Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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deaths undoubtedly intensified Lucretia’s reaction to the social and spiritual unrest of the separation.46
Like other Quakers, Lucretia and James experienced the split on a very personal level. The Motts withdrew their oldest daughter Anna from Westtown School, now affiliated with the Orthodox. Lucretia’s sister Eliza was married to Benjamin Yarnall, son of Ellis Yarnall, a vocal partisan for the Orthodox in Philadelphia. When Eliza decided to ally with the Orthodox, Lucretia worried that she might lose her sister and closest female friend in the city. The friendship between Lucretia and Eliza survived the schism, but not all relationships did. James Mott’s mother Anne Mott chose the Orthodox, a sign of the bitter division Hicks’s ministry caused in Jericho Monthly Meeting. As Anne grew increasingly alienated from her son, the frequent letters between Long Island and Philadelphia declined dramatically, devastating Lucretia and James. The choices prompted by the split were neither easy nor simple.47
The Hicksite split also served as Lucretia’s political baptism. In the wake of the schism, the Motts permanently altered their economic choices, moral judgments, and intellectual allegiances. Henceforth, both James and Lucretia Mott cut all ties to slavery, inspired by new calls for immediate emancipation. But Lucretia’s identification with Hicks’s theology also extended to a broader interest in free thought, political radicalism, and liberal religion. Amidst the wreckage of the Hicksite split, Lucretia emerged as an outspoken and divisive minister.
Elias Hicks’s sermons on free produce occasioned hard choices for James, her husband. His sermons, painting Orthodox business practices as signs of economic and spiritual corruption, offended Philadelphia elders and inspired his followers. Living on the economic margins of the market economy, many Hicksites rebelled against the combined wealth and power of the elders, embracing free produce in part to call attention to elite Quakers’ intimate ties to slavery. As he struggled to establish himself in business and support his growing family, James Mott shared an economic status similar to other Hicksites. But by 1826 he owned a cotton commission business. His success prompted a new wave of anxiety and soul-searching. American cotton, on its way to market dominance as “King Cotton,” was produced by slaves, a task made more efficient and profitable by the 1792 invention of the cotton gin. James’s commissions were a point of contention between the usually harmonious couple. Lucretia confessed to her mother-in-law, “I would be much better satisfied, if they could do business that was in no wise dependent on slavery.”48
Lucretia’s unyielding stance on free produce reflected her growing belief in its potential as a tool to end slavery. Long convinced of the truth of Hicks’s testimony, she was further stirred after reading a pamphlet by British Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick, titled Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; Or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery, published in Philadelphia in 1824. Heyrick intended to reenergize the British anti-slavery movement, which had succeeded in outlawing British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. She condemned the cautious and conciliatory efforts since embraced by politicians and moralists; gradualism, Heyrick proclaimed, only increased indifference to the plight of the slave. Instead, she called for the immediate abolition of slavery. To accomplish this, Heyrick proposed boycotting the products of slavery, primarily sugar from the West Indies, an effective tactic that had been embraced by approximately 400,000 British men and women in the 1790s. She celebrated the “astonishing effects of human power,” arguing that “The hydra-headed monster of slavery, will never be destroyed by other means, than the united exertion of individual opinion, and united exertion of individual resolution.” 49
After its publication, Heyrick’s pamphlet circulated extensively in the city, exciting “much feeling and interest.” Elias Hicks’s allies formed a ready audience; even some Orthodox Quakers adopted free produce principles. Middle-class women also embraced Heyrick’s arguments. Not only did Heyrick provide a striking example of women’s individual power, but American women were well aware of the historic link between household economy and political change. While British women formed the backbone of the earlier anti-slavery boycott, American women had provided the precedent by replacing British goods with homespun during the American Revolution. Mott agreed with Heyrick’s statement that “when there is no longer a market for the productions of slave labour, then, and not till then, will the slaves be emancipated.” But she also responded to Heyrick’s message of personal power and individual purity, or “the consciousness of sincerity and consistency,—of possessing ‘clean hands,’ of having ‘no fellowship with the workers of iniquity.’”50 For Mott and other Quakers, abstinence was another way to reject worldliness and maintain their testimony regarding slavery, plain living, and the authority of individual conscience.
Soon after reading Heyrick’s pamphlet, Mott banned slave produce from her home, much to the dismay of her husband and children. In 1830, when Hicksite Quaker Lydia White opened a free produce store, “the first establishment exclusively of this character,” at 86 North Fifth Street, Lucretia immediately began purchasing her groceries and dry goods there.51 But, as her granddaughter later wrote, “free calicoes could seldom be called handsome, even by the most enthusiastic; free umbrellas were hideous to look upon, and free candies, an abomination.”52 These hardships prevented free produce from winning a large following. Later writers derided advocates of the boycott as irrelevant, sentimental, and even “crackbrained.”53
Though boycotting sugar or cotton did little to pressure American slaveholders, the formation of a community dedicated to abstinence formed the basis for an interracial movement of men and women united in their revulsion for the peculiar institution. The publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet signaled the beginning of a new, more radical phase in American abolitionism. After his move to Philadelphia, James Mott, as an up and coming Quaker businessman, had joined the respectable, all-white, all-male Pennsylvania Abolition Society, serving as the society’s secretary in 1822 and 1823. The moderate Pennsylvania Abolition Society pursued political lobbying to restrict slavery and legal means to free fugitive slaves. In an 1815 letter to his parents, James had noted that a slaveholder bequeathed forty slaves to the organization, presumably to get around restrictive manumission laws in southern states.54 Two years later, the American Colonization Society proposed another gradual alternative to these slaveholders by encouraging them to emancipate their slaves and send them as colonizers and missionaries to Africa. African Americans in Philadelphia, led by wealthy sail maker James Forten, opposed the American Colonization Society’s plan. Three thousand individuals, including Forten, attended a protest meeting at Rev. Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They resolved that as “our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of America, we … feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured.”55 The Motts’ letters from this period do not mention arguments for or against colonization. By the late 1820s, however, James and Lucretia were ardent opponents of the American Colonization Society.
Further inspired by Hicks’s free produce sermons and the publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet, reformers created an interracial network of anti-slavery societies in Philadelphia. In 1827, while he still traded in cotton, James Mott helped found the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania to disseminate information on where to buy free “Cotton, Rice, Sugar, Molasses, Tobacco” and to encourage its consumption. Its Quaker organizers believed their efforts would diminish slavery.56 Quaker women formed a sister-society, the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton. These societies, like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, included only white members, but free produce encouraged connections across the color line. African Americans formed the Colored Free Produce Society in 1830 and the Colored Female Free Produce Society in 1831. Like their white counterparts, the free black members of these societies argued that, “every individual who uses the produce of slave labor encourages the slave-holder, becomes also a participator in his wickedness.” Robert Purvis, the wealthy son of a South Carolina slaveholder and an African American woman, was one of the founders of the Colored Free Produce Society. Within a year, the handsome Purvis married Harriet Forten, daughter of James Forten.57 It is likely that the Motts first met Purvis, who became a close friend, through these free produce societies. And, as with