you no Christian feelings?
Yes, Angelina,
I have Christian feelings,
and you are putting them
to the test right now.
My soul will be judged
by the Lord,
and not by you or anyone else.
It is my duty...
It is not your duty, Angelina!
I am glad, I suppose,
that you are so diligent
about your faith.
But leave my soul to me
and Henry's to Henry.
I speak the truth in love.
Enough!
Mother!
Mother!
Mother, listen to me!
Mother!
Angelina's religious search was
tortured, tortured, tortured.
She was more or less on her own
as she struggled with very deep
and troubling issues
about herself
and her relationship to God.
In the fall of 1829,
Grimké resolved
to leave Charleston
and the "pollutions of slavery"
for an uncertain future
in the North.
There's a kind of fearlessness
about Angelina Grimké.
Women did not strike out,
white women did not strike out
on their own in this way,
and Southern white women
certainly did not.
This is disobedience
to proper society,
to the South, to the church.
Frederick Douglass was alone
in a terrifying new world.
A few weeks earlier,
the six-year-old had been
delivered to his master's home
on Maryland's eastern shore
to begin his life as a slave.
His first experience of slavery
would haunt him to his grave.
Aunt Hester went out one night,
and happened to be absent when
the master desired her presence.
Bitch!
Oh, please, please...
No words, no tears, no prayers
seemed to move his iron heart.
The louder she screamed,
the harder he whipped;
and where the blood ran fastest,
there he whipped longest.
He would whip to make her scream
and whip to make her hush.
I dared not venture out
till long after it was over.
It was the bloodstained gate,
the entrance to the hell
of slavery.
Frederick Douglass and Angelina
Grimké lived at opposite poles
of one of the largest slave
societies in history.
In the late 1820s,
there were two million
men, women and children
living in bondage
in the United States.
In the 50 years
since the Revolution,
every northern state
had outlawed slavery.
It had once seemed likely
that it would disappear
in the South as well,
but no more.
The invention of the cotton gin
had led to a massive increase
in cotton production,
making slavery indispensable
to both the South and the North.
It's actually quite astounding
how deeply entrenched it was
in the nation's political
and economic life.
What is seen as this sort
of idiosyncratic, peculiar
Southern institution
actually had an enormous
economic significance
in the national economy
of the United States.
Slaves were the single largest
financial asset
in the entire American economy,
worth more than all
manufacturing,
all railroad, steamship lines
and other transportation systems
put together.
The only thing
in the American economy
worth more as simply
a financial asset
was the land itself,
and no one really quite knows
how to value North America.
The only voices advocating the
abolition of slavery were black.
Their frustration was growing,
and some of them were becoming
more militant,
but no one in power
was listening.
As of yet, no white Americans
could imagine turning millions
of dollars' worth of slaves
into millions of black
compatriots.
But scattered
around the country,
a few lonely souls
were convinced
that slavery was a crime
against God and man.
And in Boston, one of them
was coming to understand
that God intended
he do something about it.
William Lloyd Garrison
felt that he was destined
to do great things,
but he had no idea
how to get there.
In 1828, he was 22 years old,
newly arrived in the city from
his hometown of Newburyport.
Garrison's father,
a seaman and a drunk,
had abandoned the family
when Garrison was two years old.
Plunged into poverty,
Garrison's mother left her
children for years on end
as she looked for work.
But in their time together,
she managed to drum
a fierce Christian conscience
into her son.
William Lloyd Garrison's
religious background
was not just a background,
it was at the core
of who he was.
It was an indwelling spirit
inside of him
that constantly thought
about making God's will
come into being on this earth.
Shortly after arriving
in Boston,
Garrison happened to meet
an itinerant publisher
who was raising money for his
one-man anti-slavery newspaper.
Garrison was horrified by
descriptions of the slave pens
where men, women and children
were held awaiting shipment
further south.
And he began to think
that ending slavery
was the cause that could give
meaning to his life.
In the summer of 1829,
Garrison moved to Baltimore
to take a job
at the publisher's newspaper.
He brought new life
to the struggling operation,
which had long been
urging slaveholders
to free their slaves
so that they could be
shipped back to Africa,
leaving the United States
a single-race country.
But as Garrison
came into contact
with Baltimore's large
free black population,
he began to embrace
a far more radical vision
of America's future.
♪ To mansions in the skies ♪
♪ I bid farewell to every fear ♪
♪ And wipe my weeping eyes ♪
♪ Should earth against... ♪
Garrison went to Baltimore and
there boarded with free blacks.
Had to share the table
with them.
Had to break bread with them.
Had to sleep in the same
quarters with them.
And suddenly he had an idea that
he had a much-expanded mission
that did not simply speak
to the question of slavery
but spoke to the question
of race.
♪ ...and face a frowning world ♪
♪ Let cares
like a wild deluge come... ♪
Garrison lost interest
in gradual emancipation.
He wanted immediate abolition...
The complete eradication
of the institution
everywhere and forever.
He even envisioned a future
in which black Americans
could share
in their country's promise
of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
Garrison was making
powerful enemies;
within months,
he was thrown in prison
for vilifying a slave trader.
A New York sympathizer bailed
him out in the spring of 1830.
He had no job to return to.
Neither did he have a home
or a family.
He had few friends or allies.
He did, however, have a plan:
a newspaper of his own
to promote immediate abolition.
I am willing to be persecuted,
imprisoned and bound
for advocating African rights,
and I should deserve
to be a slave myself
if I shrunk from that duty
or danger.
By the fall of 1830,
William Lloyd Garrison
was back in Boston,
doggedly pursuing his dream
of an abolitionist newspaper.
He scrounged around
for printing supplies
and convinced a colleague to
loan him a few reams of paper.
He traveled around the Northeast
gathering a handful of allies
among white reformers,
but not enough
to support his venture.
Garrison meets with a group
of black abolitionists,
and he receives
very positive support.
In that first year,
the financial help
of black Bostonians
was absolutely critical.
He had many more
black supporters
than white supporters.
He uses his time
in African-American communities
in churches, in meetings,
to think very deliberately
about how to organize his own
abolitionist campaign.
There is a true partnership
that can go forward.
There's a kind of work
that Garrison can do
precisely because he is a white
man in America in the 1830s.
On January 1, 1831, Garrison's
long-awaited day arrived.
On the first page of the first
issue of his newspaper,
Garrison declared,
"There shall be no neutrals;
men shall either like
or dislike me."
Let Southern oppressors tremble.
Let their Northern
apologists tremble.
Let all the enemies of the
persecuted blacks tremble.
On the subject of slavery,
I do not wish to write
with moderation.
I am in earnest.
I will not equivocate.
I will not excuse.
I will not retreat
a single inch.
And I will be heard.
