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CHAPTER 1

Nantucket

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Despite the island’s official neutrality, many individuals in Lucretia’s family took sides. Indeed, her cousin Benjamin Franklin was a leading revolutionary. But other Folgers were British sympathizers. Lucretia’s mother, Anna Folger, was known as one of “Bill Folger’s tory daughters” (he had six of them). According to Anna Davis Hallowell, William Folger lost his extensive holdings during the war, when colonials seized most of his ships. “Being declared a tory,” Hallowell wrote, “he was no favorite with his companions; they liked to tell, at his expense, that the only thing he had ever found in his life was a jack-knife, sticking in a post above his head.”¹⁸ William’s brother Timothy, who helped Benjamin Franklin chart the Gulf Stream, was charged with treason in 1780 alongside Kezia Folger Coffin (the charges were dropped). Perhaps chastened, Timothy Folger left the increasingly unfriendly atmosphere of Nantucket for Wales.¹⁹

After the war, Nantucketers quickly buried their loyalist past and seized burgeoning economic opportunities. Surviving his neighbors’ enmity, William Folger turned to farming and raising sheep. When he died on Nantucket in 1815, he left a “mansion house” and an estate worth almost $6,000.²⁰ Lucretia’s cousin, renowned whaling merchant William Rotch, was an early victim of revolutionary sentiment, losing his goods at the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Yet, after the war, Rotch was among the first to sail into British harbors flying the American flag. As the whale oil trade with Britain foundered during the Revolution, William Rotch conceived of a plan to sell seal skins to China. In 1785, his ship the United States returned from the Falkland Islands with 13,000 seal skins, Nantucket’s first venture in the China trade. This initiative later proved fateful for both the Coffin and Folger families.²¹

By the time Lucretia’s mother married her childhood sweetheart, Thomas Coffin, in 1790, Nantucket had begun to rebuild its economy. Thomas’s older half-brother, Micajah Coffin, helped his brother begin his career as a mariner and merchant. One of Thomas’s earliest voyages was in the ship Lucy, which sailed from Nantucket in 1785. In 1790, Micajah bought the 160–ton brig Lydia for £720, allowing Thomas to buy a 1/8 stake in the ship for an investment of £78. The brothers estimated that the Lydia could carry 800 barrels of sperm whale oil. With the oil priced at $1.08 per gallon in 1790, at 31.5 gallons per barrel, the Lydia could bring home a gross revenue of $35,280, equivalent today to $659,000.²²

Thomas Coffin had reason to be optimistic about his fortunes; his decision to name his second daughter Lucretia, after an ancient Roman heroine, rather than giving her a family name, may have reflected his political hopes for the young republic. But in contrast to Thomas’s private dreams, in 1793, the year of Lucretia’s birth, Nantucket’s cohesive Quaker community was disintegrating. Seeking economic opportunities elsewhere, many residents left the island, including Lucretia’s Rotch cousins, who had all moved to New Bedford by 1795. Nantucket Monthly Meeting tried to prevent the exodus and recover the sense of community by withholding minutes for transfer to another meeting, necessary if a Quaker moved from an area bounded by one monthly meeting to another.²³ But the Quaker elders were also partly responsible for the growing disaffection of their fellow islanders. From 1754, when three members were disowned for grazing more than their fair share of sheep on the Nantucket commons, the number of disownments by the meeting grew exponentially. Nantucket Monthly Meeting disciplined only 90 members before 1770; in the following decade the meeting disowned 227 members. And the record disownments continued.²⁴

Led by the clerk of the women’s meeting, Sarah Barney, this local purge was part of a broader reformation in American Quakerism, and American Protestantism in general, which aimed to rid the society of sin. Often referred to as the “Great Awakening,” this spiritual renewal, characterized by the ministries of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, preceded the revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century. But while other evangelical denominations like the Methodists sought converts by preaching individual salvation from sin, the Quakers aimed both to purify their discipline against worldly encroachment and, ironically, to protect their community from dissolution.²⁵

