Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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CHAPTER 4
Immediate Abolition
LUCRETIA’S DAUGHTER WROTE THAT HER CHILDHOOD HOME fulfilled the “prophecies of amalgamation” in the minds of their neighbors. In the 1830s, racial mixing, whether in private homes, churches, or voluntary associations, was rare and taboo. Yet when her daughter penned those words, Lucretia had a house full of white and black visitors, including a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy who sat in her front window all day. Quakers and reformers knew Lucretia as a generous host. The Motts regularly welcomed out of town guests, and held dinner parties attended by anywhere from ten to fifty people. Even as her politics grew more radical, Lucretia was celebrated for her skills as a wife and mother. This domestic prowess allowed Lucretia to maintain an aura of gentility as she defied social convention by inviting whites and blacks to her home. Her most frequent guests were Robert and Harriet Purvis, but other friends in the anti-slavery movement such as the Fortens could also be found at her dinner table.1
Lucretia’s willingness to practice as well as advocate racial equality confirmed her as a critical outsider in American society. Her belief in individual authority in matters of religion threatened the evangelical Protestant establishment. Her vocal support for women’s intellectual, spiritual, and social equality rejected emerging cultural norms assigning men and women separate spheres. And, by the 1830s, Mott’s embrace of immediate abolition endangered the social and economic order of the country. Mott contributed her distinctive voice to the anti-slavery cause, giving women a visible but contested place in the burgeoning abolitionist movement.
In June 1830, Lucretia and James received a fateful visit from a young newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison. He told them a troubling story about the growing ability of the slave power to limit the individual rights of all Americans, white and black. The twenty-four-year-old had just been released from Baltimore Jail, after serving forty-nine days of his six-month sentence for libel. The previous year, Garrison had entered into partnership with Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Baltimore anti-slavery newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In its pages, Garrison had charged Francis Todd, a wealthy merchant from Garrison’s hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, with using his ships to transport slaves for Baltimore slave-trader Austin Woolfolk, another frequent target of the newspaper editors. In addition to defending his reputation, Todd and his ally Woolfolk wanted the lawsuit to shut down the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and in this they succeeded. Garrison saw the case as an attempt “to stifle free inquiry, to dishearten every effort of reform, and to intimidate the conductors of newspapers.”2
The lawsuit signaled growing national tension over the issue of slavery. From Garrison’s perspective, politicians and financial elites in the North and South were conspiring to strengthen slavery’s grip on American society. In addition, the country was in an uproar over the recent publication of Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Like his brethren in Philadelphia, David Walker, a free black man living in Boston, opposed colonization. Walker intended “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” But his incendiary language also struck fear into the hearts of white Americans. Walker warned of God’s judgment on whites for keeping African Americans in a state of ignorance and degradation. Invoking the American Revolution, he implied that this situation might soon come to a bloody end: “had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children’s lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants.” While the Genius of Universal Emancipation, under Lundy’s leadership, was too moderate to publish the pamphlet, Garrison wrote that the South’s reaction, severe censorship, showed that “the boasted security of the slave states is mere affectation, or something worse.”3
Radicalized by his experience in Baltimore, Garrison learned from Benjamin Lundy that he might find a sympathetic audience at the Motts’ house. Lundy and the Motts moved in the same network of Hicksites, free produce advocates, and freethinkers. A moderate who supported a gradual end to slavery, Lundy nevertheless offered a space for the publication of more radical ideas. In addition to Garrison, in 1829 Lundy hired a young Quaker poet named Elizabeth Margaret Chandler to edit the “Ladies’ Repository” section of his paper. Chandler encouraged women to get involved in the anti-slavery cause in two ways. First, she argued that women should abstain from the products of slave labor. Next, Chandler suggested women venture beyond this domestic “exertion” to form “societies for the publication and distribution of tracts and pamphlets” so that the “feelings of many hitherto unthinking persons [will be] aroused into detestation of a system which is a source of so much misery.” Chandler wrote approvingly of both the Female Association of Philadelphia for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton and Lydia White’s free produce store.4 Though she confined her own involvement to writing, Chandler, and by extension Lundy, endorsed female social activism, a controversial position at a time when women’s voluntarism was largely limited to religious and charitable organizations. And while Lucretia didn’t agree with everything she read in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, such proposals appealed to her, and earned her financial support.5
The Motts quickly arranged a public meeting for Garrison in the city. A passionate and persuasive writer, Garrison was still an awkward public speaker, and he read his manuscript word for word. Lucretia, by now an experienced orator, advised Garrison to take some lessons from Quaker ministers, who always spoke extemporaneously: “William, if thee expects to set forth thy cause by word of mouth thee must lay aside thy paper and trust to the leading of the spirit.”6 This initial meeting not only established their friendship, but provided a foundation for their future political alliance. Mott wrote of Garrison that “there are few my contemporaries whose characters I more revere.” Garrison was similarly admiring. In a letter to his wife, he described Lucretia as a “bold and fearless thinker.” He later wrote that “If my mind has become liberalized in any degree (and I think it has burst every sectarian trammel),—if the theological dogmas which I once regarded as essential to Christianity, I now repudiate as absurd and pernicious,—I am largely indebted to James and Lucretia Mott for the change.”7
Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet had introduced the concept of immediate abolition, but William Lloyd Garrison turned this idea into a social movement. A combination of factors—the publication of Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, growing doubts about colonization, the formation of free produce societies, and distribution of David Walker’s pamphlet—created an interracial audience for a more radical anti-slavery stance, defining slavery as both an individual and a national sin. Upon his return to Boston, Garrison began publishing his newspaper the Liberator. Unlike Lundy, who advocated gradual approaches to ending slavery, Garrison now rejected moderation, writing “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.” Garrison also proclaimed his egalitarianism in the masthead: “Our Country is the World—Our Countrymen are Mankind.” Supported in part by African Americans in Boston, the Liberator condemned colonization and promoted both immediate emancipation and racial equality. But as both Garrison and Mott soon found out, many white Americans were hostile to their views.
For most white Americans, immediate abolition posed the specter of social chaos and bloody vengeance. Two years after David Walker issued his Appeal, some of these fears came to fruition. In Southampton County, Virginia, an enslaved man named Nat Turner led a violent uprising against slavery. Beginning on August 22, 1831, Turner and his men killed his nine-year old owner, Putnam Moore, and Moore’s parents, Sally and Joseph Travis. Over the course of the next two days, Turner’s band, made up of approximately seventy free and enslaved blacks, killed fifty-five whites. The Virginia militia led the violent suppression of the rebellion, which culminated in Nat Turner’s execution on November 11, 1831. Commentators in both the North and South held Garrison and his newspaper partially responsible for the uprising. Garrison described himself as a pacifist, “a Quaker in principle,” but he set the tone for radical abolitionists’ response to slave rebellions and anti-slavery