2.4 (October 2002): 403-408
© 2002 National Communication Association

Angelina Grimké and the Rhetorical Utility of Violence

David Zarefsky

Stephen Howard Browne. Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999. ix + 201 pages. $50.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Angelina Grimké is a fascinating figure in the antebellum rhetorical history of the United States. One of two daughters of a South Carolina slaveholder, she found slavery so morally repugnant that she not only left her native state but crusaded actively against the peculiar institution. In letters and speeches in the North, she denounced slavery with passion born of her own experience growing up amidst the evils of the system. But it was not just her Southern background that attracted audiences; it also was the fact that she was a woman speaking in public when that was still a quite controversial practice. Her speeches are not about women’s rights per se, but the issues they raised about the status of the slave were also applicable, by analogy, to the condition of the woman. The women’s rights movement of the 1840s gained significant force from the injustices experienced by women in the antislavery movement, and Grimké stands at the nexus of these two major social movements.

Grimké’s rhetorical career was brief. It began in the summer of 1835 and ended with her speech at Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in May of 1838. The finite time period makes it possible in a relatively short volume to offer a rhetorical biography of considerable depth. This is what Stephen Howard Browne has ably done in this volume in the Michigan State University Press Series in Rhetoric and Public Affairs.

Browne’s overall theme is the rhetorical utility of violence. He notes that Grimké’s first public discourse was occasioned by her dissatisfaction with William Lloyd Garrison’s response to anti-abolition riots in Boston, and her final speech, the one for which she is most noted, was delivered in the face of a mob who disrupted the proceedings and set fire to the hall. The argument Browne advances is that Grimké reframed violence, interpreting it not as a threat or an attempt to silence her but instead as proof of her success. This interpretation gave her the determination to persevere and strengthened her confidence in the rightness of her cause. She “dramatically transforms violence into a catalyst for change” (11). In her treatment of violence, Grimké established her identity as a radical but one committed to genuine reform. As Browne puts it, “Grimké so managed the resources of her art as to create from the limitations of her world new possibilities for collective moral action” (16).

Browne engages in close reading of Grimké’s significant texts and finds in the detailed analyses of these texts the support for his broader claim. Following an introduction describing various understandings of Grimké’s identity, Browne devotes six chapters to careful analysis of different texts: Grimké’s private journal, beginning in 1826, that establishes the rationale for her decision to speak publicly against slavery; her response to Garrison’s 1835 abolitionist appeal; her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, which sought to invest Southern women with moral agency; her response to Catharine Beecher explaining the need for moral action against slavery; her participation in arguments about the rights of women to speak in public; and her most famous address, the 1838 speech at Pennsylvania Hall.

Grimké’s private journal enabled her to rehearse the argument that justice required her to speak out in behalf of the slave. These consciousness-raising texts also enabled her to theorize the relationship between violence and rhetoric. Noting that mobs were not new—they had been the agents of religious persecution in the Biblical world—she positioned them not as departures from secular law but as preliminary to it (48). On this reading, violence could be taken as a sign of impending moral advance. Persecution was a sign “of victory against the logic of the enemy” (50) and the appropriate response to violence was total engagement (48). Rather than despairing in the face of violence or fleeing from it, Grimké saw it as evidence that the cause of reform was just. This conviction, in turn, gave her the self-confidence that her view would prevail once public opinion was awakened and given leadership (67).

In her response to Garrison and in her appeal to Christian women of the South, she offered a world-view significantly different from his. She did not excoriate the slaveholder or blame the South for the existence of slavery, but instead stressed that the entire country (except for the slave) was complicit in the evil system; therefore all had a duty to bring about its overthrow (72). This was to be accomplished through “reading, prayer, presentation, and action” (74), and women had a special role to play. They experienced slavery, Grimké believed, in unique ways, and they could bring the force of moral suasion to bear upon their husbands. For Grimké, not only was it possible to transform slavery out of existence, but even the slaveholder could be brought “back into genuine community” (80). The slaveholder was seen as a victim of the system, not as the source of its evil. Grimké’s condemnation of slavery, then, was tempered by a melioristic view of all who were caught in its grasp. This outlook influenced Grimké’s view of the persuader’s task: not to excoriate the devil but to convince basically good people to change their ways. She positioned abolition as a unifying and transcendent moral reform rather than the outcome of a divisive, Manichean struggle. The violence around her was not the first skirmish in a coming war but the portent of impending moral advance.

