Читать книгу Lucretia Mott's Heresy - Carol Faulkner - Страница 10

CHAPTER 3

Schism

LUCRETIA MOTT BEGAN HER LONG CAREER as a Quaker minister at Twelfth Street Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia. In 1818, a year after her son Thomas’s death, she rose and prayed publicly for the first time. In her sweet and melodious voice, Lucretia appealed for strength to enable Friends to stand firm against the enticements of the larger world: “As all our efforts to resist temptation and overcome the world prove fruitless, unless aided by Thy Holy Spirit, enable us to approach Thy Throne, and ask of Three the blessing of Thy preservation from all evil, that we may be wholly devoted to Thee and Thy glorious cause.”¹ After her death, Mott’s meeting remembered her adherence to “the simple faith of the society.” They recalled her ability to quote from Scripture and her emphasis on “practical righteousness” and “the sufficiency of divine law.” These circumspect women avoided mention of their own passionate opposition to Mott’s sermons over the course of her ministry.²

In 1819, during one of her first trips as a visiting Friend, Lucretia traveled with Sarah Zane to Virginia, to attend Quarterly Meeting at Hopewell, twenty-four miles southeast of Richmond. There she met Edward Stabler of Alexandria, a regular clerk of Baltimore Yearly Meeting and friend of the increasingly divisive minister Elias Hicks. At Baltimore Yearly Meeting, Stabler had a reputation for convening a close circle of six allies to stay up all night discussing strategy, an effective way to influence the direction of debate in the larger body. Mott had a similar experience, noting that “He is one of the very interesting men. We lodged at the same house, and sat up very late to hear him talk.” Mott also observed the surrounding countryside, writing “the sight of the poor slaves was indeed affecting.” The Virginians she met reassured her of the contentment of the slaves, citing kind treatment from their masters, but Lucretia’s Quaker education taught her to question such pleasantries.³

In 1821, at age twenty-eight, Mott became an approved minister in the Society of Friends. Though any Quaker could speak in meeting if moved by the spirit, monthly meetings recorded the names of especially gifted preachers in their minutes. By issuing a minute, they also authorized these ministers to preach at distant meetings. The Society of Friends recognized female ministers regardless of age, marital status, or number of children, valuing their spiritual talents over their familial obligations. And most female Quakers typically found their calling in their twenties. For example, Elizabeth Coggeshall, the traveling minister who visited the Coffins on Nantucket, had been married three years when she was recognized as a minister at age twenty-six.⁴

A typical female preacher in many ways, Lucretia soon distinguished herself from her peers. By 1825, Quakers in Philadelphia knew her for her “peculiar testimony” on “female elevation” and “woman’s responsibility as a rational and immortal being.” One man remembered that Lucretia “was in the practice of introducing the subject in social circles and in her public communications.”⁵ Quakers were surprised by her pronouncements because advocates of women’s rights were rare in the 1820s. Lucretia’s focus on the female sex suggested her transformation over the course of the decade from a respectable Quaker minister, wife, and mother to a controversial dissenter, social critic, and activist.

Mott’s identity as a minister and reformer was forged in the context of an internal Quaker controversy over the ministry of Elias Hicks, culminating in the Schism of 1827. Hicks and his allies, known as Hicksites, preached the importance of the inner light, criticizing Quaker elders for abandoning this fundamental doctrine, abusing their power of disownment, and compromising with the world. Hicks’s opponents, known as evangelical or Orthodox Quakers for their strong theological and associational ties to mainstream evangelical Protestants, advocated the twin authorities of the Bible and Quaker leadership. Intersecting with the larger social and cultural turmoil of the 1820s, the Hicksite doctrinal schism overlapped with divisions wrought by class, slavery, and democracy. This decade witnessed not only the rending of the Society of Friends in the United States, but conflicts between free thinkers, religious liberals, and Evangelical Christians, revolutions in transportation and communications, the rise of Jacksonian democracy, preliminary skirmishes over women’s status, and the birth of immediate abolitionism.⁶

Though her granddaughter later wrote that Mott only reluctantly separated from Twelfth Street Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it is more likely that she was an enthusiastic Hicks partisan from the beginning. As historian Larry Ingle observes, the elders, or overseers, of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting were disturbed by young ministers in their purview “eagerly adopting and just as eagerly preaching the sentiments of Elias Hicks.” Mott was undoubtedly one of these young preachers. On one occasion, two female elders from Twelfth Street Meeting visited Mott to inform her that Friends felt uncomfortable with some of the language used in her sermons. What did she mean by referring to Quakers’ “notions of Christ”? Mott replied that she had been quoting from William Penn: “Men are to be judged by their likeness to Christ, rather than their notions of Christ.” While Mott’s response satisfied the elders this time, they became increasingly critical of the way Hicks’s allies used Penn and other early Quakers to justify their doctrines. Hicksite and evangelical Quakers both struggled to prove that they were the authentic and legitimate body of the Society of Friends.⁷

