Stony the Road We Trod, Volume 1

When Angelina Grimke pleads with her brother Henry not to punish a household slave, she does not anticipate her "stony road" ahead as a remarkably effective abolitionist speaker. Leaving behind their illustrious slave-holding family, she and her sister, Sarah, take their northern audiences by storm. Yet the very fact of their speaking in public, as women, doubles the opposition they face and leads them to become among the earliest American voices for women's rights. As they and their fellow abolitionists experience violent riots and the burning of their lecture hall, they wonder if their efforts have been in vain. Romance and marriage lead them to a less public life, but in the aftermath of Emancipation and the Civil War, a formidable challenge awaits them in the discovery of their unknown nephews. After their father's death and prior to the war, these promising nephews, children of Henry and his slave mistress, Nancy Weston, are enslaved by their half-brother. Mistreated, abused, and beaten nearly to death, they eventually escape and find their way north, seeking a full education. But will their eventual encounter with their abolitionist aunts redeem the suffering they and their mother experienced at the hands of their southern family?