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CHAPTER 2

Nine Partners

IN 1806, AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, LUCRETIA COFFIN left the common schools of Boston for Nine Partners Boarding School in Dutchess County, New York, about 200 miles west. Nine Partners provided Lucretia and other girls with an extraordinary education, giving her skills superior to those of most men at that time. But the school offered more than book learning; it further exposed her to the tensions between Quaker simplicity and prosperity, their anti-slavery testimony and the slave economy, their peculiarity and their connections to the larger society. In the spirit of eighteenth-century reformers, Quaker educators tried to purify their religion without losing members. Yet the balance between authority and the individual conscience was difficult to maintain. One’s inner light might just as easily counsel rebellion as obedience, a problem for the school, the Society of Friends, and indeed for a liberal republic like the United States. As Lucretia grew from gifted student to teenaged teacher, from spirited adolescent to young wife, she was ideally placed to question the authority society bestowed according to age, gender, race, and faith.

After their move to Boston in 1804, Thomas Coffin and his family had prospered. Initially establishing a home on Milk Street, in 1806 the family moved to a house in the more desirable neighborhood of Green Street. The following year, Thomas purchased a brick house on Round Lane, later renamed William Street, for $5,600. His warehouse, located on Central and then Long Wharf, the largest of eighty wharves in the commercial city, was doing very well. Long Wharf accommodated large ships, carrying goods from up and down the eastern seaboard as well as from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.¹ Coffin had the means to send three of his children to Quaker boarding school. Lucretia and her younger sister Eliza attended Nine Partners, while Thomas, Jr., went to Westtown in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Though the Nine Partners tuition was only £26 per year, this expense was a luxury most families denied their female children.²

Living only two years in Boston, Lucretia never identified with the city that would become a hotbed of radical abolitionism in the 1830s. After the religious homogeneity of Nantucket, Boston must have seemed a profoundly un-Quaker city. In the colonial period, Puritan Boston was known for its persecution of Quakers such as Mary Dyer. By the time the Coffins moved there, the city had become increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan, but it was still dominated by the established Congregational church.³

Lucretia’s parents wanted to give their children a “guarded” Quaker education. Whatever their disagreements with Nantucket Monthly Meeting, Quakers such as the Coffins would have been worried about the impact of these outside influences on their children. In response to these concerns, Quaker boarding schools like Westtown and Nine Partners, near Poughkeepsie, were located in rural settings far from the temptations of the city.⁴

Founded by New York Yearly Meeting in 1796, Nine Partners offered “useful & necessary learning” and immersion in the religious culture of the Society of Friends. The founders of Nine Partners feared that Quaker children were not learning the history or principles of the Society of Friends, and as a result had become “prey to the Custom of the World and its habitudes.” Seeking to prevent a new wave of disownments, Nine Partners School sought to discourage materialism and inculcate the Quaker doctrines of “obedience to the inward Principle of Light & Truth” and “Silence & Attention.”⁵

Though it depended on income from tuition, Nine Partners accepted impoverished pupils. Quaker educators worried that poor children might abandon the religion to achieve economic success. In its place, the members of the school committee offered themselves as examples of pious upward mobility. As educator and Nine Partners founder James Mott, Sr.—grandfather of Lucretia’s future husband—remarked to his colleague Joseph Tallcot, “I am willing to own, that a proper degree of what some call the world’s polish, or, in other words, a remove from that rusticity that the children of some Friends manifest, is not incompatible with a religious character.”⁶ Like Nantucket Quakers, Mott believed that Quaker peculiarity should not stand in the way of success in business or education.

Most important for Lucretia, Nine Partners, following Quaker religious practice, was coeducational. Following the Revolution, female education expanded in the country at large. American educators viewed women as having an essential role in the new republic in raising their children to be virtuous citizens. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated, “The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” But such calls for female education were not calls for equality. Rush wanted to educate women to be “republican mothers,” capable of raising virtuous male citizens. Until the 1820s, when Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary began instructing women in advanced subjects like math and science, most girls attended separate schools offering curriculums that included embroidery, drawing, and other feminine skills.⁷