Equally suggestive is the Motts’ longstanding personal relationship with Elias Hicks. Lucretia confirmed that Hicks was “the same consistent exemplary man that he was many years ago” at Nine Partners Boarding School. Like James Mott, Hicks was from Long Island, born in Hempstead in 1748. Hicks married a fellow Quaker, Jemima Seaman, and moved to her family’s farm in Jericho. As a farmer, he developed a deep skepticism of the market economy and industrialization, helping poor white and black neighbors in his community survive the American Revolution by selling produce at low prices (according to one source, he refused to sell to the rich). In 1778, the same year he freed his slave Ben, Hicks was recognized as a minister in the Society of Friends.⁸

By the 1820s, Hicks’s criticism of slavery, the market economy, and the Quaker elders linked him to the Democratic radicals of the Workingmen’s Party in nearby New York City. Barnabas Bates, a correspondent of Hicks, was one of these spiritual and political fellow travelers. Originally from Rhode Island, Bates moved to Manhattan in 1824 and began publishing a newspaper called the Christian Inquirer to promote “Free Inquiry, Religious Liberty, and Rational Christianity.” In 1828, Bates became an organizer for the Workingmen’s Party and also joined other Anti-Sabbatarians to oppose evangelical efforts to legislate Sunday as a day of rest. Hicks shared Bates’s opposition to Sabbath laws, arguing that they violated “the Liberty of Conscience guaranteed by our free constitution to all its Citizens.”⁹ An adamant egalitarian, Bates also opposed both high postage rates and slavery. In 1830, following Hicks’s death, he delivered a eulogy to the African Benevolent Societies of New York City. Bates remembered Elias Hicks as “among the first that brought the subject [of slavery] frequently and forcibly before the members of his religious society.”¹⁰

In 1811, Hicks had published an influential pamphlet that reflected the core of his anti-slavery principles, Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and their Descendants. Written as a series of questions and answers, the pamphlet showed slavery’s incompatibility with both America’s commitment to equality and Quaker testimony against war. Hicks began by affirming that every man is “a moral agent (that is free to act).” African Americans were deprived of their inalienable freedom at birth, he argued, when “they are taken in a state of war, and considered by the captor as a prize.” Most important, Hicks described purchasers and consumers of slave goods as supporting and encouraging the institution. He concluded that “no man who is convinced of the cruelty and injustice of holding a fellow creature in slavery, can traffic in, or make use of the produce of a slave’s labour.”¹¹ For the rest of his career, Hicks placed “free produce” at the center of Quaker anti-slavery testimony. By this time Friends had severed all direct ties to the peculiar institution, but Hicks believed that until they abjured slave products Quaker testimony was incomplete, and their “hands stained with blood.”¹²

Hicks’s pamphlet on slavery caused little debate until Quakers began questioning his other theological views. Phebe Willis (not to be confused with Lucretia’s school friend, Phebe Post Willis), a member with Elias Hicks of Jericho Monthly Meeting, called upon Hicks to clarify his views on the Bible in writing. On May 5, 1818, Hicks wrote Willis that the Scriptures, as they have been interpreted, “have been the cause of four-fold more harm than good to Christendom.” Citing Quaker founder George Fox, Hicks viewed “the light and spirit of truth in the hearts and consciences of men and women, as the only sure rule of faith and practice.” These views would have scandalized most American Christians, but Hicks was surprised at the negative response he got from Quakers. In another letter to Willis, Hicks denied that these statements deviated from his previous sermons or beliefs; he had always condemned “professors of Christianity” for idolizing the Bible. Ingle notes that these letters dropped like a “bombshell” in the midst of the Society of Friends. Indeed, Hicks’s replies set off a wave of recriminations, polemics, and pamphleteering among Quakers and non-Quakers alike.¹³

Trends within the Society of Friends made Hicks’s statements more troubling to the elders than they might have been at the beginning of his ministry. In both England and the U.S., evangelical Christianity was undergoing a period of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening. In the U.S., revivalism coincided with religious disestablishment, which prompted denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists to compete with previously state-supported religions for potential converts, especially women, through a vibrant proliferation of charitable voluntary societies. At the same time, prosperous Quaker businessmen and merchants began to drop their opposition to worldliness. Particularly in Philadelphia, the wealthy Quaker leaders saw themselves as similar to other Protestants, basing their doctrines on the Bible, establishing a clear hierarchy to rule the religion, and joining Bible, tract, missionary, Sabbath, and temperance societies to establish their place in mainstream American culture. These respectable elders wanted to remove any taint of disrepute from their religion, which had been associated with dangerous dissenters in the colonial period. One sign of this change was the decision by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1806 to disown those who denied Christ’s divinity or a literal interpretation of the Bible. By the 1820s, the Philadelphia elders were exerting their power on a regular basis, targeting Hicks and his supporters.¹⁴

The elders took special exception to Hicks’s sermons on free produce, which they rightly perceived as attacking both their piety and their business practices. In October 1819, Hicks preached at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia, where Lucretia had taught school and married James. Pine Street Meeting was now the spiritual home of Jonathan Evans, leader of the evangelical Quakers, who had retired from the lumber industry in 1817, having accumulated a fortune of $43,000. During the American Revolution, he had served a short jail term for refusing military service, and for a time he abstained from slave products. But by 1819 Evans had given up on free produce as too cumbersome in an economy so closely tied to slavery. In his sermon, Hicks remarked that Friends who had previously embraced free produce and had now fallen away were little better than “thieves and murderers.” When Hicks asked permission to preach on the same subject to the women’s meeting, Evans initially rejected his request, but eventually the men’s meeting gave permission. Still, Evans found another way to demean Hicks. While Hicks was delivering his sermon to the women, Evans proposed adjourning the men’s meeting. Hicks returned to an empty room, leading his supporters to complain bitterly about Evans’s rudeness. This infamous adjournment was not the only time that the two men disagreed over free produce. On at least two other occasions, Hicks’s sermons prompted a protest from Evans.¹⁵

