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 Grimke 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 Grimke 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 Grimkes went through New England, such was the overpowering
influence with which they swept the churches that men did not
remember this dogma till after they had gone. When they left, and the
spell weakened, some woke to the idea that it was wrong for a woman to
speak to a