At Nine Partners, male and female students received the same education in reading, writing, math, accounts, and grammar, but the curricula were not identical. Nine Partners was surrounded by a working farm, and the school’s plan called for classes to include “Business & Domestic Employment” suitable to the age of the student. Business and domestic training were implicitly segregated by sex. Only girls enrolled in the sewing classes. Girls and boys also learned and lived in separate classrooms and quarters “to prevent any improper familiarities.” As in Nantucket, however, Quakers viewed entirely distinct spheres for men and women as unnatural. So despite rules discouraging contact, no doubt instituted in part to appease parents, the school’s founders welcomed “innocent & cheerful intercourse” among students under the appropriate supervision.⁸

The school’s board, made up of male and female members of New York Yearly Meeting, was a Who’s Who of the Quaker elite. Lucretia first met abolitionist Elias Hicks, whose ministry divided the Society of Friends in the 1820s, when she was a student at Nine Partners. Hicks was a founding member of the school committee. Before her disownment in 1802, Hannah Barnard, the “deist” pacifist female preacher, also served on the board, as did her traveling companion Elizabeth Coggeshall. Quaker educators James Mott, Sr., and Joseph Tallcot were longstanding members of the committee, and both served as superintendent of the school.⁹

Mott, Lucretia’s future grandfather-in-law and the superintendent of Nine Partners during her attendance, profoundly influenced her. Under his direction, the school’s plan called for teachers to be kind and affectionate with their students, using “as little chastisement” as possible. Mott articulated his views for a larger audience in 1816 in Observations on the Education of Children; and Hints to Young People on the Duties of Civil Life. He advised parents to avoid both overindulgence and severity in raising their children. In Mott’s view, “when the dread of punishment predominates, the disposition is generally artful,” a position articulated by critics of slavery as well as opponents of corporal punishment. Instead, he advised parents to treat the child as a companion and to teach by example: “the necessity and propriety of practicing on all occasions, the most scrupulous integrity, liberality, fair dealing, and honour, consistent with the rule of doing unto others, on all occasions as they would be done unto, ought to be early and forcibly inculcated, by precept and example.” Mott extended his insights on childrearing into public life, where he urged young people “to remember others, and fulfill the obligations we are under of doing good.” Like other Quakers, Mott advocated modesty, moderation, and charity, but he also preached democracy. He believed in respecting others by avoiding bigotry and condescension.¹⁰

James Mott, Sr.’s egalitarian approach to education was not unusual in the age of revolution. His pamphlet was one entry in a flood of child-rearing tracts published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Influenced by John Locke and other philosophers, these experts argued that children too had inalienable rights that should not be abused. Instead of physical discipline, they advised parents to use psychology and reason to teach their children the essential values of morality, self-control, and good citizenship. British writer Maria Edgeworth urged parents to practice preventive methods rather than creating unreasonable restrictions. For example, she suggested parents place valuable china and tempting sweets out of reach. Teach habits of obedience, she recommended, by asking children to do things they were already inclined to do. Once children were old enough, parents should use reason. In this way, Edgeworth wrote, “children, who have for many years experienced, that their parents have exacted obedience only to such commands as proved to be ultimately wise and beneficial, will surely be disposed from habit, from gratitude, and yet more from prudence, to consult their parents in all the material actions of their lives.”¹¹ Despite the proliferation of such advice books, Lucretia especially valued Mott’s words. Later, as a new wife and mother, she corresponded regularly with her husband’s grandfather. She read his “instructive” and “useful” book when it was published, and later reread it when she had a house full of young children.¹²

As Anna Coffin prepared Lucretia and Eliza for the journey to Nine Partners, she followed the school’s guidelines for simplicity. Each girl packed 2 bonnets, 1 cloak, 2 gowns for winter and 2 for summer, 4 handkerchiefs to wear around her neck, 4 shifts, 4 pairs of stockings, and 4 aprons. The girls brought no books or money, as the school discouraged inappropriate reading material and class distinctions among students. The school also advised parents not to demand frequent visits from their children. The school committee regarded such visits as disruptive to the education of their students and potentially dangerous to their model Quaker community. Just a few decades earlier, Quaker reformers had accused parents of encouraging their children’s desire for material rather than spiritual happiness. Indeed, returning students might bring worldly influences, or, alternatively, lose the “polish” that Nine Partners wished to instill. The Coffins carefully followed the school’s instructions; Lucretia and Eliza not only missed the birth of their youngest sister Martha in 1806, they did not go home for two years.¹³

