"The forgetfulness of sex": devotion and desire in the courtship Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld.

In 1837, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, daughters of a South Carolina planter turned abolitionist orators, each penned a series of public letters in which they attacked the rigid distinctions that their culture drew between the masculine and the feminine. In Angelina's "Letters to Catherine Beecher" and Sarah's "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes," each sister argued that contemporary sex roles that characterized white men as political and economic actors in the public sphere while relegating white women to the private sphere of the home amounted to a perversion of God's plan. According to Angelina, notions of manhood gave men "a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence." Worse yet, ideals of womanhood "robbed woman of essential rights, the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions [and] the right to fulfil the great end of her being, as a moral, intellectual and immortal creature." Sarah expressed the same idea: "instead of regarding each other only in the light of immortal creatures," she wrote in the fourth letter of her series, "the mind is fettered by the idea which is early and industriously infused into it, that we must never forget the distinctions between male and female." The sisters called upon their readers to take up the heroic task of forgetting sex, defying the gender imperatives of the culture and instead obeying a higher law by viewing both men and women as spiritual rather than sexed beings. "When human beings are regarded as moral beings," Angelina asserted, "sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness." In Sarah's words, only when "our intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex" would men and women recognize and fulfill their true roles in the designs of providence. (1)

The Grimkes composed these two series of letters in the middle of a lecturing tour of New England. In the summer of 1837 the sisters began what was to become a yearlong tour, traveling from town to town advocating the abolitionist cause before thousands who came to hear them speak. Women's engagement in this kind of public activism was unprecedented, and the sisters' culturally conservative contemporaries reacted to it with a mixture of disdain and alarm. In a Pastoral Letter issued by the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts (which Sarah responded to in her later letters) and Catherine Beecher's Essay on Slavery and Abolition, With Reference to the Duty of American Females (which prompted Angelina's series), the Congregationalist clergy and Beecher (herself a daughter of a famed Congregationalist minister, Lyman Beecher) each claimed that a rigid, social hierarchy that placed men above women was part of the divine order. (2) In their responses to these attacks, as many historians have explored, the Grimkes forcefully asserted women's right and sacred duty to exercise a political voice, to transgress the boundaries of woman's sphere and publicly advocate causes that they believe were morally right. (3)

Yet in their letters the sisters' criticism was not limited to women's exclusion from public politics. Equally radical were their critiques of men's and women's private relationships. Hyperbolic notions of gender perverted the most intimate of relationships, the sisters argued, preventing women from being godly wives and mothers. Viewing her as a sexed being rather than as "an intelligent and heaven-born creature," a husband expected his wife to satisfy his sensual appetites rather than attend to his spiritual state. "By flattery, by an appeal to her passions," Sarah contended, "he seeks to gain access to her heart; and when he has gained her affections, he uses her as an instrument of his pleasure--the minister of his temporal comfort." "[I]nstead of being a help meet to man, in the highest, noblest sense of the term, as a companion, a co-worker, an equal," Angelina similarly argued, "she has been a mere appendage of his being, an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he whiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission." In their use of the term "pleasure," both of the sisters were alluding to the linkage between sexuality and domination in abolitionist ideology. Not only was sex tainted in its association with a hedonistic South where white planters exercised an appalling power over the bodies of black female slaves, sex was more generally suspect because it led a husband to treat his wife as a slaveholder treated his slave: as an object--"an instrument," a "pretty toy," a "pet animal"--that he controlled and used for his sensual satisfaction rather than regarding her as a spiritual companion. Only by jettisoning the "idea of her being a female," Sarah argued, would a wife be the spiritual partner God had intended her to be in making marriage a sacrament; only then would she truly be a "help-meet"--"a helper like unto himself." (4)

Theodore Dwight Weld no doubt had the Grimke sisters' arguments about men's and women's private relationships firmly in mind when he began to court Angelina in February 1838. (5) One suspects that he was particularly taken by Sarah's promptings about "the forgetfulness of sex," for from his first love letter to Angelina, Weld began a protracted, painstaking effort to "forget sex" in their romance. Weld had met the Grimke sisters at the 1836 agents' convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), a three-week-long intensive training convention led by Weld to prepare field workers to tour the northern states promoting abolitionism. The Grimkes were the only women to attend the convention and the first female agents of the society. (6) In 1837 they had begun their historic speaking tour of New England, which culminated with their appearances before the Massachusetts Legislature in February 1838, the first occasions where women officially addressed a legislative body in the United States. While the sisters were lecturing, Weld too labored for the abolitionist cause. Having been an influential organizer and orator for many years, following the agents' convention Weld assumed a less visible though still significant role in abolitionism as an editor at the headquarters of the AASS in New York. While there, Weld served as the sisters' primary contact with the AASS and carried on an active, lively correspondence with the sisters. The letters Weld and the Grimkes exchanged strengthened and deepened the bonds of affection they had begun to forge with each other during the agents' convention. (7)

On February 8, 1838, less than two weeks before Angelina's first address to the Massachusetts legislature, Weld wrote Angelina a letter, carefully marked as "Private", in which he confessed his love for her, declaring that "for a long time, you have had my whole heart." Weld explained that he had battled his feelings for her, thinking that Grimke, a Quaker, would not consider marrying a man who was not a Friend. Yet in the year that they had known each other his feelings had grown more intense rather than abated. After much soul searching and prayer, he ultimately came to accept those feelings as divine in origin, telling her that "I have taken this step at His bidding whose I am, and whom I serve." While Weld claimed to have no evidence that Angelina returned his feelings, he explained that he felt it "a sacred duty" to confess his love to her. (8)

