Thomas Smith Grimké (September 22, 1786 – October 12, 1834) was an American attorney, author, orator, and social activist.

He graduated from Charleston College, and entered the study of law under John Julius Pringle, then Attorney General of South Carolina, in 1804.

After completing courses at Yale, Grimké expressed a desire to prepare for the ministry, but yielded to the wishes of his jurist father and was admitted to the bar in May 1809.

"Nullifier" legislators responded to the decision by calling for a constitutional amendment to legalize the test oath and assert the primacy of allegiance to South Carolina.

[2] Grimké was an active advocate and donor to the temperance movement and a prominent member of the American Peace Society.

He was active in forming a South Carolina chapter of the American Colonization Society, which endeavored to send free blacks to Africa, to what would become Liberia.

When asked what he would do if he were mayor of Charleston, and a piratical vessel should attack the city, he is said to have replied that he would marshal the Sunday-school children in procession, and lead them to meet the invader,[1] which caused his ideas to be met with much ridicule.

[4] A sermon preached in Charleston on the occasion of his death was subsequently printed in the Episcopal publication Gospel Messenger (volume 11, December, 1834).

He had resolved the whole duty of man, in every situation and relation of life, into the simple and sublime principple of obedience to God, and was himself a luminious example of conformity, in practice, to his own theory of moral obligation.