affectation, or something worse.”3
Radicalized by his experience in Baltimore, Garrison learned from Benjamin Lundy that he might find a sympathetic audience at the Motts’ house. Lundy and the Motts moved in the same network of Hicksites, free produce advocates, and freethinkers. A moderate who supported a gradual end to slavery, Lundy nevertheless offered a space for the publication of more radical ideas. In addition to Garrison, in 1829 Lundy hired a young Quaker poet named Elizabeth Margaret Chandler to edit the “Ladies’ Repository” section of his paper. Chandler encouraged women to get involved in the anti-slavery cause in two ways. First, she argued that women should abstain from the products of slave labor. Next, Chandler suggested women venture beyond this domestic “exertion” to form “societies for the publication and distribution of tracts and pamphlets” so that the “feelings of many hitherto unthinking persons [will be] aroused into detestation of a system which is a source of so much misery.” Chandler wrote approvingly of both the Female Association of Philadelphia for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton and Lydia White’s free produce store.4 Though she confined her own involvement to writing, Chandler, and by extension Lundy, endorsed female social activism, a controversial position at a time when women’s voluntarism was largely limited to religious and charitable organizations. And while Lucretia didn’t agree with everything she read in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, such proposals appealed to her, and earned her financial support.5
The Motts quickly arranged a public meeting for Garrison in the city. A passionate and persuasive writer, Garrison was still an awkward public speaker, and he read his manuscript word for word. Lucretia, by now an experienced orator, advised Garrison to take some lessons from Quaker ministers, who always spoke extemporaneously: “William, if thee expects to set forth thy cause by word of mouth thee must lay aside thy paper and trust to the leading of the spirit.”6 This initial meeting not only established their friendship, but provided a foundation for their future political alliance. Mott wrote of Garrison that “there are few my contemporaries whose characters I more revere.” Garrison was similarly admiring. In a letter to his wife, he described Lucretia as a “bold and fearless thinker.” He later wrote that “If my mind has become liberalized in any degree (and I think it has burst every sectarian trammel),—if the theological dogmas which I once regarded as essential to Christianity, I now repudiate as absurd and pernicious,—I am largely indebted to James and Lucretia Mott for the change.”7
Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet had introduced the concept of immediate abolition, but William Lloyd Garrison turned this idea into a social movement. A combination of factors—the publication of Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, growing doubts about colonization, the formation of free produce societies, and distribution of David Walker’s pamphlet—created an interracial audience for a more radical anti-slavery stance, defining slavery as both an individual and a national sin. Upon his return to Boston, Garrison began publishing his newspaper the Liberator. Unlike Lundy, who advocated gradual approaches to ending slavery, Garrison now rejected moderation, writing “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.” Garrison also proclaimed his egalitarianism in the masthead: “Our Country is the World—Our Countrymen are Mankind.” Supported in part by African Americans in Boston, the Liberator condemned colonization and promoted both immediate emancipation and racial equality. But as both Garrison and Mott soon found out, many white Americans were hostile to their views.
For most white Americans, immediate abolition posed the specter of social chaos and bloody vengeance. Two years after David Walker issued his Appeal, some of these fears came to fruition. In Southampton County, Virginia, an enslaved man named Nat Turner led a violent uprising against slavery. Beginning on August 22, 1831, Turner and his men killed his nine-year old owner, Putnam Moore, and Moore’s parents, Sally and Joseph Travis. Over the course of the next two days, Turner’s band, made up of approximately seventy free and enslaved blacks, killed fifty-five whites. The Virginia militia led the violent suppression of the rebellion, which culminated in Nat Turner’s execution on November 11, 1831. Commentators in both the North and South held Garrison and his newspaper partially responsible for the uprising. Garrison described himself as a pacifist, “a Quaker in principle,” but he set the tone for radical abolitionists’ response to slave rebellions and anti-slavery violence. Garrison saw the revolt, and its bloody outcome, as a warning to white Americans, who should respond by ending the oppressive institution of slavery. In other words, the violence of slavery resulted only in more brutality.8
Nat Turner’s revolt further mobilized radical abolitionists in the North. In Philadelphia, women donated money to support the embattled Liberator. They also organized a campaign to petition Congress regarding the wrongs of slavery. Ultimately, Mott and over two thousand other “female citizens of Philadelphia and its vicinity” petitioned Congress to “act to the extent of their power in removing this evil.” In signing this petition, Mott and other women drew on the recent precedent of female petitioning against Cherokee removal, an effort led by evangelical Catharine Beecher. But while Beecher’s petitions proposed to channel women’s moral and religious influence on behalf of Native Americans, Mott’s petition invoked women’s status as citizens, who had a constitutional right to petition their legislators. Philadelphia women acknowledged that politicians may find their petition “intrusive,” but they softened their entrance into the political arena by noting “we approach you unarmed; our only banner is Peace.” Like subsequent anti-slavery petitions, the women who signed focused on the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital and other areas where Congress had legal jurisdiction.9
Meanwhile, Garrison directed his energies toward forming a national organization dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery. The founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) was held at the Adelphi Building in Philadelphia in December 1833. The convention signaled the delegates’ final break from colonization and other gradual schemes of abolition. The interracial body also reflected the new organization’s commitment to racial equality as well as immediatism.10 Approximately seventy men and women attended from all over the northeast; delegates from Philadelphia included James Mott, Robert Purvis, Hicks’s ally Edwin Atlee, and African American barber and dentist James McCrummell (sometimes spelled McCrummill), among others.
While the official delegates and signatories to the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments were exclusively men, Mott and at least seven other women attended the convention. Several of these women were Lucretia’s immediate family members: her mother, Anna Folger Coffin; her youngest sister Martha, now married to David Wright, who was visiting from Aurora, New York; and her oldest daughter Anna, who had recently married Edward Hopper, a twenty-one year old lawyer and son of Isaac T. Hopper, a Hicksite Quaker, who, like Lucretia, had referred to Orthodox Quaker leader Jonathan Evans as a “pope.” At the convention, they were joined by three other Quaker women: Hicksite Lydia White, owner of the first free produce store; Hicksite Esther Moore, who had moved with her physician husband from Easton, Maryland, to Philadelphia; and Orthodox Quaker Sidney Ann Lewis, an advocate of free produce, who later opened her own shop.11 All of these women were white, but it is possible some African American women attended. Out-of town abolitionists boarded with local families, including the Motts. One of these delegates invited the Coffin and Mott women. Since other abolitionists boarded with black Philadelphians, they too may have invited their hostesses.
Lucretia boldly interceded in the debates at the convention. As Edwin Atlee read the Declaration of Sentiments, composed by Garrison and a committee that included Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Unitarian minister Samuel J. May, Lucretia offered two suggestions. First she proposed that references to “Divine Revelation” and the Declaration of Independence be transposed, to read “With entire confidence in the over-ruling justice of God, we plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation as upon the EVERLASTING ROCK.” With this statement, abolitionists identified themselves as Americans committed to the egalitarian principles of the Declaration of Independence, but they also claimed the higher authority of Divine law. Lucretia also helped craft a
