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