During the mid-1830s, Catharine Beecher achieved a reputation as a public speaker for the cause of educational reform. She viewed Grimké, Browne believes, as a competitor for the allegiance of women. In 1837 Beecher published an essay criticizing Fanny Wright (according to Browne the only female speaker more notorious than Grimké) for her attack on the norms of religion, law, and domestic virtue. In Beecher’s opinion, these attacks were destructive of feminine identity. In her reply, Grimké turned the tables by accusing Beecher of lacking compassion and therefore failing “to think, feel, and argue as a woman” (109). Here Grimké illustrates, as she would do in the Pennsylvania Hall address, her ability to take the commonplace notion of separate spheres for men and women and use it to undercut her conservative opponents. If feelings and emotions were the special province of women, it was all the more important that they utilize these resources to overcome injustice by speaking out against it. In this rejoinder Grimké exhibits what Browne describes as the movement “from faith to action, from self to community, from prayer to persuasion” (20).

The interlocking relationship between women speaking out against slavery and raising the salience of women’s rights as an issue is brought out in Browne’s chapter on Grimké’s letters to Theodore Dwight Weld. Weld and others among the New York abolitionists did not object to women’s speaking in public, but they were concerned that growing attention to the women’s rights cause would distract from the priority of abolition. His was the same concern for expediency that led post-Civil War reformers to defer the issue of woman suffrage so as not to compromise the claims of black men to the vote. In response to the argument that women’s advocacy was inexpedient, Grimké maintained, in Browne’s formulation, that “women were most useful when free to speak publicly against slavery” (129). This is another example of turning the tables: granting the priority of the abolitionist cause and insisting that it can best be advanced through women’s advocacy. But Grimké also challenged Weld’s premise that abolition and women’s rights were separate and distinct issues. Rather, she concluded, “all truly moral reform coheres into a unified rationale for acting in the world on behalf of the world” (118). Embodying this belief, Grimké, unlike other prominent feminists, did not speak “for the sole purpose of proclaiming the rights of women” (136). Instead, her discourse had a thematic unity: at one and the same time it was a plea for the cause of the slave and of the woman.

Nowhere is this multidimensional character of Grimké’s discourse more evident than in the Pennsylvania Hall address. Ostensibly about slavery, it is also about women’s rights. The mob trying to suppress her speech was itself enslaved by prejudice, but the violence to which she was subjected was nothing compared to the violence regularly committed against the slave. The immediate experience of the Pennsylvania Hall audience in the face of the mob, therefore, should enable them better to empathize with the slave and to make them even more resolutely committed to the abolition cause. In this way Grimké implicitly answered the moderate northerners who believed that abolitionists needlessly inflamed matters and brought about their own trouble by employing the wrong advocates in the wrong places and in the wrong way (142). Grimké frames the violence of the mob as establishing that this is not a matter for strategic calculation but for existential commitment. As Browne observes, this speech “displayed in the most dramatic terms possible the rhetorical work required to reinvent violence, to transform sheer physical threat into an available means of persuasion” (139). The combination of trauma and fatigue, however, led Grimké to retire from the public platform and to devote herself to domestic responsibilities for the remaining forty years of her life.

As the above examples should demonstrate, Browne’s careful reading of Grimké’s texts brings out insights into her implicit theory of persuasion and the imperative of moral action. The examples testify to the heuristic power of close attention to textual details and to the rich texture that is lost when rhetorical transactions are treated only as historical events without attention to their underlying dynamics. If there is a fault in Browne’s execution of his method, it is that he does not always seem confident enough to let it do its own work. There are too many cases of repetition, too much pleading for the value of the approach, and too much “meta-analysis”: claims about what his examination will uncover, as though the examination itself could not make it clear to the discerning reader. The work would be even stronger, and more enjoyable to read, were the authorial presence not always so overt.

Browne is not on as strong a ground when he attempts to theorize the larger significance of his work. His approach shows, he maintains, “how relations once traumatized get restored through the act of public address. It extends to the process of public identity formation . . . by stressing the recuperative powers of language” (13). Now, textual analysis may well accomplish these purposes, at least sometimes, but that is not the argument Browne really makes or proves in this book. Grimké’s advocacy does not restore relationships; it transcends and reformulates them. It does not heal a schism so much as exploit it for its own purposes. Language is used not so much as an instrument for recuperation as it is for promising that current pains are the harbinger of future triumphs. In short, there seems to be a disconnect between the abstract claim Browne makes for his approach and the concrete results of that approach applied to the discourse of Angelina Grimké.

But this is hardly a serious flaw, because the analysis of Grimké stands strong in its own right. This significant but understudied rhetor is shown to have a richly textured and sophisticated ability to enact in her discourse a redefinition of the role of violence in bringing about social change. Browne’s careful attention to the details of the particular texts makes this ability evident in ways that a more general or abstract theoretical claim would not. The best proof of the heuristic value of close textual analysis is in the doing of it, and Browne has done it extremely well. His book justly merits the accolades it has received. It makes a significant contribution to scholarship on abolitionism, women’s rights, social movements, and the rhetorical practice of the antebellum United States.

David Zarefsky is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University