Conflagration & War:
Lucretia Coffin Mott, the Sunset Years
by Frances Karttunen
Read Part 2>>
Native Nantucketer Lucretia Coffin Mott has been called “the greatest American woman” and is honored with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in a sculpture in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. This is the final part of a 3-part series examining her roles in the struggles for equal rights for all citizens. Parts 1 and 2 are available online at www.YesterdaysIsland.com.
On the corners of Main and Centre streets, Centre and Broad streets, Broad and South Water streets, and South Water and Main streets there are white marble squares embedded in the red brick sidewalk. There are two more as well, one at the corner of Main and Orange streets, and one in front of Island Coffee where Broad Street turns into Steamboat Wharf. They demarcate the extent of Nantucket’s Great Fire. On July 13, 1846, a stovepipe fire grew into a conflagration that consumed the town’s center and its wharves. The Atheneum building where Frederick Douglass had spoken burned to the ground. Within six months it was rebuilt, and Douglass returned to speak in the building that stands to this day.
In the year of the Great Fire, Nantucket’s public schools were finally racially integrated after years of school boycott and fiery public debate.
The very next year, 1847, Maria Mitchell put Nantucket on the world’s scientific map by discovering a comet from her home-built astronomical observatory atop the roof of the Pacific National Bank. From her perch on the roof, had she taken her eye from the sky to look down and around, she would have seen a new Nantucket business district rising from the ashes of the old.
But Lucretia Mott was not on-island for this latest momentous event. She was in Boston speaking at the New England Anti-Slavery meeting and then traveling with her husband James by horse and buggy to Quaker meetings in Ohio and Indiana.
Just two years after the Great Fire, Nantucket held a big 4th of July celebration with fireworks. (One would think Nantucketers might have been apprehensive about playing with fire at this point.) Now Lucretia was busy organizing the Seneca Falls Convention of Women’s Rights with her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The participants at the New York convention signed a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions against unequal treatment of women and men.
During the next three years, Harriet Tubman began leading enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad; Sojourner Truth delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s rights convention in Ohio; Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and, supported by James and Lucretia Mott, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania opened its doors.
As for Lucretia, she was delivering and publishing her most famous speech, her “Discourse on Women.” In it she declared, “A woman asks nothing as a favor, but as a right. She wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being. She is seeking not to be governed by laws in the making of which she has no voice.”
These progressive years were followed by years of tragedy. Between 1861 and 1865 the previously pacifist town of Nantucket sent nearly three hundred of its young men into the Union Army and the Union Navy. The Main Street monument to the town’s Union dead erected in 1874 lists the names of 74 townsmen who lost their lives. Twenty men went to war from Nantucket’s Black community. Most enlisted in the Union Navy, and all survived.
During these hard years, Lucretia and James Mott were living in a farmhouse called Roadside, just outside Philadelphia, across the road from a Union Army base. From there they supported the soldiers from within their Quaker pacifism and collected clothes and shoes for people who had just been freed from slavery.
Three years after the war ended, James Mott died, leaving Lucretia to live on as a widow for twelve more years. James had served on the board of managers that wrote the charter for Swarthmore College. At the college’s opening ceremony Lucretia planted two oak trees there in his memory.
The Anti-Slavery Societies to which the Motts had devoted so much of their energy disbanded, and the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. It says, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Since the amendment did not explicitly extend voting rights to women, Lucretia still had work to do. In addition to her continuing work on behalf of woman suffrage, she was elected president of the Pennsylvania Peace Society and served as such for ten years. In 1876, she visited Nantucket for the last time, but she carried on speaking in public for two more years after that. By then she was in her mid-eighties.
In 1880 Lucretia Coffin Mott died at home at Roadside, Pennsylvania. She had lived from the time of George Washington through the time of Abraham Lincoln to the time when American women were being jailed for demanding the right to vote for their presidents. She had witnessed the War of 1812 and the American Civil War from close quarters. She had been born into the Age of Sail and traveled into old age by steamship and railroad in the service of human rights for all.
Unlike fellow Nantucketers Maria Mitchell and Anna Gardner, Mott remained a Quaker to the end of her life despite many efforts to expel her from Meeting or to silence her. She spoke and wrote against injustice to the end of her days. After her death it took until 1919 for Congress to guarantee American women’s right to vote and until 1972 for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
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.
