Lucretia Mott's Heresy. Carol Faulkner

Quakers had learned that the will of God abhorred war. After the restoration of Charles II, they informed the king that Divine truth taught only peace: “the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.”⁷

      In England and the American colonies, Quakers experienced persecution, as many viewed their doctrines as blasphemous or traitorous. Puritan and British authorities in America imprisoned, whipped, and even executed Quakers for their beliefs. Such extreme persecution, such as the hanging of Quaker convert Mary Dyer in Boston in 1660, prompted dissenters like Lucretia’s ancestor Thomas Macy to hide Quakers from authorities. Despite this oppression, the presence of Society of Friends in the colonies grew from the 1650s on. This growth was furthered by the labors of traveling Quaker ministers, or Public Friends, including Fox himself in 1671–72. By 1681, the aristocrat William Penn, a convert to the Society of Friends, had convinced King Charles to give him a colony in the new world to serve as a refuge for Quakers. This colony became Pennsylvania.⁸

      Known for their quietude and pacifism, the faith of Nantucket Quakers often stood in stark contrast to their worldly labors: the hunt for whales and harvest of whale oil. Whites soon discovered that the small island could not sustain the growing population of migrants and sheep, and they turned to whaling by the end of the seventeenth century. Whaling was a profitable but gory industry. After harpooning the whale, the seamen lanced the mammal, causing it to choke to death on its own blood. Then they towed the dead whale back to the ship for butchering, a process that lasted several days. During this time, historian Nathaniel Philbrick writes, “the decks were a slippery mess of oil and blood.” Confronting the odd image of pacifists slaughtering the planet’s largest mammals, Herman Melville described Nantucket’s whaling captains as “sanguinary”: “They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.”⁹

      Though not unaware of the contrast between the butchery of the whale fishery and the harmony of the meeting, these Nantucket captains exercised their conscience in other arenas. Despite their growing wealth, they condemned brazen display. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur noted in his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, “The inhabitants abhor the very idea of expending in useless waste and vain luxuries the fruits of prosperous labor.”¹⁰ Punishments for excess were light. When members did flaunt their material goods, the elders quietly sought an apology. But the problem of extravagance caused significant concern. In 1747, Quaker minister and anti-slavery advocate John Woolman visited the island and suggested that women’s desire for luxuries provoked men into “acts of extreme and escalating cruelty,” namely, the ruthless pursuit of whales.¹¹

      Significantly, their religious enthusiasm prompted their growing hostility to slave labor. In 1716, Nantucket Monthly Meeting, the local representative body of the Society of Friends, was the first to disavow slavery, an institution that remained legal on Nantucket until 1773 and in Massachusetts until 1783. Though the Society of Friends is known for its early testimony against slavery, throughout most of the eighteenth century many Quakers were ambivalent about abolition. Following an extended effort to achieve consensus, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the most influential meeting in North America, waited until 1754 to issue a statement against slavery. A similar struggle took place among Nantucket Quakers. In 1775, the Nantucket meeting threatened to disown Benjamin Coffin, Lucretia’s paternal grandfather, for owning slaves. The warning produced the desired result. In Coffin’s subsequent manumission of his slave Rose and her two sons, Bristol and Benjamin, he admitted the practice to be contrary to “true Christianity & divine injunction.”¹²

      Similarly, the Nantucket Quakers salved their consciences by touting their friendly relationship with the island’s native population. Indeed, relations with Nantucket’s approximately 3,000 Wampanoag Indians were relatively peaceful compared to those in other settlements in colonial North America, in no small part due to the efforts of Lucretia’s forebears. Her great-great-great-great grandfather Peter Folger, known as the “learned and Godly Englishman,” served as a missionary on the island during the 1640s and 1650s. Folger then worked as an interpreter for Tristam Coffyn, one of the original purchasers of the island, who carefully cultivated the Wampanaog. Lucretia’s granddaughter Anna Davis Hallowell wrote that Coffyn was “regarded as the patriarch of the colony, particularly by the neighboring Indians, with whom he maintained friendly relations from first to last.”¹³

      Nonetheless, English settlement devastated the Indians. The decline of the native community paralleled the rise of the whale fishery as the dominant industry of Nantucket. The initially collegial trade relationship between white settlers and Native Americans devolved into a complex cycle of credit, debt, and indenture that bound Wampanoag laborers to Nantucket whale boats. In 1746, the Indian community complained of unfair treatment, a charge that town leaders denied. In 1763, an epidemic devastated the Indian population of the island, reducing their already diminished numbers from 358 to 136, but by then the industry had grown beyond fishing for whales off the Massachusetts coast to the quest for sperm whales in the South Atlantic, and after 1790 in the Pacific. As the Indian population died off and whaling voyages became longer and less inviting, white ship-owners and captains turned to African Americans and other off-islanders, white and non-white, for their labor force. But if Indians played a declining role in life on Nantucket, their status remained a significant issue for many Quakers, who viewed the native islanders with a mix of concern and condescension.¹⁴

      In addition to Nantucket Quakers’ anti-slavery advocacy and sympathy for the Wampanoag, they entertained relative equality among men and women. In most colonial American societies, women were by law and custom subordinate to their husbands. By contrast, on Nantucket, women had a great deal of spiritual and economic autonomy. This freedom flowed in part from the Quaker religion and culture. As Lucretia later recalled, boys and girls received the same education in the island’s Quaker schools. And unlike most Protestant denominations in this period, the Society of Friends forbade a professional ministry, allowing anyone, including women like Mary Starbuck and later Lucretia Mott, to become preachers.¹⁵

      But this independence also stemmed from the practical realities of whaling life. Because their husbands were frequently at sea, Crèvecoeur noted that “wives are necessarily obliged to transact business, to settle accounts, and, in short, to rule and provide for their families.” Crèvecoeur cited the notorious Kezia Folger Coffin as an exemplar of Nantucket womanhood, contributing to her husband’s financial success by her business sense. But as historian Lisa Norling points out, most Nantucketers disapproved of Kezia Coffin’s pursuit of personal freedom. She left the Society of Friends after Quakers rebuked her for having a spinnet and for teaching her daughter to play the musical instrument. During the American Revolution, she engaged in smuggling and profiteering to such an extent that she was eventually charged with treason. As Lucretia herself would discover, Quakers might permit women relative independence, but they were far more ambivalent regarding absolute equality.¹⁶

      Lucretia was born on a Nantucket that was recovering from the American Revolution. The island remained neutral during the war, partly because residents opposed violence, but also because they wanted to preserve the whaling industry, which depended on friendly relations with the British. This calculation proved mistaken; both the Americans and the British attacked their ships, leading to the destruction or confiscation of 85 percent of their fleet. On the eve of the revolution, 158 whalers sailed out of Nantucket. By war’s end, only 24 ships were left in Nantucket harbor.¹⁷

      Despite the island’s official neutrality, many individuals in Lucretia’s family took sides. Indeed, her cousin Benjamin Franklin was a leading revolutionary. But other Folgers were British sympathizers. Lucretia’s mother, Anna Folger, was known as one of “Bill Folger’s tory daughters” (he had six of them). According to Anna Davis Hallowell, William Folger lost his extensive holdings during the war, when colonials seized most of his ships. “Being declared a tory,” Hallowell wrote, “he was no favorite with his companions; they liked to tell, at his expense, that the only thing he had ever found in his life was a jack-knife, sticking in a post above his head.”¹⁸