The gratitude of Sarah Douglass for the reception given her at Fort Lee was not surprising, considering how different such kindness was from the treatment she and her excellent mother had always received from the Society of Friends, of which they were members.  Scarcely anything more damaging to the Christian spirit of the Society can be found than the testimony of this mother and daughter, which Sarah Grimke obtained and wrote out, but, I believe, never published.

Before his marriage, Mr. Weld lodged, on principle, in a colored family in New York, even submitting to the inconvenience of having no heat in his room in winter, and bearing with singular charity and patience what Sarah calls the sanctimonious pride and Pharisaical aristocracy of his hosts.  He, also, and the sisters when they were in the city, attended a colored church, which, however, became to Sarah, at least, a place of such “spiritual famine” that she gave up going.

In the winter of 1839-40, when it became necessary to have more help in the household, a colored woman, Betsy Dawson by name, was sent for.  She had been a slave in Colonel Grimke’s family, and, falling to the share of Mrs. Frost when the estate was settled up, was by her emancipated.  She was received into the family at Fort Lee as a friend, and so treated in every respect.  Sarah expresses the pleasure it was to have one as a helper who knew and loved them all, and adds:  “Besides I cannot tell thee how thankful we are that our heavenly Father has put it in our power to have one who was once a slave in our family to sit at our table and be with us as a sister cherished, to place her on an entire equality with, us in social intercourse, and do all we can to show her we feel for her as we, under like circumstances, would desire her to feel for us.  I don’t know what M.C. [a friend from New York] thought of our having her at table and in our parlor just like one of ourselves.”

Some time later, Angelina writes of another of the family slaves, Stephen, to whom they gave a home, putting him to do the cooking, lest, being unaccustomed to a Northern climate, he should suffer by exposure to outdoor work.  He proved an eyesore in every way, but they retained him as long as it was possible to do so, and bore with him patiently, as no one else would have him.  Mrs. Weld frequently allowed him to hire out for four or five hours a day to husk corn, etc., and was glad to give him this opportunity to earn something extra while she did his work at home.  In short, wherever and whenever they could testify to their convictions of duty on this point, it was done unhesitatingly and zealously, without fear or favor of any man.  We might consider the incidents I have related, and a dozen similar ones I could give, as evidence only of a desire to perform a religious duty, to manifest obedience to the command to do as they would be done by, while beneath still lay the bias of early training sustained by the almost universal feeling concerning the inferiority of the negro race.  With people of such pure religious dedication, and such exalted views, it was perhaps not difficult to treat their ex-slaves as human beings, and the fact that they did so may not excite much wonder.  But there came a time, then far in their future, when the sincerity of their convictions upon this matter of prejudice was most triumphantly vindicated.