But she also responded to Heyrick’s message of personal power and individual purity, or “the consciousness of sincerity and consistency,—of possessing ‘clean hands,’ of having ‘no fellowship with the workers of iniquity.’”50 For Mott and other Quakers, abstinence was another way to reject worldliness and maintain their testimony regarding slavery, plain living, and the authority of individual conscience.
Soon after reading Heyrick’s pamphlet, Mott banned slave produce from her home, much to the dismay of her husband and children. In 1830, when Hicksite Quaker Lydia White opened a free produce store, “the first establishment exclusively of this character,” at 86 North Fifth Street, Lucretia immediately began purchasing her groceries and dry goods there.51 But, as her granddaughter later wrote, “free calicoes could seldom be called handsome, even by the most enthusiastic; free umbrellas were hideous to look upon, and free candies, an abomination.”52 These hardships prevented free produce from winning a large following. Later writers derided advocates of the boycott as irrelevant, sentimental, and even “crackbrained.”53
Though boycotting sugar or cotton did little to pressure American slaveholders, the formation of a community dedicated to abstinence formed the basis for an interracial movement of men and women united in their revulsion for the peculiar institution. The publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet signaled the beginning of a new, more radical phase in American abolitionism. After his move to Philadelphia, James Mott, as an up and coming Quaker businessman, had joined the respectable, all-white, all-male Pennsylvania Abolition Society, serving as the society’s secretary in 1822 and 1823. The moderate Pennsylvania Abolition Society pursued political lobbying to restrict slavery and legal means to free fugitive slaves. In an 1815 letter to his parents, James had noted that a slaveholder bequeathed forty slaves to the organization, presumably to get around restrictive manumission laws in southern states.54 Two years later, the American Colonization Society proposed another gradual alternative to these slaveholders by encouraging them to emancipate their slaves and send them as colonizers and missionaries to Africa. African Americans in Philadelphia, led by wealthy sail maker James Forten, opposed the American Colonization Society’s plan. Three thousand individuals, including Forten, attended a protest meeting at Rev. Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. They resolved that as “our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of America, we … feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured.”55 The Motts’ letters from this period do not mention arguments for or against colonization. By the late 1820s, however, James and Lucretia were ardent opponents of the American Colonization Society.
Further inspired by Hicks’s free produce sermons and the publication of Heyrick’s pamphlet, reformers created an interracial network of anti-slavery societies in Philadelphia. In 1827, while he still traded in cotton, James Mott helped found the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania to disseminate information on where to buy free “Cotton, Rice, Sugar, Molasses, Tobacco” and to encourage its consumption. Its Quaker organizers believed their efforts would diminish slavery.56 Quaker women formed a sister-society, the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton. These societies, like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, included only white members, but free produce encouraged connections across the color line. African Americans formed the Colored Free Produce Society in 1830 and the Colored Female Free Produce Society in 1831. Like their white counterparts, the free black members of these societies argued that, “every individual who uses the produce of slave labor encourages the slave-holder, becomes also a participator in his wickedness.” Robert Purvis, the wealthy son of a South Carolina slaveholder and an African American woman, was one of the founders of the Colored Free Produce Society. Within a year, the handsome Purvis married Harriet Forten, daughter of James Forten.57 It is likely that the Motts first met Purvis, who became a close friend, through these free produce societies. And, as with so many white abolitionists, relationships with African Americans may have accelerated the Motts’ radical rejection of slavery. By 1830, under pressure from his wife and friends, James Mott abandoned his cotton business to deal in wool, a potentially risky financial decision for a man with five children.58
Yet even as some Hicksites embraced free produce, others rapidly retreated from the more radical implications of Hicks’s ministry. In 1828, Scottish freethinker Frances (Fanny) Wright began a lecture tour of the United States, speaking in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. Three years earlier, Wright had founded a mixed-race communitarian society in Nashoba, Tennessee. She had proposed to gradually emancipate slaves by offering them the opportunity to work toward their freedom. After Nashoba failed due to poor management and accusations of free love, she edited Utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen’s New Harmony Gazette.59 Wright also had strong ties to the Workingmen’s Party (often called the “Fanny Wright Party”). Detractors referred to her as the “Red Harlot of Infidelity” for her radical politics, anti-clericalism, and rejection of marriage. According to Mott, Wright lectured on topics with broad appeal, such as “knowledge” and “education,” but she also addressed subjects close to the hearts of most Hicksites. Wright railed against slavery, intolerance, “the hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions,” and “financial and political corruption.” Like Elias Hicks, Fanny Wright aroused the outrage and fear of prominent evangelicals. Lyman Beecher worried that Wright’s audiences, filled with “females of respectable standing in society,” might be led astray by her message.60
One group of prominent Hicksites acted swiftly to sever all connections in the public mind between their beliefs and Wright’s. As clerk of Wilmington Meeting, Benjamin Ferris, better known as Amicus, led the disownment of Benjamin Webb, editor of the Delaware Free Press, for printing articles supporting Wright’s views and those of other freethinkers such as Robert Dale Owen. At least five others were also disowned for “Ultraism.” Lucretia was outraged. These individuals, she proclaimed, were among the “most active, benevolent citizens.” Lucretia and James entered an “indignant protest” against these intolerant and “arbitrary measures,” at the risk of losing their own status among their fellow Hicksites.61
As her co-religionists grew more conservative, Mott began reading more radical works. By 1827, Lucretia had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s controversial Vindication of the Rights of Woman, originally published in 1792. Wollstonecraft argued that women’s current status reflected not only their legal and political subordination but also their “notions of beauty,” “their fondness for pleasure,” and their consequent objectification. In its place, Wollstonecraft offered equal education and intellectual development: “I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength of both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.”62
Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment thought appealed to Mott’s political and religious sympathies. Like a good republican, she rejected the trappings of aristocracy, closely linked to women’s taste for fashion and adornment. And as a Quaker radical, she was out of place in a society that increasingly valued white women’s sexual purity, submission, and domestic isolation. By the 1820s, Vindication was out of print in the United States. Many Americans condemned Wollstonecraft as a “blood-stained Amazon,” a symbol of dangerous rebellion against the political, religious, and sexual order. But Mott celebrated both Wollstonecraft and Fanny Wright, decrying the “denunciations of bigoted Sectarianism.” Mott referred to Vindication as one of her “pet books”: “From that time it has been a centre table book, and I have circulated it, wherever I could find readers.”63
Mott also began reading liberal theologians outside the Society of Friends. In 1831, she encountered the published sermons of William Ellery Channing, leader of the Unitarian movement. Channing, a Harvard graduate and the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, rejected the Calvinism of New England Congregationalism in favor of a more positive interpretation of human nature and the individual relationship to God. He defined God as benevolent,
