Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner

his cotton business to deal in wool, a potentially risky financial decision for a man with five children.⁵⁸

      Yet even as some Hicksites embraced free produce, others rapidly retreated from the more radical implications of Hicks’s ministry. In 1828, Scottish freethinker Frances (Fanny) Wright began a lecture tour of the United States, speaking in cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington. Three years earlier, Wright had founded a mixed-race communitarian society in Nashoba, Tennessee. She had proposed to gradually emancipate slaves by offering them the opportunity to work toward their freedom. After Nashoba failed due to poor management and accusations of free love, she edited Utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen’s New Harmony Gazette.⁵⁹ Wright also had strong ties to the Workingmen’s Party (often called the “Fanny Wright Party”). Detractors referred to her as the “Red Harlot of Infidelity” for her radical politics, anti-clericalism, and rejection of marriage. According to Mott, Wright lectured on topics with broad appeal, such as “knowledge” and “education,” but she also addressed subjects close to the hearts of most Hicksites. Wright railed against slavery, intolerance, “the hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions,” and “financial and political corruption.” Like Elias Hicks, Fanny Wright aroused the outrage and fear of prominent evangelicals. Lyman Beecher worried that Wright’s audiences, filled with “females of respectable standing in society,” might be led astray by her message.⁶⁰

      One group of prominent Hicksites acted swiftly to sever all connections in the public mind between their beliefs and Wright’s. As clerk of Wilmington Meeting, Benjamin Ferris, better known as Amicus, led the disownment of Benjamin Webb, editor of the Delaware Free Press, for printing articles supporting Wright’s views and those of other freethinkers such as Robert Dale Owen. At least five others were also disowned for “Ultraism.” Lucretia was outraged. These individuals, she proclaimed, were among the “most active, benevolent citizens.” Lucretia and James entered an “indignant protest” against these intolerant and “arbitrary measures,” at the risk of losing their own status among their fellow Hicksites.⁶¹

      As her co-religionists grew more conservative, Mott began reading more radical works. By 1827, Lucretia had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s controversial Vindication of the Rights of Woman, originally published in 1792. Wollstonecraft argued that women’s current status reflected not only their legal and political subordination but also their “notions of beauty,” “their fondness for pleasure,” and their consequent objectification. In its place, Wollstonecraft offered equal education and intellectual development: “I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength of both mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.”⁶²

      Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment thought appealed to Mott’s political and religious sympathies. Like a good republican, she rejected the trappings of aristocracy, closely linked to women’s taste for fashion and adornment. And as a Quaker radical, she was out of place in a society that increasingly valued white women’s sexual purity, submission, and domestic isolation. By the 1820s, Vindication was out of print in the United States. Many Americans condemned Wollstonecraft as a “blood-stained Amazon,” a symbol of dangerous rebellion against the political, religious, and sexual order. But Mott celebrated both Wollstonecraft and Fanny Wright, decrying the “denunciations of bigoted Sectarianism.” Mott referred to Vindication as one of her “pet books”: “From that time it has been a centre table book, and I have circulated it, wherever I could find readers.”⁶³

      Mott also began reading liberal theologians outside the Society of Friends. In 1831, she encountered the published sermons of William Ellery Channing, leader of the Unitarian movement. Channing, a Harvard graduate and the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, rejected the Calvinism of New England Congregationalism in favor of a more positive interpretation of human nature and the individual relationship to God. He defined God as benevolent, and, like the Hicksites, criticized the doctrine of the Atonement: “This system used to teach as its fundamental principle, that man, having sinned against an infinite Being, has contracted infinite guilt, and is consequently exposed to an infinite penalty.”⁶⁴ Instead, he emphasized individual agency, echoing the Quaker doctrine of the inner light. In “Honor Due All Men,” Channing wrote “The Idea of Right is the primary and the highest revelation of God to the human mind…. [The individual] begins to stand before an inward tribunal, on the decision of which his whole happiness rests; he hears a voice, which, if faithfully followed, will guide him to perfection.” Finally, he viewed this individual sense of right as an equalizer, “which annihilates all the distinctions of this world.” In fact, Channing’s vision so clearly corresponded to Mott’s own that in her own notes quoting “Honor Due All Men” she inserted the Quaker phrase “inward monitor” in place of Channing’s “inward tribunal.”⁶⁵

      In Boston, Channing influenced another important American woman, Elizabeth Peabody. In 1825, the twenty-one-year-old teacher began attending Channing’s Federal Street Church. The minister and parishioner struck up an uncommon friendship and intellectual collaboration based on their discussions of liberal theology. As biographer Megan Marshall argues, Elizabeth Peabody “had read and studied her way out of the Calvinist doctrine of original sin.” Channing confirmed her ideas and encouraged her intellectual development; in turn, she copied Channing’s sermons for publication, securing his legacy. Over the course of her career as a teacher, writer, bookstore owner, and editor of the Dial, Elizabeth Peabody “ignited” the intellectual and literary movement known as Transcendentalism. She also coined the term. Peabody adapted poet Samuel Coleridge’s word “transcendental” to name the philosophy, which, like Hicksite Quakerism, emphasized the ability of every individual to grasp the Divine, unmediated by ecclesiastical authority or the Scriptures.⁶⁶

      As these powerful liberal ideas gained influence in Boston, Mott experienced a disappointing regression among Hicksites in Philadelphia. In 1830, Mott became clerk of the Hicksite Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Women. After the split, the London Yearly Meeting endorsed the Orthodox, refusing to recognize the Hicksites as members of the Society of Friends. In 1828, when the Hicksites appealed their case to British Friends, they were denounced as “separatists.” In 1830, they proposed to try again. The new epistle sought to “open the channel of Christian intercourse” between the (Hicksite) Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the London Yearly Meeting. The Hicksites made their case for recognition, warning that the British decision threatened to remove London Yearly Meeting “from religious communion with [upwards of] eighteenth thousand of your fellow-professors of the gospel of Christ.” Further, they described the Orthodox as usurping “power over the many, subversive of our established order, and destructive to the peace and harmony of society.” But the authors also attempted to assuage British Friends by professing their belief in the “history of the birth, life, acts, death, and resurrection of the holy Jesus” as written in the divinely authored Bible. Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that Lucretia objected to “any statement in the nature of a declaration of faith, other than the ‘inward light,’—the divine light in the soul,—which she regarded as the cardinal doctrine of Friends.” As a result, after serving her function as clerk and reading the letter to the women’s meeting, she vehemently opposed the epistle. Despite Mott’s disapproval, the women’s meeting endorsed the letter and Mott, along with John Comly, clerk of the men’s meeting, signed it. Their efforts to appease English Quakers were futile, as the epistle was returned unread with the word “mendacity” written on it.⁶⁷

      The position of clerk was a sign of Mott’s growing status in the Society of Friends, but she signaled her independence when she spoke out against the epistle. Tested in the Hicksite split, her commitment to the inner light and individual moral authority became central to her ministry. At age thirty-seven, after giving birth to five living children, Mott was poised to become the most prominent Quaker minister of her time. Nevertheless, she continued to clash with the Hicksites over their “retrograde” views on liberal theology, slavery, and women’s rights.⁶⁸ Versed in Penn and Hicks, as well as Wollstonecraft, Channing, and Fanny Wright, Mott looked beyond the borders of the Society of Friends to make sense of the problems of slavery, inequality, and religious intolerance.