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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Lucretia Coffin Mott and the Power of the Spirit
by Beverly Wilson Palmer
Lucretia C. Mott. Carte de visite photograph by Frederick Gutekunst, Philadelphia, 1860s. Courtesy of Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College.
The reputation of Lucretia Coffin Mott today rests generally on her leadership in the woman's rights and antislavery movements, and specifically on her leadership in the 1848 Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention. Yet too often overlooked is the significance of religion in her life. The power of the spirit governed all Lucretia Mott's actions; her Quaker heritage gave meaning and context to every aspect of her life. Mott's belief that every human being must be open to the promptings of the spirit fueled her demand for equality for African Americans and for women. In Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (University of Illinois Press, 2002), sponsored by the NHPRC, Mott's tireless commitment to equal rights and the central role of religion in these lifelong efforts is clearly demonstrated.
Born in 1793 to Quaker parents, at age 13 Lucretia Coffin was sent to a coeducational Quaker school in Dutchess County, New York. Here the young student met James Mott, whom she married in 1811 when the couple established permanent residence in Philadelphia. James sold cotton and wool but later, as a protest against the slave-driven cotton culture in the South, focused only on wool trading. Between 1812 and 1828, Lucretia bore six children, of whom five, four daughters and a son, lived to adulthood. She began to speak at Quaker meetings in 1818, and in 1821 she was recognized as a minister in the Society of Friends in Philadelphia.
The Quaker tradition enabled women to take public positions on a variety of social problems. Recognized as a minister in 1821 and in the 1830s as clerk of the Philadelphia Women's Yearly Meeting, Mott enjoyed the privilege of speaking in her own meeting as well as traveling widely to minister to other meetings. The historian Susan Mosher Stuard cogently expresses the religious legacy Mott and other Quaker women inherited: "Women among the Friends may be credited with helping to arouse righteous indignation against the whole corpus of received scholarly thought and the mental constructs by which thinkers arrived at their conclusions. By rejecting the very endeavor of formulating orthodox doctrines and rules, Quakerism as a movement found a way to discard the gender ideology that lay embedded within Western thought."1
Mott understood and was empowered by this inheritance. In 1869, in a letter to the British reformer Josephine Butler, she reflected on the equality she had enjoyed as a Quaker: "In the executive department of the Society, the right conceded to woman to act conjointly with man has had its influence, not only in making her familiar with the routine of business relating to our 'Discipline,' but in giving her self-reliance in mingling with the various reformatory societies in the great movements of the age." (It is no coincidence that the largest single group signing the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls were Quakers or former Quakers.)2
During the 1820s a conflict between the stricter, more conservative Quakers and the tolerant, less orthodox followers of Elias Hicks (known as the Hicksites) caused the Motts to break with their original meeting. Already in an 1822 letter to her husband's grandfather, Lucretia had asked why a Quaker should be disowned (i.e., removed from membership) for marrying outside of meeting. In 1827 first James and then Lucretia Mott followed the Hicksite branch (Lucretia insisted it was the Orthodox Quakers who left the fold) which espoused free interpretation of the Bible and reliance on inward authority, as opposed to the guidance of historic Christian authority. Moreover, Hicks' strong condemnation of slavery resonated with the Motts' antislavery beliefs.
The Hicksite/Orthodox division did not end Mott's differences with her fellow Hicksites. "Oh how our Discipline needs revising-- & stripping of its objectionable features," she wrote the Irish Quakers Richard and Hannah Webb in 1842. "I know not how far yours may differ from ours, but I know we have far too many disownable offences. Still with all our faults, I know of no religious association I would prefer to it."3 Indeed, Lucretia Mott remained a Hicksite Quaker throughout her life. Yet she often spoke outside Quaker meetings, and her sermons show her full commitment to liberal religious issues such as the inherent goodness of all humans and the importance of good works.
Addressing the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in November 1869, Mott stated how faith led to action, to her participation in antislavery activities in the 1820s. She recalled how she had felt herself obliged "to abstain from the products of the slave's labor." Although she was "somewhat prepared" to speak out against the slave trade in meeting, she described the "unexpected" call in moving and personal language: "It was a trial to be obliged to appear needlessly peculiar. It was like parting with the right hand or the right eye, but when I left the meeting I yielded to the obligation, and then, for forty years from that time, whatever I did I did under the conviction that it was wrong to partake of the products of the labor of slavery."4 For Mott, faith was pointless unless connected to action.