For eight months,
Garrison toiled away
in almost complete obscurity.
Then an explosion of violence
halfway across the country
suddenly propelled him
to national prominence.
On a hot August night in 1831,
a band of armed slaves
rode through
the Virginia countryside,
killing the white occupants
of one farmhouse after another.
Nat Turner,
the man who led the rebellion,
would elude a massive
search party for 68 days
before he, too,
was caught and executed.
The sudden explosion
of black anger, black wrath,
is so jarring that the
ramifications of the Rebellion
go far beyond Virginia.
There's no evidence
that Garrison's Liberator
had any influence on Nat Turner.
But very quickly
in the Southern press,
Garrison's name started
to be associated
with Nat Turner's revolt.
The South Carolina legislature
put a bounty on Garrison's head:
$15,000 if you deliver his body,
I think more if you delivered
the whole man alive.
Garrison welcomed the notoriety.
The Liberator is causing
extraordinary agitation
among whites
in the slave states.
I am constantly receiving
anonymous letters
filled with abominable
and bloody sentiments.
These trouble me less
than the wind.
I was never so happy
and confident
as I am at the present time.
Over the next two years,
Garrison gradually won adherents
to the anti-slavery cause.
Almost 50 abolitionist groups
formed in ten states.
Their influence extended
from urban centers
like Philadelphia and New York
to remote settlements
like Cincinnati,
a boomtown
on the Western frontier.
There, Lyman Beecher,
one of the country's
most famous preachers,
had recently moved his family.
Beecher opposed slavery
in principle,
but distrusted activists
who "recklessly" advocated
immediate abolition.
His 22-year-old daughter Harriet
had inherited his views.
There is "a class of professed
abolitionists in Cincinnati,"
she wrote, but they are
"unfashionable"
and are "regarded as a species
of moral mono-maniacs."
Ladies.
He wants to be noticed.
Don't they all?
In the spring of 1833,
Harriet and two friends
crossed over the river
into neighboring Kentucky.
She had never before
visited a slave state.
We have this fine specimen here,
what'll you give?
$25?
$50, we've got $50 going once!
$50 going twice!
$50, sold to the gentleman here.
How are you gentlemen doing
this nice warm Kentucky day?
Gonna keep this thing going.
No!
No, my baby!
What Stowe sees there
is a human thing.
She sees these people,
I mean, they are human beings.
What will you give
for this women?
$25.
She's confronted with it
in such an intimate way.
And I think
that never leaves her.
In 1833, two years
after William Lloyd Garrison
launched The Liberator,
abolitionists
from all over the North
gathered for the first time.
They could feel the strength
of their growing numbers.
The time had come to unify
their far-flung groups
into one national
anti-slavery society.
Garrison was chosen to draw up
the organization's charter.
He worked through the night,
producing a radical document
that crystallized
his own beliefs,
especially his faith
in the power of nonviolence.
Our measures shall be
the opposition of moral purity
to moral corruption,
the destruction of error
by the potency of truth,
the overthrow of prejudice
by the power of love,
and the abolition of slavery
by the spirit of repentance.
The American
Anti-Slavery Society
came to life the next day,
when 63 people
signed Garrison's manifesto.
They vowed to spread
the anti-slavery gospel
to every city, town and village.
And they agreed to use
what they called "moral suasion"
to convert slaveholders
to the cause.
The heart of the Evangelical
Christian's worldview
was this idea
that the individual
can be converted
almost immediately,
so why not the society too?
They had seen through
their own religious culture
the conversion of people from
the condition of being a sinner
to being sanctified.
And so the original intention
of the abolitionists
was to tell the slaveholders
to repent and that they would.
Abolitionists never waver
in their faith or their hope
that any day, any moment,
slavery can end.
Word of the abolitionists'
efforts spread,
even reaching the slave
Frederick Douglass.
Douglass had spent
much of his youth
as a house slave in Baltimore.
There, his horizons had widened;
he had lived among free blacks,
had secretly learned to read,
and there he had come to hope
that slavery
might not be eternal.
Every once in a while,
I could hear my master speaking
angrily about "abolitionists."
I had no idea who
or what these were.
I soon found, however,
that they were soundly hated
by slaveholders.
I realized
with deep satisfaction
that I was not alone
in abhorring slavery.
This thought makes him question,
it makes him hopeful,
it makes him angry.
So that when there is a need
for Douglass to be beaten back
into submission,
to erase the experiences
of Baltimore,
he's sent to Covey for this.
Edward Covey was a farmer
back on Maryland's eastern shore
who traded on his reputation
as a slave breaker.
He was truly sadistic.
He whipped Douglass mercilessly
at least once a week
for the first six months
for no reason at all.
Come on, boy...
Come on, boy.
Douglass knew that by physically
assaulting a white man,
his life was in danger.
But he's made this decision
that it matters not.
And he isn't punished
in part because Douglass
standing up to Covey
ruins, or at least jeopardizes,
Covey's reputation.
Covey never laid a hand
on Douglass again.
I was a changed being
after that fight.
I was nothing before;
I was a man now.
By 1835, two years
after the formation
of the American
Anti-Slavery Society,
there were over 300 chapters
throughout the free states,
with tens of thousands
of members.
Garrison and New York
businessman Lewis Tappan
hoped to build on this momentum
with a bold plan to directly
confront Southern slaveholders
and their supporters.
They proposed printing 20,000
to 50,000 pamphlets a week
and mailing them to ministers,
politicians
and newspaper editors in each
state, especially in the South.
The postal campaign
became a phenomenon.
Within a year, the Anti-Slavery
Society had flooded the nation
with over a million pieces
of abolitionist literature,
along with medals,
emblems, bandannas,
chocolate wrappers, songs,
and readers for small children.
The great postal campaign
did not bring about the end
of what Southerners called
"our peculiar institution."
Instead, it triggered
a wave of repression
throughout the slave states.
In Charleston,
3,000 people destroyed
anti-slavery materials
and then burned Garrison
in effigy.
Southerners decide,
"We're being attacked
"and you need to bring
these scoundrels to justice,
they must be kidnapped,
they must be assassinated."
I mean,
it's an incredible uproar.
This is when the South
sort of closes itself completely
on the issue of slavery.
Earlier on, you were not
putting your life into danger
if you criticized slavery.
But by that time in the South,
if you did,
you were taking a serious risk.
The vehemence of the reaction
in the South
took the abolitionists
by surprise.
But they were even more alarmed
when the violence moved north.
In some cases, abolitionists
themselves were the targets,
as when a New York mob
burned Lewis Tappan's house
to the ground.
But all too often,
African Americans were
the victims of racist violence,
from isolated beatings
to the expulsion
of entire black communities.
