Aunt Grace is still living, and must be between seventy and eighty years of age; she has, for the last forty years, been an exemplary Christian.  When I was a youth I took some pains to learn her to read; this is now a great consolation to her.  Since age and infirmity have rendered her of little value to her “owners,” she is permitted to read as much as she pleases; this she can do, with the aid of glasses, in the old family Bible, which is almost the only book she has ever looked into.  This with some little mending for the black children, is all she does; she is still held as a slave.  I well remember what a heart-rending scene there was in the family when my father sold her husband; this was, I suppose, thirty-five years ago.  And yet my father was considered one of the best of masters.  I know of few who were better, but of many who were worse.

The last time I saw my father, which was in the fall of 1832, he promised me that he would free all his slaves at his death.  He died however without doing it; and I have understood since, that he omitted it, through the influence of Rev. Dr. Speece, a Presbyterian minister, who lived in the family, and was a warm friend of the Colonization Society.

About the year 1809 or 10, I became a student of Rev. George Bourne; he was the first abolitionist I had ever seen, and the first I had ever heard pray or plead for the oppressed, which gave me the first misgivings about the innocence of slaveholding.  I received impressions from Mr. Bourne which I could not get rid of,[6] and determined in my own mind that when I settled in life, it should be in a free state; this determination I carried into effect in 1813, when I removed to this place, which I supposed at that time, to be all the opposition to slavery that was necessary, but the moment I became convinced that all slaveholding was in itself sinful, I became an abolitionist, which was about four years ago.

[Footnote 6:  Mr. Bourne resided seven years in Virginia, “in perils among false brethren; fiercely persecuted for his faithful testimony against slavery.  More than twenty years since he published a work entitled ‘The Book and Slavery irreconcileable.’”]

TESTIMONY OF ANGELINA GRIMKE WELD.

Mrs. Weld is the youngest daughter of the late Judge Grimke, of the Supreme Court of South Carolina, and a sister of the late Hon. Thomas S. Grimke, of Charleston.

Fort Lee, Bergen Co., New Jersey, Fourth month 6th, 1839.

I sit down to comply with thy request, preferred in the name of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  The responsibility laid upon me by such a request, leaves me no option.  While I live, and slavery lives, I must testify against it.  If I should hold my peace, “the stone would cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber would answer it.”  But though