Weld agreed with the Grimkes that courtship and marriage were essentially patriarchal institutions as they were commonly practiced in antebellum America. He knew that Angelina could not fully commit to him until she was convinced that theirs would be a singularly uncommon marriage: a feminist marriage, a union of equals. In August 1837 he had urged the sisters to stop speaking explicitly about women's rights, arguing that the resulting controversy would alienate many who otherwise might be won to the cause of the slave. He maintained that his position was one of pragmatism rather than principle. He had no doubt that men and women were morally and spiritually equal; once "Human rights" were properly understood and slavery was abolished surely the "derivative" concept of sexual equality would be readily recognized by all. As evidence of his longstanding belief in sexual equality, he described how in a debating society as a boy he had argued that a woman was as suited as a man to preach from the pulpit or adjudicate at the bar. He (wrongly) thought that even the Grimkes might find one of his beliefs shocking; he proposed that social conventions should not prevent a woman from proposing marriage to a man. (If he was trying to elicit a declaration of love from Angelina, he failed; while she very much agreed with the general principle, she replied that "I am afraid I am too proud ever to exercise the right.") Grimke had this specific evidence of his radical egalitarian ideas about courtship and marriage when Weld finally confessed his feelings half a year later. She had a deep respect for Weld, knowing his earnest, heartfelt belief in the essential equality of all human beings regardless of superficial differences such as race or sex. Yet if they shared this spiritually grounded ideal, they lacked contemporary examples of egalitarian marriages to emulate. In the letters they exchanged during their three-month courtship, Grimke and Weld worked to develop a conceptual framework of how a feminist marriage--their feminist marriage--might function. Marshaling their formidable skills as social critics, they each crafted complex letters in which they invoked and manipulated a host of richly connotative cultural tropes--particularly tropes of friendship and spirituality--in an effort to make both romantic love and marriage their own, not sites of social hierarchy but, instead, of spiritual fulfillment and sexual equality. (9)

In his first love letter to Angelina, Weld described his feelings for her as wholly spiritual in nature. After telling her he loved her, he immediately qualified himself, writing "Not supremely.... I do love the Lord ... better than I love you. And it is because I love him better that I love you as I do." And if he loved God more than he loved her, he also made clear that he loved her ethereal soul rather than her physical body. His passion for her was spiritual rather than sexual. It was "not [that of] a brother nor a Sister spirit but unimbodied spirit with none of the associations or incidents of the physical nature." In fact, he claimed that he had been drawn to her emotionally, intellectually, and, above all, spiritually long before he met her in person. A letter she had written to William Lloyd Garrison that had been printed in the Liberator in 1835, Weld explained, had "formed an era in my feelings and a crisis in my history." The soul embodied in that letter intimately touched his own and drew him to its author. "I read it over and over," he told her, "and in the deep consciousness that I should find in the spirit that dictated that letter the searchless power of congenial communings--which I had always been pining for and of which I had never found but one (C. Stuart)--I forgot utterly that you were not of my own sex!" (10)

Explaining the genesis of his love for Grimke, Weld did not precisely follow Sarah's lead and "forget sex." He did not say that he initially forgot which sex Angelina was, but instead said that he forgot that she was not of his own sex: he forgot that she was not a man. He was attracted to her not as a woman but instead as a "spirit," a spirit that he at one point claimed was androgynous ("not a brother nor a Sister spirit") but that he finally sexed male in his rhetoric ("I forgot utterly that you were not of my own sex!"). By directing his love toward a disembodied--possibly male--soul, Weld laid claim to the righteous, feminist ideal of love and marriage that the Grimkes had described in their serialized letters: a relationship where the man (in Sarah's words) discarded "the idea of her being a female" and instead saw his beloved as an unsexed equal, one where (in Angelina's words) "sex ... sinks into insignificance and nothingness." His passion, Weld's words suggested, was not crassly sexual, nor even gendered. Instead, it was of a higher order: disembodied and spiritual. It was like that which a man felt for a spiritual brother, in fact, like that which Weld felt for a particular spiritual brother who he referred to by name: Charles Stuart.

Weld had met Charles Stuart in the burned-over district of upstate New York in 1825 when he was 21 years old, and they had quickly developed a close friendship. Stuart, Weld's senior by over twenty years, became a second father to him. Stuart was a man of staunch and at times contentious integrity. His solitary habits and disdain for authority had led him into forced retirement from the British Army in 1815; emigrating to Canada in 1817, the deeply religious Stuart had refused ordination by the local bishop because he "believe[d] him to be an unchristian overseer; a secular not a spiritual character." He was finally ordained as a Presbyterian minister after moving to Utica, New York, in 1822 to become principal of a school. Stuart's single-minded devotion to his own principles had often cut him off from close, affectionate relationships. After meeting Weld he worked to cultivate a deeply spiritual and affectionate relationship with his young friend. He helped finance Weld's education, and was one of the influences that eventually drew Weld into abolitionism. Their feelings for one another were intensely passionate. "Often my beloved Theodore," Stuart once wrote Weld, "does my soul turn to you and contemplate you with solemn affection; sometimes it trembles for you." "If you want a father's or a brother's or a friend's assistance," he wrote on another occasion, "won't your heart always tell you in cheerful confidence of love, that as God may preserve & endow me, you have a father a brother & a friend in C. Stuart." (11)