The mobs shattered
every abolitionist assumption:
that righteousness
would triumph over evil,
that their fellow Americans
would listen to reason,
that their Northern neighbors
would support
the abolitionist cause.
Garrison was stunned.
When we first unfurled
the banner of The Liberator,
we did not anticipate that
to protect Southern slavery,
the free states would
voluntarily trample underfoot
all law, order and government.
Garrison and his fellow
abolitionists
had roused an enemy
far more tenacious, entrenched
and violent
than they had ever imagined.
In the years since
Angelina Grimké
left her home in Charleston,
she had moved to Philadelphia
and joined her
like-minded sister, Sarah.
There, Angelina discreetly
followed reports
of the abolitionist movement.
She was reluctant
to get involved,
fearing that would bring
disgrace to her mother
back in Charleston.
But as she read reports
of the rising tide
of pro-slavery violence,
Grimké finally decided that
she could remain silent no more.
Respected Friend:
I can hardly express
the deep and solemn interest
with which I have viewed
the violent proceedings
of the last few weeks.
"The ground upon which you stand
is holy ground:
"never, never surrender it.
"It is my deep, solemn,
deliberate conviction
that this is a cause
worth dying for."
Angelina Grimké.
William, she's the daughter
of one of the most famous
families in South Carolina.
McDANlEL:
When Garrison receives
Angelina Grimké's letter,
he sees a Southern woman
who is confirming everything
that the abolitionists have been
saying about slavery's evils.
It's a godsend.
Garrison's publication
of the letter
horrified Angelina's friends
and even her sister Sarah.
They pleaded with her
to renounce it,
but Grimké refused.
Instead, she committed herself
to the cause.
She had a weapon that no other
abolitionist could claim:
a pedigree among
the slaveholding aristocracy.
Grimké set about writing
an appeal
to the women of the South,
urging them to work
for the downfall of slavery.
I know you do not make the laws,
but I also know that you are
the wives and mothers,
sisters and daughters
of those who do.
Let the Christian women
of the South arise,
and salvation is certain.
Grimké's appeal
met the same reception
as Garrison's pamphlets.
In Charleston,
copies were publicly burned,
and the mayor warned her mother
that if Angelina ever dared
visit Charleston again,
she would be thrown in jail.
But Grimké had no intention
of returning to the South.
She had made up her mind to take
up the banner of abolition.
I'm going to lose my job...
You're not going to lose
nothing, understand?
I got this figured out.
Just relax.
You back off of me.
Don't you mess with me, boy.
By the fall of 1835,
anti-abolitionist violence
was closing in on Boston.
A stone-throwing crowd
had recently forced
one of Garrison's allies
to abandon a speech.
Garrison himself
woke one morning
to find a gallows
on his front lawn.
He ignored the warnings.
On the morning
of October 21, 1835,
he made his way across town
to deliver yet another
anti-slavery lecture.
That was Garrison!
That was Garrison!
We'll get him!
Hey, we'll get him
on the way back out!
We got something for you!
Someone get the tar pots ready!
I see you up there!
Well, well,
here's our little rabbit.
Oi, we got him, he's up here!
You're mine.
Come on, let's take him down
to the others.
We'll tar the nigger-loving
son of a bitch!
Get the rope.
Fortunately for Garrison,
two burly men in the crowd
took pity on him
and rushed him to the town hall.
With the mob still calling
for Garrison's blood,
the mayor put the terrified
printer in jail for the night
for his own protection.
Reeling from his brush
with death,
Garrison retreated
to the Connecticut countryside
with his wife Helen, who was
pregnant with their first child.
Garrison told colleagues
that he needed to stay
with Helen and the new baby.
In fact, he had been shaken
to his core,
his faith in his fellow man
poisoned,
his hope for his country
undermined.
Garrison begins to suspect that
every part of American society
is infected by a deep moral
disease.
And he starts to say,
"The churches are pro-slavery;
"we're coming out
of all the churches.
"Politics are pro-slavery;
abolitionists
should never vote."
And he becomes far more radical
and far more anti-institutional.
For years, John Brown had been
trying to divine God's purpose
to make sense of his
afflictions.
He had once been a successful
merchant and tanner,
a good provider to his family.
But then, suddenly,
his life collapsed:
a series of business disasters
plunged him deep into debt.
Brown is drifting
just further and further
into a very deep and dark
relationship with God.
He's always trying to discern
what God wants for him.
That's really what Calvinism
is all about.
You're eternally in sin.
You're just constantly
trying to get out of it
like a drowning man.
In November of 1837, news came
that an anti-slavery printer
had been murdered by a mob
in Illinois.
Elijah Lovejoy's death
struck at something
deep within John Brown,
conjuring up a memory
that had haunted him for years.
When I was a child,
I stayed for a short time
with a very gentlemanly landlord
who held a slave boy
near my own age.
The master made
a great pet of me
while the Negro boy
was badly clothed, poorly fed,
and beaten before my eyes
with iron shovels
or any other thing
that came first hand.
For Brown, Lovejoy's death
was a sign from God:
he must never again stand
helpless in the face of evil.
As he dressed
for a prayer meeting
a few days after the killing,
John Brown knew
what God meant for him.
He sat silently
as one speaker after another
fired up the congregation with
accounts of Lovejoy's death.
Finally, John Brown stood up
and raised his right hand.
"Here before God," he announced,
"in the presence
of these witnesses,
"from this time,
I consecrate my life
to the destruction of slavery."
A few months earlier,
scores of abolitionists
had descended on New York
for a training session.
William Lloyd Garrison came, as
did Angelina and Sarah Grimké.
Though Garrison gave
a rousing speech,
Angelina's head was turned
by a striking young theologian
who ran most of the sessions.
Theodore Weld had committed
himself totally
to the anti-slavery cause
and had even pledged
not to marry
until the slaves were free.
Angelina thinks
he walks on water.
She thinks he is
the most amazing man,
that he is filled
with the passion of abolition.
He trains them, teaches them,
and sends them off
to give talks.
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 feel that I owe it
to the suffering slave
and the deluded master...
To do all that I can
to overturn a system
built up upon the bodies
of my countrymen
and cemented
by the blood and sweat...
And tears of my sisters
in bonds.
Of course since they're women,
to speak in front of a mixed
or, as they called it,
"promiscuous" audience
of men and women
was absolutely forbidden.
The abolitionists are ardent
desirers of respectability
for their movement.
So when men start
to come to her talks,
their antennae go up.
And when they tell her
to stop talking to men,
she says,
"No, I have a right."
The Grimkés quickly
found themselves
at the center of a storm.
Ministers condemned them
and warned of the dangers
that loomed if women moved away
from their assigned sphere.
Many abolitionists agreed.
As the arguments escalated,
Angelina began linking
the rights of enslaved people
to the rights of women.
