Born on Fair Street:
Lucretia Coffin Mott, the Early Years
by Frances Karttunen
Just up the street from William Mitchell’s south meridian stone standing in front of the Quaker Meeting House is the Ship’s Inn. Here on Nantucket we know of Lucretia Mott through a plaque on the side of the inn and the little street that runs along the inn’s side called Lucretia Mott Lane.
Who was Lucretia Mott, and what did she do to be regarded as “the greatest American woman”? That’s what one of her biographers, Lloyd Hare, called her. Nantucketer Helen Seager goes further and calls Lucretia the unqualified greatest American who ever lived. She is honored along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in a sculpture in the rotunda of the United States Capitol.
We can point to the roof of the Pacific National Bank where Lucretia’s younger relative Maria Mitchell swept the skies with a telescope and discovered a comet. We can’t point to anything like that for Lucretia. Whatever Lucretia did that was of national significance, it wasn’t on Nantucket.
She left the island at age eleven. For the remaining seventy-six years of her life, she only returned to visit now and then. During those years she lived in Boston and Philadelphia. She traveled north, south, and west in the burgeoning United States of America, and she visited Ireland, England, and Scotland.
Wherever she went, she spoke in public to women and men, white and black, against the institution of slavery and for equal rights for all people, regardless of race or gender. She used a stamp on her correspondence that showed an enslaved African woman in chains. The stamp read “Am I not a woman and a sister?”
She did this before the American Civil War and after the war. People told her to sit down and be quiet. They called her a heretic and threatened her family with violence, but when it came to injustice, Lucretia would not hold her tongue.
Let’s follow Lucretia Coffin Mott’s life through time and space, on-island and off-island, to see why we should know her, honor her, and emulate her.
On February 3, 1783, more than a month before peace was declared, the captain of the ship Bedford from Nantucket raised the flag of the United States of America on the Thames River below the Tower of London. On March 22 church bells finally signaled the end of the American Revolution.
In the American Revolution over 85 percent of Nantucket’s whaling fleet had been captured or destroyed. Islanders struggled to restart business. Among the Quaker whalers was Thomas Coffin. In 1789, Thomas received command of his first ship and married Anna Folger. On January 3, 1793, their second child, Lucretia, was born to Anna and Thomas in their home on Fair Street.
In 1800 Thomas Coffin purchased the ship Trial in order to make a voyage to China. After he left Nantucket, for two years he was absent and unaccounted for. During those years Lucretia was going to Friends School in Nantucket, attending Friends Meeting, and helping out by looking after her brother and sisters while her mother operated a store in order to meet household expenses.
In 1802 Thomas Coffin reappeared. The Trial had been seized and impounded in Valparaiso, Chile. Lucretia’s father had sent his crew home and stayed behind to try to get his vessel back. While waiting, he learned to speak Spanish. Finally he gave up and set off on foot over the Andes Mountains to Brazil. From there he got passage on a ship to the United States. None of his messages to home had gotten through. After he returned, Lucretia sat at her father’s knee learning phrases in Spanish and hearing about the generosity of Catholic families in South America.
In 1804, the year that the Pacific National Bank was incorporated, Lucretia’s family moved to Boston. Thomas Coffin had left the sea and gone into partnership with a Boston merchant. From Boston Lucretia was sent to Nine Partners, a Quaker boarding school in New York State. There she came into contact with Elias Hicks, one of the school’s founders. Hicks was a strong critic of slavery. At Nine Partners Lucretia learned that although tuition was the same for girls and boys, women teachers were paid only fifty percent of men teachers’ salaries.
In 1811, on the eve of the War of 1812 between the U.S.A. and Great Britain, a war that would once again cripple Nantucket whaling and subject her island home to great deprivation and suffering, Lucretia married James Mott in the Pine Street Meeting House in Philadelphia. Lucretia was eighteen years old, and James was twenty-two. Between 1812 and 1828, during and after the war, Lucretia gave birth to four daughters and two sons.
In 1817 Lucretia lost her three-year-old son to a fever. In grief she stood and spoke in Quaker meeting. The sweetness of her voice and the power of her simple words impressed her fellow Friends. They encouraged her to speak again if she felt she had a message. Later some would regret that they had given her encouragement.
The next year Lucretia visited Virginia with a Quaker woman minister. There she saw enslaved Africans working in fields and bound together in chains. In 1821, Lucretia herself was formally recognized as a Quaker minister. She was not yet thirty years old.
During the 1820s, she spent her time in Philadelphia raising her family and struggling with her faith. At the same time James Mott was serving on the board of supervisors for a school for free black children in Philadelphia. From the school he brought home reports of families living in desperate poverty. Husband and wife felt called to work for African Americans, both free and enslaved.
Lucretia decided to stop using any product made with slave labor. In 1826, James helped found the Philadelphia Free Produce Society, offering alternative merchandise to people boycotting slave products. Nantucket also had stores offering goods guaranteed not to have been produced under conditions of slavery. Deborah Coffin Hussey of Nantucket wrote, “I remember we had to eat ‘free labor sugar’ which the slaves did not make, and nasty stuff it was. I don’t know where it came from.”
Also in 1826 the Quakers broke into opposing factions. Orthodox Quakers avoided engagement with the “world’s people.” The Hicksite Quakers, named for Elias Hicks, embraced social activism. The Hicksites were labeled “heretical Friends” by the Orthodox Quakers. Lucretia did not mind the label. She enjoyed referring to herself as a heretic. In 1830, she and James began to travel in order to preach in other places and win Friends to the Hicksite meeting. In 1833, the year that the Nantucket Steamboat Company was organized, Lucretia took a steamboat home to Nantucket, where the Hicksite faction had grown to outnumber the Orthodox Quakers on the island. The large building that has housed the Dreamland Theatre on South Water Street for nearly a century was originally built as the island’s Hicksite meetinghouse.
As Lucretia spoke in public meetings from Boston to Virginia to Ohio, people praised her voice, but many of them hated her message. She organized an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and she refused to be silenced. She was pained by criticism, and stress harmed her health, but she did not back down. She reminded herself and others that: “Any great change must expect opposition because it shakes the very foundation of privilege.” In the end, she won over or outlived her critics.
Part 2 >>
Frances Karttunen’s book, The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars, is available at bookstores and from Spinner Publications, New Bedford. Look for Law and Disorder in Old Nantucket in bookstores this summer.
