Lucretia Mott's Heresy

Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

Carol Faulkner

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205008
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Lucretia Coffin Mott was one of the most famous and controversial women in nineteenth-century America. Now overshadowed by abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott was viewed in her time as a dominant figure in the dual struggles for racial and sexual equality. History has often depicted her as a gentle Quaker lady and a mother figure, but her outspoken challenges to authority riled ministers, journalists, politicians, urban mobs, and her fellow Quakers.In the first biography of Mott in a generation, historian Carol Faulkner reveals the motivations of this radical egalitarian from Nantucket. Mott's deep faith and ties to the Society of Friends do not fully explain her activism—her roots in post-Revolutionary New England also shaped her views on slavery, patriarchy, and the church, as well as her expansive interests in peace, temperance, prison reform, religious freedom, and Native American rights. While Mott was known as the "moving spirit" of the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, her commitment to women's rights never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. She envisioned women's rights not as a new and separate movement but rather as an extension of the universal principles of liberty and equality. Mott was among the first white Americans to call for an immediate end to slavery. Her long-term collaboration with white and black women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society was remarkable by any standards. Lucretia Mott's Heresy reintroduces readers to an amazing woman whose work and ideas inspired the transformation of American society.

CHAPTER 1

Nantucket

IN 1855, WHEN ELIZABETH CADY STANTON wanted information for a proposed history of the women’s rights movement, she asked Lucretia Mott about “Nantucket women.” Born in 1793 to Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin, Lucretia spent the first eleven years of her life on Nantucket Island, approximately thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. She always considered herself an islander, recalling the “social ties & happy realizations” of Nantucket society; as an adult, Lucretia attempted to recreate this community bound by kinship, religion, and politics.¹ Idealizing Mott’s upbringing, Stanton viewed Lucretia’s Nantucket childhood as central to her public career as an abolitionist and women’s rights activist.

In her typical self-effacing manner, Mott wrote Stanton that “As to Nantucket women, there are no great things to tell.” But she proceeded to recount the history of women on the island, beginning with Mary Starbuck, an ancestor who almost single-handedly converted the island’s white residents to the Religious Society of Friends in 1702. Though mid-nineteenth-century American culture dictated that women serve as the moral counterpart for the male world of business and politics, Lucretia noted that on Nantucket, “education & intellectual culture have been for years equal for girls & boys—so that their women are prepared to be the companions of men in every sense—and their social circles are never divided.” Recalling the experiences of her mother and other wives of sailors, Lucretia stated, “During the absence of their husbands, Nantucket women have been compelled to transact business, often going to Boston to procure supplies of goods—exchanging for oil, candles, whalebone—&.c—This has made them adept in trade—They have kept their own accounts, & indeed acted the part of men.”² Like Stanton, Lucretia believed these early influences helped her defy the limited domestic and fashionable lives of most middle-class Victorian women. Raised with the communal memory of Mary Starbuck, and the daily observance of Anna Coffin’s business acumen, at a young age Lucretia rejected the idea that women were spiritually or intellectually inferior to men.

The material and religious conditions of eighteenth-century Nantucket also shaped Lucretia’s views of individual liberty, religious freedom, and the most pressing problem facing the new nation, slavery. Although Quakerism was the dominant religion on the island, the Society of Friends nevertheless provided a framework in which to critique ecclesiastical authority and established religion. Like other seaports, Nantucket was a cosmopolitan society; its boats sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, trading commodities and consumer goods and facilitating the movement of people and ideas. White settlers on the island used Native American labor for their first ventures in whaling; the industry later turned to free African Americans to staff its boats. The Coffin family’s residence on late eighteenth-century Nantucket exposed Lucretia to a range of powerful intellectual currents, from Quaker radicalism to free trade to enlightenment reform. It also introduced her to a set of social questions, most important the place of non-white Americans in the new nation.

If Lucretia spent only eleven years on Nantucket, she nonetheless inherited traditions borne over multiple generations and a century of history. Lucretia’s forebears included the first white settlers on the island. One ancestor, Tristam Coffyn, who migrated from England to Massachusetts with his family in 1642, helped organize the purchase of Nantucket. Lucretia’s great-great-great grandfather Thomas Macy became the first white resident of the island, when he brought his family to Nantucket from Salisbury, Massachusetts, in 1659. Lucretia’s granddaughter and first biographer Anna Davis Hallowell suggested that Macy migrated seeking to improve his economic fortunes. But recent historians emphasize his search for religious freedom, noting that he was a Baptist seeking to distance himself from Puritan authorities in Boston, who charged him with harboring Quakers. These two motivations—religion and finance—remained the island’s competing obsessions.³