In the period leading up to the schism, Lucretia became more openly critical of the power of the elders. In a letter to James Mott, Sr., she bemoaned the “departure from simplicity of Quakerism as reflects trade, with the consequent embarrassment attendant thereon,” adopting Elias Hicks’s perspective on the wealth and worldliness of the prominent Quakers in her city. She later referred to Jonathan Evans as “the Pope of that day.”¹⁶ Mott’s disapproval of their heavyhandedness was also reflected in her concern over a series of disownments in 1822. Two daughters of Rebecca Paul, a “poor widow” and a minister in the Society of Friends, were excommunicated for marrying outside meeting, the Quaker phrase describing an interfaith marriage. From her childhood on Nantucket, Lucretia had viewed this type of repudiation as an unnecessary abuse of power. But the Philadelphia elders pushed their authority farther than Nantucket’s Quaker leaders. The elders heard a complaint against Paul herself for “conniving” to arrange the marriages of her children. In the end, Philadelphia Monthly Meeting disowned Rebecca Paul. Mott described this case as “trying” and wondered if there could be “improvement in the Discipline relative to out-goings in marriage.”¹⁷ Two years later, Lucretia witnessed the disownment of her youngest sister Martha, who married Captain Peter Pelham, a War of 1812 hero and one of Anna Coffin’s paying boarders.¹⁸

These internal troubles spilled beyond the borders of the Society of Friends beginning in 1821, in a series of inflammatory letters printed under pseudonyms in the Christian Repository, an evangelical newspaper published in Wilmington, Delaware, later published as a book titled the Letters of Paul and Amicus. The correspondents were Eliphalet Gilbert (Paul), a prominent Presbyterian minister, and Benjamin Ferris (Amicus), one of the leaders of Hicks’s sympathizers in Wilmington. Gilbert’s goal was to prove that Quakers were not Christians, but infidels, deists, atheists, and Unitarians. He started by condemning the Quaker belief in the inner light as “superior to the sacred scriptures,” referring to Elias Hicks as an example of this Quaker heresy. The exchange, which went on for two years, horrified evangelical Quakers not only because Gilbert accused all Quakers of “holding doctrines and practices inimical to the principles of the Gospel,” but because Benjamin Ferris’s defense of the Quakers adopted Hicks’s views rather than their own. As a result, the correspondence won approval from Hicks’s allies like Mott, who later recommended Ferris’s letters to Irish Friends.¹⁹

The Letters of Paul and Amicus show the clashing worldviews of evangelical Christians, in the midst of expanding their Protestant empire, and the “liberal views” of many Hicksite Quakers, Unitarians, and free thinkers. Benjamin Ferris, writing as Amicus, defined the age as “distinguished by a Spirit of Free Enquiry,” pointing to the individual duty and ability to seek religious truth. In contrast, he singled out Lyman Beecher, the famous minister and leader of the Second Great Awakening, as “intending to establish a Calvinistic influence in this country,” noting the establishment of seminaries and colleges under Beecher’s control. In addition to violating the separation of church and state, Ferris viewed missionaries and other “hireling ministers” as examples of greed and corruption; he referred to them as “MERCENARY CLERGY.” ²⁰ Gilbert responded that free enquiry must inevitably lead to the Scriptures, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the network of Bible, Sabbath, tract, and missionary societies. He cited the “astonishing, numerous, and extensive revivals of religion” taking place in the country as evidence of the truth of his position. And he complained of Quakers’ “indiscriminate opposition to all ministers of the gospel.” ²¹ In reply, Ferris referred to Bible societies and revivals as “carnal” rather than “spiritual” manifestations of religious belief. Like Hicks, Ferris viewed custom and tradition as poor arguments for religious doctrine.²²

The debate between Gilbert and Ferris revealed one of the principal dividing lines in American religion: slavery. Gilbert criticized the Society of Friends for its opposition to missionary societies. In reply, Ferris argued that missionary efforts were “ill timed.” Using India as an example, he pointed out that missionaries had only succeeded in subjecting “Hindoos” to “political slavery” and “religious domination.” And while Gilbert and other missionaries labeled South Asians heathens and idolaters, Ferris argued that “the love of God is extended to all his rational family.” Finally, Ferris contrasted evangelical benevolence in foreign lands to their neglect of the homegrown problem of slavery. Christian missionaries, he wrote, were unwilling “to extend this divine government through our own land. Here we see One million five hundred thousand of our fellow creatures unjustly held in a degrading bondage, which is entailed on their innocent posterity.”²³ Gilbert, in turn, noted his own opposition to slavery, but argued that slavery was not a religious issue: “A man, on mere principles of humanity and sound policy, may be as strongly opposed to oaths, slavery, and war, as any of your society can be, yet be a deist or an atheist. What should hinder? Your opposition to these civil and political evils, therefore, does not prove you a Christian society.” Gilbert’s statement reflected the views of most mainstream Protestants, who desperately sought to avoid involvement in the debate over slavery. Yet as the Philadelphia elders worked to position their sect in the evangelical tradition, the exchange between “Paul” and “Amicus” further distinguished Quakers from other Protestants. As Lucretia recalled, the Philadelphia Meeting for Sufferings, a standing committee charged with governance, issued a disclaimer and protest against Benjamin Ferris.²⁴