Nine Partners provided Lucretia and Eliza with a substitute family of like-minded Quakers. Lucretia recognized the school’s reader, Mental Improvement, and the illustration of the slave-ship Brookes, from her school days on Nantucket, but she was also exposed to new ideas. Despite the school committee’s concern that their students read only Quaker authors or the Bible, Susanna Marriott, a British Quaker in charge of the sewing room, introduced Lucretia and her peers to the didactic poetry of William Cowper. Lucretia quoted Cowper’s most famous poem, “The Task,” from memory throughout her life, applying its criticism of blind adherence to social norms to the problem of slavery and women’s rights:

Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

To reverence what is ancient, and can plead

A course of long observance for its use,

That even servitude, the worst of ills,

Because delivered from sire to son,

Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.

Importantly, Cowper also wrote anti-slavery poems, which Marriott, an abolitionist, probably shared with her students. “The Negro’s Complaint” began,

Forced from home and all its pleasures

Afric’s coast I left forlorn

To increase a stranger’s treasures

O’er the raging billows borne.

The image of the African being taken from home for the profit of another appealed to this Nantucket Quaker, who disapproved of the accumulation and display of wealth for its own sake. Another Cowper poem, “Pity for Poor Africans,” reinforced Priscilla Wakefield’s admonition to boycott slave produce:

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

Especially sugar, so needful we see;

What! Give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea?

Marriott later taught New York suffragist and reformer Emily Howland, who likewise credited Marriott for introducing her to the anti-slavery movement.¹⁴

As the founders intended, Lucretia’s instructors taught Quaker doctrines, of which opposition to slavery was one. Students learned how the Society of Friends differed from other Christian denominations:

We decline the use of ordinances, viz. baptism and the sacrament, believing that worship can be acceptably performed in silence; that war and oaths are unlawful; that no human appointment can qualify a person to preach the gospel; and our ministers receive no pay for preaching.

They acknowledged and defended their peculiarities of “plainness of dress, simplicity of language, and avoiding complimentary expressions,” and their belief that all days of the week were equally holy.¹⁵

The Society of Friends believed in religious and human progress, and part of this progress was the recognition of slavery as wrong. Students at Nine Partners were drilled in the success of the British abolition movement, which by 1807 had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade (the United States followed suit in 1808). The example of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson taught Lucretia and other students that “zeal and perseverance, in a right cause, seldom fail of success.” Students also learned that many Quakers continued to use the products of slave labor, and attributed this lapse, as did Cowper, to the “bias of custom.” But they learned the immorality of slave products from their teachers. James Mott Sr. limited his family’s consumption of sweets to maple sugar, produced without the aid of slaves.¹⁶

Students also studied the Bible, but Friends disagreed over the appropriate place of Scripture and the inner light in their discipline. Joseph Tallcot, former superintendent of Nine Partners, promoted the reading of the Bible in all schools, Quaker and non-Quaker alike; most Protestants in early nineteenth-century America accepted the wisdom of this position without question. Other Quakers, however, believed that the Scriptures were subordinate to the inner light. Abigail Mott, a member of the Nine Partners school committee, wrote: “attend still more to that divine principle in your own hearts … it is by submitting to the teachings of this inward monitor, that we both learn, and are enabled to fulfill, our duty to God and to one another.”¹⁷ In the ensuing decades, such divisions among Friends grew increasingly important. Like most American Protestants, Lucretia and other Quakers had a deep familiarity with the Bible, reciting passages from memory. But they declined to allow their knowledge to become veneration, as it had among mainstream Protestants.

