1st.  That as Southerners, and having been brought up among slaveholders, they could do more to convince the North than twenty Northern women, though they could speak as well, and that they would lose this peculiar advantage the moment they took up another subject.

2d.  That almost any other women of their capacity and station could produce a greater effect on the public mind on that subject than they, because they were Quakers, and woman’s right to speak and minister was a Quaker doctrine.  Therefore, for these and other reasons, he urged them to leave the lesser work to others who could do it better than they, and devote, consecrate their whole souls, bodies, and spirits to the greater work which they could do far better than anybody else.  He continues:  “Let us all first wake up the nation to lift millions of slaves from the dust and turn them into men, and then, when we all have our hand in, it will be an easy matter to take millions of women from their knees and set them on their feet; or, in other words, transform them from babies into women.”

A spirited, almost dogmatic, controversy was the result of these letters.  In a letter to Jane Smith, Angelina says:  “I cannot understand why they (the abolitionists) so exceedingly regret sister’s having begun those letters.  Brother Weld was not satisfied with writing us one letter about them, but we have received two more setting forth various reasons why we should not moot the subject of woman’s rights at all, but our judgment is not convinced, and we hardly know what to do about it, for we have just as high an opinion of Brother Garrison’s views, and he says, ‘go on.’ ...  The great effort of abolitionists now seems to be to keep every topic but slavery out of view, and hence their opposition to Henry O. Wright and his preaching anti-government doctrines, and our even writing on woman’s rights.  Oh, if I only saw they were right and we were wrong, I would yield immediately.”

One of the two other letters from T.D.  Weld, referred to by Angelina, is a very long one, covering over ten pages of the old-fashioned foolscap paper, and is in reply to letters received from the sisters, and which were afterwards returned to them and probably destroyed.  I have concluded to make some extracts from this long letter from Mr. Weld, not only on account of the arguments used, but to show the frank, fearless spirit with which he met the reasoning of his two “sisters.”  When we consider that he was even then courting Angelina, his hardihood is a little surprising.

After observing that he had carefully read their letters, and made an abstract on half a sheet of paper of the “positions and conclusions found therein,” he continues:—­

“This abstract I have been steadily looking at with great marvelling,

“1st.  That you should argue at length the doctrine of Woman’s Rights, as though I was a dissentient;