The harsh reaction of the Philadelphia leadership provoked new entries into the ongoing pamphlet war, with Quaker women playing a central role in these theological and political battles. Phebe Willis was the first to publicly question Hicks’s views on the Bible. Anna Braithwaite, a British traveling minister closely associated with evangelical Quakers in her home country, entered the American fray with a vengeance. Braithwaite’s style was both confrontational and aristocratic—she traveled in a fine carriage with a female servant beside her—and thus guaranteed to alienate the Hicksites. She made three trips to the United States during the controversy; the first visit was in 1823, when she sought an interview with Elias Hicks. Unsurprisingly, the two sides disagreed about Braithwaite’s motivations. Evangelicals described Braithwaite as “unprejudiced”; the Hicksites criticized her intention “to bring the American people into all the glorious consistency of the Mother Church [London Yearly Meeting].”²⁵

Anna Braithwaite’s published account of her interview with Hicks was intentionally provocative, casting Hicks as a heretic and a crank. According to Braithwaite, Hicks claimed that the Bible was unnecessary. He denied the account of creation in Genesis. He also questioned the doctrine of the Atonement, asking her “whether she could suppose the Almighty to be so cruel as to suffer Jesus Christ to die for our sakes.” He demonstrated the same broad and scandalous conception of spirituality as Benjamin Ferris, asserting that “the heathen nations, the Mahometans, Chinese and Indians bore greater evidence of the influence of Divine light, than professing Christians.” Finally, according to Braithwaite, Hicks testified to the absolute universality of the inner light, stating “the fullness of the Godhead was in us and in every blade of grass.”²⁶

Elias Hicks’s defense, written as a letter to Dr. Edwin Atlee, a Philadelphia ally, indicated his distance from the evangelical position. Though he acknowledged the importance of Scripture among Christians, he reiterated his belief in the inner light: “we ought to bring all doctrines, whether written or verbal, to the test of the Spirit of Truth in our own minds, as the only sure director relative to the things of God.” And he remained skeptical of the Atonement as the test of Christian faith. In an introduction to the published version of the letter, Hicks’s friends further linked the minister to William Penn, who had also been “egregiously slandered, reviled and defamed by pulpit, press and talk, terming him a blasphemer, seducer, Socian, denying the Divinity of Christ and what not.”²⁷ They saw Hicks as protecting the Society of Friends from those who had been “too easily uniting with the prevalent spirit of the world.” His allies did not hold back from their own controversial assertions, referring to the Bible as a false idol, a “gilded household God.”²⁸

Quaker minister Priscilla Hunt of Indiana served as Hicks’s female counterpart. She preached on similar topics and drew large crowds in Philadelphia in 1822 and 1823. In one sermon she declared, “I have seen the Gospel trumpet laid down in this city. False alarms have been sounded here and believed. True alarms have been sounded and not believed.”²⁹ Like Hicks, she emphasized the inward light, which she called “the monitor in the breast.” But her preaching (and her popularity) drew the ire of the elders. In response to one sermon at Pine Street Meeting, William Evans, son of Jonathan Evans, rose and stated, “These are not the doctrines of our religious Society.” After this rebuke, Priscilla Hunt kneeled to pray, and the rest of the meeting rose in unity, with the exception of William and Jonathan Evans. The meeting then ended in an “agitated fashion.”³⁰ When Hunt returned to speak at Arch Street and Pine Street Meetings, she faced similar opposition. But she was welcomed at Green Street Meeting, a stronghold for Hicks, and at Mott’s Twelfth Street Meeting. Lucretia later referred to her as a “great minister.” Evans justified his behavior by suggesting that Hunt had been reprimanded for unsound doctrine by her home meeting. But one Hicksite later testified, “it was not the business of elders in Philadelphia to condemn an individual unheard, and thus publicly proscribe her; which that opposition manifested was calculated to do.”³¹

With women as crucial players, the character and authority of female ministers became an issue in the Hicksite controversy. Evangelical Quakers saw Hannah Barnard, whose disownment figured so prominently in Lucretia’s childhood, as a Quaker Eve, precipitating the fall. Thomas Eddy, a leading Quaker and founder of the American Bible Society, claimed that before Barnard’s trip to England the Society of Friends was united in “love and amity,” but her “deist” sermons on the Scriptures, the Atonement, and the divinity of Christ divided Quakers. Eddy cited Barnard as a direct predecessor to Elias Hicks.³² Female ministers presented a problem for evangelical Quakers because their equal presence further distinguished the Society of Friends from mainstream denominations. For example, Presbyterian minister Eliphalet Gilbert, writing as Paul, viewed female preachers as another Quaker heresy. “Paul” described the pen of “Amicus” as like a “scolding woman’s tongue” and female Quaker ministers as “frothy” and “ignorant.”³³