Such immersion in Quaker values shaped students into devoted believers, but it also provided the basis for the individual subjectivity that had threatened religious unity throughout their history. For fun, Lucretia and her friends played “meeting,” as other American children might play church or school, imitating the women’s meeting for discipline by monitoring their schoolmates’ behavior. Such games trained young women for leadership in the Society of Friends, and reinforced the individual moral authority of the inward monitor. Following their conscience, each Quaker student had the ability—even the duty—to take a position on issues of pedagogy and doctrine. As a result, her education gave Lucretia a sense of agency and purpose that led her to clash with her Quaker teachers.¹⁸

Nine Partners struggled with one of the signal questions of post-Enlightenment reform, namely how best to replace the punishment of the physical body with the discipline of the mind. Eighteenth-century British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham argued that prisons could control convicts more efficiently if they arranged their cells in a circle with a jailer at the center. Believing themselves watched at all times, prisoners would feel compelled to behave. Bentham saw his so-called “Panopticon” as humane innovation that reduced the need for brutal punishments. Though inspired by the same premises, Quakers took a very different approach. In Philadelphia, reform-minded Friends built the Walnut Street Prison in 1790, which had workshops for lesser criminals, but sixteen individual cells for harder cases. These inmates were given Bibles and kept in solitary confinement, not as punishment, but to encourage contemplation and redemption. The problem with these approaches soon became apparent. Authorities relied less on corporal punishment, but observation encouraged paranoia and guilt, while solitude induced insanity.¹⁹

Lucretia’s experience at Nine Partners led her to question this—in the words of philosopher Michel Foucault—“perfect exercise of power.” James Mott, Sr., advised teachers at the school to confine children as punishment, but urged that “they ought always to be confined in sight, and never where there is a danger of their being affrighted.” But despite the superintendent’s instructions, Lucretia saw one male student locked in a dark closet and given only bread and water as sustenance. She was so disturbed by this that she violated rules separating boys from girls, and “contrived to get into the forbidden side of the house where he was, and supply him with bread and butter under the door.” Lucretia later commented on the Philadelphia prison system, “There has always seemed to me great cruelty in doing such violence to a man’s social nature, to say nothing of the effect on the nervous system, as to place him in solitary confinement.” Convinced of the moral capabilities of every individual and fearing for the impact of punishment on the criminal, Lucretia advocated persuasion as means of inducing good behavior.²⁰

Lucretia became increasingly aware of the tension between authority and rebellion. In the winter of 1809, she would have learned that her uncle, Captain Mayhew Folger, had discovered the sole surviving mutineer from the HMS Bounty, John Adams, also known as Alexander Smith.²¹ In 1807, Captain Folger’s sealer, the Topaz, departed Nantucket for the South Pacific and eventually Canton (now Guangzhou). The first part of his voyage was relatively uneventful. Folger placed two members of his crew in stocks and irons, but otherwise the crew remained in good order. Then the Topaz met bad weather, and after two months of rough passage the crew docked in Tasmania for repairs and provisions. Island-hopping looking for seal grounds, Folger headed for Pitcairn, where he discovered the Bounty mutineer, who presented him with the Bounty’s compass and chronometer. Off the coast of Chile, the Spanish seized the Topaz and took it to Valparaiso, where Folger saw his brother-in-law’s brig, the Trial, still sitting in the harbor and passed word to a British officer of Adams’s presence on Pitcairn. While Folger waited, 21 of his 49 crewmen deserted, and he went into debt trying to support the rest. In 1809, a full year after his discovery of the Bounty mutineer and the subsequent seizure of his ship, Folger finally recovered the Topaz from the Spanish and won $44,000 in damages.²² Though Mayhew Folger was a ship captain like William Bligh, he clearly sympathized with the Bounty’s rebellious crew, calling Adams a “worthy man.”²³ From Folger, Lucretia learned that rebellion was a legitimate response to undeserved and arbitrary power. If authority was necessary for the safety of a ship (or society), then it had to be tempered with kindness, morality, and justice.

In the protective politically and theologically liberal community of Nine Partners, the teenage Lucretia Coffin blossomed. She was smart and vivacious, a petite young woman with a striking brow, large bright eyes, and brown hair. Lucretia’s radiant personality enabled contemporaries to describe her as attractive and even beautiful. She excelled in school, and by 1808 she was working as an assistant to Deborah Rogers, the head female teacher. Nine Partners was initially intended for students from ages seven to fourteen, but the previous year, possibly for financial reasons, the school decided to allow older students to continue. Since fifteen-year-old Lucretia had mastered the academic subjects available, she moved into teaching. Outside dame or finishing schools, female teachers were still unusual in the United States. As historian Joan M. Jensen notes, “Quakers were not the only women to teach but they were among the first.” Two decades later, Catharine Beecher pioneered teaching as a profession for all women. The transition Mott made from student to teacher became commonplace. Thirteen-year-old Harriet Beecher (later Stowe) entered her older sister’s Hartford Female Seminary in 1824, becoming a teacher in 1829.²⁴

