The Grimkes by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

ARCHIE AND FRANK HAD always been close. They roomed together at Lincoln, attended the same classes, and spent at least part of each summer working together at various freedmen’s schools. But the brothers dealt differently with the Grimke sisters’ combination of deep love and relentless criticism. For Archie, the Grimke-Welds were the picture of “Yankee morality and Christian goodness,” and for a while he believed he would become an orator like Uncle Weld. During the spring semester of his sophomore year, right before he turned seventeen, Archie joined a series of Presbyterian revivals that spread through the Pennsylvania countryside, which made him particularly attracted to Weld’s evangelical past. In fact, Archie was so devout he demanded that Frank join him in “being saved.” Convinced, like his fellow revivalists, that the Bible was God’s word and that he and his brothers had to save themselves “from the burning fires of Hell,” Archie spent hours reciting Bible verses to Frank in their dorm room, determined that, like everything in their lives thus far, the brothers would “stand together in fighting the devil and all his works.” But Frank was skeptical, partly because of the Presbyterianism preached by white ministers like Thomas Smyth during his not-so-distant childhood. When he warned Archie to stop badgering him and Archie refused, the two came to blows—the older brother almost crying from exasperation, the younger brother adamant that Archie was religiously insincere. It was the most intense fist fight of their entire lives, and after they made up, they agreed to “discreetly avoid the subject of religion” and to respect and “gauge [their] own gait.”26

Archie’s fascination with preaching and the pulpit endured, and by the time he met the famous Grimke sisters and Theodore Weld, he was “fairly hypnotized” by their former celebrity. After their first meeting in 1869, Archie returned whenever he could to Fairmount, where he read from Uncle Weld’s extensive library and attended lectures with his Aunt Sarah and Sissie. They introduced him to other reformers known for their evangelical style: Lucy Stone; Lottie Forten’s Salem host, Charles Lenox Remond; Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner. This exposure to reform politics, and the Radical Republican demand that “consent of the governed” become the basis for federal civil rights law, made Archie fall in love with Hyde Park and Boston and shift his focus from ministry to the law.27

In this, Wendell Phillips was particularly encouraging. He introduced Archie to the recent Black Harvard Law School graduate George L. Ruffin, who had his own practice in downtown Boston and who ran successfully for a seat on the Massachusetts State Legislature the same year Archie graduated from Lincoln. Phillips’s personal connections to many of the region’s leading Black politicians, as well as his radical politics, fascinated Archie “in ways [his] young mind” had never considered. As Archie learned more about the eight-hour movement, women’s rights, and the recently enacted Ku Klux Klan Law that allowed congressional investigations of Southern violence against freed people, Phillips was a fountain of political wisdom and legal expertise who encouraged Archie to consider law school.

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