Читать книгу Lucretia Mott's Heresy - Carol Faulkner - Страница 11

CHAPTER 4

Immediate Abolition

LUCRETIA’S DAUGHTER WROTE THAT HER CHILDHOOD HOME fulfilled the “prophecies of amalgamation” in the minds of their neighbors. In the 1830s, racial mixing, whether in private homes, churches, or voluntary associations, was rare and taboo. Yet when her daughter penned those words, Lucretia had a house full of white and black visitors, including a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy who sat in her front window all day. Quakers and reformers knew Lucretia as a generous host. The Motts regularly welcomed out of town guests, and held dinner parties attended by anywhere from ten to fifty people. Even as her politics grew more radical, Lucretia was celebrated for her skills as a wife and mother. This domestic prowess allowed Lucretia to maintain an aura of gentility as she defied social convention by inviting whites and blacks to her home. Her most frequent guests were Robert and Harriet Purvis, but other friends in the anti-slavery movement such as the Fortens could also be found at her dinner table.¹

Lucretia’s willingness to practice as well as advocate racial equality confirmed her as a critical outsider in American society. Her belief in individual authority in matters of religion threatened the evangelical Protestant establishment. Her vocal support for women’s intellectual, spiritual, and social equality rejected emerging cultural norms assigning men and women separate spheres. And, by the 1830s, Mott’s embrace of immediate abolition endangered the social and economic order of the country. Mott contributed her distinctive voice to the anti-slavery cause, giving women a visible but contested place in the burgeoning abolitionist movement.

In June 1830, Lucretia and James received a fateful visit from a young newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison. He told them a troubling story about the growing ability of the slave power to limit the individual rights of all Americans, white and black. The twenty-four-year-old had just been released from Baltimore Jail, after serving forty-nine days of his six-month sentence for libel. The previous year, Garrison had entered into partnership with Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Baltimore anti-slavery newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In its pages, Garrison had charged Francis Todd, a wealthy merchant from Garrison’s hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, with using his ships to transport slaves for Baltimore slave-trader Austin Woolfolk, another frequent target of the newspaper editors. In addition to defending his reputation, Todd and his ally Woolfolk wanted the lawsuit to shut down the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and in this they succeeded. Garrison saw the case as an attempt “to stifle free inquiry, to dishearten every effort of reform, and to intimidate the conductors of newspapers.”²

The lawsuit signaled growing national tension over the issue of slavery. From Garrison’s perspective, politicians and financial elites in the North and South were conspiring to strengthen slavery’s grip on American society. In addition, the country was in an uproar over the recent publication of Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Like his brethren in Philadelphia, David Walker, a free black man living in Boston, opposed colonization. Walker intended “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” But his incendiary language also struck fear into the hearts of white Americans. Walker warned of God’s judgment on whites for keeping African Americans in a state of ignorance and degradation. Invoking the American Revolution, he implied that this situation might soon come to a bloody end: “had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children’s lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants.” While the Genius of Universal Emancipation, under Lundy’s leadership, was too moderate to publish the pamphlet, Garrison wrote that the South’s reaction, severe censorship, showed that “the boasted security of the slave states is mere affectation, or something worse.”³

Radicalized by his experience in Baltimore, Garrison learned from Benjamin Lundy that he might find a sympathetic audience at the Motts’ house. Lundy and the Motts moved in the same network of Hicksites, free produce advocates, and freethinkers. A moderate who supported a gradual end to slavery, Lundy nevertheless offered a space for the publication of more radical ideas. In addition to Garrison, in 1829 Lundy hired a young Quaker poet named Elizabeth Margaret Chandler to edit the “Ladies’ Repository” section of his paper. Chandler encouraged women to get involved in the anti-slavery cause in two ways. First, she argued that women should abstain from the products of slave labor. Next, Chandler suggested women venture beyond this domestic “exertion” to form “societies for the publication and distribution of tracts and pamphlets” so that the “feelings of many hitherto unthinking persons [will be] aroused into detestation of a system which is a source of so much misery.” Chandler wrote approvingly of both the Female Association of Philadelphia for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton and Lydia White’s free produce store.⁴ Though she confined her own involvement to writing, Chandler, and by extension Lundy, endorsed female social activism, a controversial position at a time when women’s voluntarism was largely limited to religious and charitable organizations. And while Lucretia didn’t agree with everything she read in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, such proposals appealed to her, and earned her financial support.⁵