In his love letters to Grimke, Weld repeatedly wrote ardent passages about his friendship with Stuart. "His feelings toward me have always amazed confounded humbled and overwhelmed me" Weld wrote once. "It seems to me as tho' my heart would have broke from utter desolation years ago if it had not had the brother heart of Charles Stuart." Weld's relationship with Stuart had been the most intimate of his life, and he initially conceptualized and articulated his feelings for Grimke in references to Stuart. Yet Stuart was more than an understandable emotional referent for Weld as he made the transition from homosocial friendships into heterosexual marriage. Writing about his intensely loving friendship with Stuart was a way Weld could introduce a passion that was spiritual and not sexual into his love letters to Grimke, passion that he could then rhetorically redirect towards Grimke. "His hold upon my heart went to the foundations of my nature," Weld told Grimke of Stuart, "but not the foundations of my whole nature. Many a time I have wept on his neck from very love to him and yet at those very times I have felt in my inmost soul that there remained other intense necessities of my compound human nature untouched by the ministrations of his love and communion and panting for congenial affiliation. Those necessities you alone have reached and filled." If, as historian Anthony Rotundo suggests, passionate homosocial friendships between young men served as a training ground for marriage in the antebellum North, Weld also quite purposefully played up his intimacy with Stuart in his love letters to Grimke for his own ends. Writing passages about Stuart served a rhetorical and political function in his letters to Grimke, helping him to divorce his attraction to her from issues of sex and gender. Juxtaposed passages about Stuart and Grimke suggested that Weld's passion for her was not in any way sexual. Instead it was spiritual, similar to but even greater than that he felt for his male friend Charles Stuart. (12)

As several historians have argued, nineteenth-century same-sex friendships, particularly friendships between women, were often extremely close and physically affectionate. These relationships were generally not considered by either the participants or outside observers as problematically homoerotic. Instead, they were seen as normal and often idealized as virtuous examples of platonic love. Like Weld, Grimke had intense homosocial friendships, particularly with her sister and a Quaker woman named Jane Smith. In their courtship letters, references to these specific friendships enabled Weld and Grimke to convey to one another a sense of their capacities for love and intimacy. When Grimke wrote Weld shortly before their engagement that "Jane Smith ... was my Charles Stuart" she communicated her appreciation of Weld's bond with Stuart. More than that, her phrase "Jane Smith ... was my Charles Stuart" made "Charles Stuart" into a metaphoric referent, one which evoked a host of associations--love, emotional support, selflessness--that were linked to the concept of same-sex friendship in Victorian culture. (13)

Both Weld and Grimke wanted their relationship to evidence these cherished characteristics of same-sex friendship. By invoking their homosocial friendships in their letters, particularly Weld's deeply spiritual friendship with Stuart, they expressed their mutual desire to have a relationship that was egalitarian, essentially sacred, and only incidentally sexual. Yet if their relationship was similar to their homosocial friendships, Angelina struggled to understand why Weld's and her relationship emotionally and spiritually superseded those intimate friendships. "[W]hy does not the love of my own dear sister and of my faithful Jane satisfy, if as a human being I must have human love?" she asked Weld. "Why do I feel in my inmost soul that you, you only, can fill up the deep void that is there?" Romantic love had become more central in the emotional lives of Weld's and Grimke's generation than it had been for their grandparents living in the eighteenth century. Many, coming of age in Jacksonian and antebellum America, came to define their very identity in reference to their romantic relationship and considered all other relationships insignificant compared to that they had with their partner. Some, Weld and Grimke included, even feared that the intensity of their feelings for their beloved amounted to a form of idolatry and a betrayal of God. In asking Weld why the love of her sister and friend did not suffice, Grimke was, in part, grappling with the increased significance of romantic love in her culture. Yet, she was also expressing her concerns that their love might not be transcendently spiritual, that there might be a sinful, impure component to it. "I think I can say with you," she wrote Weld, slightly misquoting a passage from his first love letter,

  "it is the spirit, the spirit, not a brother spirit, or a sister
  spirit but a disimbodied spirit, with none of the associations or
  incidents of the physical nature, which moves upon me with overcoming
  power." But if this is so, why do I so anxiously desire to hear from
  you, to see you? O! I am distressed that I should feel as I do. Am I
  sinning ... [?] The conflict is great, for I want to know where I am,
  I want to be purified.

Grimke's ideal was that which Weld had described in his first love letter--a romance that was "disimbodied" and spiritual--so much so that she feared that her desire just to physically see her fiance might be indicative that there was something sinful about the way they felt toward one another. (14)

Grimke urged Weld to confront these concerns with her. Given that he repeatedly described his intense love and affection for Stuart in his letters to her, Grimke wanted to know why that deeply loving, deeply spiritual relationship did not wholly satisfy Weld, why she was coming to supersede Stuart in Weld's heart and soul. Weld's passionate extolments of Charles Stuart's religious character were not so different from the way he expressed his love of Grimke to Grimke. Weld told Grimke that he felt her to be "a constituent half of my own being somehow mysteriously sundered from me," when months earlier he had told Grimke that Stuart's "absence almost seems like the subtraction of a portion of my own being." If Weld's love for Grimke and his love for Stuart were both spiritual in nature, what made them categorically different from one another? This question troubled Grimke, and she asked Weld "how it is that Charles Stuart could not fill up the dark chasm of your heart, for even YOU must and DO see that he is far purer than I am." Weld's efforts to desexualize their relationship by describing their love in exclusively spiritual terms and comparing his attraction to his fiance to his feelings for his spiritual brother drove Grimke to ask Weld for an explanation "why those of our own sex cannot fill the void in human hearts." (15)

Weld found Angelina's a provocative question, one that he "marvelled" he had never before considered. Prefacing his response with the claim that he possessed no more knowledge of the issue than "a little simple child" and that he would "sit down at any bodys feet and receive most gratefully the least crumb of true teaching on the subject," he sent Angelina six carefully enumerated explanations of why he believed God had designed the sacrament of marriage as a union of the two sexes. (16)

