She told me once that often, when she knew one of the servants was to be punished, she would shut herself up and pray earnestly that the whipping might be averted; “and sometimes,” she added, “my prayers were answered in very unexpected ways.”

Writing to a young friend, a few years before her death, she says:  “When I was about your age, we spent six months of the year in the back country, two hundred miles from Charleston, where we would live for months without seeing a white face outside of the home circle.  It was often lonely, but we had many out-door enjoyments, and were very happy.  I, however, always had one terrible drawback.  Slavery was a millstone about my neck, and marred my comfort from the time I can remember myself.  My chief pleasure was riding on horseback daily.  ‘Hiram’ was a gentle, spirited, beautiful creature.  He was neither slave nor slave owner, and I loved and enjoyed him thoroughly.”

When she was quite young her father gave her a little African girl to wait on her.  To this child, the only slave she ever owned, she became much attached, treating her as an equal, and sharing all her privileges with her.  But the little girl died after a few years, and though her youthful mistress was urged to take another, she refused, saying she had no use for her, and preferred to wait on herself.  It was not until she was more than twelve years old that, at her mother’s urgent request, she consented to have a dressing-maid.

Judge Grimke, his family and connections, were all High-Church Episcopalians, tenacious of every dogma, and severe upon any neglect of the religious forms of church or household worship.  Nothing but sickness excused any member of the family, servants included, from attending morning prayers, and every Sunday the well-appointed carriage bore those who wished to attend church to the most fashionable one in the city.  The children attended Sabbath-school regularly, and in the afternoon the girls who were old enough taught classes in the colored school.  Here, Sarah was the only one who ever caused any trouble.  She could never be made to understand the wisdom which included the spelling-book, in the hands of slaves, among the dangerous weapons, and she constantly fretted because she could only give her pupils oral instruction.  She longed to teach them to read, for many of them were pining for the knowledge which the “poor white trash” rejected; but the laws of the State not only prohibited the teaching of slaves, but provided fines and imprisonment for those who ventured to indulge their fancy in that way.  So that, argue as she might, and as she did, the privilege of opening the storehouse of learning to those thirsty souls was denied her.  “But,” she writes, “my great desire in this matter would not be totally suppressed, and I took an almost malicious satisfaction in teaching my little waiting-maid at night, when she was supposed to be occupied in combing and brushing my long locks.  The light was put out, the keyhole screened, and flat on our stomachs before the fire, with the spelling-book under our eyes, we defied the laws of South Carolina.”