As an assistant teacher, Lucretia formed close friendships with other instructors at Nine Partners. Her friend and future sister-in-law Sarah Mott, granddaughter of superintendent James Mott, Sr., described the “good times” they had at school: “there are several teachers & assistants on each side & after the cares of the day, we can enjoy an hour or two of fine converse around the sitting room fire, with a double relish.” Like Lucretia, Sarah became a teacher, but she was close in age to her pupils, whom she described as “lovely girls, who interest every feeling of my heart for them.” In addition to Sarah Mott, Lucretia’s school chums included Sarah’s cousin Phebe Post (later Willis).²⁵

Despite the wishes of the founders, this social and intellectual camaraderie sometimes included romance, as it soon did for Lucretia and James Mott, Sarah’s twenty-year-old brother, another teacher at the school. A tall, blond, blue-eyed but reserved junior male teacher, James already knew Lucretia through his sister Sarah; Lucretia had visited their home on Long Island during a school vacation. Drawn to her passion and her intelligence, James invited Lucretia to join a French class that he and other teachers organized, where their flirtation deepened.²⁶

James and Lucretia met and fell in love during a transitional period in American courtship. For most of the eighteenth century, parents exerted enormous influence over their child’s choice of spouse. But after the American Revolution, young people gained more autonomy, choosing their mate based on love and mutual attraction with little parental interference. Because of their emphasis on the inner light, members of the Society of Friends emphasized the importance of individual choice and true love much earlier than other American Protestants.²⁷

Yet James and Lucretia undoubtedly sought their parents’ approval before their courtship progressed. As in other parts of the religion, the Society of Friends sought to balance individualism with the authority of the meeting. Historian Barry Levy describes Quaker marriage discipline as a “spiritual obstacle course.” Quakers disapproved of premarital sex (which could lead to disownment), so early in their relationship young couples were instructed to notify parents and other senior Friends of their intentions. If these elders approved, the couple announced their engagement to their meeting, which then undertook an investigation of the match that could last as long as two months. Of course, the marriage discipline also included harsh rules for marrying outside meeting or otherwise disobeying the community. The Coffins and Motts approved the union from the beginning; Thomas Coffin had, after all, already entrusted his daughter to the Mott family.²⁸

Teaching alongside her future husband, Lucretia expressed her first frustration at sexual inequality. In 1805, when he was seventeen, James Mott, Jr., became an assistant teacher. By May 1807 he was making £70 per year as a teacher at Nine Partners, but Deborah Rogers, the head female teacher, made only £40 per year. One year later, Mott was making £100 per year, while Lucretia, as Deborah Rogers’s assistant, worked without pay. Only in 1809 did Rogers receive a raise to £100, but by that time James earned £250. James’s salary may have reflected nepotism rather than sexism, but Lucretia clearly saw the gap as an example of male privilege. The outraged Lucretia “resolved to claim for myself all that an impartial Creator has bestowed.”²⁹

If Lucretia had already shown signs of rebelliousness, her choice of partner was conventional. Five years older than Lucretia, James Mott was raised in North Hempstead, Nassau County, then known as Cowneck. Due to the insular Quaker world of Long Island, probably similar to that of Nantucket, James’s parents’ were distant cousins, direct descendants of Adam Mott, a Quaker who settled in Hempstead in 1655, and his second wife Elizabeth Richbell, whose family owned the first land patent to Mamaroneck, in Westchester County, directly across Long Island Sound. James’s father Adam Mott was the son of Sarah Willis and Adam Mott, Sr. Anne Mott, James’s mother, was the daughter of Mary Underhill and James Mott, Sr.