Notably, the elders targeted marriage out of meeting (in other words, to non-Quakers). Though membership in the Society of Friends was easily achieved through birth or a statement of faith and desire for membership, out-marriage was a violation of Quaker discipline. As historian Lisa Norling notes, the meeting disproportionately targeted female Quakers who embraced new romantic ideas by marrying for love rather than duty to family or community. Nantucket’s Quaker elders viewed young women’s romantic sensibilities as dangerously individualistic.²⁶

Although she was never a sentimental person, this era in Nantucket Quakerism made an indelible impression on Lucretia. She agreed with the reforms inspired by early Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, who rejected the growing materialism of American society. His testimony against slavery included a refusal to use any products of slave labor, such as the indigo dye used in clothing. But throughout her life she strongly opposed the Society of Friends’ marriage policy, which condemned not only interfaith matches, but also the Quakers who approved or attended them. In an 1842 letter, Lucretia complained “Our veneration is trained to pay homage to ancient usage, rather than to truth, which is older than all. Else, why Church censure on marriages that are not of us?—on Parents conniving? On our members being present at such &c.? Oh, how our discipline needs revising—& stripping of its objectionable features.”²⁷ Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.

As Quaker elders suppressed dissent at the turn of the nineteenth century, so too did Nantucket families, with lasting impact on Lucretia. She recalled her grandmother, Ruth Coffin Folger, as equally strict with her grandchildren. On one visit to her grandparents’ home, Ruth informed Lucretia that because she had misbehaved, she would not be allowed to go on a hayride with her grandfather. Lucretia remembered this incident forty years later, writing to her sister and brother-in-law that, “What I had done left no impression, but her unkindness I couldn’t forget.”²⁸ Perhaps frustrated by their authoritarian streak, Lucretia never bonded with her Folger grandparents. Though both lived more than a decade into the nineteenth century, no correspondence with her mother’s parents survives.

Lucretia’s nagging memory of her grandmother’s discipline shows how the larger crisis in religious authority on Nantucket influenced her views. In the letter recalling the incident, Lucretia wondered, “When shall we learn that retaliation is never in imitation of [‘]Him who causeth his sun to shine on the evil & on the good’?” Mott continued, criticizing Orthodox believers for crying “heresy” at every sign of religious progress, a favorite theme of hers, in this case referring to the controversial sermons of Unitarian radical Theodore Parker. As Nantucket’s elders exerted their power, they not only prepared the ground for migration to friendlier shores, but also inspired dissenting voices, then and a generation later.²⁹

Economically, the family prospered. Thomas Coffin continued to work with his brother Micajah, and their ship the Lydia made a number of profitable voyages in the 1790s. Captained by Micajah’s son Zenas Coffin, who at his death left the largest individual fortune in Nantucket history, the Lydia sailed to the whaling grounds off the coast of Brazil in 1793–94. Though it is not recorded how much whale oil the Lydia brought back, a later voyage to Brazil procured 1,000 barrels.³⁰ By 1797, Thomas had earned enough money to purchase a large, elegant house on Fair Street for his growing family, which included Lucretia, her handicapped older sister Sarah or Sally (as was typical in this period, the family rarely mentioned her), and younger sister Eliza. As Nathaniel Philbrick points out, “where a person lived in Nantucket depended on his station in the whaling trade.” While shipowners and merchants lived up the hill from the wharves on Pleasant St., captains lived on Orange Street, with its magnificent view of the harbor.³¹ Fair Street lay between the two, perhaps indicating Thomas’s aspirations.

While Thomas pursued his various business interests with Micajah Coffin, Anna, like many Nantucket wives, kept a small store selling “East India goods” (one street in Nantucket was known as Petticoat Lane in honor of this tradition). She operated the store from the left front room, while the right front room—the parlor—hosted many gatherings of the six Folger sisters and visiting Quaker preachers. The absence of their husbands and the requirements of their stores led many Nantucket women, including Coffin, to undertake trips to the mainland “to exchange oil, candles, and other staples of the island, for dry goods and groceries.” Hallowell described these trips as “serious undertakings,” if not quite so serious as a whaling voyage.³²

