Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner

in 1790, which had workshops for lesser criminals, but sixteen individual cells for harder cases. These inmates were given Bibles and kept in solitary confinement, not as punishment, but to encourage contemplation and redemption. The problem with these approaches soon became apparent. Authorities relied less on corporal punishment, but observation encouraged paranoia and guilt, while solitude induced insanity.¹⁹

      Lucretia’s experience at Nine Partners led her to question this—in the words of philosopher Michel Foucault—“perfect exercise of power.” James Mott, Sr., advised teachers at the school to confine children as punishment, but urged that “they ought always to be confined in sight, and never where there is a danger of their being affrighted.” But despite the superintendent’s instructions, Lucretia saw one male student locked in a dark closet and given only bread and water as sustenance. She was so disturbed by this that she violated rules separating boys from girls, and “contrived to get into the forbidden side of the house where he was, and supply him with bread and butter under the door.” Lucretia later commented on the Philadelphia prison system, “There has always seemed to me great cruelty in doing such violence to a man’s social nature, to say nothing of the effect on the nervous system, as to place him in solitary confinement.” Convinced of the moral capabilities of every individual and fearing for the impact of punishment on the criminal, Lucretia advocated persuasion as means of inducing good behavior.²⁰

      Lucretia became increasingly aware of the tension between authority and rebellion. In the winter of 1809, she would have learned that her uncle, Captain Mayhew Folger, had discovered the sole surviving mutineer from the HMS Bounty, John Adams, also known as Alexander Smith.²¹ In 1807, Captain Folger’s sealer, the Topaz, departed Nantucket for the South Pacific and eventually Canton (now Guangzhou). The first part of his voyage was relatively uneventful. Folger placed two members of his crew in stocks and irons, but otherwise the crew remained in good order. Then the Topaz met bad weather, and after two months of rough passage the crew docked in Tasmania for repairs and provisions. Island-hopping looking for seal grounds, Folger headed for Pitcairn, where he discovered the Bounty mutineer, who presented him with the Bounty’s compass and chronometer. Off the coast of Chile, the Spanish seized the Topaz and took it to Valparaiso, where Folger saw his brother-in-law’s brig, the Trial, still sitting in the harbor and passed word to a British officer of Adams’s presence on Pitcairn. While Folger waited, 21 of his 49 crewmen deserted, and he went into debt trying to support the rest. In 1809, a full year after his discovery of the Bounty mutineer and the subsequent seizure of his ship, Folger finally recovered the Topaz from the Spanish and won $44,000 in damages.²² Though Mayhew Folger was a ship captain like William Bligh, he clearly sympathized with the Bounty’s rebellious crew, calling Adams a “worthy man.”²³ From Folger, Lucretia learned that rebellion was a legitimate response to undeserved and arbitrary power. If authority was necessary for the safety of a ship (or society), then it had to be tempered with kindness, morality, and justice.

      In the protective politically and theologically liberal community of Nine Partners, the teenage Lucretia Coffin blossomed. She was smart and vivacious, a petite young woman with a striking brow, large bright eyes, and brown hair. Lucretia’s radiant personality enabled contemporaries to describe her as attractive and even beautiful. She excelled in school, and by 1808 she was working as an assistant to Deborah Rogers, the head female teacher. Nine Partners was initially intended for students from ages seven to fourteen, but the previous year, possibly for financial reasons, the school decided to allow older students to continue. Since fifteen-year-old Lucretia had mastered the academic subjects available, she moved into teaching. Outside dame or finishing schools, female teachers were still unusual in the United States. As historian Joan M. Jensen notes, “Quakers were not the only women to teach but they were among the first.” Two decades later, Catharine Beecher pioneered teaching as a profession for all women. The transition Mott made from student to teacher became commonplace. Thirteen-year-old Harriet Beecher (later Stowe) entered her older sister’s Hartford Female Seminary in 1824, becoming a teacher in 1829.²⁴

