Some Recollections of Our Antislavery ConflictMay, Samuel J. (Samuel Joseph)
History
Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict
May, Samuel J. (Samuel Joseph)
Antislavery movements -- United States
The next afternoon she spoke to a large audience in Mr. Sewall’s
meeting-house in Scituate, for an hour and a half, evidently to their
great acceptance. The following Wednesday I took the sisters to
Duxbury, where, in the Methodist Church that evening, Angelina held six
hundred hearers in fixed attention for two hours, and received from
them frequent audible (as well as visible) expressions of assent and
sympathy.
On Friday afternoon I went with them to the Baptist meeting-house
in Hanover, where a crowd was already assembled to hear them. Sarah
Grimké, the state of whose voice had prevented her speaking on either
of the former occasions, gave a most impressive discourse of more than
an hour’s length on the dangers of slavery, revealing to us some things
which only those who had lived in the prison-house could have learnt.
Angelina followed in a speech of nearly an hour, in which she made the
duty and safety of immediate emancipation appear so plainly that the
wayfaring man though a fool must have seen the truth. If there was a
person there who went away unaffected, he would not have been moved
though an angel instead of Angelina had spoken to him. I said then, I
have often said since, that I never have heard from any other lips,
male or female, such eloquence as that of her closing appeal. Several
gentlemen who had come from Hingham, not disposed nor expecting to be
pleased, rushed up to me when the audience began to depart, and after
berating me roundly for “going about the neighborhood with these women
setting public sentiment at naught and violating the decorum of the
church,” said “there can be no doubt that they have a right to speak in
public, and they ought to be heard; do bring them to Hingham as soon as
may be. Our meeting-house shall be at their service.” Accordingly, the
next day I took them thither, and they spoke there with great effect on
Sunday evening, November 5th, from the pulpit of the Unitarian Church,
then occupied by Rev. Charles Brooks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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