All Quakers agreed on the right of women to be ministers, but they disagreed about which women had received genuine inspiration. Evangelical Quakers defended Anna Braithwaite as “innocent” and a victim of “calumny and persecution.” Hicksites saw her as “shameful and unprincipled,” “violent,” and deluded.³⁴ Evangelical Quakers described Ann Shipley, a witness to Anna Braithwaite’s conversation with Elias Hicks, as a “worthy minister,” while Hicksites doubted her authorship of a letter supporting Braithwaite’s account.³⁵

As a consequence, the mistreatment of female ministers became one of many points of contention between evangelical and Hicksite Quakers. In 1826, the Hicksite-dominated Green Street Meeting succeeded in having several evangelical holdouts, including Ann Scattergood and Mary Taylor, removed as ministers. The Orthodox or evangelical Quakers later referred to this action as “oppressive and arbitrary” as well as ungentlemanly.³⁶ Similarly, the Hicksites complained of the Evanses’ treatment of Priscilla Hunt, deploring their hostile “reception of a virtuous female stranger.”³⁷

Most historians consign female Quakers to a minor role in the split, yet women’s participation was evident during every stage of the conflict. In 1826, Anna Braithwaite and another British Friend, Elizabeth Robson, appeared at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and, according to Lucretia, “had full opportunities to relieve their minds, and we had much preaching.”³⁸ Robson returned to Philadelphia in 1827 and, after requesting an audience with the men’s meeting, preached for close to an hour against the unsound doctrines of Hicks and his allies.³⁹

After the acrimonious 1827 Yearly Meeting adjourned, a struggle ensued for the loyalty of women. Hicksite men were particularly concerned about the influence of British evangelicals on the women’s meeting. When Ann Jones, another English Friend, proposed appointing a committee to determine the state of the ministry, Hicksite men saw it as an attempt to derail the separation. Their anger at Jones turned on the women’s meeting, and they suggested that the women had exceeded their authority. At Green Street Monthly Meeting, which had already broken its connection to Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, Orthodox minister Ann Scattergood tried to lead a “rump” women’s meeting, only to have several men interrupt to bring out their wives.⁴⁰ Despite Hicksite men’s concerns, women were among Hicks’s most important partisans. In addition to Priscilla Hunt and Lucretia Mott, Esther Moore, wife of Hicksite Dr. Robert Moore of Easton, Maryland, remained true to Hicks throughout the controversy.⁴¹

The Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers offered two competing models of womanhood. The Hicksites’ egalitarianism, closely linked to democratic ferment and free thought, produced Hannah Barnard and Priscilla Hunt, dynamic preachers liberated from the constraints of religious orthodoxy and middle-class domesticity. The Orthodox Quakers celebrated a more reserved female piety as exemplified by the private Ann Shipley or the haughty Anna Braithwaite. Within the bounds of propriety, Orthodox Quakers and their evangelical allies encouraged women to expand their benevolent presence in the public sphere, as missionaries, exhorters, fundraisers, and volunteers. In 1829, this mainstream ministerial embrace of female moral power inspired Catharine Beecher, daughter of Lyman Beecher, to embark on the first mass petition campaign among women. Beecher argued that women’s religious “influence” should be exerted to raise sympathy and awareness of the plight of the Cherokee, the target of removal efforts led by Democratic President Andrew Jackson.⁴²

Any chance of unity among Philadelphia Quakers ended with the 1827 Yearly Meeting. After the split, the Orthodox Philadelphia Yearly Meeting retained most of the property and assets, but counted only 9,009 members to the 17,000 strong Hicksites. Both sides filed lawsuits to gain control over meetinghouses and schoolhouses. They also issued pamphlets to win the hearts and minds of fellow Quakers. The Orthodox, staking their place firmly in the Protestant evangelical mainstream, referred to the Hicksites as a new and distinct sect, made up of “libertines” advocating “wild ranterism.” They condemned the Hicksites’ disregard for doctrine, and viewed the separation as a result of Hicksite unwillingness to follow “strict morality” or “religious obligations.”⁴³ The Hicksites, on the other hand, adopted the democratic language of the time. They invoked their “inalienable right” to religious liberty, calling the measures of the Philadelphia elders “oppressive.” Instead, they promoted “the blessings of a Gospel Ministry unshackled by human authority.” ⁴⁴ With intentional symbolism, Hicksites held a meeting in June 1827 in Carpenters’ Hall, where the Continental Congress first met. This convention gave birth to Cherry Street Meeting, where the Motts worshipped after the separation.