In January 2002, the University of Illinois Press published Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, with Holly Byers Ochoa serving as Associate Editor and Carol Faulkner as Editing Fellow. Supported by a grant from the NHPRC, this work is a volume in the series 'Women in American History', edited by Anne Firor Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw.
What sort of action was appropriate when the end was admirable but the means reprehensible? The Civil War personally challenged the religious beliefs of Lucretia Mott, who as a Quaker espoused nonviolence yet had worked so assiduously to abolish slavery. This peace-loving woman protested the Civil War's violence, but not without some misgivings. In July 1861 she wrote a public letter disputing newspaper coverage of a recent speech she had given in Boston that imputed that she supported the war. She protested that "instead of the whole armor of God, we have the battle of the warrior, which is ever with confused noise and garments rolled in blood." Still, she continued, "terrible as war ever must be, let us hope that it may not be stayed by any compromise which shall continue the unequal, cruel war on the rights and liberties of millions of our unoffending fellow-beings." As prospects for abolishing slavery increased, in 1864 Lucretia wrote her sister Martha, quoting Corinthians: "The AntiS. sentiment is spreadg - not by battles with carnal weapons but the mighty 'armor of righteousness on the right hand & on the left'- It is no evidence of inconsistency, to be glad when the right is uppermost in the army-even if yr. depend[enc]e. is not on the arm of flesh."5 After the war the always optimistic activist helped found the Pennsylvania Peace Society.
Mott's distress over sectarian religion, expressed more formally in her frequent sermons, also appears in numerous letters through the years. To Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for example, Lucretia wrote of her concern: "It is lamentable, that the simple & benign religion of Jesus should be so encumbered with the creeds & dogmas of sects - Its primitive beauty obscured by these gloomy appendages of man." As a lifelong critic of sects and creeds, in the late 1860s she became active in the Free Religious Association, an organization dedicated to freeing all sects from dependence on Biblical authority and the divinity of Christ. In addresses to their meetings, Mott expressed the hope that all religions would eventually abandon theological differences and unite under one supreme power.6
Mott emphasized her activism and her continued faith in humankind in this 1867 sermon at the Brooklyn Unitarian Church:
I believe that such proving all things, such trying all things, and holding fast only to that which is good, is the great religious duty of our age. . . . Our own conscience and the Divine Spirits's teaching are always harmonious and this Divine illumination is as freely given to man as his reason, or as are many of his natural powers.7
Impelled by an "incorruptible spirit which searcheth all things," until the end of her life Lucretia Mott continued to advocate woman's rights, peace, temperance, rights for the freedpeople and freedom of conscience. This clear sense of her religious calling made her a natural leader and a major force in 19th-century American reform movements.
Beverly Wilson Palmer is the editor of Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, and The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner.
NOTES:
- "Women's Witnessing," Witness for Change: Quaker Women over Three Centuries, eds. Elizabeth Brown and Susan Mosher Stuard (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 14.
- Letter of 20 April 1869, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, eds. Beverly Wilson Palmer, Holly Byers Ochoa, and Carol Faulkner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 415. See Judith Wellman, "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks," Journal of Women's History 3 (Spring 1991), p. 27; Nancy Hewitt, "Feminist Friends: Agrarian Quakers and the Emergence of Woman's Rights in America," Feminist Studies 12 (Spring 1986), p. 29.
- Letter of 25 February 1842, Selected Letters, p. 106.
- Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, 17 November 1869, published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, 27 November 1869, p. 1.
- Letters of 6 July 1861 and 25 January 1864, Selected Letters, pp. 312, 339.
- Letter of 23 March 1841, Selected Letters, p. 90. On the Free Religious Association, see letters of 20 May 1867 and 22 May [1874] to Octavius B. Frothingham, Selected Letters, pp. 387-88, 489-90. See also Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Friends General Conference, 1999), pp. 220-21, 239.
- "When the Heart is Attuned to Prayer," Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, ed. Dana Greene (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980), p. 302. For an informal expression of Mott's beliefs, see, for example, letter to Richard D. and Hannah Webb, 2 April 1841, Selected Letters, pp. 91-92.