The Motts quickly arranged a public meeting for Garrison in the city. A passionate and persuasive writer, Garrison was still an awkward public speaker, and he read his manuscript word for word. Lucretia, by now an experienced orator, advised Garrison to take some lessons from Quaker ministers, who always spoke extemporaneously: “William, if thee expects to set forth thy cause by word of mouth thee must lay aside thy paper and trust to the leading of the spirit.”⁶ This initial meeting not only established their friendship, but provided a foundation for their future political alliance. Mott wrote of Garrison that “there are few my contemporaries whose characters I more revere.” Garrison was similarly admiring. In a letter to his wife, he described Lucretia as a “bold and fearless thinker.” He later wrote that “If my mind has become liberalized in any degree (and I think it has burst every sectarian trammel),—if the theological dogmas which I once regarded as essential to Christianity, I now repudiate as absurd and pernicious,—I am largely indebted to James and Lucretia Mott for the change.”⁷

Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet had introduced the concept of immediate abolition, but William Lloyd Garrison turned this idea into a social movement. A combination of factors—the publication of Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, growing doubts about colonization, the formation of free produce societies, and distribution of David Walker’s pamphlet—created an interracial audience for a more radical anti-slavery stance, defining slavery as both an individual and a national sin. Upon his return to Boston, Garrison began publishing his newspaper the Liberator. Unlike Lundy, who advocated gradual approaches to ending slavery, Garrison now rejected moderation, writing “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.” Garrison also proclaimed his egalitarianism in the masthead: “Our Country is the World—Our Countrymen are Mankind.” Supported in part by African Americans in Boston, the Liberator condemned colonization and promoted both immediate emancipation and racial equality. But as both Garrison and Mott soon found out, many white Americans were hostile to their views.

For most white Americans, immediate abolition posed the specter of social chaos and bloody vengeance. Two years after David Walker issued his Appeal, some of these fears came to fruition. In Southampton County, Virginia, an enslaved man named Nat Turner led a violent uprising against slavery. Beginning on August 22, 1831, Turner and his men killed his nine-year old owner, Putnam Moore, and Moore’s parents, Sally and Joseph Travis. Over the course of the next two days, Turner’s band, made up of approximately seventy free and enslaved blacks, killed fifty-five whites. The Virginia militia led the violent suppression of the rebellion, which culminated in Nat Turner’s execution on November 11, 1831. Commentators in both the North and South held Garrison and his newspaper partially responsible for the uprising. Garrison described himself as a pacifist, “a Quaker in principle,” but he set the tone for radical abolitionists’ response to slave rebellions and anti-slavery violence. Garrison saw the revolt, and its bloody outcome, as a warning to white Americans, who should respond by ending the oppressive institution of slavery. In other words, the violence of slavery resulted only in more brutality.⁸

Nat Turner’s revolt further mobilized radical abolitionists in the North. In Philadelphia, women donated money to support the embattled Liberator. They also organized a campaign to petition Congress regarding the wrongs of slavery. Ultimately, Mott and over two thousand other “female citizens of Philadelphia and its vicinity” petitioned Congress to “act to the extent of their power in removing this evil.” In signing this petition, Mott and other women drew on the recent precedent of female petitioning against Cherokee removal, an effort led by evangelical Catharine Beecher. But while Beecher’s petitions proposed to channel women’s moral and religious influence on behalf of Native Americans, Mott’s petition invoked women’s status as citizens, who had a constitutional right to petition their legislators. Philadelphia women acknowledged that politicians may find their petition “intrusive,” but they softened their entrance into the political arena by noting “we approach you unarmed; our only banner is Peace.” Like subsequent anti-slavery petitions, the women who signed focused on the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital and other areas where Congress had legal jurisdiction.⁹

Meanwhile, Garrison directed his energies toward forming a national organization dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery. The founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was held at the Adelphi Building in Philadelphia in December 1833. The convention signaled the delegates’ final break from colonization and other gradual schemes of abolition. The interracial body also reflected the new organization’s commitment to racial equality as well as immediatism.¹⁰ Approximately seventy men and women attended from all over the northeast; delegates from Philadelphia included James Mott, Robert Purvis, Hicks’s ally Edwin Atlee, and African American barber and dentist James McCrummell (sometimes spelled McCrummill), among others.

