sinned against an infinite Being, has contracted infinite guilt, and is consequently exposed to an infinite penalty.”64 Instead, he emphasized individual agency, echoing the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. In “Honor Due All Men,” Channing wrote “The Idea of Right is the primary and the highest revelation of God to the human mind…. [The individual] begins to stand before an inward tribunal, on the decision of which his whole happiness rests; he hears a voice, which, if faithfully followed, will guide him to perfection.” Finally, he viewed this individual sense of right as an equalizer, “which annihilates all the distinctions of this world.” In fact, Channing’s vision so clearly corresponded to Mott’s own that in her own notes quoting “Honor Due All Men” she inserted the Quaker phrase “inward monitor” in place of Channing’s “inward tribunal.”65
In Boston, Channing influenced another important American woman, Elizabeth Peabody. In 1825, the twenty-one-year-old teacher began attending Channing’s Federal Street Church. The minister and parishioner struck up an uncommon friendship and intellectual collaboration based on their discussions of liberal theology. As biographer Megan Marshall argues, Elizabeth Peabody “had read and studied her way out of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin.” Channing confirmed her ideas and encouraged her intellectual development; in turn, she copied Channing’s sermons for publication, securing his legacy. Over the course of her career as a teacher, writer, bookstore owner, and editor of the Dial, Elizabeth Peabody “ignited” the intellectual and literary movement known as Transcendentalism. She also coined the term. Peabody adapted poet Samuel Coleridge’s word “transcendental” to name the philosophy, which, like Hicksite Quakerism, emphasized the ability of every individual to grasp the Divine, unmediated by ecclesiastical authority or the Scriptures.66
As these powerful liberal ideas gained influence in Boston, Mott experienced a disappointing regression among Hicksites in Philadelphia. In 1830, Mott became clerk of the Hicksite Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Women. After the split, the London Yearly Meeting endorsed the Orthodox, refusing to recognize the Hicksites as members of the Society of Friends. In 1828, when the Hicksites appealed their case to British Friends, they were denounced as “separatists.” In 1830, they proposed to try again. The new epistle sought to “open the channel of Christian intercourse” between the (Hicksite) Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the London Yearly Meeting. The Hicksites made their case for recognition, warning that the British decision threatened to remove London Yearly Meeting “from religious communion with [upwards of] eighteenth thousand of your fellow-professors of the gospel of Christ.” Further, they described the Orthodox as usurping “power over the many, subversive of our established order, and destructive to the peace and harmony of society.” But the authors also attempted to assuage British Friends by professing their belief in the “history of the birth, life, acts, death, and resurrection of the holy Jesus” as written in the divinely authored Bible. Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that Lucretia objected to “any statement in the nature of a declaration of faith, other than the ‘inward light,’—the divine light in the soul,—which she regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Friends.” As a result, after serving her function as clerk and reading the letter to the women’s meeting, she vehemently opposed the epistle. Despite Mott’s disapproval, the women’s meeting endorsed the letter and Mott, along with John Comly, clerk of the men’s meeting, signed it. Their efforts to appease English Quakers were futile, as the epistle was returned unread with the word “mendacity” written on it.67
The position of clerk was a sign of Mott’s growing status in the Society of Friends, but she signaled her independence when she spoke out against the epistle. Tested in the Hicksite split, her commitment to the inner light and individual moral authority became central to her ministry. At age thirty-seven, after giving birth to five living children, Mott was poised to become the most prominent Quaker minister of her time. Nevertheless, she continued to clash with the Hicksites over their “retrograde” views on liberal theology, slavery, and women’s rights.68 Versed in Penn and Hicks, as well as Wollstonecraft, Channing, and Fanny Wright, Mott looked beyond the borders of the Society of Friends to make sense of the problems of slavery, inequality, and religious intolerance. And she identified the principle obstacle to human progress as slavery.
CHAPTER 4
Immediate Abolition
LUCRETIA’S DAUGHTER WROTE THAT HER CHILDHOOD HOME fulfilled the “prophecies of amalgamation” in the minds of their neighbors. In the 1830s, racial mixing, whether in private homes, churches, or voluntary associations, was rare and taboo. Yet when her daughter penned those words, Lucretia had a house full of white and black visitors, including a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy who sat in her front window all day. Quakers and reformers knew Lucretia as a generous host. The Motts regularly welcomed out of town guests, and held dinner parties attended by anywhere from ten to fifty people. Even as her politics grew more radical, Lucretia was celebrated for her skills as a wife and mother. This domestic prowess allowed Lucretia to maintain an aura of gentility as she defied social convention by inviting whites and blacks to her home. Her most frequent guests were Robert and Harriet Purvis, but other friends in the anti-slavery movement such as the Fortens could also be found at her dinner table.1
Lucretia’s willingness to practice as well as advocate racial equality confirmed her as a critical outsider in American society. Her belief in individual authority in matters of religion threatened the evangelical Protestant establishment. Her vocal support for women’s intellectual, spiritual, and social equality rejected emerging cultural norms assigning men and women separate spheres. And, by the 1830s, Mott’s embrace of immediate abolition endangered the social and economic order of the country. Mott contributed her distinctive voice to the anti-slavery cause, giving women a visible but contested place in the burgeoning abolitionist movement.
In June 1830, Lucretia and James received a fateful visit from a young newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison. He told them a troubling story about the growing ability of the slave power to limit the individual rights of all Americans, white and black. The twenty-four-year-old had just been released from Baltimore Jail, after serving forty-nine days of his six-month sentence for libel. The previous year, Garrison had entered into partnership with Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Baltimore anti-slavery newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In its pages, Garrison had charged Francis Todd, a wealthy merchant from Garrison’s hometown of Newburyport, Massachusetts, with using his ships to transport slaves for Baltimore slave-trader Austin Woolfolk, another frequent target of the newspaper editors. In addition to defending his reputation, Todd and his ally Woolfolk wanted the lawsuit to shut down the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and in this they succeeded. Garrison saw the case as an attempt “to stifle free inquiry, to dishearten every effort of reform, and to intimidate the conductors of newspapers.”2
The lawsuit signaled growing national tension over the issue of slavery. From Garrison’s perspective, politicians and financial elites in the North and South were conspiring to strengthen slavery’s grip on American society. In addition, the country was in an uproar over the recent publication of Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Like his brethren in Philadelphia, David Walker, a free black man living in Boston, opposed colonization. Walker intended “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” But his incendiary language also struck fear into the hearts of white Americans. Walker warned of God’s judgment on whites for keeping African Americans in a state of ignorance and degradation. Invoking the American Revolution, he implied that this situation might soon come to a bloody end: “had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children’s lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants.” While the Genius of Universal Emancipation, under Lundy’s leadership, was too moderate to publish the pamphlet,