Like their neutral pacifist coreligionists on Nantucket, Long Island Quakers struggled during the American Revolution. Adam Mott, Sr., a farmer, was robbed by colonials and commanded by the British to furnish their army with wood. James Mott, Sr., a prosperous merchant in New York City prior to the Revolution, bought a mill in Mamaroneck, where he retreated from the British-controlled city in 1776. But his daughter Anne vividly recalled life in Westchester County during the Revolution, when she hid cattle from thieves and concealed the profits from coffee hidden in her father’s mill.³⁰

Slavery also played a prominent role in James Mott’s family history. According to Lucretia’s granddaughter, the family genealogist, “most Friends” on Long Island held slaves prior to the American Revolution. New York Yearly Meeting prohibited slaveholding in 1774, but, as historian Graham Hodges writes, in an area with a large African American population of 21,000, “New York Quakers lagged behind their brethren elsewhere in the colonies in shedding their commitment to slaveownership.” The natural rights ideology of the Revolution helped further anti-slavery sentiment. Black New Yorkers participated in revolutionary uprisings and put pressure on their owners to free them. British influence also may have prompted Quakers to manumit their slaves. In Virginia in 1775, British commander Lord Dunmore issued his famous proclamation offering freedom to slaves who fought for the king. By 1776, the British army, supported by black soldiers, occupied New York City. As Hodges notes, “New York under British rule became an emporium for black freedom.” Accordingly, in 1776, James’s paternal great-grandmother Phebe Willets Mott Dodge, known as Grandmother Dodge, a traveling minister in the Society of Friends, freed her slave Rachel, after years of “concern of mind on account of holding negroes in bondage.”³¹ Dodge’s act was the first manumission in Westbury (Long Island) Monthly Meeting. In 1778, Dodge’s neighbor and friend Elias Hicks, then thirty years old, freed a slave named Ben. These belated manumissions still put Quakers ahead of their fellow New Yorkers, who instituted a gradual emancipation plan in 1799. On July 4, 1827, the state of New York released all slaves in its jurisdiction. But liberty remained unattainable for many former slaves. The children of So-journer Truth, a former slave from Ulster County, were bound as apprentices as late as 1851.³²

In 1785, James’s parents Adam and Anne Mott married in Mamaroneck. After their wedding, they lived with Adam’s parents while he ran a flour mill in what is now Port Washington. Their second child and first son James was born in 1788. By 1790, they were living on their own on a farm near the mill. According to their great-granddaughter, Anna Davis Hallowell, the Motts prospered: “The simple, frugal, diligent habits of this rural life; the kindly, gentle manners and self-watchfulness inherited from many Quaker ancestors, added to much intellectual culture and refinement, made a model household.” ³³ As on Nantucket, religious beliefs seemed to further, rather than impede, Quaker ability to prosper. Adam and Anne Mott strictly followed Quaker guidelines for simplicity in dress and manner and were respected members of their religious community. Adam served as clerk of the Westbury men’s meeting for business, while Anne served as clerk of the women’s meeting. In 1803, the family moved to Mamaroneck to live on a farm adjacent to that of James Mott, Sr., becoming partners in his mill. But Jefferson’s 1807 embargo of Britain and France caused the family some financial difficulty, and so young James became a teacher at Nine Partners.³⁴

According to Lucretia, James Mott, Jr., “was never in his element” as a teacher, as he preferred not to be the center of attention. Once Lucretia and James decided to make their life together, Lucretia arranged for the couple to live with her family in Philadelphia, where they had moved in 1809. Thomas Odiorne, a Massachusetts native who brought the new and booming business in cut nails to Pennsylvania, had invited Thomas Coffin, whom he probably met through his second wife, Mary Hussey of Nantucket, to run one of his manufactories outside Philadelphia. Coffin invested $20,000 of his own money in the concern, and initially the factory, at French Creek in Chester County, did well, with sales reaching $100,000 per year. Coffin also continued his career as a merchant, establishing a commission, or wholesale, business in the city. Though James had no special experience with business, Thomas Coffin helped his daughter by inviting his son in-law to become a partner in the venture with an investment of $3000.³⁵