First, Weld proposed that men and women were in some indefinable, unknown way essentially different from one another, that God had created them so in order that marriage would be a holy sacrament where they could minister to one another. "[H]uman nature of both sexes," he suggested to Grimke, "feels in itself a profound want to which, either the love of its own sex or for its own sex does not minister." The soul would only find satisfaction in union with another of the opposite sex. This argument might be seen as something of a contradiction, for less than a month earlier he had said that he had first felt a compelling spiritual attraction to her forgetting that she was "not of [his] own sex." If he had not exactly forgotten sex in that earlier letter, he went to great lengths to forget it now. Women and men, he claimed, were spiritually drawn to one another because of God-given difference, but, he insisted (in his third enumerated point), they were never consciously aware of those differences. To those in love, "the difference of sex is not a matter of consciousness, ... it does not mingle with its associations of ideas as a subject of thought." In fact, to the lover any awareness of sexual difference was anathema; it was "an unwelcome intruder, of which the mind instinctively and instantly rids itself, feeling it to be a disturbing force, a felt non conductor, intercepting the progress of the soul toward the spirit that draws it and a veil dimming its vision of the loved one." (17)

Weld accepted an idea that both his religious tradition and culture considered commonsensical: that the sacred and civic union of marriage was composed of one man and one woman. At the same time he sincerely wished to build a radically egalitarian relationship with the feminist pioneer he was courting by following her sister Sarah's advice and discard the "idea of her being a female." If their relationship was (to use a twentieth-century term) heterosexual, neither Weld nor Grimke would have been entirely comfortable with either the "hetero" or the "sexual" aspect of that description. Beyond any religious concerns about undue focus on sex being a sin, for these two abolitionists sexuality was ideologically linked with patriarchal domination. Logically, there was no way to account for the "hetero" nature of marriage without appealing to either sexual difference or gender conventions, thus accepting the "idea of her being a female." Weld's response to this predicament was clever if transparently contrived. God had made men and women different, he argued, but, he repeatedly insisted in increasingly tortured prose, he did not himself consciously think of Angelina as either a sexed or a gendered being. While "deep, chaste and intense love" was built upon "the constitutional element of sex[,] ... that element ... is really an auxiliary to the higher affections, ... an insensible influence pouring itself thro channels of which the mind is not aware and producing effects, the cause of which the mind has not the least consciousness of." "In a word my dearest," Weld explained to Grimke, "I suppose you and I feel for each other more absorbing affinities than tho' we were of the same sex; and we feel them not BECAUSE we are of different sexes, but from the fact that we are--from the law of our nature sublimely assigned by God as a reason for creating a difference of sex." Having, as best he could, addressed the political issues raised by Angelina's questions, Weld turned to their emotional significance, reassuring Grimke that she eclipsed all others, even Charles Stuart, in his heart. "I feel [my heart] turning from father and mother and brothers and only sister and from C Stuart dear dear as they are to me," Weld wrote, "and reaching out in very agony after you, and cleaving to you, feeling that we are no more twain but one flesh. Do you ask, is not this idolatry?" Weld assured Grimke that he was sure it was not, sensing as never before "Divine Approval continually smiling down upon the exercise of my emotions." (18)

Weld's explanations why marriage was a more spiritually significant relationship than same-sex friendships did not amount to a particularly persuasive answer to her questions. Grimke knew it, telling Weld again that "[t]his love of the sexes utterly confounds me." But if his long explanation was not totally persuasive in terms of its logic, it was politically attractive enough for Grimke to echo and reaffirm:

  Yes, true love does not, cannot originate in differences of sex, and
  this idea is a disturbing force which the mind instinctively repels,
  for it is the seeking of the spirit after spiritual communion, the
  filling up of itself in love, the union of heart and mind and soul.
  This is marriage. In the sight of God we are married, even tho' we
  should never see each other face to face; from the moment you were
  assured that I loved you, we became one.

Grimke had long feared that marriage was "sinful," because far too often "[i]nstead of the higher, nobler sentiments being first aroused, and leading on the lower passions captive to their will, the latter seemed to be lords over the former." If Weld's response left the heterosexual nature of marriage a divine mystery, it provided abundant evidence that he too wanted a marriage of equality and that he also believed that sex was too often a site of male domination in marriage rather than an act between equals. "I am convinced that men in general, the vast majority," Grimke wrote, "believe most seriously that women were made to gratify their animal appetites, expressly to minister to their pleasure--yea christian men too. My soul abhors such a base letting down of the high dignity of my nature as a woman. How I have feared the possibility of ever being married to one who regarded this as the end--the great design of marriage." Whatever its shortcomings, Weld's thoughts on the matter suggested that he shared these same concerns and loathed the idea of exercising power--sexual or otherwise--over her. (19)

Though Weld and Grimke often went to great lengths to divorce their romance from issues of sexuality (leading historian Ronald G. Walters to characterize their courtship as "a veritable orgy of restraint"), Weld's attraction to Grimke--or more precisely, Weld's account of his attraction to Grimke--was not always devoid of erotic charge. While often restrained and reasoned, Weld's love letters at times evidenced an almost sophomoric passion. "Unnatural and shocking as it seems," he wrote Grimke in early March, "I cannot help saying that ever since that moment which [you] told me you were mine, to think of you is pain to read your letters is pain to write you is pain--since I began this letter I have travailed with pain and anguish. As I do whenever I write or think of you or read your letters--again and again I am forced to stop and press my head and aching heart and walk my room with suppressed breath--or utter it only in stifled groanings." During their three-month courtship Grimke and Weld remained apart--she lecturing in Massachusetts and he at the American Anti-Slavery Society office in New York--except for one brief visit in late March. Shortly after their rendezvous, Weld wrote Grimke to explain some unusual behavior: "You know that very frequently I would leave you very suddenly when I had been clasping you to my bosom and not come back into the room again for some minutes." Weld, then in his mid thirties, had almost certainly had no personal sexual experience with women--he in fact had vowed not to marry until slavery was abolished--and he was understandably unprepared to handle the sexual desire that he experienced during his meeting with Grimke. "I kept an extinguisher on my spirit all the time I was with you," Weld explained in a long passage filled with fluid, erotic imagery.