In 1801, Anna Coffin opened her parlor to visiting Rhode Island Quaker minister Elizabeth Coggeshall. The previous year, Thomas Coffin had embarked on an extended voyage to the Pacific on the ship Trial. Coggeshall talked to Anna, Lucretia, and her siblings, who now included three-year-old Thomas and one-year-old Mary, “on the importance of heeding the inward monitor, and of praying for the strength to follow its directions.”³³ This visit influenced Lucretia in two important ways. First, it cemented her commitment to the inner light, or individual conscience, above all other forms of religious and temporal authority. Though basic to Quaker principles, this belief became increasingly controversial over the course of the nineteenth century as Quakers, guided by the influence of evangelicalism, turned more to Scripture and church doctrine for authority.

Second, Lucretia was curious about Coggeshall’s association with the infamous Hannah Barnard. In 1798, Coggeshall and Barnard embarked on a religious mission to England, which led to Barnard’s 1802 disownment for her rational, some said “deist,” interpretation of Quaker theology. As Mott later recalled, Barnard had been censured because “when she had preached against war, as never having been prosecuted by the command of the Divinity, she had been accused of denying the authenticity of the Scriptures; and whereas Jesus had faith in Moses, therefore she denied Jesus, and was an infidel.” In the view of English Quakers, Barnard’s peace sermon challenged a literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. The controversy surrounding Barnard’s visit to England reverberated throughout American Quakerism, paving the way for the Hicksite split of 1827, during which the Society of Friends divided into two factions not only over the place of the Scriptures and the inner light in Quaker belief, but also over the growing power of the elders and the propriety of doing business with slavery.³⁴

Though Coggeshall expressed her uneasiness with Barnard’s views, her visit to Nantucket brought Lucretia into vicarious contact with a female minister who was not afraid to challenge the Quaker elders or their growing faith in the Bible, and who became an example for the young girl. This influence was reinforced when Lucretia later attended Nine Partners Boarding School in Hudson, New York, run in part by Barnard in the 1790s. Yet Barnard’s story also suggested the costs of female dissent. Anne Mott, Lucretia’s mother-in-law, sent her various papers relating to Hannah Barnard’s disownment, including “Hannah Barnard’s creed, opposed to any ‘scheme of salvation.’” After reading (and undoubtedly rereading) them, Lucretia passed these papers on to other Friends until they were lost.³⁵

Like all Quaker children in Nantucket, Lucretia also learned to hate slavery and admire the economic principles underlying the whale fishery. At Quaker school in 1797, she first saw British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s widely distributed image of the packed slave-ship Brookes, which made such an impression that she told her children and grandchildren about it. First printed by the thousands in 1789, the diagram, showing 482 slaves crowded into a ship for transport from Africa to Jamaica, remained a powerful weapon in the anti-slavery movement. The image probably arrived in Nantucket via a Quaker ship captain. Nantucket’s close economic ties to Britain intersected with religious ties to English Quakers, who dominated the anti-slavery movement there. Alternatively, British sailors may have passed on copies of the image to their American counterparts when socializing in port.³⁶

Likewise, Lucretia’s reader, Quaker Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement, encouraged children’s empathy by offering lessons on slavery in the context of amusing and instructive discussions of natural history. Originally published in London at the height of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, the first American edition was published in Nantucket’s sister port, New Bedford, in 1799. Written as a conversation between the fictional Harcourt family and their orphaned friend Augusta, the book sought to “excite the curiosity of young persons” regarding how cloth, paper, glass, metal, and other common objects were made. Appropriately for Nantucket’s schoolchildren, Mental Improvement began with a discussion of whaling. When Augusta asks Mr. Harcourt why men undertake such dangerous voyages, he replies that they do it to earn a living, noting that whaling not only supplies Europe with candles and oil, but also encourages free trade and friendship among nations, “by which each party may reap advantage by interchanging the superfluous produce of different climes, and exercising the mutual good offices of love and kindness.”³⁷ When the Harcourts’ son Henry asks about sugar, Mr. Harcourt replies that it is farmed by “negro slaves,” “snatched from their own country, friends, and connections, by the hand of violence, and power.” After hearing Mr. Harcourt’s account, the children conclude to abstain from all goods produced by slave labor, including sugar, rice, coffee, and calico, as had hundreds of thousands of British citizens. Sophia Harcourt, the oldest daughter, proposes to discuss maple sugar as a substitute for cane, describing the maple tree as a potential weapon against slavery: “A tree so various in its uses, if duly cultivated, may one day supply us with sugar; and silence the arguments of the planters, for a continuation of the slave trade.”³⁸

