The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenridge (review)

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• The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenridge
• Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family. By Kerri K. Greenridge. (New York: Liveright, 2023. Pp. xxviii, 404. Paper, $21.99, ISBN 978-1-324-09454-8; cloth, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-324-09084-7.)

In her carefully argued family biography The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family, Kerri K. Greenridge details the history of the Grimke sisters—Angelina Grimke and Sarah Moore Grimke—and the several generations that followed, those born from Angelina Grimke’s marriage to famed abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld and those born to an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and her abuser (and possible rapist) Henry Grimke. The work opens and closes with details of queer writer Angelina (“Nana”) Weld Grimke, granddaughter of Nancy Weston and Henry Grimke, whose life, like all others in the family, was shaped by race, the legacy of slavery, and her link to the Grimke name.

Greenridge’s engrossing narrative centers three themes. First, she traces what she describes as the multigenerational attempt by white reformers (and the Grimke-Welds, specifically) to disavow their “complicity in America’s racial project” (p. xxvi). She highlights the children of Henry and Nancy, too, as in a denial of sorts, highlighting Black elites’ “superficialities” and their classist belief in the politics of respectability in the post–Civil War world (p. xxvii). Third—and possibly most important for those scholars reading this book for intersections with recent abolitionist historiography—she describes “the limits of interracial alliances” (p. xxvii).

Greenridge revisits the oft-told story of the power that the Grimke sisters (and Weld) held in late-1830s America as they lectured widely and authored powerful tracts in addition to their work on American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). The many narrative choices made by Greenridge to juxtapose the lives of the white Grimkes in Philadelphia and New York with those of their Black neighbors, such as James Forten, are striking. Through this technique, Greenridge shows how Angelina and Sarah—fleeing the sin of southern slavery and seeking personal atonement—failed to see the full humanity of the Black community they supposedly looked to save.

A pivotal early moment in the narrative comes when the sisters took up correspondence with Sarah Mapp Douglass. Two years in, they began to really listen to her, as well as to the Forten women. Greenridge presents Angelina as having this moment where she really was changed, newly aware of the antislavery work done by Black activists and committed to a substantive interracial cooperation. However, the moment quickly passed. Greenridge casts the Grimke-Weld retreat to New Jersey after their marriage as not just a retreat from active abolitionism but as an abandonment of the Black community and interracial efforts. And when the Grimke sisters encountered two of their brother Henry’s children, nephews Archibald Henry Grimke (Archie) and Francis James Grimke (Frank), in the spring of 1869, whatever lessons they learned from Black women in 1838 were gone. They instead scolded the brothers—two young men who had had harrowing experiences in slavery as children and teens—for overspending on ostentatious dress clothing. Frank saw Angelina and Sarah for what they were and drew away, while Archie—a rising member of the Black elite—remained more in their orbit.

Greenridge is unsparing in her evaluation of the remaining Grimke family. Angelina and Theodore Weld’s children—Charles Stuart Weld, Theodore [End Page 610] Grimke Weld (Sodie), and Sarah Grimke Weld (Sissie)—appear almost shockingly uninterested in following the reformist sensibilities of their parents and were, according to Greenridge, “not particularly remarkable” (p. 174). Sissie’s daughter Angelina Grimke Hamilton (also dubbed Nana) wound up in Anna, Illinois, a notorious sundown town. Archie and Frank, too, wore blinders that blocked them from fully acknowledging either the trauma they had experienced or the classism and elitism of respectability politics. Late in the book, Greenridge depicts an elderly Theodore Weld delighting in “Archie’s Nana,” Angelina Weld Grimke (p. 265). Her great-aunts had died before she was born, but the family legacy...