  At those times and at many others my feelings had such a masterless
  intensity it seemed as tho' I could not live, as though my very being
  ... were all rushing as by rapid instantaneous absorption into yours.
  Oh that was a weary week to me ... with holding in my heart (or rather
  with the impossibility of giving vent) and soul and mind and strength
  all struggling for transfusion into your own spirit. Yes, solecism as
  it is in words, in reality it is simple fact that though it was a week
  of unutterable bliss to me yet its very unutterableness and
  incommunicableness were agony as though it were a mighty quickening
  spirit, every instant filling my being with new created life which
  struggled with throes and spasms for breath--or pouring in with every
  instant fresh tides of power which heaved and tossed on high only to
  fall back upon themselves weary and discomfited, unable to pour all
  abroad their ever swelling but still barricaded floods.... Though
  seeing you and pressing you to my heart did minister to my spirit an
  element that assuaged the lacerating violence of those emotions that
  filled me before and poured a mellowing tide all over me, yet it was
  so deep it was well nigh a drowning joy--and the warm wave that bathed
  my swollen heart and lulled its throbbings and stilled its moans did
  whelm it also in its stifling depths.... That while I saw you and
  heard you and pressed you to my heart I struggled with an oppressive
  sense of unutterable emotion that could only vent itself in groanings,
  and that it was only by leaving you that my spirit found sweet calm.

In this metonym-laden passage, Weld described his erect phallus as a "spirit" and a "heart" that he kept an "extinguisher" on though he longed to "vent" and transfuse his "very being" into her "spirit." He hinted at the procreative potential of the union he desired in his reference to the "mighty quickening spirit" that "fill[ed]" his "being with new created life which struggled with throes and spasms for breath." Despite his earlier claim that he was attracted to her as an "unimbodied spirit with none of the associations or incidents of the physical nature," he now felt a visceral, physical attraction to her. Earlier he had suggested that the love he felt for her was disembodied, incorporeal. He said he loved her long before meeting her, his feelings having been born of her letter that had appeared in the Liberator. Now mere words would no longer do: his intense attraction was now "unutterable" and "incommunicable," something that was of the body rather than the mind. While Weld suggested that he had kept his desire in check during their visit, referring to "the impossibility of giving vent," his "ever swelling but still barricaded floods," and the "sweet calm" his "spirit found" upon leaving the room, his language also suggests that they engaged in some variety of outercourse that resulted in an orgasm for Weld; as a result of "pressing you to my heart" (again, a metonym for his erect penis) a "warm wave ... bathed my swollen heart and lulled it throbbings and stilled its moans" and "poured a mellowing tide all over me." (20)

In Weld's mind, and one suspects in those of other antebellum evangelicals, sexual passion was closely linked to spiritual passion. Living in a pre-Freudian world, Weld did not conceptualize sexuality as a distinct component of his identity analogous to his gendered identity as a man. Instead, sexual desire and behavior were inextricably connected with his spiritual and moral identity. This coupling of sexuality and spirituality, in part, accounts for Weld's almost misleading use of an extended spiritual metaphor to describe his sexual desire and behavior to Grimke. Yet the fact that he felt it necessary to account for his behavior, on the one hand, and that he crafted such an intricately metaphoric passage, on the other, suggests that a tension existed within this coupling of sexuality and spirituality and that Weld suffered some guilt about what had happened between Angelina and himself. From the beginning of their engagement he had been anxious about meeting her, fearing that he lacked "the mastery of my spirit and power to quell its wildest insurrection--the pride of self control has been one of my most frequent besetments--but your letter has taught me that I am a novice in one department of self restraint." While it is not clear in this passage if "one department" refers to sexual desire, language about mastering his "spirit" anticipates the diction of his later letter, and here "spirit" might refer to intense desire if not specifically to an erection. Weld may have felt that whatever had happened between them was potentially immoral, not an expression of their spiritual connectedness but instead of gross desires. Regardless of his own feelings about the matter, he was concerned that in retrospect Angelina might take their encounter as evidence that she had been right all along in her fears that marriage was "sinful" and that men were first and foremost interested in satisfying their "animal appetites." Anxious about this, Weld labored in his letter to shape their encounter as a spiritual event. Again attempting to "forget sex," in his letter Weld worked to submerge--to baptize--the sexual in the sacred. (21)

No doubt to Weld's relief, Grimke did not feel guilt or shame, but only sympathy for Weld's emotional and physical discomfort, writing him "Thou sayest, thou kept an extinguisher on thy spirit whilst thou wast at Brookline. I knew it, I felt it, and it grieved me because thou wouldst leave me when I tho't it would have been an inexpressible relief to thy full heart to have unburdened itself." Responding in kind to Weld's elusive yet explicit love letter, Grimke wrote of the desires of her own "spirit," telling him "I never could get near enough to thee. If my being could have been absorbed into thine, O then I might have found rest and ease to my soul, but as it was, my soul was reaching and longing after what it seemed impossible for me to grasp--but what is the use of writing, WRITING these things? They can only be felt in the secret chambers of ones OWN heart. Thou knowest all ALL about what I mean: thou only canst know." With her assertion that Weld knew what she meant, Grimke invited Weld to interpret her words with his own erotic metonyms in mind. Grimke assured Weld that she felt an intense desire for him too, "reaching and longing" for something (an evocative "it" that lacks a clear referent, likely an orgasm of her own, though perhaps simultaneously a reference to his erect penis) that she could not "grasp." Echoing his claim, she too suggested that words were not enough, that there was no "use [in] writing, WRITING these things." Grimke had believed that sex in a patriarchal culture was usually a sensual pleasure for the man alone. Now, she felt between a man and a woman who considered each other equals it might be a spiritual and physical pleasure for both. This discovery, no doubt, represented for her a psychological emancipation, liberating her from the limitations she had thought America's patriarchal culture universally imposed upon female sexuality. In their epistolary exchange, Weld and Grimke not only unsettled the association of sex with domination, opening up the conceptual possibility of a sexual relationship that was both sacral and egalitarian; their suggestive letters were also acts of foreplay that heightened the spiritually-steeped erotic charge between them. (Take, for example, the building, desperate urgency of Grimke's question "what is the use of writing, WRITING these things?") Following their rendezvous a shared physical attraction to one another was occasionally acknowledged in an unashamed, at times even playful, manner in their letters to one another. For instance, Grimke wrote Weld of "the weary longing of my hungering and thirsting spirit" that she suspected would surprise a friend of hers who thought her love for Weld "truly Platonic." Yet, as this passage indicates, if they were increasingly comfortable with sexual desire, that desire was still understood and expressed in terms of "spirit." (22)