Though slaves were rare on Nantucket by the late eighteenth century, Lucretia and the other children on the island did have contact with free blacks. African Americans increasingly made up the crews of Nantucket whaling vessels (her uncle Micajah asked a New Bedford colleague to find him four African American sailors for the Lydia in 1801), making them part of the fabric of everyday life on the island. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nantucket town had an established black neighborhood, known as New Guinea. Lucretia’s mother Anna Folger Coffin borrowed some of her many colorful and practical sayings (for instance, “Handsome they that handsome be”) from a black man named Pompey. Anna also referred to “Black Amy,” who lived with Lucretia’s grandmother Folger, who “didn’t like to be told to do, what she was just going to do.” As the story suggests, in the Folger household, African Americans filled traditionally subordinate roles as servants and laborers, if not slaves. Yet even though “Black Amy” was a domestic servant, she had the luxury of grousing. Within the Folger household, whites and blacks, employers and workers, had thus negotiated the terms of free labor. Anna and her children recognized in Amy’s complaint the desire for autonomy and respect. Years later, Anna Folger Coffin joined Lucretia at the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.³⁹

At the age of ten, Lucretia had a common but nevertheless traumatic experience, when the family believed her father had been lost at sea. Fearing the dangers of whaling voyages, Thomas Coffin had been anxious to abandon the business for some time. In 1788, off the coast of the French colony of Martinico (Martinique), Thomas reported to a passing ship that, “he had lost his mate and four hands, and when he left the coast, he had only one man able to keep the deck.” In 1790, Thomas fitted the Lydia for whaling only after he and his brother Micajah concluded they could not succeed trading with France or England.⁴⁰ In 1800, Coffin followed the inspiration of William Rotch and turned to the China trade in South American sealskins, a line hardly less lucrative than whaling. In 1799, Mayhew Folger, Anna Coffin’s younger brother, had captained one of the first ships solely devoted to sealing, the Minerva. On this one voyage, Folger and his crew accumulated 87,000 skins, gathered by clubbing the mammals to death. Though the practice was vicious, the profits were enormous: Folger brought back $40,000 from this trip (unsurprisingly, by 1807, when Folger commanded the Topaz, the seals had disappeared and he had to look for new sealing grounds).⁴¹

In 1800, Coffin invested in the ship Trial (or Tryall) with Moses Mitchell, Paul Gardner, Jr., and Thomas Starbuck. Mitchell and Gardner were members of the Richard Mitchell family, which had “a controlling interest in virtually all of Nantucket’s ventures to China.” Captained by Coffin, the Trial headed for the Juan Fernández island group off the coast of Chile. But rather than killing the seals themselves, Lucretia’s biographer and granddaughter Anna Hallowell claimed, the crew allegedly “bought” skins in the Straits of Magellan and sent them to China by another ship. Whether an invention of Coffin’s squeamish great-granddaughter, or an expression of Coffin’s Quaker principles, the decision to send an initial load of seal skins on to China guaranteed the voyage’s profits.⁴²