Nantucket’s origins as haven for nonconformists made it a “microcosm of religious New England” for the remainder of the seventeenth century. But this tolerance paradoxically allowed it to become more religiously homogeneous after 1700. Lacking an established church, Nantucket was “culturally Quaker” even before the arrival of missionaries like John Richardson to the island. In 1702, Lucretia’s ancestor Mary Coffin Starbuck welcomed Richardson into her home. She soon joined the Society of Friends, and then became a preacher herself, converting her large extended family and drawing the island’s remaining white inhabitants into the growing meeting.⁴

The Society of Friends first appeared in England in the seventeenth century, during a period of religious reformation that challenged the authority and perceived hypocrisy of the established Anglican church. This quest to recover an authentic Christian past led to the birth of dissenting groups like the Levellers, Diggers, and Puritans. Founded by a young Englishman named George Fox in 1652, the Quakers believed that every human being had the ability to know God, a doctrine known as “the inner light.” Rather than relying on the Bible, Fox believed that individuals, through prayer, meditation, and quietness (Quaker meetings were silent until someone was moved to speak), had access to divine revelation. As a result, Quakers had no formal priesthood and they addressed each other as “thee” and “thou,” rejecting titles that recognized social hierarchy. From the beginning of the Society, then, women could become ministers and elders.⁵

In order to balance the individualism inherent in Quaker doctrine, George Fox established a system of Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly meetings to provide counsel and create consensus. Fox also urged meetings to appoint elders to ensure the sound doctrine and deportment of Quaker ministers. Traveling ministers had to prove their good standing by showing a “minute” (or record) issued by their meeting. Quaker egalitarianism had other limits. While women worshipped and preached with men, they were confined to separate and subordinate business meetings well into the nineteenth century. Few African Americans became members of the Society of Friends. If they applied for membership, they faced rejection; if accepted, they sat on segregated benches.⁶

Fox’s 1645 refusal to serve in the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the English Civil War served as the basis for the Quaker testimony against war. By 1660 the Society of Friends as a whole had adopted pacifism, arguing that through contemplation of the inner light Quakers had learned that the will of God abhorred war. After the restoration of Charles II, they informed the king that Divine truth taught only peace: “the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.”⁷

In England and the American colonies, Quakers experienced persecution, as many viewed their doctrines as blasphemous or traitorous. Puritan and British authorities in America imprisoned, whipped, and even executed Quakers for their beliefs. Such extreme persecution, such as the hanging of Quaker convert Mary Dyer in Boston in 1660, prompted dissenters like Lucretia’s ancestor Thomas Macy to hide Quakers from authorities. Despite this oppression, the presence of Society of Friends in the colonies grew from the 1650s on. This growth was furthered by the labors of traveling Quaker ministers, or Public Friends, including Fox himself in 1671–72. By 1681, the aristocrat William Penn, a convert to the Society of Friends, had convinced King Charles to give him a colony in the new world to serve as a refuge for Quakers. This colony became Pennsylvania.⁸

Known for their quietude and pacifism, the faith of Nantucket Quakers often stood in stark contrast to their worldly labors: the hunt for whales and harvest of whale oil. Whites soon discovered that the small island could not sustain the growing population of migrants and sheep, and they turned to whaling by the end of the seventeenth century. Whaling was a profitable but gory industry. After harpooning the whale, the seamen lanced the mammal, causing it to choke to death on its own blood. Then they towed the dead whale back to the ship for butchering, a process that lasted several days. During this time, historian Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “the decks were a slippery mess of oil and blood.” Confronting the odd image of pacifists slaughtering the planet’s largest mammals, Herman Melville described Nantucket’s whaling captains as “sanguinary”: “They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.”⁹

Though not unaware of the contrast between the butchery of the whale fishery and the harmony of the meeting, these Nantucket captains exercised their conscience in other arenas. Despite their growing wealth, they condemned brazen display. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur noted in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, “The inhabitants abhor the very idea of expending in useless waste and vain luxuries the fruits of prosperous labor.”¹⁰ Punishments for excess were light. When members did flaunt their material goods, the elders quietly sought an apology. But the problem of extravagance caused significant concern. In 1747, Quaker minister and anti-slavery advocate John Woolman visited the island and suggested that women’s desire for luxuries provoked men into “acts of extreme and escalating cruelty,” namely, the ruthless pursuit of whales.¹¹