In Grimke's and Weld's courtship letters sexual and spiritual passion were conflated: sexuality was spiritualized, and spirit was often sexualized. Seeking a radically egalitarian relationship based on Christian love, both of them had invoked cultural tropes of friendship and spirituality in their efforts to "forget sex" and depict their romance as a transcendent experience and a sacred duty. In Weld's efforts to accomplish this, he initially repeatedly referenced his relationship with Stuart, making his friend into a rich rhetorical figure--"Charles Stuart"--that could serve as a useful surrogate for Grimke in Weld's love letters. Resisting the sexual hierarchy of nineteenth-century courtship and marriage, Weld employed "Charles Stuart" to rhetorically desex Grimke, at moments even imaginatively remaking her into a man. Weld's conflation of "Stuart" and Grimke--and of sexuality and spirituality--enabled him to subtly suggest that his marriage with Grimke would evidence the equality of nineteenth-century homosocial friendships rather than the power hierarchy characteristic of marriage.

In nineteenth-century English literature, Eve Sedgwick has argued, erotic triangles involving two men and a woman functioned to produce and affirm the patriarchal union of the two male participants. The two men in these triangles, Sedgwick suggests, objectified the woman and competed with one another for her as they would for a prize. Yet it was not the relationship with the woman that they valued, but instead the competitive one with their male rival. Ultimately, the woman was not won but dismissed by both; in the process the primacy of the male homosocial bond was cemented. The triangular relationship between Weld, Grimke, and Stuart had a very different political resonance than the fictional relationships analyzed by Sedgwick. In their erotic triangle the woman was neither objectified nor dismissed. Instead, it was the man Charles Stuart who was made into the rhetorical figure "Charles Stuart." Fearing that marriage was a fundamentally despotic, patriarchal institution, both Weld and Grimke self-consciously invoked deeply affectionate, loving homosocial friendships as models for their own heterosexual relationship. (23)

Other scholars besides Sedgwick have emphasized the centrality of rivalry and inequality to conceptions of manhood in the nineteenth century. Dana Nelson, for instance, has recently argued that one pervasive nineteenth-century American ideology of manhood, which she labels "national manhood," seduced white men away from local attachments toward an abstract ideal of a fraternity of citizens. She suggests that this ideal, on the one hand, reconciled these men to the U.S.'s burgeoning capitalist marketplace and thus to class inequalities and, on the other hand, foreclosed the possibility of fulfilling, close emotional bonds between men. Weld's close relationship with Stuart--along with other friendships between male abolitionists that have been explored by historians John Stauffer, Donald Yacovone, Chris Dixon, Frederick J. Blue, and Lawrence J. Friedman--calls into question the totalizing force of the gender imperatives Nelson analyzes. The bonds between abolitionist men were cooperative rather than competitive, affectionate rather than distant. While these friendships were characterized by a conception of manhood different than Nelson's notion of "national manhood," these homosocial relationships, Weld and Stuart's amongst them, together provide evidence that supports the link Nelson draws between male friendship and democratic politics (in Nelson's account it is local engagements that hold the promise of nurturing egalitarian social practices). In The Black Hearts of Men, for example, Stauffer argues that deep affection enabled four abolitionist contemporaries of Weld's and Grimke's--two black and two white--to heroically, if only briefly, overcome racial prejudice, consider each other friends, and collaborate together as political allies. (24)

While the work of these historians suggests that male friendship could promote equality between men, even (albeit very infrequently) between men of different races, Weld's and Grimke's recurring use of "Charles Stuart" in their courtship letters suggests another facet of the political import of male friendship in nineteenth-century culture. Male friendship could be more than a democratizing force amongst men; it could also serve as a model for a new relationship between men and women. More than a social practice, it was additionally an abstract, radical political ideal.

Beyond suggesting the exemplary potential of male homosocial friendships for heterosocial relationships, that Weld and Grimke continually recurred to the figure of Stuart in their epistles both challenges and complicates our understanding of the relationship between sentiment and sex in nineteenth-century America. While Grimke had referred to her same-sex relationships with her sister and Jane Smith in her letters to Weld, the friendship between the two men proved to be a more powerful model for the love and affection they wanted to share in their own relationship than any of Grimke's relationships with women. If in her work Grimke struggled to assume some of the political privileges that were reserved for men, in courting Grimke Weld found a reason to lay claim to the realm of sentiment and affect that were conventionally associated much more with women than with men in nineteenth-century America. Weld's male world of love and ritual more than rivaled Grimke's female world as an exemplary model of love and affection. (25)