The bitter rupture of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting spread quickly through American Quakerism. News of the split traveled to Aurora, New York, where Anna Coffin and the newly widowed Martha Pelham were teaching school. Lucretia’s youngest sister had already been disowned for marrying out of meeting, but Scipio Meeting promptly disowned Anna Coffin, who sided with the Hicksites. Yearly Meetings in Baltimore, Indiana, New York, and Ohio soon suffered their own fractures.⁴⁵

Though Mott followed these theological debates intently, her family required her physical presence and emotional attention. Lucretia had children at regular intervals throughout the decade. After the birth of her daughter Maria in 1818, there was a gap of a few years as she explored her calling as a minister. This deliberate spacing of children suggests Lucretia participated in a larger demographic transition among American women, who limited their family size from an average of seven children to an average of 3.5 children over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1823, Lucretia had a son, also named Thomas. Two more daughters followed: Elizabeth in 1825, and Martha (known as Pattie) in 1828. In the nineteenth century, pregnancy was a dangerous proposition. While Lucretia survived her pregnancies, her younger sister Mary Temple died in childbirth in 1824. Her older sister Sarah had died from a fall earlier that year. These births and deaths undoubtedly intensified Lucretia’s reaction to the social and spiritual unrest of the separation.⁴⁶

Like other Quakers, Lucretia and James experienced the split on a very personal level. The Motts withdrew their oldest daughter Anna from Westtown School, now affiliated with the Orthodox. Lucretia’s sister Eliza was married to Benjamin Yarnall, son of Ellis Yarnall, a vocal partisan for the Orthodox in Philadelphia. When Eliza decided to ally with the Orthodox, Lucretia worried that she might lose her sister and closest female friend in the city. The friendship between Lucretia and Eliza survived the schism, but not all relationships did. James Mott’s mother Anne Mott chose the Orthodox, a sign of the bitter division Hicks’s ministry caused in Jericho Monthly Meeting. As Anne grew increasingly alienated from her son, the frequent letters between Long Island and Philadelphia declined dramatically, devastating Lucretia and James. The choices prompted by the split were neither easy nor simple.⁴⁷

The Hicksite split also served as Lucretia’s political baptism. In the wake of the schism, the Motts permanently altered their economic choices, moral judgments, and intellectual allegiances. Henceforth, both James and Lucretia Mott cut all ties to slavery, inspired by new calls for immediate emancipation. But Lucretia’s identification with Hicks’s theology also extended to a broader interest in free thought, political radicalism, and liberal religion. Amidst the wreckage of the Hicksite split, Lucretia emerged as an outspoken and divisive minister.

Elias Hicks’s sermons on free produce occasioned hard choices for James, her husband. His sermons, painting Orthodox business practices as signs of economic and spiritual corruption, offended Philadelphia elders and inspired his followers. Living on the economic margins of the market economy, many Hicksites rebelled against the combined wealth and power of the elders, embracing free produce in part to call attention to elite Quakers’ intimate ties to slavery. As he struggled to establish himself in business and support his growing family, James Mott shared an economic status similar to other Hicksites. But by 1826 he owned a cotton commission business. His success prompted a new wave of anxiety and soul-searching. American cotton, on its way to market dominance as “King Cotton,” was produced by slaves, a task made more efficient and profitable by the 1792 invention of the cotton gin. James’s commissions were a point of contention between the usually harmonious couple. Lucretia confessed to her mother-in-law, “I would be much better satisfied, if they could do business that was in no wise dependent on slavery.”⁴⁸

Lucretia’s unyielding stance on free produce reflected her growing belief in its potential as a tool to end slavery. Long convinced of the truth of Hicks’s testimony, she was further stirred after reading a pamphlet by British Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick, titled Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; Or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery, published in Philadelphia in 1824. Heyrick intended to reenergize the British anti-slavery movement, which had succeeded in outlawing British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. She condemned the cautious and conciliatory efforts since embraced by politicians and moralists; gradualism, Heyrick proclaimed, only increased indifference to the plight of the slave. Instead, she called for the immediate abolition of slavery. To accomplish this, Heyrick proposed boycotting the products of slavery, primarily sugar from the West Indies, an effective tactic that had been embraced by approximately 400,000 British men and women in the 1790s. She celebrated the “astonishing effects of human power,” arguing that “The hydra-headed monster of slavery, will never be destroyed by other means, than the united exertion of individual opinion, and united exertion of individual resolution.” ⁴⁹

After its publication, Heyrick’s pamphlet circulated extensively in the city, exciting “much feeling and interest.” Elias Hicks’s allies formed a ready audience; even some Orthodox Quakers adopted free produce principles. Middle-class women also embraced Heyrick’s arguments. Not only did Heyrick provide a striking example of women’s individual power, but American women were well aware of the historic link between household economy and political change. While British women formed the backbone of the earlier anti-slavery boycott, American women had provided the precedent by replacing British goods with homespun during the American Revolution. Mott agreed with Heyrick’s statement that “when there is no longer a market for the productions of slave labour, then, and not till then, will the slaves be emancipated.” But she also responded to Heyrick’s message of personal power and individual purity, or “the consciousness of sincerity and consistency,—of possessing ‘clean hands,’ of having ‘no fellowship with the workers of iniquity.’”⁵⁰ For Mott and other Quakers, abstinence was another way to reject worldliness and maintain their testimony regarding slavery, plain living, and the authority of individual conscience.

