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.
CHAPTER 3
Schism
LUCRETIA MOTT BEGAN HER LONG CAREER as a Quaker minister at Twelfth Street Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia. In 1818, a year after her son Thomas’s death, she rose and prayed publicly for the first time. In her sweet and melodious voice, Lucretia appealed for strength to enable Friends to stand firm against the enticements of the larger world: “As all our efforts to resist temptation and overcome the world prove fruitless, unless aided by Thy Holy Spirit, enable us to approach Thy Throne, and ask of Three the blessing of Thy preservation from all evil, that we may be wholly devoted to Thee and Thy glorious cause.”1 After her death, Mott’s meeting remembered her adherence to “the simple faith of the society.” They recalled her ability to quote from Scripture and her emphasis on “practical righteousness” and “the sufficiency of divine law.” These circumspect women avoided mention of their own passionate opposition to Mott’s sermons over the course of her ministry.2
In 1819, during one of her first trips as a visiting Friend, Lucretia traveled with Sarah Zane to Virginia, to attend Quarterly Meeting at Hopewell, twenty-four miles southeast of Richmond. There she met Edward Stabler of Alexandria, a regular clerk of Baltimore Yearly Meeting and friend of the increasingly divisive minister Elias Hicks. At Baltimore Yearly Meeting, Stabler had a reputation for convening a close circle of six allies to stay up all night discussing strategy, an effective way to influence the direction of debate in the larger body. Mott had a similar experience, noting that “He is one of the very interesting men. We lodged at the same house, and sat up very late to hear him talk.” Mott also observed the surrounding countryside, writing “the sight of the poor slaves was indeed affecting.” The Virginians she met reassured her of the contentment of the slaves, citing kind treatment from their masters, but Lucretia’s Quaker education taught her to question such pleasantries.3
In 1821, at age twenty-eight, Mott became an approved minister in the Society of Friends. Though any Quaker could speak in meeting if moved by the spirit, monthly meetings recorded the names of especially gifted preachers in their minutes. By issuing a minute, they also authorized these ministers to preach at distant meetings. The Society of Friends recognized female ministers regardless of age, marital status, or number of children, valuing their spiritual talents over their familial obligations. And most female Quakers typically found their calling in their twenties. For example, Elizabeth Coggeshall, the traveling minister who visited the Coffins on Nantucket, had been married three years when she was recognized as a minister at age twenty-six.4
A typical female preacher in many ways, Lucretia soon distinguished herself from her peers. By 1825, Quakers in Philadelphia knew her for her “peculiar testimony” on “female elevation” and “woman’s responsibility as a rational and immortal being.” One man remembered that Lucretia “was in the practice of introducing the subject in social circles and in her public communications.”5 Quakers were surprised by her pronouncements because advocates of women’s rights were rare in the 1820s. Lucretia’s focus on the female sex suggested her transformation over the course of the decade from a respectable Quaker minister, wife, and mother to a controversial dissenter, social critic, and activist.
Mott’s identity as a minister and reformer was forged in the context of an internal Quaker controversy over the ministry of Elias Hicks, culminating in the Schism of 1827. Hicks and his allies, known as Hicksites, preached the importance of the inner light, criticizing Quaker elders for abandoning this fundamental doctrine, abusing their power of disownment, and compromising with the world. Hicks’s opponents, known as evangelical or Orthodox Quakers for their strong theological and associational ties to mainstream evangelical Protestants, advocated the twin authorities of the Bible and Quaker leadership. Intersecting with the larger social and cultural turmoil of the 1820s, the Hicksite doctrinal schism overlapped with divisions wrought by class, slavery, and democracy. This decade witnessed not only the rending of the Society of Friends in the United States, but conflicts between free thinkers, religious liberals, and Evangelical Christians, revolutions in transportation and communications, the rise of Jacksonian democracy, preliminary skirmishes over women’s status, and the birth of immediate abolitionism.6
Though her granddaughter later wrote that Mott only reluctantly separated from Twelfth Street Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it is more likely that she was an enthusiastic Hicks partisan from the beginning. As historian Larry Ingle observes, the elders, or overseers, of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting were disturbed by young ministers in their purview “eagerly adopting and just as eagerly preaching the sentiments of Elias Hicks.” Mott was undoubtedly one of these young preachers. On one occasion, two female elders from Twelfth Street Meeting visited Mott to inform her that Friends felt uncomfortable with some of the language used in her sermons. What did she mean by referring to Quakers’ “notions of Christ”? Mott replied that she had been quoting from William Penn: “Men are to be judged by their likeness to Christ, rather than their notions of Christ.” While Mott’s response satisfied the elders this time, they became increasingly critical of the way Hicks’s allies used Penn and other early Quakers to justify their doctrines. Hicksite and evangelical Quakers both struggled to prove that they were the authentic and legitimate body of the Society of Friends.7
Equally suggestive is the Motts’ longstanding personal relationship with Elias Hicks. Lucretia confirmed that Hicks was “the same consistent exemplary man that he was many years ago” at Nine Partners Boarding School. Like James Mott, Hicks was from Long Island, born in Hempstead in 1748. Hicks married a fellow Quaker, Jemima Seaman, and moved to her family’s farm in Jericho. As a farmer, he developed a deep skepticism of the market economy and industrialization, helping poor white and black neighbors in his community survive the American Revolution by selling produce at low prices (according to one source, he refused to sell to the rich). In 1778, the same year he freed his slave Ben, Hicks was recognized as a minister in the Society of Friends.8
By the 1820s, Hicks’s criticism of slavery, the market economy, and the Quaker elders linked him to the Democratic radicals of the Workingmen’s Party in nearby New York City. Barnabas Bates, a correspondent of Hicks, was one of these spiritual and political fellow travelers. Originally from Rhode Island, Bates moved to Manhattan in 1824 and began publishing a newspaper called the Christian Inquirer to promote “Free Inquiry, Religious Liberty, and Rational Christianity.” In 1828, Bates became an organizer for the Workingmen’s Party and also joined other Anti-Sabbatarians to oppose evangelical efforts to legislate Sunday as a day of rest. Hicks shared Bates’s opposition to Sabbath laws, arguing that they violated “the Liberty of Conscience guaranteed by our free constitution to all its Citizens.”9 An adamant egalitarian, Bates also opposed both high postage rates and slavery. In 1830, following Hicks’s death, he delivered a eulogy to the African Benevolent Societies of New York City. Bates remembered Elias Hicks as “among the first that brought the subject [of slavery] frequently and forcibly before the members of his religious society.”10
In 1811, Hicks had published an influential pamphlet that reflected the core of his anti-slavery principles, Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and their Descendants. Written as a series of questions and answers, the pamphlet showed slavery’s incompatibility with both America’s commitment to equality and Quaker testimony against war. Hicks began by affirming that every man is “a moral agent (that is free to act).” African Americans were deprived of their inalienable freedom at birth, he argued, when “they are taken in a state of war, and considered by the captor as a prize.” Most important, Hicks described purchasers and consumers of slave goods as supporting and encouraging the institution.
