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INTRODUCTION

Heretic and Saint

ON FEBRUARY 11, 1849, LUCRETIA MOTT gave an unusual sermon in her usual place of worship, Cherry Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia. The petite fifty-six-year-old Quaker minister was one of the most famous women in America. During the previous year alone, she had addressed the first women’s rights conventions at Seneca Falls and Rochester, Seneca Indians on the Cattaraugus reservation, former slaves living in Canada, and the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Yet her audience on that winter day was filled, not with Quakers, African Americans, reformers, or politicians, but with white medical students from Thomas Jefferson Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Many of these students were born in the south. And, although a female medical school would open in Philadelphia the next year, all these students were men.¹

Her sermon was unique to its time and place. In 1849, Philadelphia was the fourth largest city in the United States, with a population of 121,376. The diverse city was home to the largest population of free blacks in any northern state. It also contained the oldest and most prestigious anti-slavery society in the country, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded by Quakers. With borders touching the slave states of Delaware and Maryland, Pennsylvania was regularly infiltrated by fugitive slaves. Philadelphia’s black abolitionists established a Vigilance Committee to aid these fugitives. Mott was a member of two anti-slavery organizations, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Both of these interracial organizations denounced slavery as a sin and called for its immediate end. Yet, despite the presence of this vibrant anti-slavery community, the majority of Philadelphia residents were openly hostile to abolitionism. In the previous decades, the City of Brotherly Love had witnessed multiple race riots. Philadelphia’s elites cultivated ties with their southern counterparts. Southern slave owners were welcomed in the city’s churches, museums, concert halls, and universities. Philadelphia’s free blacks were not.

In order to appeal to these young southern gentlemen, Mott relied on the striking contrast between her virtuous femininity and her anti-slavery radicalism. Walking the streets of Philadelphia, and seeing these young men “separated from the tender care, the cautionary admonition of parents, of a beloved mother or sister,” Mott communicated her maternal interest in their lives. She wished to guard their “innocence and purity” against the “allurements” and “vice” of the city. But she did not dwell on the predictable topic of sexual immorality. Instead, she declared, “I am a worshipper after the way called heresy—a believer after the manner which many deem infidel.” Mott challenged the medical students to question the received wisdom of organized religion and polite society on the “great evil” of slavery. She prayed that they were “willing to receive that which conflicts with their education, their prejudices, and their preconceived notions.” Mott wanted to open their hearts and minds to the degrading and brutalizing reality of plantation slavery. This sermon was not the first, or last, time she addressed white southerners on the topic. Her demure appearance as a Quaker matron enabled her to preach her radical message of individual liberty and racial equality to a wide variety of audiences, including those hostile to her views.²

Throughout her long career, Mott identified as a heretic, adopting the term to explain her iconoclasm as much as her theology. In another speech, she declared that it was the obligation of reformers to “stand out in our heresy,” to defy social norms, unjust laws, and religious traditions. Her choice of the physical verb “to stand” was deliberate. Mott rejected the idea that the peace testimony of the Society of Friends meant quietism. She told an audience of abolitionists that, “the early Friends were agitators; disturbers of the peace.” She advised them to be equally “obnoxious.”³ Lucretia followed her own counsel. She used her powerful feminine voice and her physical body to confront slavery and racial prejudice as well as sexual inequality, religious intolerance, and war. Though she demonstrated enormous personal bravery, she did not advocate violence. Instead, as she did in her sermon to the medical students, she used reason and example to contrast “moral purity” to the “moral corruption” of slavery.⁴

Too often Lucretia Mott is misunderstood as a “quiet Quaker.”⁵ Scholars have followed the lead of nineteenth-century commentators like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote that she “worshipped” Mott, regarding her as “above ordinary mortals.”⁶ Reviled by her opponents, Mott was hailed by her friends as a pious, benevolent, self-sacrificing woman, the perfect nineteenth-century wife, mother, and grandmother. Such perfection has intimidated historians and biographers. Despite her iconic status in the history of the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements, there have been only two scholarly biographies of her in the last sixty years. In the most recent biography, Valiant Friend, published in 1980, Margaret Hope Bacon argues, “Victorians made a living legend of Lucretia Mott, emphasizing her sweetness and calm.” Bacon tried to correct this image, focusing on the repressed anger that drove Lucretia’s activism and threatened her health, only to be undermined by her publisher, who proclaimed Mott a “gentle Quaker” on the cover.⁷

