Quakers might permit women relative independence, but they were far more ambivalent regarding absolute equality.16
Lucretia was born on a Nantucket that was recovering from the American Revolution. The island remained neutral during the war, partly because residents opposed violence, but also because they wanted to preserve the whaling industry, which depended on friendly relations with the British. This calculation proved mistaken; both the Americans and the British attacked their ships, leading to the destruction or confiscation of 85 percent of their fleet. On the eve of the revolution, 158 whalers sailed out of Nantucket. By war’s end, only 24 ships were left in Nantucket harbor.17
Despite the island’s official neutrality, many individuals in Lucretia’s family took sides. Indeed, her cousin Benjamin Franklin was a leading revolutionary. But other Folgers were British sympathizers. Lucretia’s mother, Anna Folger, was known as one of “Bill Folger’s tory daughters” (he had six of them). According to Anna Davis Hallowell, William Folger lost his extensive holdings during the war, when colonials seized most of his ships. “Being declared a tory,” Hallowell wrote, “he was no favorite with his companions; they liked to tell, at his expense, that the only thing he had ever found in his life was a jack-knife, sticking in a post above his head.”18 William’s brother Timothy, who helped Benjamin Franklin chart the Gulf Stream, was charged with treason in 1780 alongside Kezia Folger Coffin (the charges were dropped). Perhaps chastened, Timothy Folger left the increasingly unfriendly atmosphere of Nantucket for Wales.19
After the war, Nantucketers quickly buried their loyalist past and seized burgeoning economic opportunities. Surviving his neighbors’ enmity, William Folger turned to farming and raising sheep. When he died on Nantucket in 1815, he left a “mansion house” and an estate worth almost $6,000.20 Lucretia’s cousin, renowned whaling merchant William Rotch, was an early victim of revolutionary sentiment, losing his goods at the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Yet, after the war, Rotch was among the first to sail into British harbors flying the American flag. As the whale oil trade with Britain foundered during the Revolution, William Rotch conceived of a plan to sell seal skins to China. In 1785, his ship the United States returned from the Falkland Islands with 13,000 seal skins, Nantucket’s first venture in the China trade. This initiative later proved fateful for both the Coffin and Folger families.21
By the time Lucretia’s mother married her childhood sweetheart, Thomas Coffin, in 1790, Nantucket had begun to rebuild its economy. Thomas’s older half-brother, Micajah Coffin, helped his brother begin his career as a mariner and merchant. One of Thomas’s earliest voyages was in the ship Lucy, which sailed from Nantucket in 1785. In 1790, Micajah bought the 160–ton brig Lydia for £720, allowing Thomas to buy a 1/8 stake in the ship for an investment of £78. The brothers estimated that the Lydia could carry 800 barrels of sperm whale oil. With the oil priced at $1.08 per gallon in 1790, at 31.5 gallons per barrel, the Lydia could bring home a gross revenue of $35,280, equivalent today to $659,000.22
Thomas Coffin had reason to be optimistic about his fortunes; his decision to name his second daughter Lucretia, after an ancient Roman heroine, rather than giving her a family name, may have reflected his political hopes for the young republic. But in contrast to Thomas’s private dreams, in 1793, the year of Lucretia’s birth, Nantucket’s cohesive Quaker community was disintegrating. Seeking economic opportunities elsewhere, many residents left the island, including Lucretia’s Rotch cousins, who had all moved to New Bedford by 1795. Nantucket Monthly Meeting tried to prevent the exodus and recover the sense of community by withholding minutes for transfer to another meeting, necessary if a Quaker moved from an area bounded by one monthly meeting to another.23 But the Quaker elders were also partly responsible for the growing disaffection of their fellow islanders. From 1754, when three members were disowned for grazing more than their fair share of sheep on the Nantucket commons, the number of disownments by the meeting grew exponentially. Nantucket Monthly Meeting disciplined only 90 members before 1770; in the following decade the meeting disowned 227 members. And the record disownments continued.24
Led by the clerk of the women’s meeting, Sarah Barney, this local purge was part of a broader reformation in American Quakerism, and American Protestantism in general, which aimed to rid the society of sin. Often referred to as the “Great Awakening,” this spiritual renewal, characterized by the ministries of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, preceded the revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century. But while other evangelical denominations like the Methodists sought converts by preaching individual salvation from sin, the Quakers aimed both to purify their discipline against worldly encroachment and, ironically, to protect their community from dissolution.25
Notably, the elders targeted marriage out of meeting (in other words, to non-Quakers). Though membership in the Society of Friends was easily achieved through birth or a statement of faith and desire for membership, out-marriage was a violation of Quaker discipline. As historian Lisa Norling notes, the meeting disproportionately targeted female Quakers who embraced new romantic ideas by marrying for love rather than duty to family or community. Nantucket’s Quaker elders viewed young women’s romantic sensibilities as dangerously individualistic.26
Although she was never a sentimental person, this era in Nantucket Quakerism made an indelible impression on Lucretia. She agreed with the reforms inspired by early Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, who rejected the growing materialism of American society. His testimony against slavery included a refusal to use any products of slave labor, such as the indigo dye used in clothing. But throughout her life she strongly opposed the Society of Friends’ marriage policy, which condemned not only interfaith matches, but also the Quakers who approved or attended them. In an 1842 letter, Lucretia complained “Our veneration is trained to pay homage to ancient usage, rather than to truth, which is older than all. Else, why Church censure on marriages that are not of us?—on Parents conniving? On our members being present at such &c.? Oh, how our discipline needs revising—& stripping of its objectionable features.”27 Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.
As Quaker elders suppressed dissent at the turn of the nineteenth century, so too did Nantucket families, with lasting impact on Lucretia. She recalled her grandmother, Ruth Coffin Folger, as equally strict with her grandchildren. On one visit to her grandparents’ home, Ruth informed Lucretia that because she had misbehaved, she would not be allowed to go on a hayride with her grandfather. Lucretia remembered this incident forty years later, writing to her sister and brother-in-law that, “What I had done left no impression, but her unkindness I couldn’t forget.”28 Perhaps frustrated by their authoritarian streak, Lucretia never bonded with her Folger grandparents. Though both lived more than a decade into the nineteenth century, no correspondence with her mother’s parents survives.
Lucretia’s nagging memory of her grandmother’s discipline shows how the larger crisis in religious authority on Nantucket influenced her views. In the letter recalling the incident, Lucretia wondered, “When shall we learn that retaliation is never in imitation of [‘]Him who causeth his sun to shine on the evil & on the good’?” Mott continued, criticizing Orthodox believers for crying “heresy” at every sign of religious progress, a favorite theme of hers, in this case referring to the controversial sermons of Unitarian radical Theodore Parker. As Nantucket’s elders exerted their power, they not only prepared the ground for migration to friendlier shores, but also inspired dissenting voices, then and a generation later.29
Economically, the family prospered. Thomas Coffin continued to work with his brother Micajah, and their ship the Lydia made a number of profitable voyages in the 1790s. Captained by Micajah’s son Zenas Coffin, who at his death left the largest individual fortune in Nantucket history, the Lydia sailed to the whaling grounds off the coast of