While the official delegates and signatories to the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments were exclusively men, Mott and at least seven other women attended the convention. Several of these women were Lucretia’s immediate family members: her mother, Anna Folger Coffin; her youngest sister Martha, now married to David Wright, who was visiting from Aurora, New York; and her oldest daughter Anna, who had recently married Edward Hopper, a twenty-one year old lawyer and son of Isaac T. Hopper, a Hicksite Quaker, who, like Lucretia, had referred to Orthodox Quaker leader Jonathan Evans as a “pope.” At the convention, they were joined by three other Quaker women: Hicksite Lydia White, owner of the first free produce store; Hicksite Esther Moore, who had moved with her physician husband from Easton, Maryland, to Philadelphia; and Orthodox Quaker Sidney Ann Lewis, an advocate of free produce, who later opened her own shop.¹¹ All of these women were white, but it is possible some African American women attended. Out-of town abolitionists boarded with local families, including the Motts. One of these delegates invited the Coffin and Mott women. Since other abolitionists boarded with black Philadelphians, they too may have invited their hostesses.

Lucretia boldly interceded in the debates at the convention. As Edwin Atlee read the Declaration of Sentiments, composed by Garrison and a committee that included Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Unitarian minister Samuel J. May, Lucretia offered two suggestions. First she proposed that references to “Divine Revelation” and the Declaration of Independence be transposed, to read “With entire confidence in the over-ruling justice of God, we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation as upon the EVERLASTING ROCK.” With this statement, abolitionists identified themselves as Americans committed to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, but they also claimed the higher authority of Divine law. Lucretia also helped craft a phrase expressing abolitionists’ firm commitment to the ultimate truth of abolition: “We may be personally defeated, but our principles never.”¹²

Her participation in the convention violated the period’s gender and racial norms. Outside of Quaker meetings, the sight of a woman speaking publicly to a “promiscuous” audience of men and women was a rare event. Delegates to the convention remembered Lucretia’s comments long after. Robert Purvis recalled that Lucretia’s “beautiful face was all aglow.” After Lucretia used the word “transpose,” James Miller McKim, a young delegate from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, twisted around in his seat to catch a glimpse of the woman who knew the meaning of the term. While Lucretia’s participation surprised the delegates, the very existence of an interracial anti-slavery convention scandalized Philadelphians. The young anti-slavery movement had already inspired violent opposition, such as the attacks on Prudence Crandall’s school for African Americans in Canterbury, Connecticut. As a result, the convention took the precaution of posting a guard outside the building on Fifth Street. Still, some local philanthropists, fearing retribution, refused to participate. Their refusal prompted another short speech by Mott, who argued “right principles are stronger than great names. If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?”¹³

Under Mott’s influence, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s declaration set out the basic assumptions of the emerging abolitionist movement. The declaration compared abolitionists to the patriots of the American Revolution, but noted their rejection of “all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage; relying solely upon those which are spiritual.” As a result, their method of resisting slavery was to contrast “moral purity to moral corruption” and to “overthrow prejudice by the power of love.” In addition, members of the American Anti-Slavery Society agreed that “no compensation should be given to the planters emancipating their slaves—because it would be a surrender of the great fundamental principle, that man cannot hold property in man.” Finally, the declaration included a statement of support for free produce: “We shall encourage the labor of freemen rather than that of slaves, by giving a preference to their productions.” The declaration reflected the same “purity of motive” that had captured Lucretia’s attention in Heyrick’s pamphlet.¹⁴

