Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner
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in two important ways. First, it cemented her commitment to the inner light, or individual conscience, above all other forms of religious and temporal authority. Though basic to Quaker principles, this belief became increasingly controversial over the course of the nineteenth century as Quakers, guided by the influence of evangelicalism, turned more to Scripture and church doctrine for authority.
Second, Lucretia was curious about Coggeshall’s association with the infamous Hannah Barnard. In 1798, Coggeshall and Barnard embarked on a religious mission to England, which led to Barnard’s 1802 disownment for her rational, some said “deist,” interpretation of Quaker theology. As Mott later recalled, Barnard had been censured because “when she had preached against war, as never having been prosecuted by the command of the Divinity, she had been accused of denying the authenticity of the Scriptures; and whereas Jesus had faith in Moses, therefore she denied Jesus, and was an infidel.” In the view of English Quakers, Barnard’s peace sermon challenged a literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. The controversy surrounding Barnard’s visit to England reverberated throughout American Quakerism, paving the way for the Hicksite split of 1827, during which the Society of Friends divided into two factions not only over the place of the Scriptures and the inner light in Quaker belief, but also over the growing power of the elders and the propriety of doing business with slavery.34
Though Coggeshall expressed her uneasiness with Barnard’s views, her visit to Nantucket brought Lucretia into vicarious contact with a female minister who was not afraid to challenge the Quaker elders or their growing faith in the Bible, and who became an example for the young girl. This influence was reinforced when Lucretia later attended Nine Partners Boarding School in Hudson, New York, run in part by Barnard in the 1790s. Yet Barnard’s story also suggested the costs of female dissent. Anne Mott, Lucretia’s mother-in-law, sent her various papers relating to Hannah Barnard’s disownment, including “Hannah Barnard’s creed, opposed to any ‘scheme of salvation.’” After reading (and undoubtedly rereading) them, Lucretia passed these papers on to other Friends until they were lost.35
Like all Quaker children in Nantucket, Lucretia also learned to hate slavery and admire the economic principles underlying the whale fishery. At Quaker school in 1797, she first saw British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s widely distributed image of the packed slave-ship Brookes, which made such an impression that she told her children and grandchildren about it. First printed by the thousands in 1789, the diagram, showing 482 slaves crowded into a ship for transport from Africa to Jamaica, remained a powerful weapon in the anti-slavery movement. The image probably arrived in Nantucket via a Quaker ship captain. Nantucket’s close economic ties to Britain intersected with religious ties to English Quakers, who dominated the anti-slavery movement there. Alternatively, British sailors may have passed on copies of the image to their American counterparts when socializing in port.36
Likewise, Lucretia’s reader, Quaker Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement, encouraged children’s empathy by offering lessons on slavery in the context of amusing and instructive discussions of natural history. Originally published in London at the height of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, the first American edition was published in Nantucket’s sister port, New Bedford, in 1799. Written as a conversation between the fictional Harcourt family and their orphaned friend Augusta, the book sought to “excite the curiosity of young persons” regarding how cloth, paper, glass, metal, and other common objects were made. Appropriately for Nantucket’s schoolchildren, Mental Improvement began with a discussion of whaling. When Augusta asks Mr. Harcourt why men undertake such dangerous voyages, he replies that they do it to earn a living, noting that whaling not only supplies Europe with candles and oil, but also encourages free trade and friendship among nations, “by which each party may reap advantage by interchanging the superfluous produce of different climes, and exercising the mutual good offices of love and kindness.”37 When the Harcourts’ son Henry asks about sugar, Mr. Harcourt replies that it is farmed by “negro slaves,” “snatched from their own country, friends, and connections, by the hand of violence, and power.” After hearing Mr. Harcourt’s account, the children conclude to abstain from all goods produced by slave labor, including sugar, rice, coffee, and calico, as had hundreds of thousands of British citizens. Sophia Harcourt, the oldest daughter, proposes to discuss maple sugar as a substitute for cane, describing the maple tree as a potential weapon against slavery: “A tree so various in its uses, if duly cultivated, may one day supply us with sugar; and silence the arguments of the planters, for a continuation of the slave trade.”38
Though slaves were rare on Nantucket by the late eighteenth century, Lucretia and the other children on the island did have contact with free blacks. African Americans increasingly made up the crews of Nantucket whaling vessels (her uncle Micajah asked a New Bedford colleague to find him four African American sailors for the Lydia in 1801), making them part of the fabric of everyday life on the island. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nantucket town had an established black neighborhood, known as New Guinea. Lucretia’s mother Anna Folger Coffin borrowed some of her many colorful and practical sayings (for instance, “Handsome they that handsome be”) from a black man named Pompey. Anna also referred to “Black Amy,” who lived with Lucretia’s grandmother Folger, who “didn’t like to be told to do, what she was just going to do.” As the story suggests, in the Folger household, African Americans filled traditionally subordinate roles as servants and laborers, if not slaves. Yet even though “Black Amy” was a domestic servant, she had the luxury of grousing. Within the Folger household, whites and blacks, employers and workers, had thus negotiated the terms of free labor. Anna and her children recognized in Amy’s complaint the desire for autonomy and respect. Years later, Anna Folger Coffin joined Lucretia at the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.39
At the age of ten, Lucretia had a common but nevertheless traumatic experience, when the family believed her father had been lost at sea. Fearing the dangers of whaling voyages, Thomas Coffin had been anxious to abandon the business for some time. In 1788, off the coast of the French colony of Martinico (Martinique), Thomas reported to a passing ship that, “he had lost his mate and four hands, and when he left the coast, he had only one man able to keep the deck.” In 1790, Thomas fitted the Lydia for whaling only after he and his brother Micajah concluded they could not succeed trading with France or England.40 In 1800, Coffin followed the inspiration of William Rotch and turned to the China trade in South American sealskins, a line hardly less lucrative than whaling. In 1799, Mayhew Folger, Anna Coffin’s younger brother, had captained one of the first ships solely devoted to sealing, the Minerva. On this one voyage, Folger and his crew accumulated 87,000 skins, gathered by clubbing the mammals to death. Though the practice was vicious, the profits were enormous: Folger brought back $40,000 from this trip (unsurprisingly, by 1807, when Folger commanded the Topaz, the seals had disappeared and he had to look for new sealing grounds).41
In 1800, Coffin invested in the ship Trial (or Tryall) with Moses Mitchell, Paul Gardner, Jr., and Thomas Starbuck. Mitchell and Gardner were members of the Richard Mitchell family, which had “a controlling interest in virtually all of Nantucket’s ventures to China.” Captained by Coffin, the Trial headed for the Juan Fernández island group off the coast of Chile. But rather than killing the seals themselves, Lucretia’s biographer and granddaughter Anna Hallowell claimed, the crew allegedly “bought” skins in the Straits of Magellan and sent them to China by another ship. Whether an invention of Coffin’s squeamish great-granddaughter, or an expression of Coffin’s Quaker principles, the decision to send an initial load of seal skins on to China guaranteed the voyage’s profits.42
This decision proved wise when the Spanish authorities in Valparaiso arrested Coffin the next year, condemning his vessel, charging a “violation of neutrality.” In the 1790s, Spanish seizure of American ships was a common occurrence. The Spanish did not allow any foreign trade in their American colonies, though between 1796 and 1800 they allowed neutral ships from countries like the United States to bring goods owned by Spanish merchants into their ports. Nevertheless, extensive illegal trading persisted. Spain’s enemy Britain pierced