#59: The Grimké sisters, Sewee Shell Ring, and a Colonial Dinner
For South Carolina history lovers far and wide! Enjoy weekly SC history and upcoming SC historical events
Welcome to the first 100 days of the South Carolina History Newsletter! My name is Kate Fowler and I live in Greenville, SC. I have a 9-5 job in marketing, and outside of work, have a deep love of history. I started this newsletter as a passion project to learn more about our beautiful state and build a community of fellow SC history lovers along the way! To establish a foundation for the newsletter and to grow my expertise on a wide variety of South Carolina historical topics, this past February I challenged myself to post 100 newsletters in 100 days. After this coming May 20th, the newsletter will become weekly. Thank you for joining the journey!
Dear reader,
Welcome to Newsletter #59 of The South Carolina History Newsletter! I’m so happy you’re here.
Here’s a little welcome/update audio message:
As always, I’d like to also extend a special welcome to the following new free subscribers — woohoo! Thank you for subscribing.
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I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter, and as always, please feel free to reply to this email with your ideas and suggestions on South Carolina history you’d like to learn more about. I’m only a click away.
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And now, let’s learn some South Carolina history!
Yours truly,
Kate
(Writing from Greenville, SC)
➳ Featured SC History Event
Please enjoy our featured SC History Event below, and click here to visit my SC History Events Calendar that organizes all the upcoming SC history events I have discovered. Please let me know if you’d like to add an event to the calendar! Reply to this email or send me a note at schistorynewsletter@gmail.com.
Thursday, April 18th at 6:30 pm | “Under The Crown Colonial Dinner” | Living History Park | North Augusta, SC | Tickets: $75/each
“Immerse yourself in history at Living History Park’s “Under the Crown” Colonial Dinner. Experience daily life under British occupation with demonstrations including pottery-making, musket firing, and more. Play games, sample treats and try colonial dancing.”
➳ SC History Fun Facts
I.
Did you know that well-known abolitionists and sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, were the daughters of a wealthy Lowcountry plantation owner who owned hundreds of slaves?
Listen to this section in the mini audio voiceover below!
The story of the Grimké sisters begins with their father Judge John Faucheraud Grimké, who was a wealthy planter who owned a number of successful plantations across the Lowcountry as well as “hundreds of slaves.” He was a strong advocate of slavery.
Grimké was a high-profile public figure and served as chief judge of the Supreme Court of South Carolina.
Judge Grimké had 14 children with his wife and had “at least three children from enslaved women.”
In addition to their plantation lifestyle, the Grimké family also spent considerable time in Charleston, where the family owned what is now known as the Blake-Grimké House.
Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) and Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) were born 13 years apart, but they were very close.
The sisters grew up on their family’s plantations exposed to the inhumane treatment of enslaved people at a young age. These experiences were the foundation of their eventual abolitionist activism.
As a testament to the horrors of what she experienced as a child, Sarah Grimké would later write:
“As I left my native state on account of slavery, and deserted the home of my fathers to escape the sound of the lash and the shriek of tortured victims, I would gladly bury in oblivion the recollection of those scenes with which I have been familiar. But this cannot be. They come over my memory like gory spectres, and implore me, with resistless power, in the name of a God of mercy, in the name of a crucified Saviour, in the name of humanity, for the sake of the slaveholder as well as the slave, to bear witness to the horrors of the Southern prison-house.”
Unwilling to perpetuate the institution of slavery, “Sarah and Angelina Grimké became exiles in Charleston society.”
In the early 1820s, Sarah Grimké began attending Charleston’s small Quaker Church, the first religious body in North America to condemn slavery, and soon after moved to Philadelphia where her involvement in the church grew.
Angelina Grimké followed in her sister’s footsteps, attending Quaker services in Charleston and moving to Philadelphia in 1829, where the sisters began participating in the organized abolition movement.
By the mid-1830s, the Grimké sisters were prominent figures in the abolition movement, and their notoriety in Charleston grew.
In 1836, Angelina Grimké penned her Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States, a document imploring white southern women to support the abolitionist cause. Here is an excerpt from that letter:
“Slavery must be attacked with the whole power of truth and the sword of the spirit. You must take it up on Christian ground, and fight against it with Christian weapons, whilst your feet are shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. And you are now loudly called upon by the cries of the widow and the orphan, to arise and gird yourselves for this great moral conflict, with the whole armour of righteousness upon the right hand and on the left.”
Following the earlier example of the African-American orator Maria W. Stewart of Boston, the Grimké sisters were among the first female public speakers in the United States.
The Grimké sisters first spoke to "parlor meetings" or "sewing circles," of women only, as was considered proper. The sisters gained attention because of their background in owning slaves, and the fact that they were from a wealthy, Southern planter family.