Significantly, their religious enthusiasm prompted their growing hostility to slave labor. In 1716, Nantucket Monthly Meeting, the local representative body of the Society of Friends, was the first to disavow slavery, an institution that remained legal on Nantucket until 1773 and in Massachusetts until 1783. Though the Society of Friends is known for its early testimony against slavery, throughout most of the eighteenth century many Quakers were ambivalent about abolition. Following an extended effort to achieve consensus, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the most influential meeting in North America, waited until 1754 to issue a statement against slavery. A similar struggle took place among Nantucket Quakers. In 1775, the Nantucket meeting threatened to disown Benjamin Coffin, Lucretia’s paternal grandfather, for owning slaves. The warning produced the desired result. In Coffin’s subsequent manumission of his slave Rose and her two sons, Bristol and Benjamin, he admitted the practice to be contrary to “true Christianity & divine injunction.”¹²

Similarly, the Nantucket Quakers salved their consciences by touting their friendly relationship with the island’s native population. Indeed, relations with Nantucket’s approximately 3,000 Wampanoag Indians were relatively peaceful compared to those in other settlements in colonial North America, in no small part due to the efforts of Lucretia’s forebears. Her great-great-great-great grandfather Peter Folger, known as the “learned and Godly Englishman,” served as a missionary on the island during the 1640s and 1650s. Folger then worked as an interpreter for Tristam Coffyn, one of the original purchasers of the island, who carefully cultivated the Wampanaog. Lucretia’s granddaughter Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that Coffyn was “regarded as the patriarch of the colony, particularly by the neighboring Indians, with whom he maintained friendly relations from first to last.”¹³

Nonetheless, English settlement devastated the Indians. The decline of the native community paralleled the rise of the whale fishery as the dominant industry of Nantucket. The initially collegial trade relationship between white settlers and Native Americans devolved into a complex cycle of credit, debt, and indenture that bound Wampanoag laborers to Nantucket whale boats. In 1746, the Indian community complained of unfair treatment, a charge that town leaders denied. In 1763, an epidemic devastated the Indian population of the island, reducing their already diminished numbers from 358 to 136, but by then the industry had grown beyond fishing for whales off the Massachusetts coast to the quest for sperm whales in the South Atlantic, and after 1790 in the Pacific. As the Indian population died off and whaling voyages became longer and less inviting, white ship-owners and captains turned to African Americans and other off-islanders, white and non-white, for their labor force. But if Indians played a declining role in life on Nantucket, their status remained a significant issue for many Quakers, who viewed the native islanders with a mix of concern and condescension.¹⁴

In addition to Nantucket Quakers’ anti-slavery advocacy and sympathy for the Wampanoag, they entertained relative equality among men and women. In most colonial American societies, women were by law and custom subordinate to their husbands. By contrast, on Nantucket, women had a great deal of spiritual and economic autonomy. This freedom flowed in part from the Quaker religion and culture. As Lucretia later recalled, boys and girls received the same education in the island’s Quaker schools. And unlike most Protestant denominations in this period, the Society of Friends forbade a professional ministry, allowing anyone, including women like Mary Starbuck and later Lucretia Mott, to become preachers.¹⁵

But this independence also stemmed from the practical realities of whaling life. Because their husbands were frequently at sea, Crèvecoeur noted that “wives are necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families.” Crèvecoeur cited the notorious Kezia Folger Coffin as an exemplar of Nantucket womanhood, contributing to her husband’s financial success by her business sense. But as historian Lisa Norling points out, most Nantucketers disapproved of Kezia Coffin’s pursuit of personal freedom. She left the Society of Friends after Quakers rebuked her for having a spinnet and for teaching her daughter to play the musical instrument. During the American Revolution, she engaged in smuggling and profiteering to such an extent that she was eventually charged with treason. As Lucretia herself would discover, Quakers might permit women relative independence, but they were far more ambivalent regarding absolute equality.¹⁶

Lucretia was born on a Nantucket that was recovering from the American Revolution. The island remained neutral during the war, partly because residents opposed violence, but also because they wanted to preserve the whaling industry, which depended on friendly relations with the British. This calculation proved mistaken; both the Americans and the British attacked their ships, leading to the destruction or confiscation of 85 percent of their fleet. On the eve of the revolution, 158 whalers sailed out of Nantucket. By war’s end, only 24 ships were left in Nantucket harbor.¹⁷

Despite the island’s official neutrality, many individuals in Lucretia’s family took sides. Indeed, her cousin Benjamin Franklin was a leading revolutionary. But other Folgers were British sympathizers. Lucretia’s mother, Anna Folger, was known as one of “Bill Folger’s tory daughters” (he had six of them). According to Anna Davis Hallowell, William Folger lost his extensive holdings during the war, when colonials seized most of his ships. “Being declared a tory,” Hallowell wrote, “he was no favorite with his companions; they liked to tell, at his expense, that the only thing he had ever found in his life was a jack-knife, sticking in a post above his head.”¹⁸ William’s brother Timothy, who helped Benjamin Franklin chart the Gulf Stream, was charged with treason 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 good...