Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner

Quakers were surprised by her pronouncements because advocates of women’s rights were rare in the 1820s. Lucretia’s focus on the female sex suggested her transformation over the course of the decade from a respectable Quaker minister, wife, and mother to a controversial dissenter, social critic, and activist.

      Mott’s identity as a minister and reformer was forged in the context of an internal Quaker controversy over the ministry of Elias Hicks, culminating in the Schism of 1827. Hicks and his allies, known as Hicksites, preached the importance of the inner light, criticizing Quaker elders for abandoning this fundamental doctrine, abusing their power of disownment, and compromising with the world. Hicks’s opponents, known as evangelical or Orthodox Quakers for their strong theological and associational ties to mainstream evangelical Protestants, advocated the twin authorities of the Bible and Quaker leadership. Intersecting with the larger social and cultural turmoil of the 1820s, the Hicksite doctrinal schism overlapped with divisions wrought by class, slavery, and democracy. This decade witnessed not only the rending of the Society of Friends in the United States, but conflicts between free thinkers, religious liberals, and Evangelical Christians, revolutions in transportation and communications, the rise of Jacksonian democracy, preliminary skirmishes over women’s status, and the birth of immediate abolitionism.⁶

      Though her granddaughter later wrote that Mott only reluctantly separated from Twelfth Street Meeting and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, it is more likely that she was an enthusiastic Hicks partisan from the beginning. As historian Larry Ingle observes, the elders, or overseers, of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting were disturbed by young ministers in their purview “eagerly adopting and just as eagerly preaching the sentiments of Elias Hicks.” Mott was undoubtedly one of these young preachers. On one occasion, two female elders from Twelfth Street Meeting visited Mott to inform her that Friends felt uncomfortable with some of the language used in her sermons. What did she mean by referring to Quakers’ “notions of Christ”? Mott replied that she had been quoting from William Penn: “Men are to be judged by their likeness to Christ, rather than their notions of Christ.” While Mott’s response satisfied the elders this time, they became increasingly critical of the way Hicks’s allies used Penn and other early Quakers to justify their doctrines. Hicksite and evangelical Quakers both struggled to prove that they were the authentic and legitimate body of the Society of Friends.⁷

      Equally suggestive is the Motts’ longstanding personal relationship with Elias Hicks. Lucretia confirmed that Hicks was “the same consistent exemplary man that he was many years ago” at Nine Partners Boarding School. Like James Mott, Hicks was from Long Island, born in Hempstead in 1748. Hicks married a fellow Quaker, Jemima Seaman, and moved to her family’s farm in Jericho. As a farmer, he developed a deep skepticism of the market economy and industrialization, helping poor white and black neighbors in his community survive the American Revolution by selling produce at low prices (according to one source, he refused to sell to the rich). In 1778, the same year he freed his slave Ben, Hicks was recognized as a minister in the Society of Friends.⁸

      By the 1820s, Hicks’s criticism of slavery, the market economy, and the Quaker elders linked him to the Democratic radicals of the Workingmen’s Party in nearby New York City. Barnabas Bates, a correspondent of Hicks, was one of these spiritual and political fellow travelers. Originally from Rhode Island, Bates moved to Manhattan in 1824 and began publishing a newspaper called the Christian Inquirer to promote “Free Inquiry, Religious Liberty, and Rational Christianity.” In 1828, Bates became an organizer for the Workingmen’s Party and also joined other Anti-Sabbatarians to oppose evangelical efforts to legislate Sunday as a day of rest. Hicks shared Bates’s opposition to Sabbath laws, arguing that they violated “the Liberty of Conscience guaranteed by our free constitution to all its Citizens.”⁹ An adamant egalitarian, Bates also opposed both high postage rates and slavery. In 1830, following Hicks’s death, he delivered a eulogy to the African Benevolent Societies of New York City. Bates remembered Elias Hicks as “among the first that brought the subject [of slavery] frequently and forcibly before the members of his religious society.”¹⁰