As they attracted larger audiences, the Grimké sisters began to speak in front of mixed audiences (both men and women). They challenged social conventions by speaking out against slavery when it was not popular to do so, and the very act of public speaking was criticized, as it was believed to be improper and unladylike.
The ardor of the Grimké sisters participation in the abolitionist movement soon reached a fever pitch. On May 17th 1838, Angelina Grimké gave a powerful speech at Pennsylvania Hall to a gathering of abolitionists.
Pennsylvania Hall was an abolitionist venue in Philadelphia, built in 1837–38. It was meant to be a "Temple of Free Discussion,” where antislavery, women's rights, and other reform lecturers could be heard.
Four days after Pennsylvania Hall opened, on the night of Angelina Grimké’s speech, an anti-abolitionist mob “attacked the building with rocks and bricks.” The next night, the mob, a “hired band of ruffians led by wealthy gentlemen with investments in the South,” burned down the hall, while the fire department protected only the nearby buildings and left Pennsylvania Hall to burn. The building was a “symbol of the abolitionist movement and thus a target for those who opposed it.”
The Grimké sisters saw early on the connection between civil rights for African Americans and civil rights for women.
Neither Sarah nor Angelina initially sought to become feminists, “but felt the role was unavoidable.” Both sisters were devoutly religious and their arguments for both the abolition and women’s rights causes had strong Biblical arguments.
Both sisters were powerful speakers as well as writers. They effectively summarized the abolitionist arguments which would eventually lead to the Civil War, and addressed issues that would become foundational to the feminist movement of the late 20th century, 150 years later.
Sarah Grimke's pamphlet, The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, represents “the first serious discussion of woman's rights by an American woman.”
While women’s suffrage was not achieved during their lifetimes, both Sarah and Angelina Grimké lived to see the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863 that abolished slavery in the United States.
With their public speaking tour and activist writings, the Grimké sisters paved the way for women to take part in public affairs.
II.
Did you know that the Sewee Shell Ring is one of South Carolina’s most well-preserved traces of aboriginal occupation prior to European colonization?
Listen to this section in the mini audio voiceover below!
The Sewee Shell Ring is the northernmost known member of a group of circular-shaped, prehistoric “middens” occurring along the Atlantic Coast from Florida to South Carolina.
A midden is an “old dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, human excrement, botanical material, mollusc shells, potsherds, lithics, and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.”
This pre-historic construction has never been definitively dated, but some sources suggest it was created by one of the earliest homo sapien groups to settle along the Southeast coast of North America about 4,000 years ago.
It is one of South Carolina’s few “well-preserved, visible, and publicly accessible traces of aboriginal occupation of this territory prior to European colonization.”
It is named for the Sewee, a Native American tribe that lived in the area of the “lower course of the Santee River and the coast westward to the divide of Ashley River, around present-day Moncks Corner, South Carolina.”
About “20 such rings have been identified on South Carolina’s coastal plain, all located along tidal creeks.” They range from about 130 to about 200 feet in diameter and up to ten feet in height.
The Sewee Shell Ring is composed mainly of oyster shells. Its surviving portion rises to about ten feet and has an approximate diameter of just under 150 feet.
Though archeologists learning more about the physical nature of these structures every day, their purpose remains a mystery.
Near the Sewee Shell Ring lies a mound, composed exclusively of oyster shells, about 35 feet in diameter. William Edwards, who studied the Sewee Shell Ring in 1965 without publishing his findings, “concluded that it had probably been used as a fish trap.”
Some archaeologists have hypothesized that the coastal shell rings may have served a “ceremonial function.”
Another mystery is that shell rings are found in “only four disparate places in the world: Japan, Colombia, Peru and the southeastern United States.”
The Sewee shell ring has been damaged over the centuries by hurricanes, forest fires, erosion and sea-level rise. The most tragic destructive force, however, has been human. Transportation workers in the late 1920s mined nearly half the site for building materials to pave Highway 17 for smoother automobile travel. They had no idea what they were destroying.
The Sewee Shell Ring is part of the Francis Marion National Forest and can be accessed by a one-mile, self-guided interpretive trail that includes an elevated boardwalk for viewing the remains of the Shell Ring below.
Thank you to our subscriber Sarah Wadsworth Bowers for bringing this awesome historical site to my attention! Have you visited the Sewee Shell Ring? If so, leave a comment below and tell us about your experience!
➳ Quote from an SC historical figure
“I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.”
— From “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman” (1838) by Sarah Moore Grimke
Sources used in today’s newsletter:
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Never had heard of the Sewell Shell ring. I’ll have to learn more about this! Thanks