Four days later, Mott and the other female spectators helped to found the interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), which would outlive every other women’s anti-slavery group in the United States. Mott remembered that “at that time I had no idea of the meaning of preambles, and resolutions, and votings.” But her ignorance, exaggerated to emphasize the newness of their venture, had as much to do with religion as it did sex. Mott was clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Women, with over a decade of experience in the internal politics of the Society of Friends. But Quakers determined doctrine by consensus rather than votes. Outside of the Society of Friends, her experience was limited to one “colored” convention (probably one of the Annual Conventions of Colored Americans, held in Philadelphia from 1830–1832) and the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The women asked James McCrummell, a member of Philadelphia’s black elite and a signer of the American Anti-Slavery Society’s Declaration, to chair the meeting, the only time in the organization’s history that such a measure was taken. Their choice of McCrummell also explicitly linked the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society to the American Anti-Slavery Society, further attesting to their commitment to racial equality.¹⁵

The meeting appointed a committee composed of white and black women, including Mott, Margaretta Forten (daughter of James Forten), Sarah McCrummell (James McCrummell’s wife), Esther Moore, and Lydia White, to write the organization’s constitution. Submitted on December 14, the constitution stated that “slavery, and prejudice against colour, are contrary to the laws of God, and to the principles of our far-famed Declaration of Independence.” Article 1 noted the society’s intentions to distribute accurate information about slavery, “dispel prejudice against color,” and improve the condition of free African Americans. Article 10, added to the constitution in January 1834, demonstrated the women’s years of commitment to free produce, recommending “that the Members of this society should, at all times and on all occasions, give the preference to free produce over that of slaves believing that the refusal to purchase and use the products of slave labour is one of the most efficient means of abolishing slavery.”¹⁶ Their language echoed Heyrick’s, showing the continuing influence of her emphasis on the potential of individual moral power to end slavery.

Like other voluntary societies, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had a president, corresponding secretary, treasurer and other officers to run the organization. Hicksite Esther Moore was named the organization’s first president. Lucretia was the first corresponding secretary, and, after she was succeeded by the gifted Mary Grew, she served a short stint as president before becoming a regular member of the Board of Managers. Abba Alcott, mother of the young Louisa May Alcott, whose husband Bronson was teaching at the nondenominational Germantown Academy, was on the original Board of Managers. While white women dominated the official positions, African American women usually held at least one office. Margaretta Forten was the society’s first recording secretary.¹⁷

One historian astutely describes the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society as “cliquish.” Though its membership eventually exceeded two hundred women, a core group ran the society and determined its direction. Kinship, as well as friendship, bound these members together. Charlotte Forten, wife of James, along with her daughters, Margaretta Forten, Sarah Forten, and Harriet Purvis, were all members. Grace Bustill Douglass, an Orthodox Quaker and wife of the successful black barber Robert Douglass, joined with her daughter Sarah, a schoolteacher. By 1836, Mott’s two oldest daughters, Anna and Maria, were active in the organization. Women in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society also shared similar economic status. Both white and black members came from the middle and even elite classes of Philadelphia society. Some of the white and black women worked as school teachers, but other members did not need to rely on paid employment. African American members were especially unusual in this regard, as most free black women in Philadelphia were among the poorest residents of the city, working primarily as domestic servants, laundresses, or street vendors.¹⁸

The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society represented a breakthrough for women’s activism. Though female anti-slavery societies proliferated in the coming years, the society was one of only a handful in existence in 1833. The mingling of black and white women stoked the fear of social equality and even “amalgamation,” that is, miscegenation. And women’s entrance into the often violent debate over slavery soon provoked a crisis over women’s proper place in the public arena.

While the city of Philadelphia was home to a large and vibrant community of free blacks, some of whom were prosperous by any standards (James Forten and Robert Purvis both had fortunes of $100,000), the era of Jacksonian democracy saw an assault on their status. Black Philadelphians endured routine violence, including race riots in 1834, 1835, and 1837. Following the August 1834 riot, which killed one, injured numerous others, and destroyed forty-four black-owned churches and buildings, Lucretia and James visited a damaged neighborhood and estimated the property losses at $5,000–6,000. The destruction prompted their friends Robert and Harriet Purvis to buy a country home in Bristol Township. Then, when Pennsylvania revised its constitution to expand voting rights for white men in 1838, the state simultaneously disenfranchised African American men. Robert Purvis and other free blacks argued that the new constitution “laid our rights a sacrifice on the altar of slavery,” in order to win favor from southern states. This loss of their citizenship further endangered the uneasy freedom of the state’s African American population, now lacking the political power to resist further attacks on their civil rights. Reminding readers of the fugitive slave clause in the U.S. Constitution, Purvis asked, “Need we inform you that every colored man in Pennsylvania, is exposed to be arrested as a fugitive from slavery?”¹⁹

