1,000 barrels.30 By 1797, Thomas had earned enough money to purchase a large, elegant house on Fair Street for his growing family, which included Lucretia, her handicapped older sister Sarah or Sally (as was typical in this period, the family rarely mentioned her), and younger sister Eliza. As Nathaniel Philbrick points out, “where a person lived in Nantucket depended on his station in the whaling trade.” While shipowners and merchants lived up the hill from the wharves on Pleasant St., captains lived on Orange Street, with its magnificent view of the harbor.31 Fair Street lay between the two, perhaps indicating Thomas’s aspirations.
While Thomas pursued his various business interests with Micajah Coffin, Anna, like many Nantucket wives, kept a small store selling “East India goods” (one street in Nantucket was known as Petticoat Lane in honor of this tradition). She operated the store from the left front room, while the right front room—the parlor—hosted many gatherings of the six Folger sisters and visiting Quaker preachers. The absence of their husbands and the requirements of their stores led many Nantucket women, including Coffin, to undertake trips to the mainland “to exchange oil, candles, and other staples of the island, for dry goods and groceries.” Hallowell described these trips as “serious undertakings,” if not quite so serious as a whaling voyage.32
In 1801, Anna Coffin opened her parlor to visiting Rhode Island Quaker minister Elizabeth Coggeshall. The previous year, Thomas Coffin had embarked on an extended voyage to the Pacific on the ship Trial. Coggeshall talked to Anna, Lucretia, and her siblings, who now included three-year-old Thomas and one-year-old Mary, “on the importance of heeding the inward monitor, and of praying for the strength to follow its directions.”33 This visit influenced Lucretia in two important ways. First, it cemented her commitment to the inner light, or individual conscience, above all other forms of religious and temporal authority. Though basic to Quaker principles, this belief became increasingly controversial over the course of the nineteenth century as Quakers, guided by the influence of evangelicalism, turned more to Scripture and church doctrine for authority.
Second, Lucretia was curious about Coggeshall’s association with the infamous Hannah Barnard. In 1798, Coggeshall and Barnard embarked on a religious mission to England, which led to Barnard’s 1802 disownment for her rational, some said “deist,” interpretation of Quaker theology. As Mott later recalled, Barnard had been censured because “when she had preached against war, as never having been prosecuted by the command of the Divinity, she had been accused of denying the authenticity of the Scriptures; and whereas Jesus had faith in Moses, therefore she denied Jesus, and was an infidel.” In the view of English Quakers, Barnard’s peace sermon challenged a literal interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. The controversy surrounding Barnard’s visit to England reverberated throughout American Quakerism, paving the way for the Hicksite split of 1827, during which the Society of Friends divided into two factions not only over the place of the Scriptures and the inner light in Quaker belief, but also over the growing power of the elders and the propriety of doing business with slavery.34
Though Coggeshall expressed her uneasiness with Barnard’s views, her visit to Nantucket brought Lucretia into vicarious contact with a female minister who was not afraid to challenge the Quaker elders or their growing faith in the Bible, and who became an example for the young girl. This influence was reinforced when Lucretia later attended Nine Partners Boarding School in Hudson, New York, run in part by Barnard in the 1790s. Yet Barnard’s story also suggested the costs of female dissent. Anne Mott, Lucretia’s mother-in-law, sent her various papers relating to Hannah Barnard’s disownment, including “Hannah Barnard’s creed, opposed to any ‘scheme of salvation.’” After reading (and undoubtedly rereading) them, Lucretia passed these papers on to other Friends until they were lost.35
Like all Quaker children in Nantucket, Lucretia also learned to hate slavery and admire the economic principles underlying the whale fishery. At Quaker school in 1797, she first saw British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s widely distributed image of the packed slave-ship Brookes, which made such an impression that she told her children and grandchildren about it. First printed by the thousands in 1789, the diagram, showing 482 slaves crowded into a ship for transport from Africa to Jamaica, remained a powerful weapon in the anti-slavery movement. The image probably arrived in Nantucket via a Quaker ship captain. Nantucket’s close economic ties to Britain intersected with religious ties to English Quakers, who dominated the anti-slavery movement there. Alternatively, British sailors may have passed on copies of the image to their American counterparts when socializing in port.36
Likewise, Lucretia’s reader, Quaker Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement, encouraged children’s empathy by offering lessons on slavery in the context of amusing and instructive discussions of natural history. Originally published in London at the height of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade, the first American edition was published in Nantucket’s sister port, New Bedford, in 1799. Written as a conversation between the fictional Harcourt family and their orphaned friend Augusta, the book sought to “excite the curiosity of young persons” regarding how cloth, paper, glass, metal, and other common objects were made. Appropriately for Nantucket’s schoolchildren, Mental Improvement began with a discussion of whaling. When Augusta asks Mr. Harcourt why men undertake such dangerous voyages, he replies that they do it to earn a living, noting that whaling not only supplies Europe with candles and oil, but also encourages free trade and friendship among nations, “by which each party may reap advantage by interchanging the superfluous produce of different climes, and exercising the mutual good offices of love and kindness.”37 When the Harcourts’ son Henry asks about sugar, Mr. Harcourt replies that it is farmed by “negro slaves,” “snatched from their own country, friends, and connections, by the hand of violence, and power.” After hearing Mr. Harcourt’s account, the children conclude to abstain from all goods produced by slave labor, including sugar, rice, coffee, and calico, as had hundreds of thousands of British citizens. Sophia Harcourt, the oldest daughter, proposes to discuss maple sugar as a substitute for cane, describing the maple tree as a potential weapon against slavery: “A tree so various in its uses, if duly cultivated, may one day supply us with sugar; and silence the arguments of the planters, for a continuation of the slave trade.”38
Though slaves were rare on Nantucket by the late eighteenth century, Lucretia and the other children on the island did have contact with free blacks. African Americans increasingly made up the crews of Nantucket whaling vessels (her uncle Micajah asked a New Bedford colleague to find him four African American sailors for the Lydia in 1801), making them part of the fabric of everyday life on the island. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nantucket town had an established black neighborhood, known as New Guinea. Lucretia’s mother Anna Folger Coffin borrowed some of her many colorful and practical sayings (for instance, “Handsome they that handsome be”) from a black man named Pompey. Anna also referred to “Black Amy,” who lived with Lucretia’s grandmother Folger, who “didn’t like to be told to do, what she was just going to do.” As the story suggests, in the Folger household, African Americans filled traditionally subordinate roles as servants and laborers, if not slaves. Yet even though “Black Amy” was a domestic servant, she had the luxury of grousing. Within the Folger household, whites and blacks, employers and workers, had thus negotiated the terms of free labor. Anna and her children recognized in Amy’s complaint the desire for autonomy and respect. Years later, Anna Folger Coffin joined Lucretia at the founding meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society.39
At the age of ten, Lucretia had a common but nevertheless traumatic experience, when the family believed her father had been lost at sea. Fearing the dangers of whaling voyages, Thomas Coffin had been anxious to abandon the business for some time. In 1788, off the coast of the French colony of Martinico (Martinique), Thomas reported to a passing ship that, “he had lost his mate and four hands, and when he left the coast, he had only one man able to keep the deck.” In 1790, Thomas fitted the Lydia for whaling only after he and his brother Micajah concluded
