CHAPTER 2

      Nine Partners

      IN 1806, AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, LUCRETIA COFFIN left the common schools of Boston for Nine Partners Boarding School in Dutchess County, New York, about 200 miles west. Nine Partners provided Lucretia and other girls with an extraordinary education, giving her skills superior to those of most men at that time. But the school offered more than book learning; it further exposed her to the tensions between Quaker simplicity and prosperity, their anti-slavery testimony and the slave economy, their peculiarity and their connections to the larger society. In the spirit of eighteenth-century reformers, Quaker educators tried to purify their religion without losing members. Yet the balance between authority and the individual conscience was difficult to maintain. One’s inner light might just as easily counsel rebellion as obedience, a problem for the school, the Society of Friends, and indeed for a liberal republic like the United States. As Lucretia grew from gifted student to teenaged teacher, from spirited adolescent to young wife, she was ideally placed to question the authority society bestowed according to age, gender, race, and faith.

      After their move to Boston in 1804, Thomas Coffin and his family had prospered. Initially establishing a home on Milk Street, in 1806 the family moved to a house in the more desirable neighborhood of Green Street. The following year, Thomas purchased a brick house on Round Lane, later renamed William Street, for $5,600. His warehouse, located on Central and then Long Wharf, the largest of eighty wharves in the commercial city, was doing very well. Long Wharf accommodated large ships, carrying goods from up and down the eastern seaboard as well as from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.¹ Coffin had the means to send three of his children to Quaker boarding school. Lucretia and her younger sister Eliza attended Nine Partners, while Thomas, Jr., went to Westtown in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Though the Nine Partners tuition was only £26 per year, this expense was a luxury most families denied their female children.²

      Living only two years in Boston, Lucretia never identified with the city that would become a hotbed of radical abolitionism in the 1830s. After the religious homogeneity of Nantucket, Boston must have seemed a profoundly un-Quaker city. In the colonial period, Puritan Boston was known for its persecution of Quakers such as Mary Dyer. By the time the Coffins moved there, the city had become increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan, but it was still dominated by the established Congregational church.³

      Lucretia’s parents wanted to give their children a “guarded” Quaker education. Whatever their disagreements with Nantucket Monthly Meeting, Quakers such as the Coffins would have been worried about the impact of these outside influences on their children. In response to these concerns, Quaker boarding schools like Westtown and Nine Partners, near Poughkeepsie, were located in rural settings far from the temptations of the city.⁴

      Founded by New York Yearly Meeting in 1796, Nine Partners offered “useful & necessary learning” and immersion in the religious culture of the Society of Friends. The founders of Nine Partners feared that Quaker children were not learning the history or principles of the Society of Friends, and as a result had become “prey to the Custom of the World and its habitudes.” Seeking to prevent a new wave of disownments, Nine Partners School sought to discourage materialism and inculcate the Quaker doctrines of “obedience to the inward Principle of Light & Truth” and “Silence & Attention.”⁵

      Though it depended on income from tuition, Nine Partners accepted impoverished pupils. Quaker educators worried that poor children might abandon the religion to achieve economic success. In its place, the members of the school committee offered themselves as examples of pious upward mobility. As educator and Nine Partners founder James Mott, Sr.—grandfather of Lucretia’s future husband—remarked to his colleague Joseph Tallcot, “I am willing to own, that a proper degree of what some call the world’s polish, or, in other words, a remove from that rusticity that the children of some Friends manifest, is not incompatible with a religious character.”⁶ Like Nantucket Quakers, Mott believed that Quaker peculiarity should not stand in the way of success in business or education.

      Most important for Lucretia, Nine Partners, following Quaker religious practice, was coeducational. Following the Revolution, female education expanded in the country at large. American educators viewed women as having an essential role in the new republic in raising their children to be virtuous citizens. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated, “The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” But such calls for female education were not calls for equality. Rush wanted to educate women to be “republican mothers,” capable of raising virtuous male citizens. Until the 1820s, when Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary began instructing women in advanced subjects like math and science, most girls attended separate schools offering curriculums that included embroidery, drawing, and other feminine skills.⁷

      At Nine Partners, male and female students received the same education in reading, writing, math, accounts, and grammar, but the curricula were not identical. Nine Partners was surrounded by a working farm, and the school’s plan called for classes to include “Business & Domestic Employment” suitable to the age of the student. Business and domestic training were implicitly segregated by sex. Only girls enrolled in the sewing classes. Girls and boys also learned and lived in separate classrooms and quarters “to prevent any improper familiarities.” As in Nantucket, however, Quakers viewed entirely distinct spheres for men and women as unnatural. So despite rules discouraging contact, no doubt instituted in part to appease parents, the school’s founders welcomed “innocent & cheerful intercourse” among students under the appropriate supervision.⁸

      The school’s board, made up of male and female members of New York Yearly Meeting, was a Who’s Who of the Quaker elite. Lucretia first met abolitionist Elias Hicks, whose ministry divided the Society of Friends in the 1820s, when she was a student at Nine Partners. Hicks was a founding member of the school committee. Before her disownment in 1802, Hannah Barnard, the “deist” pacifist female preacher, also served on the board, as did her traveling companion Elizabeth Coggeshall. Quaker educators James Mott, Sr., and Joseph Tallcot were longstanding members of the committee, and both served as superintendent of the school.⁹

      Mott, Lucretia’s future grandfather-in-law and the superintendent of Nine Partners during her attendance, profoundly influenced her. Under his direction, the school’s plan called for teachers to be kind and affectionate with their students, using “as little chastisement” as possible. Mott articulated his views for a larger audience in 1816 in Observations on the Education of Children; and Hints to Young People on the Duties of Civil Life. He advised parents to avoid both overindulgence and severity in raising their children. In Mott’s view, “when the dread of punishment predominates, the disposition is generally artful,” a position articulated by critics of slavery as well as opponents of corporal punishment. Instead, he advised parents to treat the child as a companion and to teach by example: “the necessity and propriety of practicing on all occasions, the most scrupulous integrity, liberality, fair dealing, and honour, consistent with the rule of doing unto others, on all occasions as they would be done unto, ought to be early and forcibly inculcated, by precept and example.” Mott extended his insights on childrearing into public life, where he urged young people “to remember others, and fulfill the obligations we are under of doing good.” Like other Quakers, Mott advocated modesty, moderation, and charity, but he also preached democracy. He believed in respecting others by avoiding bigotry and condescension.¹⁰