Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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protested British abolitionists’ purchase and liberation of Frederick Douglass. Thereafter, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society refused to donate any of its considerable funds to buy the freedom of fugitives.18 Finally, her distaste for the moral compromises involved in party politics made her a poor strategist. She viewed American politics as corrupted by slavery. As a result, she was not particularly interested in the way that political organizing might secure the abolition of slavery or the equal rights of women.
Mott’s kind of fame was peculiar to the nineteenth century. A renowned orator, she rarely wrote anything for publication. Like other Quaker ministers, Mott preached extemporaneously, moved by the divine spirit within. Yet as her sermon to the medical students indicates, her reputation extended beyond religious audiences. Mott’s effectiveness as a speaker is not always evident in printed versions of her sermons, found in newspapers reports or phonographic (shorthand) transcriptions. Audiences—including Quakers and non-Quakers, Europeans and Americans, southerners and abolitionists, politicians and clergy—flocked to hear this eloquent and feminine woman for her controversial subject matter; many of them responded to her hopeful vision of human progress, from sin, tradition, and slavery to personal morality, equality, and freedom.19
Mott spoke before thousands of people, but for much of her life the public repudiated her message. Most early nineteenth-century Americans did not oppose slavery. Most Americans believed racial equality was impossible. And most Americans viewed marriage and motherhood as women’s highest and only calling. Mott challenged these political and social orthodoxies of nineteenth-century America, prompting oratorical challenge, public derision, and even mob violence. She was vilified as a heretic and condemned as an ultraist. While Mott embraced these derisive labels, her allies promoted her sainthood, imagining her as a nineteenth-century domestic goddess, an example of their movement’s legitimacy. In between these extremes lived the real Lucretia Mott.
CHAPTER 1
Nantucket
IN 1855, WHEN ELIZABETH CADY STANTON wanted information for a proposed history of the women’s rights movement, she asked Lucretia Mott about “Nantucket women.” Born in 1793 to Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin, Lucretia spent the first eleven years of her life on Nantucket Island, approximately thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. She always considered herself an islander, recalling the “social ties & happy realizations” of Nantucket society; as an adult, Lucretia attempted to recreate this community bound by kinship, religion, and politics.1 Idealizing Mott’s upbringing, Stanton viewed Lucretia’s Nantucket childhood as central to her public career as an abolitionist and women’s rights activist.
In her typical self-effacing manner, Mott wrote Stanton that “As to Nantucket women, there are no great things to tell.” But she proceeded to recount the history of women on the island, beginning with Mary Starbuck, an ancestor who almost single-handedly converted the island’s white residents to the Religious Society of Friends in 1702. Though mid-nineteenth-century American culture dictated that women serve as the moral counterpart for the male world of business and politics, Lucretia noted that on Nantucket, “education & intellectual culture have been for years equal for girls & boys—so that their women are prepared to be the companions of men in every sense—and their social circles are never divided.” Recalling the experiences of her mother and other wives of sailors, Lucretia stated, “During the absence of their husbands, Nantucket women have been compelled to transact business, often going to Boston to procure supplies of goods—exchanging for oil, candles, whalebone—&.c—This has made them adept in trade—They have kept their own accounts, & indeed acted the part of men.”2 Like Stanton, Lucretia believed these early influences helped her defy the limited domestic and fashionable lives of most middle-class Victorian women. Raised with the communal memory of Mary Starbuck, and the daily observance of Anna Coffin’s business acumen, at a young age Lucretia rejected the idea that women were spiritually or intellectually inferior to men.
The material and religious conditions of eighteenth-century Nantucket also shaped Lucretia’s views of individual liberty, religious freedom, and the most pressing problem facing the new nation, slavery. Although Quakerism was the dominant religion on the island, the Society of Friends nevertheless provided a framework in which to critique ecclesiastical authority and established religion. Like other seaports, Nantucket was a cosmopolitan society; its boats sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, trading commodities and consumer goods and facilitating the movement of people and ideas. White settlers on the island used Native American labor for their first ventures in whaling; the industry later turned to free African Americans to staff its boats. The Coffin family’s residence on late eighteenth-century Nantucket exposed Lucretia to a range of powerful intellectual currents, from Quaker radicalism to free trade to enlightenment reform. It also introduced her to a set of social questions, most important the place of non-white Americans in the new nation.
If Lucretia spent only eleven years on Nantucket, she nonetheless inherited traditions borne over multiple generations and a century of history. Lucretia’s forebears included the first white settlers on the island. One ancestor, Tristam Coffyn, who migrated from England to Massachusetts with his family in 1642, helped organize the purchase of Nantucket. Lucretia’s great-great-great grandfather Thomas Macy became the first white resident of the island, when he brought his family to Nantucket from Salisbury, Massachusetts, in 1659. Lucretia’s granddaughter and first biographer Anna Davis Hallowell suggested that Macy migrated seeking to improve his economic fortunes. But recent historians emphasize his search for religious freedom, noting that he was a Baptist seeking to distance himself from Puritan authorities in Boston, who charged him with harboring Quakers. These two motivations—religion and finance—remained the island’s competing obsessions.3
Nantucket’s origins as haven for nonconformists made it a “microcosm of religious New England” for the remainder of the seventeenth century. But this tolerance paradoxically allowed it to become more religiously homogeneous after 1700. Lacking an established church, Nantucket was “culturally Quaker” even before the arrival of missionaries like John Richardson to the island. In 1702, Lucretia’s ancestor Mary Coffin Starbuck welcomed Richardson into her home. She soon joined the Society of Friends, and then became a preacher herself, converting her large extended family and drawing the island’s remaining white inhabitants into the growing meeting.4
The Society of Friends first appeared in England in the seventeenth century, during a period of religious reformation that challenged the authority and perceived hypocrisy of the established Anglican church. This quest to recover an authentic Christian past led to the birth of dissenting groups like the Levellers, Diggers, and Puritans. Founded by a young Englishman named George Fox in 1652, the Quakers believed that every human being had the ability to know God, a doctrine known as “the inner light.” Rather than relying on the Bible, Fox believed that individuals, through prayer, meditation, and quietness (Quaker meetings were silent until someone was moved to speak), had access to divine revelation. As a result, Quakers had no formal priesthood and they addressed each other as “thee” and “thou,” rejecting titles that recognized social hierarchy. From the beginning of the Society, then, women could become ministers and elders.5
In order to balance the individualism inherent in Quaker doctrine, George Fox established a system of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings to provide counsel and create consensus. Fox also urged meetings to appoint elders to ensure the sound doctrine and deportment of Quaker ministers. Traveling ministers had to prove their good standing by showing a “minute” (or record) issued by their meeting. Quaker egalitarianism had other limits. While women worshipped and preached with men, they were confined to separate and subordinate business meetings well into the nineteenth century. Few African Americans became members of the Society of Friends. If they applied for membership, they faced rejection; if accepted, they sat on segregated benches.6
Fox’s 1645 refusal to serve in the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the English Civil War served as the basis for the Quaker testimony against war. By 1660 the Society