ost
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 Grimke, 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."

WENDELL PHILLIPS said:

Friends, this life carries us back to the first chapter of that great
movement with which the name of Angelina Grimke 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." 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,