      In 1811, Hicks had published an influential pamphlet that reflected the core of his anti-slavery principles, Observations on the Slavery of the Africans and their Descendants. Written as a series of questions and answers, the pamphlet showed slavery’s incompatibility with both America’s commitment to equality and Quaker testimony against war. Hicks began by affirming that every man is “a moral agent (that is free to act).” African Americans were deprived of their inalienable freedom at birth, he argued, when “they are taken in a state of war, and considered by the captor as a prize.” Most important, Hicks described purchasers and consumers of slave goods as supporting and encouraging the institution. He concluded that “no man who is convinced of the cruelty and injustice of holding a fellow creature in slavery, can traffic in, or make use of the produce of a slave’s labour.”¹¹ For the rest of his career, Hicks placed “free produce” at the center of Quaker anti-slavery testimony. By this time Friends had severed all direct ties to the peculiar institution, but Hicks believed that until they abjured slave products Quaker testimony was incomplete, and their “hands stained with blood.”¹²

      Hicks’s pamphlet on slavery caused little debate until Quakers began questioning his other theological views. Phebe Willis (not to be confused with Lucretia’s school friend, Phebe Post Willis), a member with Elias Hicks of Jericho Monthly Meeting, called upon Hicks to clarify his views on the Bible in writing. On May 5, 1818, Hicks wrote Willis that the Scriptures, as they have been interpreted, “have been the cause of four-fold more harm than good to Christendom.” Citing Quaker founder George Fox, Hicks viewed “the light and spirit of truth in the hearts and consciences of men and women, as the only sure rule of faith and practice.” These views would have scandalized most American Christians, but Hicks was surprised at the negative response he got from Quakers. In another letter to Willis, Hicks denied that these statements deviated from his previous sermons or beliefs; he had always condemned “professors of Christianity” for idolizing the Bible. Ingle notes that these letters dropped like a “bombshell” in the midst of the Society of Friends. Indeed, Hicks’s replies set off a wave of recriminations, polemics, and pamphleteering among Quakers and non-Quakers alike.¹³

      Trends within the Society of Friends made Hicks’s statements more troubling to the elders than they might have been at the beginning of his ministry. In both England and the U.S., evangelical Christianity was undergoing a period of revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening. In the U.S., revivalism coincided with religious disestablishment, which prompted denominations such as the Baptists and Methodists to compete with previously state-supported religions for potential converts, especially women, through a vibrant proliferation of charitable voluntary societies. At the same time, prosperous Quaker businessmen and merchants began to drop their opposition to worldliness. Particularly in Philadelphia, the wealthy Quaker leaders saw themselves as similar to other Protestants, basing their doctrines on the Bible, establishing a clear hierarchy to rule the religion, and joining Bible, tract, missionary, Sabbath, and temperance societies to establish their place in mainstream American culture. These respectable elders wanted to remove any taint of disrepute from their religion, which had been associated with dangerous dissenters in the colonial period. One sign of this change was the decision by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1806 to disown those who denied Christ’s divinity or a literal interpretation of the Bible. By the 1820s, the Philadelphia elders were exerting their power on a regular basis, targeting Hicks and his supporters.¹⁴

      The elders took special exception to Hicks’s sermons on free produce, which they rightly perceived as attacking both their piety and their business practices. In October 1819, Hicks preached at Pine Street Meeting in Philadelphia, where Lucretia had taught school and married James. Pine Street Meeting was now the spiritual home of Jonathan Evans, leader of the evangelical Quakers, who had retired from the lumber industry in 1817, having accumulated a fortune of $43,000. During the American Revolution, he had served a short jail term for refusing military service, and for a time he abstained from slave products. But by 1819 Evans had given up on free produce as too cumbersome in an economy so closely tied to slavery. In his sermon, Hicks remarked that Friends who had previously embraced free produce and had now fallen away were little better than “thieves and murderers.”