Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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in 1780 alongside Kezia Folger Coffin (the charges were dropped). Perhaps chastened, Timothy Folger left the increasingly unfriendly atmosphere of Nantucket for Wales.19
After the war, Nantucketers quickly buried their loyalist past and seized burgeoning economic opportunities. Surviving his neighbors’ enmity, William Folger turned to farming and raising sheep. When he died on Nantucket in 1815, he left a “mansion house” and an estate worth almost $6,000.20 Lucretia’s cousin, renowned whaling merchant William Rotch, was an early victim of revolutionary sentiment, losing his goods at the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Yet, after the war, Rotch was among the first to sail into British harbors flying the American flag. As the whale oil trade with Britain foundered during the Revolution, William Rotch conceived of a plan to sell seal skins to China. In 1785, his ship the United States returned from the Falkland Islands with 13,000 seal skins, Nantucket’s first venture in the China trade. This initiative later proved fateful for both the Coffin and Folger families.21
By the time Lucretia’s mother married her childhood sweetheart, Thomas Coffin, in 1790, Nantucket had begun to rebuild its economy. Thomas’s older half-brother, Micajah Coffin, helped his brother begin his career as a mariner and merchant. One of Thomas’s earliest voyages was in the ship Lucy, which sailed from Nantucket in 1785. In 1790, Micajah bought the 160–ton brig Lydia for £720, allowing Thomas to buy a 1/8 stake in the ship for an investment of £78. The brothers estimated that the Lydia could carry 800 barrels of sperm whale oil. With the oil priced at $1.08 per gallon in 1790, at 31.5 gallons per barrel, the Lydia could bring home a gross revenue of $35,280, equivalent today to $659,000.22
Thomas Coffin had reason to be optimistic about his fortunes; his decision to name his second daughter Lucretia, after an ancient Roman heroine, rather than giving her a family name, may have reflected his political hopes for the young republic. But in contrast to Thomas’s private dreams, in 1793, the year of Lucretia’s birth, Nantucket’s cohesive Quaker community was disintegrating. Seeking economic opportunities elsewhere, many residents left the island, including Lucretia’s Rotch cousins, who had all moved to New Bedford by 1795. Nantucket Monthly Meeting tried to prevent the exodus and recover the sense of community by withholding minutes for transfer to another meeting, necessary if a Quaker moved from an area bounded by one monthly meeting to another.23 But the Quaker elders were also partly responsible for the growing disaffection of their fellow islanders. From 1754, when three members were disowned for grazing more than their fair share of sheep on the Nantucket commons, the number of disownments by the meeting grew exponentially. Nantucket Monthly Meeting disciplined only 90 members before 1770; in the following decade the meeting disowned 227 members. And the record disownments continued.24
Led by the clerk of the women’s meeting, Sarah Barney, this local purge was part of a broader reformation in American Quakerism, and American Protestantism in general, which aimed to rid the society of sin. Often referred to as the “Great Awakening,” this spiritual renewal, characterized by the ministries of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, preceded the revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century. But while other evangelical denominations like the Methodists sought converts by preaching individual salvation from sin, the Quakers aimed both to purify their discipline against worldly encroachment and, ironically, to protect their community from dissolution.25
Notably, the elders targeted marriage out of meeting (in other words, to non-Quakers). Though membership in the Society of Friends was easily achieved through birth or a statement of faith and desire for membership, out-marriage was a violation of Quaker discipline. As historian Lisa Norling notes, the meeting disproportionately targeted female Quakers who embraced new romantic ideas by marrying for love rather than duty to family or community. Nantucket’s Quaker elders viewed young women’s romantic sensibilities as dangerously individualistic.26
Although she was never a sentimental person, this era in Nantucket Quakerism made an indelible impression on Lucretia. She agreed with the reforms inspired by early Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, who rejected the growing materialism of American society. His testimony against slavery included a refusal to use any products of slave labor, such as the indigo dye used in clothing. But throughout her life she strongly opposed the Society of Friends’ marriage policy, which condemned not only interfaith matches, but also the Quakers who approved or attended them. In an 1842 letter, Lucretia complained “Our veneration is trained to pay homage to ancient usage, rather than to truth, which is older than all. Else, why Church censure on marriages that are not of us?—on Parents conniving? On our members being present at such &c.? Oh, how our discipline needs revising—& stripping of its objectionable features.”27 Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.
As Quaker elders suppressed dissent at the turn of the nineteenth century, so too did Nantucket families, with lasting impact on Lucretia. She recalled her grandmother, Ruth Coffin Folger, as equally strict with her grandchildren. On one visit to her grandparents’ home, Ruth informed Lucretia that because she had misbehaved, she would not be allowed to go on a hayride with her grandfather. Lucretia remembered this incident forty years later, writing to her sister and brother-in-law that, “What I had done left no impression, but her unkindness I couldn’t forget.”28 Perhaps frustrated by their authoritarian streak, Lucretia never bonded with her Folger grandparents. Though both lived more than a decade into the nineteenth century, no correspondence with her mother’s parents survives.
Lucretia’s nagging memory of her grandmother’s discipline shows how the larger crisis in religious authority on Nantucket influenced her views. In the letter recalling the incident, Lucretia wondered, “When shall we learn that retaliation is never in imitation of [‘]Him who causeth his sun to shine on the evil & on the good’?” Mott continued, criticizing Orthodox believers for crying “heresy” at every sign of religious progress, a favorite theme of hers, in this case referring to the controversial sermons of Unitarian radical Theodore Parker. As Nantucket’s elders exerted their power, they not only prepared the ground for migration to friendlier shores, but also inspired dissenting voices, then and a generation later.29
Economically, the family prospered. Thomas Coffin continued to work with his brother Micajah, and their ship the Lydia made a number of profitable voyages in the 1790s. Captained by Micajah’s son Zenas Coffin, who at his death left the largest individual fortune in Nantucket history, the Lydia sailed to the whaling grounds off the coast of Brazil in 1793–94. Though it is not recorded how much whale oil the Lydia brought back, a later voyage to Brazil procured 1,000 barrels.30 By 1797, Thomas had earned enough money to purchase a large, elegant house on Fair Street for his growing family, which included Lucretia, her handicapped older sister Sarah or Sally (as was typical in this period, the family rarely mentioned her), and younger sister Eliza. As Nathaniel Philbrick points out, “where a person lived in Nantucket depended on his station in the whaling trade.” While shipowners and merchants lived up the hill from the wharves on Pleasant St., captains lived on Orange Street, with its magnificent view of the harbor.31 Fair Street lay between the two, perhaps indicating Thomas’s aspirations.
While Thomas pursued his various business interests with Micajah Coffin, Anna, like many Nantucket wives, kept a small store selling “East India goods” (one street in Nantucket was known as Petticoat Lane in honor of this tradition). She operated the store from the left front room, while the right front room—the parlor—hosted many gatherings of the six Folger sisters and visiting Quaker preachers. The absence of their husbands and the requirements of their stores led many Nantucket women, including Coffin, to undertake trips to the mainland “to exchange oil, candles, and other staples of the island, for dry goods and groceries.” Hallowell described these trips as “serious undertakings,” if not quite so serious as a whaling voyage.32
In 1801, Anna Coffin opened her parlor to visiting Rhode Island Quaker minister Elizabeth Coggeshall. The previous year, Thomas Coffin had embarked on an extended voyage to the Pacific on the ship Trial. Coggeshall talked to Anna, Lucretia, and her siblings, who now included three-year-old Thomas and one-year-old Mary, “on the importance