In this intense period, Lucretia and the members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society met monthly, undertaking three main tasks. First, in order to disseminate information about slavery, they donated money to support the American Anti-Slavery Society and subscribed to newspapers like the Liberator and the Herald of Freedom, edited by New Hampshire abolitionist Nathaniel P. Rogers. They also sponsored public lectures, including one by British abolitionist George Thompson, whose scheduled appearance in Boston in 1835 incited a mob. Similarly, American activists, such as Samuel J. May, Robert Purvis, James Forten, Jr., Charles C. Burleigh, and Benjamin Lundy, regularly addressed the society’s meetings. Second, in order to improve the condition of blacks in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society established a committee to visit African American schools and offer aid. By 1838, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had taken on financial responsibility for the school run by member Sarah Mapps Douglass. Finally, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society continued the work begun by Philadelphia women in 1831, petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and the territories, and to outlaw the interstate slave trade. One such petition declared slavery “a sin against God, and inconsistent with our declaration that equal liberty is the birth-right of all.”²⁰

The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society also encouraged women to join the anti-slavery movement and to take on more public roles. In her initial role as corresponding secretary, Lucretia exchanged letters with women in other young anti-slavery societies, such as Lucy Williams of the Brooklyn, Connecticut, Female Anti-Slavery Society, who sought advice from an “elder” in the movement.²¹ In their own state, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society published an address “To the Women of Pennsylvania” describing their “duty as a citizen of the United States” to leave the “hallowed precincts of the home” for the “halls of Congress.” They urged women to circulate and sign anti-slavery petitions. Adopting a strategy used by other anti-slavery women, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society drew attention to free women’s obligations to enslaved women: “Yes, although we are women, we still are citizens, and it is to us, as women, that the captive wives and mothers, sisters and daughters of the South have a particular right to look for help in this day of approaching Emancipation.”²² When Angelina Grimké, the daughter of a prominent South Carolina slaveholding family and a new member of the society, became an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the first woman to hold such position, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society issued a public statement of approval. Describing Grimké’s path as a “new field of labor,” they acknowledged that she would receive “not only the sneers of the heartless multitude, which are the portion of every faithful abolitionist, but grave charges of infractions of the laws of female delicacy and propriety.” The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society urged anti-slavery societies around the country to give her “your support, your sympathy, and your prayers.”²³

Angelina Grimké’s 1836–37 public speaking tour, which included an address to the Massachusetts Legislature, provoked immediate backlash. Congregational ministers in Massachusetts issued a Pastoral Letter that denounced women who adopted the male role of “public reformer” as “unnatural,” and recommended that churches close their doors to female speakers. Catharine Beecher, daughter of the eminent evangelical and colonizationist Lyman Beecher, published an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females. Addressed to Angelina Grimké, the essay condemned female anti-slavery societies and petition campaigns (despite Beecher’s own activism on behalf of the Cherokee), instead advising that women use their influence not to “exasperate” but “for the purpose of promoting a spirit of candour, forbearance, charity, and peace.”²⁴

In Philadelphia, Benjamin Lundy’s new journal, the National Enquirer, printed a series of responses to Catharine Beecher from “L.” “L” was undoubtedly a member of Philadelphia’s abolitionist community, and may have been Lucretia Mott. While Lucretia did not usually write for publication—she did not believe she had any particular talent for it—she did occasionally publish short letters or articles in anti-slavery newspapers. And as a defender of Angelina Grimké’s right to speak out against slavery, Mott believed that Beecher merited a thorough rebuttal. In her first article, L denied that colonizationists could properly be considered abolitionists. She defended William Lloyd Garrison from Beecher’s aspersions and suggested Beecher herself was a member of the “half-way” or “neutral” party (unacceptable to uncompromising Garrisonians). L also denied that the tactics of abolitionists were dangerous, inciting “envy, discontent, and revengeful feelings” in the black community. Instead, L pointed out that black abolitionists were “universally acknowledged to be kind, respectful, sober, and forgiving, and above slander, even from Miss Beecher.”²⁵

