Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/421

Rh Some great wrong, like slavery, over which the world had slept for ages, becomes thus revealed to the clearer vision. Slavery, war, intemperance, licentiousness, injustice to woman, have thus one after another been brought to the light, as violations of God's eternal laws. The soul of Angelina Grimké, and that of her sister Sarah, were in vital sympathy with al] attempts to reform these great wrongs; but the one which then had pre-eminence above all was human slavery. All of us who are advanced in years can recall with what almost overwhelming effect the appeals of our beloved and lamented Garrison first came to our minds. The conscience of the community was slumbering over this sin: his utterances stung it to frenzy. In the midst of it, and in the heartiest response to his appeals, came the gentle, calm voices of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, enforcing those appeals by facts of their own observation and experience. I have said that their nature was full of tenderness and compassion; but, in addition to this, Angelina, especially, possessed a rare gift of eloquence, a calm power of persuasion, a magnetic influence over those that listened to her, which carried conviction to hearts that nothing before had reached." "I shall never forget the wonderful manifestation of this power during six successive evenings in what was then called the Odeon, at the corner of Franklin and Federal Streets. It was the old Boston Theater, which had been converted into a music hall, the four galleries rising above the auditorium all crowded with a silent audience, carried away with the calm, simple eloquence which narrated what she and her sister had seen from their earliest days. And yet this Odeon scene, the audience so quiet and intensely absorbed, occurred at the most enflamed period of the anti-slavery contest. The effective agent in this phenomenon was Angelina's serene, commanding eloquence, a wonderful gift, which enchained attention, disarmed prejudice, and carried her hearers with her."

said:

Friends, this life carries us back to the first chapter of that great movement with which the name of Angelina Grimké is associated — when our cities roared with riot, when William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets, when Dresser was mobbed in Nashville, and Mackintosh burned in St. Louis. At that time, the hatred toward Abolitionists was so bitter and merciless that the friends of Lovejoy left his grave a long time unmarked; and at last ventured to put, with his name, on his tombstone, only this piteous entreaty: Jam parce sepulto, "Spare him now in his grave."