Language acts, specifically the deployment of tropes of friendship and spirituality, were the means that Weld and Grimke used to imagine an egalitarian marriage. Grimke, Weld, and others in their community of reformers in the 1830s fought against many entrenched institutions and customs: slavery, patriarchal power, drinking. Yet the abolition of these sins amounted to only half of their agenda. They were equally invested in constructing new, godly social practices. Reform was not simply a manner of banishing the bad, but of discovering the good. Reform required literally re-forming society and culture. Before being realized, a millennial world of social harmony on earth first had to be imagined and expressed. The tropical potential of language--the capacity of words to signify more than or something different from their standard meaning--could be a powerful tool, enabling reformers to foster the utopian possibilities they often found imminent in the deeply flawed social reality of the moment. Weld and Grimke, for instance, made courtship and marriage into sites of social engineering where they could perform reform experiments upon themselves. Their chosen object of experimentation was the politics of sex (which for them encompassed both of the inextricably connected categories of gender and sexuality), and their instrument for such experiments was the play of language. Weld, for instance, initially used the term "spirit" as a synecdoche for Grimke, identifying her unsexed soul as the true her and as the object of his love and devotion, ridding her of her problematically sexed body and gendered identity. When that strategy proved problematic itself because it failed to privilege heterosexual marriage over homosocial friendship, Weld and Grimke changed their political and rhetorical tactics, accommodating rather than denying heterosexual desire. Again, the term "spirit" was instrumental. In Weld's letter it became an evasive metaphor for his phallus, enabling him to imaginatively transform a possibly carnal event into a sacred one. Convinced that sex too often proved to be an instrument of male power in marriages, whatever precisely happened between them during their visit in late March provided them the opportunity to separate their developing physical relationship from any associations with patriarchal domination and instead invest sexuality with spiritual significance. Writing about this experience was not a descriptive act of reproduction, but rather a creative act of reformulation. Through the use of figurative language they reengineered their understandings of a particular experience, making that sexual encounter into a sacred act that they shared in and enjoyed as equals. The efforts of Weld and Grimke to "forget sex" amounted to an assault upon the practices and conventions of romance and sexuality in nineteenth-century courtship and marriage that was every bit as radical as their antislavery work in the public sphere. (26)

This reform effort resulted in some successes. Using their homosocial friendships as models, they had negotiated a set of shared guiding values that they hoped would help them have an egalitarian marriage. They also had unsettled the connection between sex and domination and supplied sex with a host of positive spiritual associations. Admittedly, the immediate scope of these accomplishments was limited to their own relationship. Yet insofar as their relationship indicated that the gender and sexual conventions that most in their society considered both natural and immutable were actually cultural and plastic, their courtship functioned as a journey of exploration, mapping out the unknown possibilities for men's and women's private relationships. While following their marriage both Weld and Grimke took much less active roles in abolitionist politics, they had come to see the building of an egalitarian marriage as perhaps an even more important task. Amongst all sinful social practices and institutions, Weld proposed that "marriage and the relations of husband and wife are perhaps ... the most horrible perversions of all; and they must be redeemed from these perversions." Their love for one another, he speculated, might have been providentially calculated to affect such a redemption; "who knoweth," Weld asked Grimke, "but God has brought us into this state for such a time [of crisis and redemption] as this?" Marriage would be the ultimate test of their politics to determine whether they could successfully "reduce to practice what [we] have long and perhaps pertinaceously [sic] contended for in theory," using Christian love and affection to transform a conventionally hierarchical relationship into one of equality. (27)

On May 14, 1838, Weld and Grimke were wed in a simple ceremony in the house of another sister of Angelina's, Anna R. Frost, in Philadelphia. Following Quaker traditions, a minister did not officiate at the ceremony; instead Weld and Grimke addressed unrehearsed, unplanned vows to one another. Describing these vows to friend and fellow abolitionist Elizabeth Pease, Sarah Grimke reported that Weld "abjured all authority, all government, save the influence which love would give to them over each other as moral and immortal beings." No doubt Sarah felt pleased that in her sister's and Weld's relationship her vision of the "forgetfulness of sex" found some realization. (28)

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Timothy Barnard, Matt Cohen, Stephen Feeley, Brian Geiger, Robert A. Gross, Amy Howard, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Gretchen Schoel, Amy Speckart, and Andrea Westcot for their comments on drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan for awarding me a Price Visiting Research Fellowship in 2000.

1. Sarah Grimke, "Social Intercourse of the Sexes," Liberator, 12 January 1838 (Sarah Grimke's letters first appeared in the New England Spectator in 1837; all quotations in this essay are from a reprinting of the series in the Liberator); [Angelina Grimke], Letters to Catherine E. Beecher in reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, addressed to A. E. Grimke (Boston, 1838), 116 (Angelina Grimke's letters first appeared in the Emancipator and the Liberator in 1837 before being collected and published, in slightly revised form, as a tract in 1838).

2. In the Pastoral Letter, the Congregationalist clergy urged congregations not to open their churches for the sisters to use during their controversial speaking tour. Given that "[d]eference and subordination are essential to the happiness of society," these church leaders contended, women activists like the Grimkes were "unnatural" and invited "degeneracy and ruin" by assuming "the place and tone of a man as a public reformer," ("Pastoral Letter of the Gneral Association of Massachusetts," <http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/340/pastoralletter.html>[22 October 2003]). In her Essay, Beecher argued that politics was not the appropriate sphere of women. "In this arrangement of the duties of life, Heaven has appointed to one sex the superior, and to the other the subordinate station," Beecher claimed. "It is therefore as much for the dignity as it is for the interest of females, in all respects to conform to the duties of this relation. And it is as much a duty as it is for the child to fulfil similar relations to parents, or subjects to rulers" (Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, With Reference to the Duty of American Females [Philadelphia, Pa.: Henry Perkins, 1837], 99).

3. Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman's Rights and Abolition (New York, 1967), 183-194; Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 212-219. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy, Lerner provides a brief but brilliant analysis of Sarah Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes as a groundbreaking work of feminist biblical interpretation (Lerner, Creation of Feminist Consciousness [New York, 1993], 160-163).

4. Grimke, "Social Intercourse"; [Grimke], Letters to Catherine Beecher, 115-116. Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (New York, 1978), 70-87; Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 218-222.

5. Weld and Angelina were roughly the same age, Sarah significantly older. In February 1838, Weld was 34, Angelina 32, and Sarah 45.

