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Philadelphia, September 18, 1837. 2 pp. manuscript on bifolium, 10” x 7.875”, stamped, addressed, and docketed (“Resolutions of Philadelphia Slavery Society to SMG & A.E.G. ‘37”) on p. 4. CONDITION: Very good.

An exceedingly important manuscript document, sent by the mixed-race Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society to pathbreaking activists Sarah and Angelina Grimké in the midst of their grueling New England lecture tour and including highly resonant language that, incorporated into the resolutions of the Seneca Falls Convention a decade later, positions the Grimkés at the heart of American feminism.

The Grimké sisters, skyrocketing to abolitionist fame between 1835 and early 1837 for their radical views of racial equality and firsthand knowledge of slavery, became the first female agents for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1837 and undertook two major tours, first in New York State and then—two weeks after the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in May, through New England. They scandalized the country by addressing mixed-gender audiences, and in July were denounced by the New England clergy, who declared in a public letter that when “a woman assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer…her character becomes unnatural.”

The letter offered here, by leading member and sometime officer of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Mary Grew, addresses her “ Beloved Sisters,” then in Worcester, Massachusetts, at a time when they would have been especially in need of support and camaraderie: the sisters sometimes spoke at as many as six lectures a week, and in addition to the attack of the “Pastoral Letter,” had been frequently challenged to defend and debate both their right to speak out on political subjects, and the veracity of their firsthand knowledge of slavery. Grew’s letter reads in part:

In behalf of the [Philadelphia Female] Anti-Slavery Society which still claims you as “valued members,” I transmit to you the accompanying resolutions, which were passed at our last meeting, on the 14th inst. It is scarcely necessary to assure you of the deep interest that we feel in all your vicissitudes, and of our earnest desire that you may be ever guided by unerring wisdom, and preserved from giving just cause of offence on anything, that your “ministry be not blamed.”

Allow me, dear sisters, to express my personal sympathy with you, in your labors of love, while spending, and being spent, for the sake of the holy cause, in which our hearts are so strongly united…

The resolutions themselves, adopted at the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting four days earlier, are a moving acknowledgment of the immense influence of the Grimké sisters, as well as their personal importance to their fellow members of the Philadelphia society—the community in which they ultimately found a home after leaving South Carolina. Repeating verbatim the contentious resolution that Angelina herself submitted to the women’s Anti-Slavery Convention that May, the Philadelphia society offers a fresh injection of the sisters’ own courage and convictions four months into their tour—an extraordinarily demanding undertaking that would see the first of Sarah’s remarkable “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” and leave Angelina, the more compelling and therefore active speaker, gravely ill:

Whereas at the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women [in May of 1837], it was resolved, “That as certain rights and duties are common to all moral beings, the time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom, and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her, therefore it is the duty of woman, and the province of woman to plead the cause of the oppressed in our land, and to do all that she can by her voice, and her pen, and her purse, and the influence of her example, to overthrow the horrible system of American slavery.”

And whereas our beloved friends S. M. and A. E. Grimke, acting in the spirit of this resolution, have devoted themselves to plead publicly the “cause of the oppressed in our land,” and thereby been subjected to the sneers of the heartless—the scoffs of the worldling, and even to the censures of the more serious class of the community, who see not, that thereunto our sisters are called—therefore

Resolved, That this Society, of which they are valued members, deeply sympathising with them in the difficulties and trials that beset their path—would encourage them to perseverance in the work set before them, believing that He by whom it is appointed, will reward with the consoling language, “Well done, good and faithful servants,” “As ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

Angelina’s resolution was vocally supported at the May Anti-Slavery Convention by fellow Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society member Lucretia Mott, who, eleven years later at the Seneca Falls Convention, remembered it “almost to the world” (Faulkner, p. 72), channeling its sentiment and incorporating much of its language into two of the Convention resolutions: “That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her,” and “That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means…” (“Report”). Despite the absence of the Grimkés from Seneca Falls, Angelina’s language would underpin the Convention’s ethos and exert a profound influence on the development of American feminism.

The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society resolutions articulated here are signed by Grew for Mary Pugh, the society’s secretary, and Lucretia Mott, its president and later the co-convener of the Seneca Falls Convention. They are addressed to the Grimké sisters in Worcester, Massachusetts, care of John Milton Earle (1794–1874), a fellow abolitionist as well as a politician, businessman, and founder of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Earle’s wife Sarah (née Hussey, 1799–1858) was the organizer of the Worcester Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle and the Worcester County Anti-Slavery Society, South Division, and as a member of the latter society’s executive committee she organized Anti-Slavery fairs and, in 1850, opened the National Woman’s Rights Convention. It is docketed in the rather unruly hand of abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld (1803–1895), who married Angelina Grimké in 1838.

A remarkable document of the intertwined development of the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements in America, and a poignant example of the early life and use of radical feminist language that became a direct progenitor of the Seneca Falls resolutions.

REFERENCES: “Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention” at National Park Service online; Berkin, Carol. “Angelina and Sarah Grimke: Abolitionist Sisters” at The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History online; Moran, Karen Board. “Grimké Sisters” at Worcester Women’s History Project online; Faulkner, Carol. Lucretia Mott’s Heresy : Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Item #10601

Price: $22,500.00