Mott’s very real devotion to her family further complicates efforts to rescue her from sainthood. In 1884, Anna Davis Hallowell published a joint biography of her grandparents, James and Lucretia Mott, Life and Letters. In many ways, Hallowell’s instinct to meld the two biographies was correct. The couple’s private and public lives were deeply intertwined. Lucretia and James were married for almost fifty-seven years. They had five children who lived to adulthood. James was an important abolitionist in his own right. Very deliberately, however, Hallowell emphasized “the domestic side” of Lucretia Mott. She wanted to “offset the prevailing fallacy that a woman cannot attend to public service except at the sacrifice of household duties.”⁸ Like other Quaker ministers, Mott’s religious calling required her to balance her vocation and her family life. Ironically, her ministry made her more economically dependent than other female activists. Since Lucretia could not accept any pay for preaching, a sin denounced by the Society of Friends in their phrase “hireling minister,” she relied on James for financial support.⁹ Lucretia was a traditionalist in other ways as well. She used her married name for her entire adult life, for example, even after it became fashionable among other women’s rights activists, including her sister Martha Coffin Wright, to include their maiden names. Nevertheless, Hallowell’s description of Mott’s homemaking skills—particularly in cooking Nantucket delicacies and sewing rag carpets—softens her radicalism.¹⁰

To borrow one of her favorite terms, Mott has become a “cipher.”¹¹ She used the word to describe women’s invisibility in the nation, neither citizen nor chattel. Its other meaning, a code or puzzle, also describes Mott. Unlike many of her fellow activists, including William Lloyd Garrison and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Mott did not leave a significant body of published writings. She did not keep a diary, except for during one three-month period. The first scholarly edition of her correspondence, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, Holly Byers Ochoa, and myself, reveals letters filled with family news rather than introspection. And she rarely commented on her oppressive public image as a domestic saint.¹²

Without abandoning the private realm, this biography shifts attention back to Mott’s public life, and places her at the center of nineteenth-century struggles for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. As a leading abolitionist and women’s rights activist, Mott also illuminates the complex personal and political connections between the two movements. With black abolitionists, Mott and her allies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society were among the first and most important advocates of the controversial doctrine of immediatism. Mott was also one of the earliest and most visible supporters of women’s rights. When other white female activists prioritized women’s suffrage, however, Mott insisted that feminism must include racial equality.¹³

Mott was the foremost white female abolitionist in the United States. An anti-slavery purist who advocated immediate emancipation, moral suasion, abstinence from slave-made products, and racial equality, Mott was in the interracial vanguard of the anti-slavery movement. Historians usually associate this radical position with William Lloyd Garrison, but, in many ways she was more Garrisonian than Garrison himself. One of a small group of women present at the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, Mott’s conversion to immediate abolition predated Garrison’s by several years. For thirty-six years, she and the white and black members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society urged abolitionists to be uncompromising in their opposition to slavery. Lucretia’s remarkable history with this interracial organization provides a crucial correction to recent scholars, who exclude women by privileging the radicalism and egalitarianism of political abolitionists and revolutionaries.¹⁴

One of the founders of the transatlantic women’s rights movement, Mott’s deep interest in feminism never trumped her support for abolition or racial equality. The latest studies of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement rightly focus on the racism of most post-Civil War suffragists. This postwar narrative of conflict between feminists and abolitionists also influences the way historians tell the story of the birth of the women’s rights movement. According to legend, the meeting of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 precipitated the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. In this version, the women’s rights movement began with male abolitionists’ rejection of Mott and other female delegates to the convention.¹⁵ Rather than a reaction to sexism, however, Mott’s recounting of the London convention suggests that women’s rights were a logical extension of interconnected humanitarian concerns. She also believed the snub of the female delegates less important than the convention’s anti-slavery goals. Eight years later at Seneca Falls, Mott urged convention participants to consider the relationship between women’s rights and other reforms, including anti-slavery, prison reform, temperance, and pacifism. After the American Civil War, as other activists split over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, she and her allies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society fought segregation on Philadelphia’s railway lines and streetcars.