Garrison stood by the embattled
sisters, but Weld did not.
"Women's rights should not be
your preoccupation,"
he told Angelina.
"At least not until
the slaves are free."
Grimké's pain and anger
came through in her reply.
Can't you just stand here
side by side with us?
Can you not see that women
could do, and would do,
a hundred times more for the
slave if she were not shackled?
By the time their six-month tour
finally ended
in the fall of 1837,
Angelina could go no further;
she collapsed
with typhoid fever.
As she was recovering,
Angelina wrote to Theodore,
saying she hadn't realized
how much he disliked her.
And he writes back to her,
"You're young and you have
too much pride
and you're not helping
the cause."
And then in great big letters,
three times the size of the rest
of the letter, he writes,
"I have loved you from the first
moment I met you."
And I'm sure Angelina had the
same response I had in reading,
"You're terrible,
you're prideful,
"I love you...
What?"
My dear, look at you.
You're beautiful.
Your letter was indeed
a great surprise, my brother,
and yet it was no surprise
at all.
I feel, my Theodore, that we are
the two halves of one whole,
two bodies animated by one soul,
and that the Lord
has given us to each other.
In the spring of 1838,
Angelina and Theodore's friends
received a wedding invitation
adorned with an engraving
of a slave in chains.
It would be a ceremony
unlike any other.
The couple improvised
their vows,
denounced a man's authority
over his wife,
and to cap it all off,
they had a black minister
and a white minister
lead the congregation in prayer.
And I reject all authority,
all government,
save the influence which love
gives us over each other.
May the sun continue
to shine as it now does,
and may our Father
guide us in love
through the rest
of our pilgrimage.
Brothers and sisters.
Mr. and Mrs. Weld have chosen
to solemnize their union
not by the illegitimate
authority of state or church,
but by your witness.
All kind of rumors had been
flying around Philadelphia
about the wedding
and the guest list
and the social amalgamation,
or mixing, that had gone on.
As news of the event filtered
out, the city grew tense.
By the time Angelina
and Theodore
attended an anti-slavery
convention
two days after the wedding,
Philadelphia was seething
with racial tension.
The meeting was held
in Pennsylvania Hall,
which had been constructed
as a haven for free speech.
The leaders of the movement
are on the stage.
And as they're speaking, as
they're holding their meeting,
they begin to hear noise
outside,
and the noise grows
and grows and grows.
And then they begin to see
the rocks hitting the windows.
And they realize that
they're in danger.
Angelina Weld kept speaking
as showers of stones
pelted the windows.
Shattered glass cascaded
to the floor.
What is the mob?
What would the breaking
of every window be:
any evidence that we are wrong,
or that slavery is a good
and wholesome institution?
What if that mob
should burst in upon us
and commit violence
on our persons?
Would this be anything compared
with what the slaves endure?
The following night, a crowd
broke into the empty hall
and set fire to the building.
Firemen stood aside
and watched it burn.
Soon, Philadelphia's monument
to free speech lay in ruins.
Only days after the burning
of Pennsylvania Hall,
a shaken Angelina
moved with Theodore
to a rustic farm in New Jersey.
There, far from the violence
and upheaval
of abolition's front lines,
they would take up
their most influential work.
American Slavery As It Is
was a book made up of firsthand
accounts of slavery:
handbills for runaway slaves,
court records
and the words of slave owners
themselves.
A mammoth undertaking,
it was an irrefutable answer
to the argument that slavery
was a necessary
and benevolent institution.
Grimké was unflinching
in her own account.
I saw slavery in the city,
among the fashionable
and the honorable.
There, everything
cruel and revolting
is carefully concealed
from strangers.
I have known the mistress
of a family
to borrow servants
to wait on company
because their own slaves
had been so cruelly flogged
that they could not walk
without limping at every step,
and their putrefied flesh
emitted such
an intolerable smell
that they were not fit to be
in the presence of company.
American Slavery As It Is
became the best-selling book
in the country.
But with its publication,
Angelina Grimké's public career
was over.
Her health had been severely
weakened by her public ordeals,
leaving her barely able to cope
with the demands of motherhood.
For all that, Angelina Grimké
never surrendered the vision
of a more perfect society
in which black and white,
men and women,
walked together
in the ways of God.
She's exhausted from fighting.
And yet she really never lets go
of doing what is morally right.
But she's not the same
know-it-all obnoxious girl
she was when she was younger.
Now she's genuinely a humanist.
She's genuinely a person
with great empathy
for people who suffer
and great sensitivity
to the inequalities in society.
By 1840, after
ten years of struggle,
William Lloyd Garrison
was drifting away
from many of his old allies,
alienating them with what they
considered irrelevant heresies.
Rather than backing down,
Garrison upped the ante:
because the Constitution itself
was corrupt, he charged,
the Union was fatally flawed.
Garrison insisted
that abolitionists
renounce their government;
that they withdraw from
citizenship and refuse to vote.
The American Union was effected
by a guilty compromise
between the free
and slave-holding states;
in other words, by incorporating
the slave system
into the government.
In the language of scripture,
it was "a covenant with death
and an agreement with hell."
The first American Republic,
the one invented
in the revolution
in the late 18th century,
had to die.
It is so deeply flawed
by the fact that human beings
are property
that that Republic is doomed.
It must be crushed, it must be
changed and reinvented.
Many of Garrison's old friends
had had enough.
Some of them
had been deeply offended
by his support
of women's rights.
Others thought it lunacy
for a reform movement
to ignore politics,
or to insist that supporters
refrain from voting.
And a few were quietly wondering
whether nonviolence
could ever free the slaves.
In May of 1840, they quit the
American Anti-Slavery Society.
The organization remained,
with Garrison at its head,
but membership
and income plummeted.
The infighting left
the abolition movement
fragmented and disheartened.
Many wondered whether it would
disappear altogether.
Time and again,
Garrison, Grimké, Weld
and their kindred spirits
had sounded the warning:
the Republic couldn't forever
encompass the ideal of liberty
and the reality of slavery.
For their beliefs,
they had been reviled,
mocked, beaten and imprisoned.
But they had exposed the fatal
weakness in the Union
and set the nation on course
to the gravest crisis
in its history.
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As the daughter of one of South
Carolina's first families,
Angelina Grimké lived in almost
unimaginable luxury.
In the 1820s,
Charleston's aristocracy
was one of the wealthiest
societies on earth,
but Angelina found it almost
unbearable, an empire of sin.
The story goes that
each of them in the family
had their own personal slave
behind them
when they ate dinner.
And if the salt and pepper
were next to the person
sitting next to you,
you didn't ask them to pass it.
Your slave got it from his slave
and gave it to you.
There was nothing
that you had to do
that there wasn't a slave
who took care of it for you.
Did you hear last night?
Hear what?
