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