Shortly after L began publishing her articles, Lundy printed Angelina Grimké’s responses to Beecher. Grimké defended the anti-slavery movement as the ultimate “school of morals in our land.” She argued that individuals had rights as moral beings, and that while the slave’s rights had been “plundered,” his “right and title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher.” Grimké made the same argument on behalf of her sex: “My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.” ²⁶ Grimké defined equality as inherent to every human being, echoing Quaker belief in the inner light and William Ellery Channing’s “Idea of Right.” L probably concluded that Grimké’s response was much more effective than her own, as she stopped publication of her series. Still, not all Garrisonians agreed with Grimké’s assessment of women’s “right” to speak against slavery. As abolitionists deliberately and repeatedly violated the nation’s racial and sexual order, the outcry intensified.

As the controversy over women’s role in the anti-slavery movement grew, Mott took her place on the national stage. After the separation, Mott’s skills as a preacher made her an important ambassador from Philadelphia Friends to Quakers across the country. In 1833, she and her school friend Phebe Post Willis, a cousin of James from Long Island, traveled on a religious mission through New York and Massachusetts, ending in Mott’s birthplace of Nantucket, where Quakers were in a “tried state” following a series of disownments, further reverberations from the schism in Philadelphia. Despite these tensions, Mott relished her time with Phebe, writing “sisters could not have harmonized more entirely.” But the Orthodox journal The Friend pointed out that Lucretia was traveling under false pretenses by claiming she represented the Society of Friends. Classifying Mott as a Hicksite, they argued “the Society of Friends are in no way responsible for her doctrines or movements.” (“Have you seen how I am posted in ‘The Friend’?” Mott asked Willis).²⁷

Though she still had young children, Lucretia’s calling meant that she was frequently away from home. In May 1834, after several of her children had recovered from scarlet fever, Lucretia left on a three week journey to Southern Quarterly Meeting. Anna Coffin lived with the Motts and helped with domestic duties, as did Lucretia’s older daughters. Nevertheless, James experienced her departure as an emotional as well as a practical trial, writing, “I am not a whit better reconciled to a separation than I was a year ago,—but must make the best of it.” The following spring Mott commented that “I have been less from home this winter than for several years past,” a turn of phrase that suggested she had traveled quite a bit. But the demands of childrearing also declined in the coming years. In 1836, eight-year-old Martha and eleven-year-old Elizabeth went to a school run by Anthony Sharp in Mt. Holly, New Jersey, where Lucretia’s cousin Rebecca Bunker was a teacher. In October of that year, eighteen-year old Maria married Edward M. Davis, a Quaker merchant, member of the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society of City and County of Philadelphia, and, in 1838, one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, a state-wide organization affiliated with the American Anti-Slavery Society.²⁸ Lucretia approved whole-heartedly of both her sons-in-law, who were as devoted to abolition as the rest of the family.

In 1836, in response to the emergence of female anti-slavery societies across New England and the mid-Atlantic, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) suggested the formation of an executive committee to oversee the various groups. Benjamin Lundy praised the idea, writing “Much good would doubtless result from the united exertions, of such minds as those of A. E. Grimké, Lucretia Mott, Mary Parker, Mary Clarke [sic], M. W. Chapman, L. M. Child” and others. Parker, Maria Weston Chapman, and Lydia Maria Child were all members of the Boston society, while Mary Clark hailed from the Concord, New Hampshire, Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1834. While the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society approved the proposal, anti-slavery women from Maine to Pennsylvania disagreed about what they could and should do to end slavery. An executive committee offered the possibility of a female alternative to the American Anti-Slavery Society. But some women suggested they preferred to integrate the American Anti-Slavery Society, and still others remained skeptical of the utility of a national organization.²⁹