Really?
Angelina, what are you
talking about?
You know!
Henry!
He whipped John again!
I told you before, dear:
that's Henry's business.
Angelina attacked slavery
not in the beginning because
she cared about the slaves.
It is Henry's business.
She was really concerned about
the fate of their white masters.
I asked you to leave him alone.
He's my brother!
Yes, I know.
She believed slavery was a sin
and that God would punish people
who had slaves.
Mother, it is my duty
to bear testimony against...
Angelina,
mind your own business.
It is my business,
and it's your business too!
How can you stand in church
every week...
You must let it be.
I can't let it be!
Have you no Christian feelings?
Yes, Angelina,
I have Christian feelings,
and you are putting them
to the test right now.
My soul will be judged
by the Lord,
and not by you or anyone else.
It is my duty...
It is not your duty, Angelina!
I am glad, I suppose,
that you are so diligent
about your faith.
But leave my soul to me
and Henry's to Henry.
I speak the truth in love.
Enough!
Mother!
Mother!
Mother, listen to me!
Mother!
Angelina's religious search was
tortured, tortured, tortured.
She was more or less on her own
as she struggled with very deep
and troubling issues
about herself
and her relationship to God.
In the fall of 1829,
Grimké resolved
to leave Charleston
and the "pollutions of slavery"
for an uncertain future
in the North.
There's a kind of fearlessness
about Angelina Grimké.
Women did not strike out,
white women did not strike out
on their own in this way,
and Southern white women
certainly did not.
This is disobedience
to proper society,
to the South, to the church.
Frederick Douglass was alone
in a terrifying new world.
A few weeks earlier,
the six-year-old had been
delivered to his master's home
on Maryland's eastern shore
to begin his life as a slave.
His first experience of slavery
would haunt him to his grave.
Aunt Hester went out one night,
and happened to be absent when
the master desired her presence.
Bitch!
Oh, please, please...
No words, no tears, no prayers
seemed to move his iron heart.
The louder she screamed,
the harder he whipped;
and where the blood ran fastest,
there he whipped longest.
He would whip to make her scream
and whip to make her hush.
I dared not venture out
till long after it was over.
It was the bloodstained gate,
the entrance to the hell
of slavery.
Frederick Douglass and Angelina
Grimké lived at opposite poles
of one of the largest slave
societies in history.
In the late 1820s,
there were two million
men, women and children
living in bondage
in the United States.
In the 50 years
since the Revolution,
every northern state
had outlawed slavery.
It had once seemed likely
that it would disappear
in the South as well,
but no more.
The invention of the cotton gin
had led to a massive increase
in cotton production,
making slavery indispensable
to both the South and the North.
It's actually quite astounding
how deeply entrenched it was
in the nation's political
and economic life.
What is seen as this sort
of idiosyncratic, peculiar
Southern institution
actually had an enormous
economic significance
in the national economy
of the United States.
Slaves were the single largest
financial asset
in the entire American economy,
worth more than all
manufacturing,
all railroad, steamship lines
and other transportation systems
put together.
The only thing
in the American economy
worth more as simply
a financial asset
was the land itself,
and no one really quite knows
how to value North America.
The only voices advocating the
abolition of slavery were black.
Their frustration was growing,
and some of them were becoming
more militant,
but no one in power
was listening.
As of yet, no white Americans
could imagine turning millions
of dollars' worth of slaves
into millions of black
compatriots.
But scattered
around the country,
a few lonely souls
were convinced
that slavery was a crime
against God and man.
And in Boston, one of them
was coming to understand
that God intended
he do something about it.
William Lloyd Garrison
felt that he was destined
to do great things,
but he had no idea
how to get there.
In 1828, he was 22 years old,
newly arrived in the city from
his hometown of Newburyport.
Garrison's father,
a seaman and a drunk,
had abandoned the family
when Garrison was two years old.
Plunged into poverty,
Garrison's mother left her
children for years on end
as she looked for work.
But in their time together,
she managed to drum
a fierce Christian conscience
into her son.
William Lloyd Garrison's
religious background
was not just a background,
it was at the core
of who he was.
It was an indwelling spirit
inside of him
that constantly thought
about making God's will
come into being on this earth.
Shortly after arriving
in Boston,
Garrison happened to meet
an itinerant publisher
who was raising money for his
one-man anti-slavery newspaper.
Garrison was horrified by
descriptions of the slave pens
where men, women and children
were held awaiting shipment
further south.
And he began to think
that ending slavery
was the cause that could give
meaning to his life.
In the summer of 1829,
Garrison moved to Baltimore
to take a job
at the publisher's newspaper.
He brought new life
to the struggling operation,
which had long been
urging slaveholders
to free their slaves
so that they could be
shipped back to Africa,
leaving the United States
a single-race country.
But as Garrison
came into contact
with Baltimore's large
free black population,
he began to embrace
a far more radical vision
of America's future.
♪ To mansions in the skies ♪
♪ I bid farewell to every fear ♪
♪ And wipe my weeping eyes ♪
♪ Should earth against... ♪
Garrison went to Baltimore and
there boarded with free blacks.
Had to share the table
with them.
Had to break bread with them.
Had to sleep in the same
quarters with them.
And suddenly he had an idea that
he had a much-expanded mission
that did not simply speak
to the question of slavery
but spoke to the question
of race.
♪ ...and face a frowning world ♪
♪ Let cares
like a wild deluge come... ♪
Garrison lost interest
in gradual emancipation.
He wanted immediate abolition...
The complete eradication
of the institution
everywhere and forever.
He even envisioned a future
in which black Americans
could share
in their country's promise
of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
Garrison was making
powerful enemies;
within months,
he was thrown in prison
for vilifying a slave trader.
A New York sympathizer bailed
him out in the spring of 1830.
He had no job to return to.
Neither did he have a home
or a family.
He had few friends or allies.
He did, however, have a plan:
a newspaper of his own
to promote immediate abolition.
I am willing to be persecuted,
imprisoned and bound
for advocating African rights,
and I should deserve
to be a slave myself
if I shrunk from that duty
or danger.
By the fall of 1830,
William Lloyd Garrison
was back in Boston,
doggedly pursuing his dream
of an abolitionist newspaper.
He scrounged around
for printing supplies
and convinced a colleague to
loan him a few reams of paper.
He traveled around the Northeast
gathering a handful of allies
among white reformers,
but not enough
to support his venture.
Garrison meets with a group
of black abolitionists,
and he receives
very positive support.
In that first year,
the financial help
of black Bostonians
was absolutely critical.
He had many more
black supporters
than white supporters.
He uses his time
in African-American communities
in churches, in meetings,
to think very deliberately
about how to organize his own
abolitionist campaign.
There is a true partnership
that can go forward.
