Mostly Off-Island:
Lucretia Coffin Mott, the Middle Years
by Frances Karttunen
Read Part 1>>
The Ship’s Inn at 13 Fair Street, bears a plaque commemorating Lucretia Coffin Mott. In 1793, Lucretia was born in her family’s Fair Street home, but that house was removed to make way for a different building in 1831. By the time the old house was replaced with the much grander one that stands today, Lucretia and her family had been gone from the island for more than a quarter of a century. One of the reasons Nantucketers have a hard time explaining why Lucretia is important enough to merit a plaque on the side of The Ship’s Inn is because the achievements for which she is honored were accomplished off-island.
Most Quakers were against portraiture on principle, but both Lucretia Mott and her mother Anna Folger Coffin had their portraits painted. There are, however, few photographs of Lucretia and none from her young years, when photography had yet to be invented. Most people who have seen a photograph of Lucretia Mott have the impression of a stern, humorless woman, but in her day she was described as a small and very pretty woman with a beautiful speaking voice. People praised that voice, although many of them hated her message.
Joseph Mitchell with 4 unknown ladies. |
The 1830s were momentous years on Nantucket and abroad. After years of unsuccessful rebellion in Jamaica, Britain abolished slavery in the West Indies, and Jamaicans of African heritage found themselves free. They faced a new up-hill battle to establish a government and an economy that was not based on slave labor. A call went out to abolitionists in Boston to help in any way they could, and the widow Nancy Gardner Prince, daughter of Black Nantucketer Thomas Prince, answered the call. At the end of the 1830s, she traveled to Jamaica and concluded that what was most needed was a vocational training school for women where they could learn ways to earn their own money. Returning to the U.S.A. to do fundraising for the school, she went straight to Philadelphia to consult with Lucretia Mott.
The 1830s also saw the organization of the Nantucket Steamboat Company, and Lucretia immediately took advantage of this faster mode of transportation to make a visit home. Her purpose was not just to get together with relatives and old friends, but to bring Nantucket Quakers to the point of view held by the socially activist Hicksite faction of the Religious Society of Friends. Indeed, the Hicksite Meeting was already attracting many of Nantucket’s Friends. The local Hicksites soon required a large meeting house, and the one they built survives to the present as the Dreamland Theatre building.
In 1837, Main Street was paved with cobblestones purchased from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and from that moment on, it was reported, “Weary lie the heads on that thoroughfare in the early morning hours, as the carts rattling over them disturb the slumbers of Main Street dwellers.” This inconvenience did not deter whale oil merchant Joseph Starbuck from buying land on the north side of Main Street in 1837 for the construction of the Three Bricks for his three sons.
Where was Lucretia while all this was going on? She and James Mott were busy raising money for the construction of a huge, magnificently appointed convention hall in Philadelphia. It was to be called Pennsylvania Hall.
During this period white Americans were fixated on the notion of racial “amalgamation.” Lucretia and James Mott and likeminded colleagues and family members visited black families in their homes and welcomed African-Americans into their homes. According to Mary Starbuck, author of My House and I, Sojourner Truth visited Nantucket and “was billeted with two Friends in one of the finest houses of the town.” This angered many people in Philadelphia and Nantucket.
In 1838, Lucretia opened the first sessions of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in the newly dedicated Pennsylvania Hall. That night a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall to the ground. It was destroyed after being open just one single day. The mob intended to burn the Motts’ house too but couldn’t locate it. Instead they burned a church and an orphanage.
Back in Nantucket, pillars were added to the front of the Methodist Church that stands to the north of the Pacific National Bank, and William Mitchell’s meridian stones were set to the south of the bank. The south meridian stone is only a block away from the Ship’s Inn and the plaque that marks Lucretia’s birthplace.
Lucretia and James were not in Nantucket or Philadelphia. They had sailed to England as American delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. When they got to London, however, Lucretia was outraged to learn that their English hosts refused to seat women delegates on the floor of the convention. Overnight she had found a new cause. At the convention she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the women began a life-long partnership dedicated to advancing the rights of women.
On August 11, 1841, another of Lucretia’s dear friends, Frederick Douglass, made his first public speech to a “promiscuous” audience of men and women, white and black, at the first Anti-Slavery Convention in the original Nantucket Atheneum building, but Lucretia wasn’t there. She was at home in Philadelphia helping James prepare a book about their experiences in London.
Nor was she in Nantucket the following August for the second Anti-slavery Convention on the island. The Rev. Stephen Foster’s “Brotherhood of Thieves” address delivered at that convention accused northern clergymen of complicity in maintaining slavery. The speech and the riot it provoked are memorialized a sign on Broad Street showing a man with devil’s horns balancing the worth of a slave family against the value of a bag of money.
Cobblestones flew in through the windows of the Atheneum. Eliza Starbuck Barney, Lucretia’s relative and fellow Quaker, was secretary of the Nantucket Anti-Slavery Society, and in the affray she was pelted with eggs. Fearing that their building would suffer the same fate as Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia, the Nantucket Atheneum’s trustees closed the building. After being chased from place to place, the convention finally concluded in a large boat-building shop on the west edge of town.
When all this happened, Lucretia had just left the island. On a visit to Nantucket in July, she had organized a peaceful meeting for Nantucket’s black community in one of the island’s Quaker Meeting Houses. The riot broke out after her departure.
Read Part 3 >>
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.
