Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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secretary, and, after she was succeeded by the gifted Mary Grew, she served a short stint as president before becoming a regular member of the Board of Managers. Abba Alcott, mother of the young Louisa May Alcott, whose husband Bronson was teaching at the nondenominational Germantown Academy, was on the original Board of Managers. While white women dominated the official positions, African American women usually held at least one office. Margaretta Forten was the society’s first recording secretary.17
One historian astutely describes the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society as “cliquish.” Though its membership eventually exceeded two hundred women, a core group ran the society and determined its direction. Kinship, as well as friendship, bound these members together. Charlotte Forten, wife of James, along with her daughters, Margaretta Forten, Sarah Forten, and Harriet Purvis, were all members. Grace Bustill Douglass, an Orthodox Quaker and wife of the successful black barber Robert Douglass, joined with her daughter Sarah, a schoolteacher. By 1836, Mott’s two oldest daughters, Anna and Maria, were active in the organization. Women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society also shared similar economic status. Both white and black members came from the middle and even elite classes of Philadelphia society. Some of the white and black women worked as school teachers, but other members did not need to rely on paid employment. African American members were especially unusual in this regard, as most free black women in Philadelphia were among the poorest residents of the city, working primarily as domestic servants, laundresses, or street vendors.18
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society represented a breakthrough for women’s activism. Though female anti-slavery societies proliferated in the coming years, the society was one of only a handful in existence in 1833. The mingling of black and white women stoked the fear of social equality and even “amalgamation,” that is, miscegenation. And women’s entrance into the often violent debate over slavery soon provoked a crisis over women’s proper place in the public arena.
While the city of Philadelphia was home to a large and vibrant community of free blacks, some of whom were prosperous by any standards (James Forten and Robert Purvis both had fortunes of $100,000), the era of Jacksonian democracy saw an assault on their status. Black Philadelphians endured routine violence, including race riots in 1834, 1835, and 1837. Following the August 1834 riot, which killed one, injured numerous others, and destroyed forty-four black-owned churches and buildings, Lucretia and James visited a damaged neighborhood and estimated the property losses at $5,000–6,000. The destruction prompted their friends Robert and Harriet Purvis to buy a country home in Bristol Township. Then, when Pennsylvania revised its constitution to expand voting rights for white men in 1838, the state simultaneously disenfranchised African American men. Robert Purvis and other free blacks argued that the new constitution “laid our rights a sacrifice on the altar of slavery,” in order to win favor from southern states. This loss of their citizenship further endangered the uneasy freedom of the state’s African American population, now lacking the political power to resist further attacks on their civil rights. Reminding readers of the fugitive slave clause in the U.S. Constitution, Purvis asked, “Need we inform you that every colored man in Pennsylvania, is exposed to be arrested as a fugitive from slavery?”19
In this intense period, Lucretia and the members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society met monthly, undertaking three main tasks. First, in order to disseminate information about slavery, they donated money to support the American Anti-Slavery Society and subscribed to newspapers like the Liberator and the Herald of Freedom, edited by New Hampshire abolitionist Nathaniel P. Rogers. They also sponsored public lectures, including one by British abolitionist George Thompson, whose scheduled appearance in Boston in 1835 incited a mob. Similarly, American activists, such as Samuel J. May, Robert Purvis, James Forten, Jr., Charles C. Burleigh, and Benjamin Lundy, regularly addressed the society’s meetings. Second, in order to improve the condition of blacks in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society established a committee to visit African American schools and offer aid. By 1838, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had taken on financial responsibility for the school run by member Sarah Mapps Douglass. Finally, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society continued the work begun by Philadelphia women in 1831, petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, and to outlaw the interstate slave trade. One such petition declared slavery “a sin against God, and inconsistent with our declaration that equal liberty is the birth-right of all.”20
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society also encouraged women to join the anti-slavery movement and to take on more public roles. In her initial role as corresponding secretary, Lucretia exchanged letters with women in other young anti-slavery societies, such as Lucy Williams of the Brooklyn, Connecticut, Female Anti-Slavery Society, who sought advice from an “elder” in the movement.21 In their own state, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society published an address “To the Women of Pennsylvania” describing their “duty as a citizen of the United States” to leave the “hallowed precincts of the home” for the “halls of Congress.” They urged women to circulate and sign anti-slavery petitions. Adopting a strategy used by other anti-slavery women, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society drew attention to free women’s obligations to enslaved women: “Yes, although we are women, we still are citizens, and it is to us, as women, that the captive wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the South have a particular right to look for help in this day of approaching Emancipation.”22 When Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family and a new member of the society, became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the first woman to hold such position, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society issued a public statement of approval. Describing Grimké’s path as a “new field of labor,” they acknowledged that she would receive “not only the sneers of the heartless multitude, which are the portion of every faithful abolitionist, but grave charges of infractions of the laws of female delicacy and propriety.” The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society urged anti-slavery societies around the country to give her “your support, your sympathy, and your prayers.”23
Angelina Grimké’s 1836–37 public speaking tour, which included an address to the Massachusetts Legislature, provoked immediate backlash. Congregational ministers in Massachusetts issued a Pastoral Letter that denounced women who adopted the male role of “public reformer” as “unnatural,” and recommended that churches close their doors to female speakers. Catharine Beecher, daughter of the eminent evangelical and colonizationist Lyman Beecher, published an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females. Addressed to Angelina Grimké, the essay condemned female anti-slavery societies and petition campaigns (despite Beecher’s own activism on behalf of the Cherokee), instead advising that women use their influence not to “exasperate” but “for the purpose of promoting a spirit of candour, forbearance, charity, and peace.”24
In Philadelphia, Benjamin Lundy’s new journal, the National Enquirer, printed a series of responses to Catharine Beecher from “L.” “L” was undoubtedly a member of Philadelphia’s abolitionist community, and may have been Lucretia Mott. While Lucretia did not usually write for publication—she did not believe she had any particular talent for it—she did occasionally publish short letters or articles in anti-slavery newspapers. And as a defender of Angelina Grimké’s right to speak out against slavery, Mott believed that Beecher merited a thorough rebuttal. In her first article, L denied that colonizationists could properly be considered abolitionists. She defended William Lloyd Garrison from Beecher’s aspersions and suggested Beecher herself was a member of the “half-way” or “neutral” party (unacceptable to uncompromising Garrisonians). L also denied that the tactics of abolitionists were dangerous, inciting “envy, discontent, and revengeful feelings” in the black community. Instead, L pointed out that black abolitionists were “universally acknowledged to be kind, respectful, sober, and forgiving, and above slander, even from Miss Beecher.”25
Shortly after L began publishing her articles, Lundy printed Angelina Grimké’s responses to Beecher. Grimké defended the anti-slavery movement as the ultimate “school of morals in our land.” She argued that individuals had rights as moral beings, and that while the slave’s rights had been