We were but a handful then, and our words beat against the stony public as powerless as if against the north wind. We got no sympathy from most Northern men: their consciences were seared as with a hot iron. At this time, a young girl came from the proudest State in the slave-holding section. She come to lay on the altar of this despised cause, this seemingly hopeless crusade, both family and friends, the best social position, a high place in the church, genius, and many gifts. No man at this day can know the gratitude we felt for this help from such an unexpected source. After this came James G. Birney from the South, and many able and influential men and women joined us. At last John Brown laid his life, the crowning sacrifice, on the altar of the cause. But no man who remembers 1837 and its lowering clouds will deny that there was hardly any contribution to the anti-slavery movement greater or more impressive than the crusade of these Grimké sisters from South Carolina through the New England States.
Gifted with rare eloquence, she swept the chords of the human heart with a power that has never been surpassed, and rarely equaled. I well remember, evening after evening, listening to eloquence such as never then had been heard from a woman. Her own hard experience, the long, lonely, intellectual and moral struggle from which she came out conqueror, had ripened her power, and her wondrous faculty of laying bare her own heart to reach the hearts of others, shone forth till she carried us all captive. She was the first woman to whom the halls of the Massachusetts Legislature were opened. My friend, James C. Alvord, was the courageous chairman who broke that door open for the anti-slavery women. It gave Miss Grimké the opportunity to speak to the best culture and character of Massachusetts; and the profound impression then made on a class not often in our meetings was never wholly lost. It was not only the testimony of one most competent to speak, but it was the profound religious experience of one who had broken out of the charmed circle, and whose intense earnestness melted all opposition. The converts she made needed no after-training. It was when you saw she was opening some secret record of her own experience, that the painful silence and breathless interest told the deep effect and lasting impression her words were making on minds, that afterward never rested in their work.
In 1840, '41, this anti-slavery movement was broken in halves by the woman question. The people believed in the silence of women. But, when the Grimkés went through New England, such was the overpowering influence with which they swept the churches that
