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
