In another letter in 1862, she writes:—­

“The negro has generously come forward, in spite of his multiplied wrongs, and offered to help to defend the country against those who are trying to fasten the chains on the white as well as the black.  We have impiously denied him the right of citizenship, and have virtually said, ‘Stand back; I am holier than thou.’  I pray that victory may not crown our arms until the negro stands in his acknowledged manhood side by side in this conflict with the white man, until we have the nobility to say that this war is a war of abolition, and that no concession on the part of the South shall save slavery from destruction.  Whatever Lincoln and his Cabinet are carrying on the war to accomplish, God’s design is to deliver from bondage his innocent people.”

About this time Mrs. Weld published one of the most powerful things she ever wrote, “A Declaration of War on Slavery.”  She and Sarah also drew up a petition to the government for the entire abolition of slavery, and took it around themselves for signatures.  Very few refused to sign it; and they were proposing to canvass, by means of agents, the entire North, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

With their Charleston relatives, Mrs. Weld and Sarah had always kept up a rather irregular, but, on one side, at least, an affectionate correspondence.  Their mother died in 1839, retaining, to the never-ceasing grief of her Northern daughters, her slave-holding principles to the last.  The few remaining members of the family were settled in and around Charleston, and were, with one exception, in comfortable circumstances at the beginning of the war.  This exception was their brother John, who was infirm, and had outlived his resources and the ability to make a living.  For years before the war, Sarah and Angelina sent him from their slender incomes a small annuity, sufficient to keep him from want, and it was continued, at much inconvenience during the war, until his death, which occurred in the latter part of 1863.  Their sisters, Mary and Eliza, wrote very proud and defiant letters during the first two years of hostilities, and declared they were secure and happy in their dear old city.  But gradually their tone changed, and they did not refuse to receive, through blockade-runners, a variety of necessary articles from their abolition sisters.  As their slaves deserted them, and one piece of property after another lost its value or was destroyed, they saw poverty staring them in the face; but their pride sustained them, and it was not until they had lived for nearly a year on little else but hominy and water that they allowed their sisters to know of their condition.  But in informing them of it, they still declared their willingness to die “for slavery and the Confederacy.”

“Blind to the truth,” writes Sarah, “they religiously believe that slavery is a divine institution, and say they hope never to be guilty of disbelieving the Bible, and thus rendering themselves amenable to the wrath of God.  I am glad,” she adds, “to have this lesson of honest blindness.  It shows me that thousands like themselves are worshipping a false god of their own creation.”