There's a kind of work
that Garrison can do
precisely because he is a white
man in America in the 1830s.
On January 1, 1831, Garrison's
long-awaited day arrived.
On the first page of the first
issue of his newspaper,
Garrison declared,
"There shall be no neutrals;
men shall either like
or dislike me."
Let Southern oppressors tremble.
Let their Northern
apologists tremble.
Let all the enemies of the
persecuted blacks tremble.
On the subject of slavery,
I do not wish to write
with moderation.
I am in earnest.
I will not equivocate.
I will not excuse.
I will not retreat
a single inch.
And I will be heard.
For eight months,
Garrison toiled away
in almost complete obscurity.
Then an explosion of violence
halfway across the country
suddenly propelled him
to national prominence.
On a hot August night in 1831,
a band of armed slaves
rode through
the Virginia countryside,
killing the white occupants
of one farmhouse after another.
Nat Turner,
the man who led the rebellion,
would elude a massive
search party for 68 days
before he, too,
was caught and executed.
The sudden explosion
of black anger, black wrath,
is so jarring that the
ramifications of the Rebellion
go far beyond Virginia.
There's no evidence
that Garrison's Liberator
had any influence on Nat Turner.
But very quickly
in the Southern press,
Garrison's name started
to be associated
with Nat Turner's revolt.
The South Carolina legislature
put a bounty on Garrison's head:
$15,000 if you deliver his body,
I think more if you delivered
the whole man alive.
Garrison welcomed the notoriety.
The Liberator is causing
extraordinary agitation
among whites
in the slave states.
I am constantly receiving
anonymous letters
filled with abominable
and bloody sentiments.
These trouble me less
than the wind.
I was never so happy
and confident
as I am at the present time.
Over the next two years,
Garrison gradually won adherents
to the anti-slavery cause.
Almost 50 abolitionist groups
formed in ten states.
Their influence extended
from urban centers
like Philadelphia and New York
to remote settlements
like Cincinnati,
a boomtown
on the Western frontier.
There, Lyman Beecher,
one of the country's
most famous preachers,
had recently moved his family.
Beecher opposed slavery
in principle,
but distrusted activists
who "recklessly" advocated
immediate abolition.
His 22-year-old daughter Harriet
had inherited his views.
There is "a class of professed
abolitionists in Cincinnati,"
she wrote, but they are
"unfashionable"
and are "regarded as a species
of moral mono-maniacs."
Ladies.
He wants to be noticed.
Don't they all?
In the spring of 1833,
Harriet and two friends
crossed over the river
into neighboring Kentucky.
She had never before
visited a slave state.
We have this fine specimen here,
what'll you give?
$25?
$50, we've got $50 going once!
$50 going twice!
$50, sold to the gentleman here.
How are you gentlemen doing
this nice warm Kentucky day?
Gonna keep this thing going.
No!
No, my baby!
What Stowe sees there
is a human thing.
She sees these people,
I mean, they are human beings.
What will you give
for this women?
$25.
She's confronted with it
in such an intimate way.
And I think
that never leaves her.
In 1833, two years
after William Lloyd Garrison
launched The Liberator,
abolitionists
from all over the North
gathered for the first time.
They could feel the strength
of their growing numbers.
The time had come to unify
their far-flung groups
into one national
anti-slavery society.
Garrison was chosen to draw up
the organization's charter.
He worked through the night,
producing a radical document
that crystallized
his own beliefs,
especially his faith
in the power of nonviolence.
Our measures shall be
the opposition of moral purity
to moral corruption,
the destruction of error
by the potency of truth,
the overthrow of prejudice
by the power of love,
and the abolition of slavery
by the spirit of repentance.
The American
Anti-Slavery Society
came to life the next day,
when 63 people
signed Garrison's manifesto.
They vowed to spread
the anti-slavery gospel
to every city, town and village.
And they agreed to use
what they called "moral suasion"
to convert slaveholders
to the cause.
The heart of the Evangelical
Christian's worldview
was this idea
that the individual
can be converted
almost immediately,
so why not the society too?
They had seen through
their own religious culture
the conversion of people from
the condition of being a sinner
to being sanctified.
And so the original intention
of the abolitionists
was to tell the slaveholders
to repent and that they would.
Abolitionists never waver
in their faith or their hope
that any day, any moment,
slavery can end.
Word of the abolitionists'
efforts spread,
even reaching the slave
Frederick Douglass.
Douglass had spent
much of his youth
as a house slave in Baltimore.
There, his horizons had widened;
he had lived among free blacks,
had secretly learned to read,
and there he had come to hope
that slavery
might not be eternal.
Every once in a while,
I could hear my master speaking
angrily about "abolitionists."
I had no idea who
or what these were.
I soon found, however,
that they were soundly hated
by slaveholders.
I realized
with deep satisfaction
that I was not alone
in abhorring slavery.
This thought makes him question,
it makes him hopeful,
it makes him angry.
So that when there is a need
for Douglass to be beaten back
into submission,
to erase the experiences
of Baltimore,
he's sent to Covey for this.
Edward Covey was a farmer
back on Maryland's eastern shore
who traded on his reputation
as a slave breaker.
He was truly sadistic.
He whipped Douglass mercilessly
at least once a week
for the first six months
for no reason at all.
Come on, boy...
Come on, boy.
Douglass knew that by physically
assaulting a white man,
his life was in danger.
But he's made this decision
that it matters not.
And he isn't punished
in part because Douglass
standing up to Covey
ruins, or at least jeopardizes,
Covey's reputation.
Covey never laid a hand
on Douglass again.
I was a changed being
after that fight.
I was nothing before;
I was a man now.
By 1835, two years
after the formation
of the American
Anti-Slavery Society,
there were over 300 chapters
throughout the free states,
with tens of thousands
of members.
Garrison and New York
businessman Lewis Tappan
hoped to build on this momentum
with a bold plan to directly
confront Southern slaveholders
and their supporters.
They proposed printing 20,000
to 50,000 pamphlets a week
and mailing them to ministers,
politicians
and newspaper editors in each
state, especially in the South.
The postal campaign
became a phenomenon.
Within a year, the Anti-Slavery
Society had flooded the nation
with over a million pieces
of abolitionist literature,
along with medals,
emblems, bandannas,
chocolate wrappers, songs,
and readers for small children.
The great postal campaign
did not bring about the end
of what Southerners called
"our peculiar institution."
Instead, it triggered
a wave of repression
throughout the slave states.
In Charleston,
3,000 people destroyed
anti-slavery materials
and then burned Garrison
in effigy.
Southerners decide,
"We're being attacked
"and you need to bring
these scoundrels to justice,
they must be kidnapped,
they must be assassinated."
I mean,
it's an incredible uproar.
This is when the South
sort of closes itself completely
on the issue of slavery.
