Walking by Faith by Angelina Grimké

First published: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003, edited by Charles Wilbanks

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Autobiography; journal or diary

Core issue(s): Communion; perfection; Quakers; racism; self-knowledge; silence; women

Overview

Angelina Grimké’s religious struggle is activated by her growing revulsion with slavery and her ultimate decision to become an abolitionist speaker. The diary is more a spiritual delineation of the scriptural justifications for her changing positions than it is a daily diary; every entry is filled with biblical quotations. Her method is perpetually to find biblical analogies to her situation, and she seems to be able to find comfort in this kind of “proof-texting” when the Presbyterian minister, a friend, or a family member castigates her for her position.

Grimké’s self-doubts are clearly laid out as she decides to take up Quaker practices: “plain speaking” (thee and thou, using “First Day” and “Second Day” instead of Sunday or Monday, “Fifth Month” instead of May, and so on), and the prohibitions against eating rich foods or wearing a lace-trimmed shawl or dress. She describes her destruction of her beloved novels of Sir Walter Scott, her denunciation of her brother for his treatment of his slaves, and her worries about her vexed relationship with her mother over slavery, the expense of redoing the drawing room (her father, an Oxford-educated judge, having died when she was very young), and her other siblings (especially a brother who did not contribute to his own upkeep). All of this is written in amazing particulars. The reader feels as if Grimké were in the room speaking directly to the reader about her spiritual journey of self-doubt to self-knowledge.

Grimké arranges to go to Philadelphia, first for a visit of several months. On returning to Charleston, she thinks she will rejoin the Quakers in Philadelphia within several months but is unable to return until about a year later. Because by this time she had left the Presbyterian Church and was speaking out against slavery to friends and family, she worried daily about the trials of continuing to live in the slave-holding society of South Carolina. Additionally, she was changing her dress, her speech, her eating and social habits, and she agonized over each difficulty with her acquaintances and family. She believed that she was called on to speak out against her brother’s partying and drinking, her mother’s orders to slaves, and her sister’s use of lace and silks. She herself cut the lace off her dresses, refused rich cakes and wine, adopted Quaker speech by using thee and thou, refused to stand for prayers, and did not take communion.

Grimké’s diary is filled with scriptural references on each matter, and her arguments against slavery become more sophisticated. She communicates with the Presbyterian minister about leaving the church and is ultimately satisfied that he understands. However, the Presbyterian Session then calls her to account on two charges: that she has absented herself from Sunday services and that she has not taken communion. By this time she has been attending the Quaker meeting in Charleston and has decided that this silent meeting is better than Sunday worship. When she appears before the session, her argument is that she believes that if she did indeed take communion and attend services, she would be doing a greater blasphemy than if she absented herself, believing as she now does that neither practice was demanded of Christians (supported of course by scriptural references).

Finally, Grimké is told she has a place to stay in Philadelphia and a position taking care of a child in the home of a Quaker there. So at the end of October, 1829, she travels by ship to Philadelphia, but she worries about leaving her mother. Applying for membership in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, she is castigated for leaving her mother in Charleston, agrees to return to Charleston if necessary, but finally is accepted into the Arch Street Quaker meeting.

In 1831, Grimké travels with friends to New England, having been invited by Catherine Beecher, head of a girls’ school in Hartford, Conn. Grimké is trying to determine her life work and learns that she could become a teacher in six months. She also visits prisons, factories, and an insane asylum, as well as natural wonders such as mountains and waterfalls. However, she is dissuaded by her Quaker community from pursuing teaching, since Beecher’s seminary is Presbyterian and people there know nothing about Quakers.

For over a year, both before and after her trip to New England, Grimké is courted by Edward Bettle, son of a prominent Philadelphia Quaker family. Grimké is decidedly ambivalent in her attitude toward him, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes worried that marriage will take her away from her “great work” (details of which she did not yet know). When Bettle is taken ill and dies within two weeks in late 1832, Angelina ultimately feels relief. She is reading abolitionist literature, making her clearest arguments against slavery, and preparing mentally for her entry into the public world as an abolitionist speaker and organizer, beginning with her letter to William Lloyd Garrison in 1835, published in The Liberator.

Christian Themes

The years of this diary cover Grimké’s struggles with denominational differences and her conversion to Quaker beliefs and practices, especially while she was still living in Charleston with her family. So each step, from cutting the lace off her mantle to using Quaker speech to refusing to participate in family prayers and beginning to attend Quaker (silent) meeting on “First Day,” is met with great conflict and self-doubt in her diary. Even when she first travels to Philadelphia, she is assailed with doubts about the spiritual correctness of her decisions; when she returns to Charleston, she is confronted by those wishing to dissuade her at every turn—her mother and brother, the Presbyterian minister, and her friends and acquaintances.

The Doctrine of Perfection (1810) is an early Methodist belief noted by the Reverend John Fletcher that asserts that humans were once perfect. If humans were once perfect, it is possible to again attain perfection, and humans must attempt to become perfect again. For Grimké, this perfection was a kind of enlightenment, so she attempts in all things to see her faults and try to change them. The doctrine is in essence a rejection of the doctrine of Original Sin. Believing in the doctrine of perfection leads Grimké closer to the Quaker belief in humanity’s inherent goodness.

Grimké’s arguments against slavery become more sophisticated in the years of her diary, as she notes the reasons why the usual biblical injunctions for slavery will not stand. She uses the Golden Rule in her debates with friends and family in Charleston, asking if that person would like to be a slave. When the answer was no, then she would quote, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” She learns to argue with biblical accuracy and to preach in Quaker meetings, and she is especially influenced by Elizabeth Evans, a woman preacher in Philadelphia. Note that the Hicksite Quakers, which Grimké first disagreed with, accepted women as preachers (such as the great Lucretia Mott) whereas other (Orthodox) Quakers and most other denominations did not. However, Grimké came by her rhetorical power by means of her prodigious biblical knowledge, her experiences teaching Sunday School in the Presbyterian Church, and the education she received from her older sister Sarah and the books in her father’s library.

Sources for Further Study

Birney, Catherine. The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969. First published in 1885 by a contemporary, the work is remarkably free of nineteenth century laudatory rhetoric.

Browne, Stephen Howard. Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999. Study of Grimké’s rhetoric and language in diary, letters, and speeches.

Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. Rev. ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. This expanded edition, by the women’s history scholar who wrote the first twentieth century biography of the sisters, includes a new introduction and bibliography, as well as speeches and essays of both sisters.

Lumpkin, Katherine DuPre. The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Important biographical work with detail from years covered in Angelina’s diary.