This decision proved wise when the Spanish authorities in Valparaiso arrested Coffin the next year, condemning his vessel, charging a “violation of neutrality.” In the 1790s, Spanish seizure of American ships was a common occurrence. The Spanish did not allow any foreign trade in their American colonies, though between 1796 and 1800 they allowed neutral ships from countries like the United States to bring goods owned by Spanish merchants into their ports. Nevertheless, extensive illegal trading persisted. Spain’s enemy Britain pierced their defenses, seeking to turn the Spanish colonies into a market for their manufactured goods. American whaling vessels, whose Nantucket captains combined their close economic ties to Britain with increasing distrust of imperial and religious authority, may have aided their efforts. While the Spanish authorities suspected U.S. ships of bringing contraband into their ports (often under the guise of distress), the Americans suspected the Spanish of merely wanting to loot their ships. Often, the Spanish suspicions proved true. In 1801, Captain Swain of the Mars (another ship owned by the Mitchells and Paul Gardner, Jr.), tried to smuggle $2,000 worth of luxury goods into the port of Callou. Captain Swain’s cargo was seized, though the ship was sent on its way. In 1808, Lucretia’s uncle Mayhew Folger’s ship, the Topaz, was also condemned on its way back from Pitcairn Island, where he had discovered the survivor mutineers of the HMS Bounty.⁴³

Seeking to recover his investment in the Trial, Coffin stayed in Chile for three years, only returning when the courts ruled against him a final time. When he arrived home in Nantucket, “he learned that his family had heard nothing of him for more than a year, and had believed him lost.”⁴⁴ During that time, Anna and her children undoubtedly hoped for Thomas’s return. As time passed, however, they came to accept their lot as a familiar one in a whaling community, and began to grieve his passing. Anna and ten-year-old Lucretia, who took on the responsibilities of an eldest child, probably worried what would happen to the family without the economic support of a husband and father.

Ecstatic at their father’s return, Lucretia and her sisters and brother begged Thomas Coffin to tell and retell the story of his journey. Like Captain Swain, Coffin may have believed he had been “robbed, plundered, and put into prison, set at liberty and ordered to leave the country without ever finding out what we had done to cause them to treat us in this manner.” But, strikingly, the trip only enhanced the family’s sense of tolerance. After boarding with a family in Valparaiso, Thomas Coffin offered a “warm-hearted defense of the Catholics of South America” on his return. He also taught his children to say “good morning” and “good night” in Spanish.⁴⁵ Coffin’s return imbued the young Lucretia with a sense of optimism that came in handy in the long battle against slavery; Frederick Douglass later described one of her speeches as among the most “hopeful” he had ever heard.⁴⁶ More speculatively, the loss of her father’s ship may have convinced Lucretia to privilege morality over profit. Throughout her adult life, Lucretia insisted her Quaker brethren renounce the consumption of and trade in slave goods like cotton and sugar. She aimed at replacing Melville’s “sanguinary,” greedy Quaker with something more consistent.

Even after her father’s return, the seizure of the Trial brought the Coffins into the political and legal struggle to dismantle slavery and elevate free labor in northern states. In 1804, Stephen and Joshua Hall sued Thomas Coffin, Paul Gardner, Jr., and Thomas Starbuck for $200 in damages following the Trial’s confiscation. The plaintiffs, the Halls, had not sailed on the Trial, but their indentured servant James Mye, of Mashpee Wampanoag and free African American ancestry, had been hired by Coffin and his partners for 1/100th of the ship’s profits, also known as a lay. After the court of Common Pleas ruled against them, the ship’s partners appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The Halls asserted that Coffin had only pretended to hunt seals, intending instead to “take on board” and trade illicit (probably British) goods in the Spanish colonies of South America, knowing full well that his ship might be condemned. Deceived by Coffin, the Halls had thus been “wholly deprived of the expected and stipulated benefits and profits of a hundredth part of the skins which might have been acquired and sold aforesaid, and have lost the time, labor and service of the said James Mye from that time to this.”⁴⁷

As with whaling and sealing, Quaker traders managed to reconcile their religion to their business. Though the discipline of the Society of Friends forbade “fraudulent trade,” this testimony did not prevent Quakers like Swain (or possibly Coffin) from smuggling, especially in a foreign land. The disciplinary assertiveness of Quaker elders on Nantucket, combined with the politics of the American Revolution, made many sea captains ambivalent about any authority except their own. And given their economic experiences during the Revolution, most Nantucket merchants abhorred any restrictions on their ability to trade. In their attempts to traffic with Spanish colonies, they became early missionaries of free trade, recently popularized by Adam Smith, deliberately violating Spain’s mercantile restrictions in favor of their economic interests.⁴⁸