Earlier on, you were not
putting your life into danger
if you criticized slavery.
But by that time in the South,
if you did,
you were taking a serious risk.
The vehemence of the reaction
in the South
took the abolitionists
by surprise.
But they were even more alarmed
when the violence moved north.
In some cases, abolitionists
themselves were the targets,
as when a New York mob
burned Lewis Tappan's house
to the ground.
But all too often,
African Americans were
the victims of racist violence,
from isolated beatings
to the expulsion
of entire black communities.
The mobs shattered
every abolitionist assumption:
that righteousness
would triumph over evil,
that their fellow Americans
would listen to reason,
that their Northern neighbors
would support
the abolitionist cause.
Garrison was stunned.
When we first unfurled
the banner of The Liberator,
we did not anticipate that
to protect Southern slavery,
the free states would
voluntarily trample underfoot
all law, order and government.
Garrison and his fellow
abolitionists
had roused an enemy
far more tenacious, entrenched
and violent
than they had ever imagined.
In the years since
Angelina Grimké
left her home in Charleston,
she had moved to Philadelphia
and joined her
like-minded sister, Sarah.
There, Angelina discreetly
followed reports
of the abolitionist movement.
She was reluctant
to get involved,
fearing that would bring
disgrace to her mother
back in Charleston.
But as she read reports
of the rising tide
of pro-slavery violence,
Grimké finally decided that
she could remain silent no more.
Respected Friend:
I can hardly express
the deep and solemn interest
with which I have viewed
the violent proceedings
of the last few weeks.
"The ground upon which you stand
is holy ground:
"never, never surrender it.
"It is my deep, solemn,
deliberate conviction
that this is a cause
worth dying for."
Angelina Grimké.
William, she's the daughter
of one of the most famous
families in South Carolina.
McDANlEL:
When Garrison receives
Angelina Grimké's letter,
he sees a Southern woman
who is confirming everything
that the abolitionists have been
saying about slavery's evils.
It's a godsend.
Garrison's publication
of the letter
horrified Angelina's friends
and even her sister Sarah.
They pleaded with her
to renounce it,
but Grimké refused.
Instead, she committed herself
to the cause.
She had a weapon that no other
abolitionist could claim:
a pedigree among
the slaveholding aristocracy.
Grimké set about writing
an appeal
to the women of the South,
urging them to work
for the downfall of slavery.
I know you do not make the laws,
but I also know that you are
the wives and mothers,
sisters and daughters
of those who do.
Let the Christian women
of the South arise,
and salvation is certain.
Grimké's appeal
met the same reception
as Garrison's pamphlets.
In Charleston,
copies were publicly burned,
and the mayor warned her mother
that if Angelina ever dared
visit Charleston again,
she would be thrown in jail.
But Grimké had no intention
of returning to the South.
She had made up her mind to take
up the banner of abolition.
I'm going to lose my job...
You're not going to lose
nothing, understand?
I got this figured out.
Just relax.
You back off of me.
Don't you mess with me, boy.
By the fall of 1835,
anti-abolitionist violence
was closing in on Boston.
A stone-throwing crowd
had recently forced
one of Garrison's allies
to abandon a speech.
Garrison himself
woke one morning
to find a gallows
on his front lawn.
He ignored the warnings.
On the morning
of October 21, 1835,
he made his way across town
to deliver yet another
anti-slavery lecture.
That was Garrison!
That was Garrison!
We'll get him!
Hey, we'll get him
on the way back out!
We got something for you!
Someone get the tar pots ready!
I see you up there!
Well, well,
here's our little rabbit.
Oi, we got him, he's up here!
You're mine.
Come on, let's take him down
to the others.
We'll tar the nigger-loving
son of a bitch!
Get the rope.
Fortunately for Garrison,
two burly men in the crowd
took pity on him
and rushed him to the town hall.
With the mob still calling
for Garrison's blood,
the mayor put the terrified
printer in jail for the night
for his own protection.
Reeling from his brush
with death,
Garrison retreated
to the Connecticut countryside
with his wife Helen, who was
pregnant with their first child.
Garrison told colleagues
that he needed to stay
with Helen and the new baby.
In fact, he had been shaken
to his core,
his faith in his fellow man
poisoned,
his hope for his country
undermined.
Garrison begins to suspect that
every part of American society
is infected by a deep moral
disease.
And he starts to say,
"The churches are pro-slavery;
"we're coming out
of all the churches.
"Politics are pro-slavery;
abolitionists
should never vote."
And he becomes far more radical
and far more anti-institutional.
For years, John Brown had been
trying to divine God's purpose
to make sense of his
afflictions.
He had once been a successful
merchant and tanner,
a good provider to his family.
But then, suddenly,
his life collapsed:
a series of business disasters
plunged him deep into debt.
Brown is drifting
just further and further
into a very deep and dark
relationship with God.
He's always trying to discern
what God wants for him.
That's really what Calvinism
is all about.
You're eternally in sin.
You're just constantly
trying to get out of it
like a drowning man.
In November of 1837, news came
that an anti-slavery printer
had been murdered by a mob
in Illinois.
Elijah Lovejoy's death
struck at something
deep within John Brown,
conjuring up a memory
that had haunted him for years.
When I was a child,
I stayed for a short time
with a very gentlemanly landlord
who held a slave boy
near my own age.
The master made
a great pet of me
while the Negro boy
was badly clothed, poorly fed,
and beaten before my eyes
with iron shovels
or any other thing
that came first hand.
For Brown, Lovejoy's death
was a sign from God:
he must never again stand
helpless in the face of evil.
As he dressed
for a prayer meeting
a few days after the killing,
John Brown knew
what God meant for him.
He sat silently
as one speaker after another
fired up the congregation with
accounts of Lovejoy's death.
Finally, John Brown stood up
and raised his right hand.
"Here before God," he announced,
"in the presence
of these witnesses,
"from this time,
I consecrate my life
to the destruction of slavery."
A few months earlier,
scores of abolitionists
had descended on New York
for a training session.
William Lloyd Garrison came, as
did Angelina and Sarah Grimké.
Though Garrison gave
a rousing speech,
Angelina's head was turned
by a striking young theologian
who ran most of the sessions.
Theodore Weld had committed
himself totally
to the anti-slavery cause
and had even pledged
not to marry
until the slaves were free.
Angelina thinks
he walks on water.
She thinks he is
the most amazing man,
that he is filled
with the passion of abolition.
He trains them, teaches them,
and sends them off
to give talks.
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 feel that I owe it
to the suffering slave
and the deluded master...
To do all that I can
to overturn a system
built up upon the bodies
of my countrymen
and cemented
by the blood and sweat...
And tears of my sisters
in bonds.
