st us when we were doing
what to us seemed positive duty. They wanted us to live out Wm. Lloyd
Garrison, not the convictions of our own souls, entirely unaware that
they were exhibiting, in the high places of moral reform, the genuine
spirit of slave-holding by wishing to curtail the sacred privilege of
conscience. But we have not allowed their unreasonableness to sever us
from them; they have many noble traits, have acted grandly for
humanity, and it was perhaps a part of their business to abuse us. I
do not think I love Garrison any the less for what he has said. His
spirit of intolerance towards those who did not draw in his traces,
and his adulation of those who surrendered themselves to his guidance,
have always been exceedingly repulsive to me, weaknesses which marred
the beauty and symmetry of his character, and prevented its
symmetrical development, but nevertheless I know the stern principle
which is the basis of his action. He is Garrison and nobody else, and
all I ask is that he would let others be themselves."

The feeling thus expressed was probably never changed until after the
sisters had taken up their residence in the neighborhood of Boston,
when visits were interchanged with Mr. Garrison, and friendly
relations established, which ended only with death. It is certain,
however, that Sarah and Angelina sympathized with the stalwart freemen
who used Sharp's rifles in the defence of free Kansas, who voted the
Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican ticket, who elected Abraham Lincoln
President, and who shouldered muskets against the rebels.

CHAPTER XV.

The anti-slavery cause, and intimate association with so many of its
enthusiastic advocates, had indeed done much for Sarah Grimke. Her
mind was rapidly becoming purified from the dross that had clogged it
so long; religious doubts and difficulties were fading away one by
one, and the wide, warm sympathies of her nature now freed, expanded
gladly to a new world of light and love and labor. As she expressed
it, she was like one coming into a clear brisk atmosphere, after
having been long shut up in a close room. Her drowsy faculties were
all stirred and invigorated, and though her disappointments had left
wounds whose pain must always remind her of them, she had no longer
time to sit down and bemoan them. There was so much to do in the
broad, fresh fields which stretched around her, and she had been idle
so long! Is it any wonder that she tried to gras