Philadelphia had long been the hub of the Society of Friends in America, and the Coffins and Motts felt comfortable in the City of Brotherly Love, where Quakers still had significant, if declining, influence. Important for Lucretia, Philadelphia was home to a prominent anti-slavery movement, as well as the largest community of free blacks in the northern states. The most important anti-slavery society in the country, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had been founded in Philadelphia in 1775, five years before Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery. Founded by Quakers, the organization grew to include prominent lawyers, politicians, and businessmen. Benjamin Franklin served as the society’s president in the 1780s. In the ensuing decades, Philadelphia became a “city of refuge” for blacks fleeing slavery from below the Mason-Dixon Line. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society offered legal assistance to these fugitives and otherwise promoted the end of slavery through moderate legal and political means. As a consequence, by 1810, people of African descent numbered 9,656, 10.5 percent of the total population of 91,877. James Mott joined the Abolition Society; Lucretia did not. Such organizations were closed to women and African Americans, and Lucretia’s new life as a wife, mother, and schoolteacher, left her little time for activism. But the city put her in contact with slavery and anti-slavery in ways that her childhood in Nantucket and adolescence in New York had not.³⁶

In 1810, James wrote to his parents of his plans to make his connection to the Coffin family permanent. Of going into business with Thomas Coffin, he shared his reasoning: “when we take into view that the business here is an established one, and the person with whom connected, a man of experience and prudence, I believe you will say with me that this is the most eligible.” Like many young businessmen, James took into account Thomas Coffin’s reputation in the community. In a credit economy, economic success was built on such personal ties. He also informed his parents that he and Lucretia had decided to announce their intention to marry in their monthly meeting, setting off the period of inquiry by the meeting. Both parents gave their final approval, and James and Lucretia declared their engagement to their fellow Friends on February 20, 1811. Though James expressed his anxiety, he “felt as calm and composed during the whole operation as if I had been speaking before so many cabbage stumps.”³⁷

After their monthly meeting investigated the suitability of the match, James and eighteen-year-old Lucretia were married on April 10, 1811, in Pine Street Meeting House, with both families in attendance. Like other Quaker couples, the two were married in a ceremony without a presiding minister to “consecrate or legalize the bond.” Instead, they stood before the meeting and vowed to be “loving and faithful.” Though it would become fashionable for nineteenth-century feminists in other denominations to drop the promise of obedience in marriage vows, there was no such clause in the Quaker ceremony because there was no, in Lucretia’s words, “assumed authority or admitted inferiority; no promise of obedience.” “Their independence is equal,” she continued, “their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.”³⁸

Yet the backdrop for egalitarian Quaker marriages was a patriarchal marriage relation established by English and American common law. No matter how progressive her vows, Lucretia Mott was officially a feme covert. As an unmarried feme sole, she had enjoyed an independent legal status and the right to control her earnings. But after her wedding her husband became her legal, financial, and political caretaker. Mott and other married women were “covered” by their husbands.³⁹

Lucretia and James shared a deep physical as well as emotional connection throughout their marriage. Under the close supervision of Lucretia’s parents, they may have kissed or shared some physical intimacy before their marriage, but they probably did not have sex. Though premarital pregnancy rates spiked in this period of American history due to a transition in courtship practices, Lucretia did not give birth until a very respectable sixteen months after her wedding. Their sexual relationship lasted for many years. She had her sixth and last child at age thirty-five, when she and James celebrated their seventeenth anniversary. Lucretia and James were together constantly, so few letters survive to document their relationship. But after James’s death in 1868, a devastated Lucretia refused to sleep in the bedroom they had shared. She once described her feelings for James as “perfect love.”⁴⁰

The young couple’s anticipation of owning a “house of their own” faltered as their early marriage coincided with a turbulent economy. Jefferson’s embargo, intended to insulate America from the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars, had hurt many northeastern merchants. The growing possibility of war between the U.S. and England furthered the economic disruptions. As James reported to his parents, “Many failures have taken place, and no doubt many more will. All confidence is destroyed, and those who have money keep it in their own hands.”⁴¹

These economic troubles also affected the whaling industry, prompting a visit from Lucretia’s uncle, Mayhew Folger, and his family. In addition to sharing his complete adventures on the Topaz, Folger introduced the Coffins and Motts to “Ohio fever.” With business in Philadelphia stagnant and war with England begun, many looked to Ohio as a place of opportunity. In 1812, Thomas and Anna Coffin traveled to Massillon, Ohio, to consider moving there permanently. Though the Coffins returned to Philadelphia, Folger decided to relocate, living there until his death in 1828. James considered migrating with the Folgers as he searched for a way to provide a “comfortable living” for his family. Instead of heading for Ohio, however, James, pregnant Lucretia, and their daughter Anna, born in August 1812, moved to Mamaroneck in early 1814, where James worked at his Uncle Richard Mott’s mill. After six months, the young family, including their new son Thomas Coffin Mott, born in July 1814, returned to Philadelphia, where James found work in a wholesale plow store. James and Lucretia’s anxiety over their finances was partially relieved by their joy over their growing family.⁴²