      As an assistant teacher, Lucretia formed close friendships with other instructors at Nine Partners. Her friend and future sister-in-law Sarah Mott, granddaughter of superintendent James Mott, Sr., described the “good times” they had at school: “there are several teachers & assistants on each side & after the cares of the day, we can enjoy an hour or two of fine converse around the sitting room fire, with a double relish.” Like Lucretia, Sarah became a teacher, but she was close in age to her pupils, whom she described as “lovely girls, who interest every feeling of my heart for them.” In addition to Sarah Mott, Lucretia’s school chums included Sarah’s cousin Phebe Post (later Willis).²⁵

      Despite the wishes of the founders, this social and intellectual camaraderie sometimes included romance, as it soon did for Lucretia and James Mott, Sarah’s twenty-year-old brother, another teacher at the school. A tall, blond, blue-eyed but reserved junior male teacher, James already knew Lucretia through his sister Sarah; Lucretia had visited their home on Long Island during a school vacation. Drawn to her passion and her intelligence, James invited Lucretia to join a French class that he and other teachers organized, where their flirtation deepened.²⁶

      James and Lucretia met and fell in love during a transitional period in American courtship. For most of the eighteenth century, parents exerted enormous influence over their child’s choice of spouse. But after the American Revolution, young people gained more autonomy, choosing their mate based on love and mutual attraction with little parental interference. Because of their emphasis on the inner light, members of the Society of Friends emphasized the importance of individual choice and true love much earlier than other American Protestants.²⁷

      Yet James and Lucretia undoubtedly sought their parents’ approval before their courtship progressed. As in other parts of the religion, the Society of Friends sought to balance individualism with the authority of the meeting. Historian Barry Levy describes Quaker marriage discipline as a “spiritual obstacle course.” Quakers disapproved of premarital sex (which could lead to disownment), so early in their relationship young couples were instructed to notify parents and other senior Friends of their intentions. If these elders approved, the couple announced their engagement to their meeting, which then undertook an investigation of the match that could last as long as two months. Of course, the marriage discipline also included harsh rules for marrying outside meeting or otherwise disobeying the community. The Coffins and Motts approved the union from the beginning; Thomas Coffin had, after all, already entrusted his daughter to the Mott family.²⁸

      Teaching alongside her future husband, Lucretia expressed her first frustration at sexual inequality. In 1805, when he was seventeen, James Mott, Jr., became an assistant teacher. By May 1807 he was making £70 per year as a teacher at Nine Partners, but Deborah Rogers, the head female teacher, made only £40 per year. One year later, Mott was making £100 per year, while Lucretia, as Deborah Rogers’s assistant, worked without pay. Only in 1809 did Rogers receive a raise to £100, but by that time James earned £250. James’s salary may have reflected nepotism rather than sexism, but Lucretia clearly saw the gap as an example of male privilege. The outraged Lucretia “resolved to claim for myself all that an impartial Creator has bestowed.”²⁹

      If Lucretia had already shown signs of rebelliousness, her choice of partner was conventional. Five years older than Lucretia, James Mott was raised in North Hempstead, Nassau County, then known as Cowneck. Due to the insular Quaker world of Long Island, probably similar to that of Nantucket, James’s parents’ were distant cousins, direct descendants of Adam Mott, a Quaker who settled in Hempstead in 1655, and his second wife Elizabeth Richbell, whose family owned the first land patent to Mamaroneck, in Westchester County, directly across Long Island Sound. James’s father Adam Mott was the son of Sarah Willis and Adam Mott, Sr. Anne Mott, James’s mother, was the daughter of Mary Underhill and James Mott, Sr.

      Like their neutral pacifist coreligionists on Nantucket, Long Island Quakers struggled during the American Revolution. Adam Mott, Sr., a farmer, was robbed by colonials and commanded by the British to furnish their army with wood. James Mott, Sr., a prosperous merchant in New York City prior to the Revolution, bought a mill in Mamaroneck, where he retreated