Although Angelina Grimké's “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South” (1836) arrayed the Bible and the Declaration of Independence against chattel slavery with a moral force hard to excel, Grimké had precious little regional tradition to sustain her demand for emancipation. There had been numerous antislavery Southerners and some Colonizationists, but there were precious few southern Abolitionists, and virtually no Abolitionists of the uncompensated, immediatist persuasion like those who, for the preceding five years, had been following the Garrisonian banner. Accordingly, Grimké's appeal had to be profoundly ahistorical, based upon the presumably timeless divine commands imbedded in the two scriptural texts, one religious and one political, that were most widely valued by Americans on both sides of the line of the Missouri Compromise.

In Massachusetts the argumentative resources for abolition were at once broader than Grimké's and oddly narrower, evolving almost as much from a selective reading of regional history as from Jefferson and Jesus.