Ultimately, the case rested not on the intricacies of international trade but on state laws regarding the status of Native Americans and the nature of indentured labor. In their appeal, Coffin and his partners cited a 1789 Massachusetts law placing the Mashpee Indians under the care of overseers and guardians. As the court interpreted the law, only the board of overseers of the poor had the power to apprentice Indian children. The guardians of the Indians, answerable to the overseers, also had the right to bind out impoverished Mashpee children. The Hall brothers produced a 1793 apprenticeship agreement between their father and the guardians of the Mashpee that bound Mye for the next ten years, until he reached age twenty one. Upon his death, Joshua Hall, the father, assigned his wife and sons “all right and title conveyed to him by the indenture to the service of James Mye.” The Supreme Court ruled strongly in favor of Coffin and his partners. The judges objected to the Hall brothers’ assumption of the terms of an indenture that they had not personally signed. They ruled the assignment “a nullity.” But, the judges continued, even if the Hall brothers did have a formal indenture agreement with the Mashpee guardians, “they would not have had the right to send him [Mye] to the south pole, to the end of the globe, in their service.” The court speculated that the guardians might have had this right, but then only if instruction in navigation was part of the agreement.⁴⁹

In the decision, the judges, and by extension Coffin and his partners, objected to the idea that a person’s labor (indeed the entire individual) could be owned by another, to the extent that labor could be traded, inherited, or hired out. In the view of the court, the Halls’ proposed attempt to profit from James Mye’s labor was akin to slavery. In challenging this illegal indenture, Coffin, Gardner, and Starbuck aided the triumph of free over slave labor in the North.⁵⁰ Whether young Lucretia was aware of her father’s actions, the issues in Hall v. Gardner—race, native rights, slavery, patriarchal authority—remained at the very forefront of her consciousness until her death over seven decades later.

Lucretia’s father’s victory reflected the growing connection between Quaker interests and Quaker politics. As many historians have noted, Friends were the “vanguard of the industrial revolution”; their principled stance against slavery was conveniently attuned to their economic interests.⁵¹ Nantucket crews were paid in shares, so if the ship’s owners lost money, as in the case of the Trial, the sailors did as well. And, though whalers hired sailors of color, crewmen like Mye often bunked in segregated and cramped quarters and ate inferior rations.⁵² Stranded in Chile, the Trial’s crew were forced, like Thomas Coffin, to make their way home. Yet the freedom granted by Hall v. Gardner allowed the young man of color to gain a measure of economic and personal independence. Mye’s descendents were able to buy property after working as mariners and carpenters along Cape Cod. By 1850, Mye’s son and namesake could proclaim his prosperity by purchasing a daguerreotype of himself wearing a top hat, frock coat, vest, and bowtie.⁵³

The ordeal of the Trial ended Thomas Coffin’s seafaring career and marked the conclusion of Lucretia’s childhood on Nantucket. In 1804, Thomas moved his family to Boston, leaving behind the anxious life of the sea for a potentially more stable career as a merchant. He continued his business relationship with his brother, selling oil and candles that Micajah delivered to Boston, buying bricks to be sent back to Nantucket, or advancing funds to Micajah’s associates.⁵⁴ In doing so, the Coffins became part of the larger migration from Nantucket in the early national period, joining the Rotchs and others who sought more economic opportunity, and perhaps greater religious freedom, elsewhere.

The move was more difficult for Lucretia than for the younger Coffin children. She left behind family, friends, and a place where she felt at home, whether on the wharves and beaches, or in the cobblestone streets and wood frame buildings. Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that her grandmother “always seemed to regard this first home with an affection different from that which she felt for any subsequent dwelling-place. In after years she taught her children, to the third generation, to cherish its traditions.” Included in these Nantucket traditions, according to Hallowell, were “simplicity, moderation, temperance, and self-restraint in all material things” and “abhorrence of falsehood and injustice.”⁵⁵ Though Lucretia never lived on the island again, she visited at least seven times, with her visits increasing in number as she got older. It was on Nantucket that she developed her conscience. Lucretia’s education continued at Nine Partners Boarding School, where she became part of a larger family of Quaker reformers.