Even when distracted by domestic concerns, Lucretia and James always paid close attention to race relations in Philadelphia. Despite the city’s reputation for anti-slavery, the situation of free blacks was far from equal. In a brief moment of racial cooperation during the War of 1812, white Philadelphians asked African American men for help in fortifying the city against potential British invasion. But whites also feared that the free black population would increase as the city became a destination for fugitive slaves. In January 1815, James wrote to his parents that southern Quakers and slaveholders had begun to bequeath slaves to Philadelphia Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in an effort to free them. James was “undecided”—torn between the possibility of determining the “future situation of blacks in the Southern States” and violating Quaker testimony against slaveholding. A careful man, James believed that Quakers needed to consider this moral dilemma before deciding whether it was acceptable to own slaves, even if ownership was only a means to free them. James and Lucretia were also aware of the Northern Liberties mob that burned down a black church later that year, presaging the racial violence that characterized antebellum Philadelphia.⁴³

Meanwhile, the financial problems of Thomas Coffin and James Mott grew worse. Coffin lent some money to a friend, John James, who defaulted on the loan. As Coffin spiraled into debt, his reputation suffered. Lucretia later recalled that her father’s accounts “were disputed by the Odiornes, because of their inability to pay.” When Thomas died suddenly from typhus in February 1815, he left his family thousands of dollars in debt and in the midst of a lawsuit. As James Mott wrote, “my business is suddenly changed.” In addition to the four members of their nuclear family, Lucretia’s mother Anna Coffin, her older sister Sarah, and younger siblings Thomas and Mary continued to reside with them (her sister Eliza had married Philadelphia merchant Benjamin Yarnall in 1814). In order to support the family, Anna opened a small store as she had on Nantucket, while James continued to search for a meaningful career, working as a bookkeeper for Philadelphian John Large at a salary of $750 per year; he would eventually earn $1,000 a year in the same position. Despite having two young children in the house, Lucretia also contributed to the family’s income, teaching in a Quaker school affiliated with Pine Street Meeting, where students paid $7 per quarter to attend. In April 1817, the school had ten students.⁴⁴

Though the family rebounded quickly after Thomas Coffin’s death, they soon faced another tragedy. In the spring of 1817, Lucretia and her son Thomas came down with high fevers. Lucretia survived, but their “active, fat, and rosy-cheeked” darling Thomas died at the age of two years and nine months. His last words were “I love thee, mother.” Lucretia, weak from the same illness, was bereft. James wrote platitudes to his parents about the “inscrutable wisdom” of the Almighty and endeavoring “patiently to bear the stroke,” but Lucretia never resigned herself to little Thomas’s death. Her grief prompted a religious awakening that would eventually lead her into the ministry. Rejecting the pessimistic Christianity that saw humans as sinners with little ability to comprehend the divine, Lucretia believed that all individuals had the ability to know and understand God’s plans. Though medicine had not yet progressed to the point that it could have cured her son, she believed that reason and science, rather than superstition, were the answer to the world’s ills. This powerful belief allowed her to return to teaching soon after little Thomas’s death. She only stopped teaching when another daughter, Maria, was born in 1818.⁴⁵

At twenty-five, Lucretia was a loving wife and mother and a devout member of the Society of Friends. But her “guarded” Quaker education at Nine Partners had also prepared her to be an independent actor in conflicts that would soon divide the nation: the province of religion in a society rapidly disestablishing its churches, the place of slavery in a free country, and the status of women as citizens in a republic that did not grant them full rights. Nine Partners also introduced Lucretia to a broader Quaker community, stretching from Nantucket to New York to Philadelphia. But this close-knit religious group was about to come apart. Following Tommy’s death, Mott sought spiritual and intellectual solace. Her personal search brought her into the heart of the social and religious conflict that severed the Society of Friends in America.