Soon after reading Heyrick’s pamphlet, Mott banned slave produce from her home, much to the dismay of her husband and children. In 1830, when Hicksite Quaker Lydia White opened a free produce store, “the first establishment exclusively of this character,” at 86 North Fifth Street, Lucretia immediately began purchasing her groceries and dry goods there.⁵¹ But, as her granddaughter later wrote, “free calicoes could seldom be called handsome, even by the most enthusiastic; free umbrellas were hideous to look upon, and free candies, an abomination.”⁵² These hardships prevented free produce from winning a large following. Later writers derided advocates of the boycott as irrelevant, sentimental, and even “crackbrained.”⁵³

Though boycotting sugar or cotton did little to pressure American slaveholders, the formation of a community dedicated to abstinence formed the basis for an interracial movement of men and women united in their revulsion for the peculiar institution. The publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet signaled the beginning of a new, more radical phase in American abolitionism. After his move to Philadelphia, James Mott, as an up and coming Quaker businessman, had joined the respectable, all-white, all-male Pennsylvania Abolition Society, serving as the society’s secretary in 1822 and 1823. The moderate Pennsylvania Abolition Society pursued political lobbying to restrict slavery and legal means to free fugitive slaves. In an 1815 letter to his parents, James had noted that a slaveholder bequeathed forty slaves to the organization, presumably to get around restrictive manumission laws in southern states.⁵⁴ Two years later, the American Colonization Society proposed another gradual alternative to these slaveholders by encouraging them to emancipate their slaves and send them as colonizers and missionaries to Africa. African Americans in Philadelphia, led by wealthy sail maker James Forten, opposed the American Colonization Society’s plan. Three thousand individuals, including Forten, attended a protest meeting at Rev. Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They resolved that as “our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of America, we … feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured.”⁵⁵ The Motts’ letters from this period do not mention arguments for or against colonization. By the late 1820s, however, James and Lucretia were ardent opponents of the American Colonization Society.

Further inspired by Hicks’s free produce sermons and the publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet, reformers created an interracial network of anti-slavery societies in Philadelphia. In 1827, while he still traded in cotton, James Mott helped found the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania to disseminate information on where to buy free “Cotton, Rice, Sugar, Molasses, Tobacco” and to encourage its consumption. Its Quaker organizers believed their efforts would diminish slavery.⁵⁶ Quaker women formed a sister-society, the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton. These societies, like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, included only white members, but free produce encouraged connections across the color line. African Americans formed the Colored Free Produce Society in 1830 and the Colored Female Free Produce Society in 1831. Like their white counterparts, the free black members of these societies argued that, “every individual who uses the produce of slave labor encourages the slave-holder, becomes also a participator in his wickedness.” Robert Purvis, the wealthy son of a South Carolina slaveholder and an African American woman, was one of the founders of the Colored Free Produce Society. Within a year, the handsome Purvis married Harriet Forten, daughter of James Forten.⁵⁷ It is likely that the Motts first met Purvis, who became a close friend, through these free produce societies. And, as with so many white abolitionists, relationships with African Americans may have accelerated the Motts’ radical rejection of slavery. By 1830, under pressure from his wife and friends, James Mott abandoned his cotton business to deal in wool, a potentially risky financial decision for a man with five children.⁵⁸

Yet even as some Hicksites embraced free produce, others rapidly retreated from the more radical implications of Hicks’s ministry. In 1828, Scottish freethinker Frances (Fanny) Wright began a lecture tour of the United States, speaking in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. Three years earlier, Wright had founded a mixed-race communitarian society in Nashoba, Tennessee. She had proposed to gradually emancipate slaves by offering them the opportunity to work toward their freedom. After Nashoba failed due to poor management and accusations of free love, she edited Utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen’s New Harmony Gazette.⁵⁹ Wright also had strong ties to the Workingmen’s Party (often called the “Fanny Wright Party”). Detractors referred to her as the “Red Harlot of Infidelity” for her radical politics, anti-clericalism, and rejection of marriage. According to Mott, Wright lectured on topics with broad appeal, such as “knowledge” and “education,” but she also addressed subjects close to the hearts of most Hicksites. Wright railed against slavery, intolerance, “the hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions,” and “financial and political corruption.” Like Elias Hicks, Fanny Wright aroused the outrage and fear of prominent evangelicals. Lyman Beecher worried that Wright’s audiences, filled with “females of respectable standing in society,” might be led astray by her message.⁶⁰

One group of prominent Hicksites acted swiftly to sever all connections in the public mind between their beliefs and Wright’s. As clerk of Wilmington Meeting, Benjamin Ferris, better known as Amicus, led the disownment of Benjamin Webb, editor of the Delaware Free Press, for printing articles supporting Wright’s views and those of other freethinkers such as Robert Dale Owen. At least five others were also disowned for “Ultraism.” Lucretia was outraged. These individuals, she proclaimed, were among the “most active, benevolent citizens.” Lucretia and James entered an “indignant protest” against these intolerant and “arbitrary measures,” at the risk of losing their own status among their fellow Hicksites.⁶¹

As her co-religionists grew more conservative, Mott began reading more radical works. By 1827, Lucretia had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s controversial Vindication of the Rights of Woman, originally published in 1792. Wollstonecraft argued that women’s current status reflected not only their legal and political subordination but also their “notions of beauty,” “their fondness for pleasure,” and their consequent objectification. In its place, Wollstonecraft offered equal education and intellectual development: “I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength of both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.”⁶²

Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment thought appealed to Mott’s political and religious sympathies. Like a good republican, she rejected the trappings of aristocracy, closely linked to women’s taste for fashion and adornment. And as a Quaker radical, she was out of place in a society that increasingly valued white women’s sexual purity, submission, and domestic isolation. By the 1820s, Vindication was out of print in the United States. Many Americans condemned Wollstonecraft as a “blood-stained Amazon,” a symbol of dangerous rebellion against the political, religious, and sexual order. But Mott celebrated both Wollstonecraft and Fanny Wright, decrying the “denunciations of bigoted Sectarianism.” Mott referred to Vindication as one of her “pet books”: “From that time it has been a centre table book, and I have circulated it, wherever I could find readers.”⁶³

Mott also began reading liberal theologians outside the Society of Friends. In 1831, she encountered the published sermons of William Ellery Channing, leader of the Unitarian movement. Channing, a Harvard graduate and the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, rejected the Calvinism of New England Congregationalism in favor of a more positive interpretation of human nature and the individual relationship to God. He defined God as benevolent, and, like the Hicksites, criticized the doctrine of the Atonement: “This system used to teach as its fundamental principle, that man, having sinned against an infinite Being, has contracted infinite guilt, and is consequently exposed to an infinite penalty.”⁶⁴ Instead, he emphasized individual agency, echoing the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. In “Honor Due All Men,” Channing wrote “The Idea of Right is the primary and the highest revelation of God to the human mind…. [The individual] begins to stand before an inward tribunal, on the decision of which his whole happiness rests; he hears a voice, which, if faithfully followed, will guide him to perfection.” Finally, he viewed this individual sense of right as an equalizer, “which annihilates all the distinctions of this world.” In fact, Channing’s vision so clearly corresponded to Mott’s own that in her own notes quoting “Honor Due All Men” she inserted the Quaker phrase “inward monitor” in place of Channing’s “inward tribunal.”⁶⁵

In Boston, Channing influenced another important American woman, Elizabeth Peabody. In 1825, the twenty-one-year-old teacher began attending Channing’s Federal Street Church. The minister and parishioner struck up an uncommon friendship and intellectual collaboration based on their discussions of liberal theology. As biographer Megan Marshall argues, Elizabeth Peabody “had read and studied her way out of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin.” Channing confirmed her ideas and encouraged her intellectual development; in turn, she copied Channing’s sermons for publication, securing his legacy. Over the course of her career as a teacher, writer, bookstore owner, and editor of the Dial, Elizabeth Peabody “ignited” the intellectual and literary movement known as Transcendentalism. She also coined the term. Peabody adapted poet Samuel Coleridge’s word “transcendental” to name the philosophy, which, like Hicksite Quakerism, emphasized the ability of every individual to grasp the Divine, unmediated by ecclesiastical authority or the Scriptures.⁶⁶

As these powerful liberal ideas gained influence in Boston, Mott experienced a disappointing regression among Hicksites in Philadelphia. In 1830, Mott became clerk of the Hicksite Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Women. After the split, the London Yearly Meeting endorsed the Orthodox, refusing to recognize the Hicksites as members of the Society of Friends. In 1828, when the Hicksites appealed their case to British Friends, they were denounced as “separatists.” In 1830, they proposed to try again. The new epistle sought to “open the channel of Christian intercourse” between the (Hicksite) Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the London Yearly Meeting. The Hicksites made their case for recognition, warning that the British decision threatened to remove London Yearly Meeting “from religious communion with [upwards of] eighteenth thousand of your fellow-professors of the gospel of Christ.” Further, they described the Orthodox as usurping “power over the many, subversive of our established order, and destructive to the peace and harmony of society.” But the authors also attempted to assuage British Friends by professing their belief in the “history of the birth, life, acts, death, and resurrection of the holy Jesus” as written in the divinely authored Bible. Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that Lucretia objected to “any statement in the nature of a declaration of faith, other than the ‘inward light,’—the divine light in the soul,—which she regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Friends.” As a result, after serving her function as clerk and reading the letter to the women’s meeting, she vehemently opposed the epistle. Despite Mott’s disapproval, the women’s meeting endorsed the letter and Mott, along with John Comly, clerk of the men’s meeting, signed it. Their efforts to appease English Quakers were futile, as the epistle was returned unread with the word “mendacity” written on it.⁶⁷

The position of clerk was a sign of Mott’s growing status in the Society of Friends, but she signaled her independence when she spoke out against the epistle. Tested in the Hicksite split, her commitment to the inner light and individual moral authority became central to her ministry. At age thirty-seven, after giving birth to five living children, Mott was poised to become the most prominent Quaker minister of her time. Nevertheless, she continued to clash with the Hicksites over their “retrograde” views on liberal theology, slavery, and women’s rights.⁶⁸ Versed in Penn and Hicks, as well as Wollstonecraft, Channing, and Fanny Wright, Mott looked beyond the borders of the Society of Friends to make sense of the problems of slavery, inequality, and religious intolerance. And she identified the principle obstacle to human progress as slavery.