6. It should be noted while the sisters functioned as and believed themselves to be considered agents, when the sisters sought to clarify their official relationship with the AASS in the midst of their controversial speaking tour the Executive Committee chose to not label them agents but instead extended to them the nebulous status of "cooperators" (Weld to Sarah and Angelina Grimke, 1 October [1 September] 1837, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (1934; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 1: 443.

7. Benjamin P. Thomas, Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom (New Brunswick, N.J., 1950), 122-149; Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York, 1980), 150-165;

8. Weld to Grimke, 8 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2: 533-534.

9. Weld to the Grimkes, 15 August 1837, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 1: 425-427; Weld to the Grimkes, 26 August 1837, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 1: 435; Angelina Grimke to Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, 20 August 1837, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 1: 431.

10. Weld to Grimke, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2: 533-534. Interestingly, Angelina transcribed much of this portion of Weld's letter into a letter to her friend Jane Smith, including the passage "I forgot utterly that you were not of my own sex! The spirit, the spirit, not a brother, nor a sister spirit, but an unembodied spirit (with none of the associations or incidents of the physical nature)." This passage, she suggested, was evidence of Weld's "character" and "the purity, strength and constancy of his love for me and his religious feeling under which he disclosed it". (Grimke to Jane Smith, 22 February 1838, Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke Weld Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.)

11. Anthony J. Barker, Captain Charles Stuart: Anglo-American Abolitionist (Baton Rouge, La., 1986), 10-37; Stuart quoted on 21 of Barker. Stuart to Weld, 8 July 1828, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 1:22; Stuart to Weld, 7 October 1828, Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke Papers.

12. Weld to Grimke, 7 March 1838, Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke Papers; Weld to Grimke, 18 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 5: 562; E. Anthony Rotundo, "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900," Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 1-25.

13. On same-sex friendship see Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York, 1985), 53-76; Donald Yacovone, "'Surpassing the Love of Women': Victorian Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love," in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, ed. Laura McCall and Yacovone (New York, 1998), 195-221; Rotundo, "Romantic Friendships"; Yacovone, "Abolitionists and the 'Language of Fraternal Love,'" in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago, Ill., 1990), 85-95. Grimke to Weld, 21 January 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:520.

14. Grimke to Weld, 17 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:554. This same letter is a representative example of the fear Weld and Grimke, particularly Grimke, evidenced that their passion for one another amounted to a form of religious idolatry. Immediately before stating her questions about why her sister's and Jane Smith's love did not wholly suffice, Grimke asked Weld "Why my Savior and my God is not enough to satisfy me. Am I sinning, am I ungrateful, am I an IDOLATOR?" (2:553-554). Less than a week later, she asked Weld to try to provide a reassuring answer "why I find myself involuntarily applying to you the language which hitherto I had applied to my blessed Master, for instance 'I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine', etc. I shall look anxiously for a letter tomorrow, for you promised to make some suggestions on my IDOLATRY--at least I fear it is" (Grimke to Weld, 22 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:569). Historian Karen Lystra's work suggests that Weld's and Grimke's concerns were by no means unusual. In Victorian America, Lystra argues, "the personhood of the loved one, by the 1830s, had become a powerful rival to God as the individual's central symbol of ultimate significance. More and more middleclass individuals--propelled by romantic love--were worshipping in the new temple of individual selfhood" (Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America [New York, 1989], 242).

15. Weld to Grimke, 18 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:562; Weld to Sarah and Angelina Grimke, 28 December 1837, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 1:509, Grimke to Weld, 22 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:569.

16. Weld to Grimke, 1 March 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:581.

17. Weld to Grimke, 1 March 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:581-582.

18. Weld to Grimke, 1 March 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:582-583.

19. Grimke to Weld, 15 March 1838, Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke papers; Grimke to Weld, 4 March 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:587-588.

20. Walters, Antislavery Appeal, 79; Weld to Grimke, 7 March 1838, Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke Papers; Weld to Grimke, 13 April 1838, Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke Papers.

21. Weld to Grimke, 16 February 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:556. Further evidence of Weld's anxieties about sexuality would be seen five years later in his efforts to break his three-year-old son Charles of the "filthy and most dangerous habit" of masturbation. (Weld quoted in Abzug, Passionate Liberator, 236). For another analysis of the connections between spirituality, sexuality, and romance among American Victorians, see Lystra, Searching the Heart, 249, and for another close reading of a mid-century correspondence where carnal desire was partially disguised by veiled, metaphorical language see Karen V. Hansen, "'No Kisses Is Like Yours': An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Gender & History 7 (August 1995): 153-182.

22. Grimke to Weld, 29 April 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:647; Grimke to Weld, 2 May 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:653.

23. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985).

24. Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C., 1998). For another analysis of manhood that emphasizes rivalry, see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989). Works on friendships between male abolitionists include John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Yacavone, "Abolitionists and the 'Language of Fraternal Love'"; Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 157-202; Frederick J. Blue, "The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship, 1837-1874," Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Summer 1995): 273-297; and Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (New York, 1982).

25. The phrase "male world of love and ritual" is of course an allusion to Caroll Smith-Rosenberg's now classic essay "The Female World of Love and Ritual." For other works on the relationship between sentiment, sex, marriage, and reform, see Lystra, Searching the Heart, Dixon, Perfecting the Family, and Anya Jabour, "'The Language of Love': The Letters of Elizabeth and William Wirt, 1802-1834," in A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender, ed. Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone (New York, 1998), 119-140.

26. My ideas on the reshaping of the perceptions of particular social experiences through language have been particularly influenced by Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991), 773-797.

27. Weld to Grimke, 15 April 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:637-638.

28. Grimke to Pease, 20? May 1838, Letters of Weld, Grimke Weld, and Grimke, 2:678.

By Robert K. Nelson

College of William & Mary

American Studies Program

Williamsburg, VA 23187