Though Mott’s name is inextricably linked to the Society of Friends, her birthright membership only partially explains her involvement in abolition, women’s rights, peace, and other reforms. The Society of Friends believed that the divine light of God was in every human being. From their beginnings in seventeenth-century England, this doctrine allowed Friends to accept women as preachers and elders. It also contributed to American Quakers’ slow and agonizing rejection of slavery in the eighteenth century. Throughout her life, Mott argued that the inner light was “no mere Quaker doctrine.”¹⁶ But her relationship to the Society of Friends was contentious. To her dismay, Quakers tempered their faith in the individual conscience with a series of hierarchical meetings; they also appointed elders and ministers to discipline members. After she was recognized as a minister in 1821, Mott supported the divisive preacher Elias Hicks, who criticized the Quaker leadership for invoking the authority of Scripture over the inner light, abusing their disciplinary power, and betraying their anti-slavery testimony.

The political aftermath of the American Revolution also shaped Lucretia’s anti-authoritarianism. On her native Nantucket, Lucretia learned of whaling captains and female ministers who challenged the legitimacy of traditional political and religious powers. While Quaker schools educated her in the evils of slavery, the diverse whaling industry brought Lucretia and her family into contact with the ongoing conflicts over slavery and free labor in post-emancipation Massachusetts. Her religious and political dissent coalesced during a period of protracted schism in the Society of Friends and democratic upheaval in American politics. Following the Separation of 1827, dividing American Quakers into “Hicksite” and “Orthodox,” even the more radical Hicksites repudiated Mott’s broad attack on all forms of hierarchy, though they never disowned her, fearing her speaking ability might be lost to them. Mott believed she could do more good as a member of the Society of Friends than as a religious come-outer. Preaching the primacy of the inner light, she challenged her fellow Quakers, and all Americans, to break the bonds of sectarianism, elitism, and slavery.¹⁷

A determined egalitarian, Mott was still human. She was witty, outgoing, and a steadfast friend. She was also overly modest, critical, and stubborn. Though she could not abide division among her allies, she loved a good argument. And Mott was an ideologue. Her allegiance to the founding principles of the American Anti-Slavery Society was unyielding. Much to the annoyance and frustration of other abolitionists, Mott chastised anyone who deviated from these ideals. Her preference for principles over pragmatism had a real—and undoubtedly negative—impact on individual slaves. For example, in 1847, she and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society protested British abolitionists’ purchase and liberation of Frederick Douglass. Thereafter, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society refused to donate any of its considerable funds to buy the freedom of fugitives.¹⁸ Finally, her distaste for the moral compromises involved in party politics made her a poor strategist. She viewed American politics as corrupted by slavery. As a result, she was not particularly interested in the way that political organizing might secure the abolition of slavery or the equal rights of women.

Mott’s kind of fame was peculiar to the nineteenth century. A renowned orator, she rarely wrote anything for publication. Like other Quaker ministers, Mott preached extemporaneously, moved by the divine spirit within. Yet as her sermon to the medical students indicates, her reputation extended beyond religious audiences. Mott’s effectiveness as a speaker is not always evident in printed versions of her sermons, found in newspapers reports or phonographic (shorthand) transcriptions. Audiences—including Quakers and non-Quakers, Europeans and Americans, southerners and abolitionists, politicians and clergy—flocked to hear this eloquent and feminine woman for her controversial subject matter; many of them responded to her hopeful vision of human progress, from sin, tradition, and slavery to personal morality, equality, and freedom.¹⁹

Mott spoke before thousands of people, but for much of her life the public repudiated her message. Most early nineteenth-century Americans did not oppose slavery. Most Americans believed racial equality was impossible. And most Americans viewed marriage and motherhood as women’s highest and only calling. Mott challenged these political and social orthodoxies of nineteenth-century America, prompting oratorical challenge, public derision, and even mob violence. She was vilified as a heretic and condemned as an ultraist. While Mott embraced these derisive labels, her allies promoted her sainthood, imagining her as a nineteenth-century domestic goddess, an example of their movement’s legitimacy. In between these extremes lived the real Lucretia Mott.