Of course since they're women,
to speak in front of a mixed
or, as they called it,
"promiscuous" audience
of men and women
was absolutely forbidden.
The abolitionists are ardent
desirers of respectability
for their movement.
So when men start
to come to her talks,
their antennae go up.
And when they tell her
to stop talking to men,
she says,
"No, I have a right."
The Grimkés quickly
found themselves
at the center of a storm.
Ministers condemned them
and warned of the dangers
that loomed if women moved away
from their assigned sphere.
Many abolitionists agreed.
As the arguments escalated,
Angelina began linking
the rights of enslaved people
to the rights of women.
Garrison stood by the embattled
sisters, but Weld did not.
"Women's rights should not be
your preoccupation,"
he told Angelina.
"At least not until
the slaves are free."
Grimké's pain and anger
came through in her reply.
Can't you just stand here
side by side with us?
Can you not see that women
could do, and would do,
a hundred times more for the
slave if she were not shackled?
By the time their six-month tour
finally ended
in the fall of 1837,
Angelina could go no further;
she collapsed
with typhoid fever.
As she was recovering,
Angelina wrote to Theodore,
saying she hadn't realized
how much he disliked her.
And he writes back to her,
"You're young and you have
too much pride
and you're not helping
the cause."
And then in great big letters,
three times the size of the rest
of the letter, he writes,
"I have loved you from the first
moment I met you."
And I'm sure Angelina had the
same response I had in reading,
"You're terrible,
you're prideful,
"I love you...
What?"
My dear, look at you.
You're beautiful.
Your letter was indeed
a great surprise, my brother,
and yet it was no surprise
at all.
I feel, my Theodore, that we are
the two halves of one whole,
two bodies animated by one soul,
and that the Lord
has given us to each other.
In the spring of 1838,
Angelina and Theodore's friends
received a wedding invitation
adorned with an engraving
of a slave in chains.
It would be a ceremony
unlike any other.
The couple improvised
their vows,
denounced a man's authority
over his wife,
and to cap it all off,
they had a black minister
and a white minister
lead the congregation in prayer.
And I reject all authority,
all government,
save the influence which love
gives us over each other.
May the sun continue
to shine as it now does,
and may our Father
guide us in love
through the rest
of our pilgrimage.
Brothers and sisters.
Mr. and Mrs. Weld have chosen
to solemnize their union
not by the illegitimate
authority of state or church,
but by your witness.
All kind of rumors had been
flying around Philadelphia
about the wedding
and the guest list
and the social amalgamation,
or mixing, that had gone on.
As news of the event filtered
out, the city grew tense.
By the time Angelina
and Theodore
attended an anti-slavery
convention
two days after the wedding,
Philadelphia was seething
with racial tension.
The meeting was held
in Pennsylvania Hall,
which had been constructed
as a haven for free speech.
The leaders of the movement
are on the stage.
And as they're speaking, as
they're holding their meeting,
they begin to hear noise
outside,
and the noise grows
and grows and grows.
And then they begin to see
the rocks hitting the windows.
And they realize that
they're in danger.
Angelina Weld kept speaking
as showers of stones
pelted the windows.
Shattered glass cascaded
to the floor.
What is the mob?
What would the breaking
of every window be:
any evidence that we are wrong,
or that slavery is a good
and wholesome institution?
What if that mob
should burst in upon us
and commit violence
on our persons?
Would this be anything compared
with what the slaves endure?
The following night, a crowd
broke into the empty hall
and set fire to the building.
Firemen stood aside
and watched it burn.
Soon, Philadelphia's monument
to free speech lay in ruins.
Only days after the burning
of Pennsylvania Hall,
a shaken Angelina
moved with Theodore
to a rustic farm in New Jersey.
There, far from the violence
and upheaval
of abolition's front lines,
they would take up
their most influential work.
American Slavery As It Is
was a book made up of firsthand
accounts of slavery:
handbills for runaway slaves,
court records
and the words of slave owners
themselves.
A mammoth undertaking,
it was an irrefutable answer
to the argument that slavery
was a necessary
and benevolent institution.
Grimké was unflinching
in her own account.
I saw slavery in the city,
among the fashionable
and the honorable.
There, everything
cruel and revolting
is carefully concealed
from strangers.
I have known the mistress
of a family
to borrow servants
to wait on company
because their own slaves
had been so cruelly flogged
that they could not walk
without limping at every step,
and their putrefied flesh
emitted such
an intolerable smell
that they were not fit to be
in the presence of company.
American Slavery As It Is
became the best-selling book
in the country.
But with its publication,
Angelina Grimké's public career
was over.
Her health had been severely
weakened by her public ordeals,
leaving her barely able to cope
with the demands of motherhood.
For all that, Angelina Grimké
never surrendered the vision
of a more perfect society
in which black and white,
men and women,
walked together
in the ways of God.
She's exhausted from fighting.
And yet she really never lets go
of doing what is morally right.
But she's not the same
know-it-all obnoxious girl
she was when she was younger.
Now she's genuinely a humanist.
She's genuinely a person
with great empathy
for people who suffer
and great sensitivity
to the inequalities in society.
By 1840, after
ten years of struggle,
William Lloyd Garrison
was drifting away
from many of his old allies,
alienating them with what they
considered irrelevant heresies.
Rather than backing down,
Garrison upped the ante:
because the Constitution itself
was corrupt, he charged,
the Union was fatally flawed.
Garrison insisted
that abolitionists
renounce their government;
that they withdraw from
citizenship and refuse to vote.
The American Union was effected
by a guilty compromise
between the free
and slave-holding states;
in other words, by incorporating
the slave system
into the government.
In the language of scripture,
it was "a covenant with death
and an agreement with hell."
The first American Republic,
the one invented
in the revolution
in the late 18th century,
had to die.
It is so deeply flawed
by the fact that human beings
are property
that that Republic is doomed.
It must be crushed, it must be
changed and reinvented.
Many of Garrison's old friends
had had enough.
Some of them
had been deeply offended
by his support
of women's rights.
Others thought it lunacy
for a reform movement
to ignore politics,
or to insist that supporters
refrain from voting.
And a few were quietly wondering
whether nonviolence
could ever free the slaves.
In May of 1840, they quit the
American Anti-Slavery Society.
The organization remained,
with Garrison at its head,
but membership
and income plummeted.
The infighting left
the abolition movement
fragmented and disheartened.
Many wondered whether it would
disappear altogether.
Time and again,
Garrison, Grimké, Weld
and their kindred spirits
had sounded the warning:
the Republic couldn't forever
encompass the ideal of liberty
and the reality of slavery.
For their beliefs,
they had been reviled,
mocked, beaten and imprisoned.
But they had exposed the fatal
weakness in the Union
and set the nation on course
to the gravest crisis
in its history.
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