father’s victory reflected the growing connection between Quaker interests and Quaker politics. As many historians have noted, Friends were the “vanguard of the industrial revolution”; their principled stance against slavery was conveniently attuned to their economic interests.51 Nantucket crews were paid in shares, so if the ship’s owners lost money, as in the case of the Trial, the sailors did as well. And, though whalers hired sailors of color, crewmen like Mye often bunked in segregated and cramped quarters and ate inferior rations.52 Stranded in Chile, the Trial’s crew were forced, like Thomas Coffin, to make their way home. Yet the freedom granted by Hall v. Gardner allowed the young man of color to gain a measure of economic and personal independence. Mye’s descendents were able to buy property after working as mariners and carpenters along Cape Cod. By 1850, Mye’s son and namesake could proclaim his prosperity by purchasing a daguerreotype of himself wearing a top hat, frock coat, vest, and bowtie.53
The ordeal of the Trial ended Thomas Coffin’s seafaring career and marked the conclusion of Lucretia’s childhood on Nantucket. In 1804, Thomas moved his family to Boston, leaving behind the anxious life of the sea for a potentially more stable career as a merchant. He continued his business relationship with his brother, selling oil and candles that Micajah delivered to Boston, buying bricks to be sent back to Nantucket, or advancing funds to Micajah’s associates.54 In doing so, the Coffins became part of the larger migration from Nantucket in the early national period, joining the Rotchs and others who sought more economic opportunity, and perhaps greater religious freedom, elsewhere.
The move was more difficult for Lucretia than for the younger Coffin children. She left behind family, friends, and a place where she felt at home, whether on the wharves and beaches, or in the cobblestone streets and wood frame buildings. Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that her grandmother “always seemed to regard this first home with an affection different from that which she felt for any subsequent dwelling-place. In after years she taught her children, to the third generation, to cherish its traditions.” Included in these Nantucket traditions, according to Hallowell, were “simplicity, moderation, temperance, and self-restraint in all material things” and “abhorrence of falsehood and injustice.”55 Though Lucretia never lived on the island again, she visited at least seven times, with her visits increasing in number as she got older. It was on Nantucket that she developed her conscience. Lucretia’s education continued at Nine Partners Boarding School, where she became part of a larger family of Quaker reformers.
CHAPTER 2
Nine Partners
IN 1806, AT THE AGE OF THIRTEEN, LUCRETIA COFFIN left the common schools of Boston for Nine Partners Boarding School in Dutchess County, New York, about 200 miles west. Nine Partners provided Lucretia and other girls with an extraordinary education, giving her skills superior to those of most men at that time. But the school offered more than book learning; it further exposed her to the tensions between Quaker simplicity and prosperity, their anti-slavery testimony and the slave economy, their peculiarity and their connections to the larger society. In the spirit of eighteenth-century reformers, Quaker educators tried to purify their religion without losing members. Yet the balance between authority and the individual conscience was difficult to maintain. One’s inner light might just as easily counsel rebellion as obedience, a problem for the school, the Society of Friends, and indeed for a liberal republic like the United States. As Lucretia grew from gifted student to teenaged teacher, from spirited adolescent to young wife, she was ideally placed to question the authority society bestowed according to age, gender, race, and faith.
After their move to Boston in 1804, Thomas Coffin and his family had prospered. Initially establishing a home on Milk Street, in 1806 the family moved to a house in the more desirable neighborhood of Green Street. The following year, Thomas purchased a brick house on Round Lane, later renamed William Street, for $5,600. His warehouse, located on Central and then Long Wharf, the largest of eighty wharves in the commercial city, was doing very well. Long Wharf accommodated large ships, carrying goods from up and down the eastern seaboard as well as from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.1 Coffin had the means to send three of his children to Quaker boarding school. Lucretia and her younger sister Eliza attended Nine Partners, while Thomas, Jr., went to Westtown in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Though the Nine Partners tuition was only £26 per year, this expense was a luxury most families denied their female children.2
Living only two years in Boston, Lucretia never identified with the city that would become a hotbed of radical abolitionism in the 1830s. After the religious homogeneity of Nantucket, Boston must have seemed a profoundly un-Quaker city. In the colonial period, Puritan Boston was known for its persecution of Quakers such as Mary Dyer. By the time the Coffins moved there, the city had become increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan, but it was still dominated by the established Congregational church.3
Lucretia’s parents wanted to give their children a “guarded” Quaker education. Whatever their disagreements with Nantucket Monthly Meeting, Quakers such as the Coffins would have been worried about the impact of these outside influences on their children. In response to these concerns, Quaker boarding schools like Westtown and Nine Partners, near Poughkeepsie, were located in rural settings far from the temptations of the city.4
Founded by New York Yearly Meeting in 1796, Nine Partners offered “useful & necessary learning” and immersion in the religious culture of the Society of Friends. The founders of Nine Partners feared that Quaker children were not learning the history or principles of the Society of Friends, and as a result had become “prey to the Custom of the World and its habitudes.” Seeking to prevent a new wave of disownments, Nine Partners School sought to discourage materialism and inculcate the Quaker doctrines of “obedience to the inward Principle of Light & Truth” and “Silence & Attention.”5
Though it depended on income from tuition, Nine Partners accepted impoverished pupils. Quaker educators worried that poor children might abandon the religion to achieve economic success. In its place, the members of the school committee offered themselves as examples of pious upward mobility. As educator and Nine Partners founder James Mott, Sr.—grandfather of Lucretia’s future husband—remarked to his colleague Joseph Tallcot, “I am willing to own, that a proper degree of what some call the world’s polish, or, in other words, a remove from that rusticity that the children of some Friends manifest, is not incompatible with a religious character.”6 Like Nantucket Quakers, Mott believed that Quaker peculiarity should not stand in the way of success in business or education.
Most important for Lucretia, Nine Partners, following Quaker religious practice, was coeducational. Following the Revolution, female education expanded in the country at large. American educators viewed women as having an essential role in the new republic in raising their children to be virtuous citizens. As Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, stated, “The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” But such calls for female education were not calls for equality. Rush wanted to educate women to be “republican mothers,” capable of raising virtuous male citizens. Until the 1820s, when Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary began instructing women in advanced subjects like math and science, most girls attended separate schools offering curriculums that included embroidery, drawing, and other feminine skills.7
At Nine Partners, male and female students received the same education in reading, writing, math, accounts, and grammar, but the curricula were not identical. Nine Partners was surrounded by a working farm, and the school’s plan called for classes to include “Business & Domestic Employment” suitable to the age of the student. Business and domestic training were implicitly segregated
