to Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, Orthodox minister Ann Scattergood tried to lead a “rump” women’s meeting, only to have several men interrupt to bring out their wives.40 Despite Hicksite men’s concerns, women were among Hicks’s most important partisans. In addition to Priscilla Hunt and Lucretia Mott, Esther Moore, wife of Hicksite Dr. Robert Moore of Easton, Maryland, remained true to Hicks throughout the controversy.41
The Hicksite and Orthodox Quakers offered two competing models of womanhood. The Hicksites’ egalitarianism, closely linked to democratic ferment and free thought, produced Hannah Barnard and Priscilla Hunt, dynamic preachers liberated from the constraints of religious orthodoxy and middle-class domesticity. The Orthodox Quakers celebrated a more reserved female piety as exemplified by the private Ann Shipley or the haughty Anna Braithwaite. Within the bounds of propriety, Orthodox Quakers and their evangelical allies encouraged women to expand their benevolent presence in the public sphere, as missionaries, exhorters, fundraisers, and volunteers. In 1829, this mainstream ministerial embrace of female moral power inspired Catharine Beecher, daughter of Lyman Beecher, to embark on the first mass petition campaign among women. Beecher argued that women’s religious “influence” should be exerted to raise sympathy and awareness of the plight of the Cherokee, the target of removal efforts led by Democratic President Andrew Jackson.42
Any chance of unity among Philadelphia Quakers ended with the 1827 Yearly Meeting. After the split, the Orthodox Philadelphia Yearly Meeting retained most of the property and assets, but counted only 9,009 members to the 17,000 strong Hicksites. Both sides filed lawsuits to gain control over meetinghouses and schoolhouses. They also issued pamphlets to win the hearts and minds of fellow Quakers. The Orthodox, staking their place firmly in the Protestant evangelical mainstream, referred to the Hicksites as a new and distinct sect, made up of “libertines” advocating “wild ranterism.” They condemned the Hicksites’ disregard for doctrine, and viewed the separation as a result of Hicksite unwillingness to follow “strict morality” or “religious obligations.”43 The Hicksites, on the other hand, adopted the democratic language of the time. They invoked their “inalienable right” to religious liberty, calling the measures of the Philadelphia elders “oppressive.” Instead, they promoted “the blessings of a Gospel Ministry unshackled by human authority.” 44 With intentional symbolism, Hicksites held a meeting in June 1827 in Carpenters’ Hall, where the Continental Congress first met. This convention gave birth to Cherry Street Meeting, where the Motts worshipped after the separation.
The bitter rupture of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting spread quickly through American Quakerism. News of the split traveled to Aurora, New York, where Anna Coffin and the newly widowed Martha Pelham were teaching school. Lucretia’s youngest sister had already been disowned for marrying out of meeting, but Scipio Meeting promptly disowned Anna Coffin, who sided with the Hicksites. Yearly Meetings in Baltimore, Indiana, New York, and Ohio soon suffered their own fractures.45
Though Mott followed these theological debates intently, her family required her physical presence and emotional attention. Lucretia had children at regular intervals throughout the decade. After the birth of her daughter Maria in 1818, there was a gap of a few years as she explored her calling as a minister. This deliberate spacing of children suggests Lucretia participated in a larger demographic transition among American women, who limited their family size from an average of seven children to an average of 3.5 children over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1823, Lucretia had a son, also named Thomas. Two more daughters followed: Elizabeth in 1825, and Martha (known as Pattie) in 1828. In the nineteenth century, pregnancy was a dangerous proposition. While Lucretia survived her pregnancies, her younger sister Mary Temple died in childbirth in 1824. Her older sister Sarah had died from a fall earlier that year. These births and deaths undoubtedly intensified Lucretia’s reaction to the social and spiritual unrest of the separation.46
Like other Quakers, Lucretia and James experienced the split on a very personal level. The Motts withdrew their oldest daughter Anna from Westtown School, now affiliated with the Orthodox. Lucretia’s sister Eliza was married to Benjamin Yarnall, son of Ellis Yarnall, a vocal partisan for the Orthodox in Philadelphia. When Eliza decided to ally with the Orthodox, Lucretia worried that she might lose her sister and closest female friend in the city. The friendship between Lucretia and Eliza survived the schism, but not all relationships did. James Mott’s mother Anne Mott chose the Orthodox, a sign of the bitter division Hicks’s ministry caused in Jericho Monthly Meeting. As Anne grew increasingly alienated from her son, the frequent letters between Long Island and Philadelphia declined dramatically, devastating Lucretia and James. The choices prompted by the split were neither easy nor simple.47
The Hicksite split also served as Lucretia’s political baptism. In the wake of the schism, the Motts permanently altered their economic choices, moral judgments, and intellectual allegiances. Henceforth, both James and Lucretia Mott cut all ties to slavery, inspired by new calls for immediate emancipation. But Lucretia’s identification with Hicks’s theology also extended to a broader interest in free thought, political radicalism, and liberal religion. Amidst the wreckage of the Hicksite split, Lucretia emerged as an outspoken and divisive minister.
Elias Hicks’s sermons on free produce occasioned hard choices for James, her husband. His sermons, painting Orthodox business practices as signs of economic and spiritual corruption, offended Philadelphia elders and inspired his followers. Living on the economic margins of the market economy, many Hicksites rebelled against the combined wealth and power of the elders, embracing free produce in part to call attention to elite Quakers’ intimate ties to slavery. As he struggled to establish himself in business and support his growing family, James Mott shared an economic status similar to other Hicksites. But by 1826 he owned a cotton commission business. His success prompted a new wave of anxiety and soul-searching. American cotton, on its way to market dominance as “King Cotton,” was produced by slaves, a task made more efficient and profitable by the 1792 invention of the cotton gin. James’s commissions were a point of contention between the usually harmonious couple. Lucretia confessed to her mother-in-law, “I would be much better satisfied, if they could do business that was in no wise dependent on slavery.”48
Lucretia’s unyielding stance on free produce reflected her growing belief in its potential as a tool to end slavery. Long convinced of the truth of Hicks’s testimony, she was further stirred after reading a pamphlet by British Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick, titled Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; Or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery, published in Philadelphia in 1824. Heyrick intended to reenergize the British anti-slavery movement, which had succeeded in outlawing British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. She condemned the cautious and conciliatory efforts since embraced by politicians and moralists; gradualism, Heyrick proclaimed, only increased indifference to the plight of the slave. Instead, she called for the immediate abolition of slavery. To accomplish this, Heyrick proposed boycotting the products of slavery, primarily sugar from the West Indies, an effective tactic that had been embraced by approximately 400,000 British men and women in the 1790s. She celebrated the “astonishing effects of human power,” arguing that “The hydra-headed monster of slavery, will never be destroyed by other means, than the united exertion of individual opinion, and united exertion of individual resolution.” 49
After its publication, Heyrick’s pamphlet circulated extensively in the city, exciting “much feeling and interest.” Elias Hicks’s allies formed a ready audience; even some Orthodox Quakers adopted free produce principles. Middle-class women also embraced Heyrick’s arguments. Not only did Heyrick provide a striking example of women’s individual power, but American women were well aware of the historic link between household economy and political change. While British women formed the backbone of the earlier anti-slavery boycott, American women had provided the precedent by replacing British goods with homespun during the American Revolution. Mott agreed with Heyrick’s
