Towards the close of the winter there are two paragraphs in her letters which show that she did at least read the daily papers.  In one she asks:  “Didst thou know that great efforts are making in the House of Delegates in Virginia to abolish slavery?”

The other one is as follows:—­

“Read the enclosed, and give it to brother Thomas from me.  Do you know how this subject has been agitated in the Virginia legislature?”

The question naturally arises:  if a little, why not more?  If she could refer to the subject of the Virginia debates, why should she not in some of her letters give expression to her own views, or answer some expressions from Sarah?  The Quaker Society, is the only answer we can find; the Society whose rules and customs at that time tended to repress individuality in its members, and independence of thought or action; which forbade its young men and maidens to look admiringly on any fair face or manly form not framed in a long-eared cap, or surmounted by the regulation broad-brim; which did not accord to a member the right even to publish a newspaper article, without having first submitted it to a committee of its Solons.

From the beginning, the Quaker Church bore its testimony against the abolition excitement.  Most Friends were in favor of the Colonization Society; the rest were gradualists.  Their commercial interests were as closely interwoven with those of the South as were the interests of any other class of the Northern people, and it took them years to admit, if not to discover, that there was any new light on the subject of human rights.

“The mills of the gods grind slowly;” and perhaps it was all the better in the end, for the cause their advocated so grandly, that Sarah and Angelina Grimke should have gone through this long period of silence and repression, during which their moral and intellectual forces gathered power for the conflict—­the great work which both had so singularly and for so many years seen was before them, though its nature was for a long time hidden.

Angelina’s experience in the infant school, interesting as it was to her, was discouraging so far as her success as a teacher went; and she soon gave it up and made inquiries concerning some school in which she could prepare herself to teach.  Catherine Beecher’s then famous seminary at Hartford was recommended, and a correspondence was opened.  Several letters passed between Catherine and her would-be pupil, which so aroused Catherine’s interest, that she went on to Philadelphia chiefly to make a personal acquaintance with the very mature young woman who at the age of twenty-seven declared she knew nothing and wanted to go to school again.  In one of her letters to Sarah, early in the spring of 1832, Angelina says,—­

“Catherine Beecher has actually paid her promised visit.  She regretted not seeing thee, and seemed much pleased with me.  The day after she arrived she went to meeting with me, and I think was more tired of it than any person I ever saw.  It was a long, silent meeting, except a few words from J.L.”