Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,076

Inside this locked cemetery is the grave of Lucretia Mott.

Born in 1793 in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Lucretia Coffin grew up in a whaling family. Her family were early Puritans and had gotten involved in shipping and then whaling as that became a profession. Her father piloted a whaling ship. The family later moved to Boston as her father went into the merchant business. Being a whaler was a tough life. For reasons that I’m not sure of, her parents then sent her to a Quaker boarding school in New York. I don’t think the family were Quakers yet, but in any case, she was 13 years old. Her teacher, a man named James Mott, fell in love with the very much still a girl. She graduated from that school and started teaching there at the age of 15. They got married when she was 18, which I guess, OK, but this is pretty creepy.

Well, anyway…..Mott had a long standing sense of injustice. When she got that teaching job and found out that men made more than women, she was not happy about it. She also thought slavery was disgusting and immoral and needed to end. She became a Quaker and started feeling the spirit enough to be a preacher at the age of 25. becoming a minister three years later. Whatever the circumstances of her early marriage, James Mott supported her activism and her personal growth. She became a traveling Quaker minister, which was rare for a woman to do, even in that church.

In 1818, as part of her ministering travels, Mott visited Virginia. She saw slavery in its full effect for the first time, though she had certainly seen slaves in New York, as there were still plenty in the early nineteenth century. But the plantation slavery of the South was a different kind of thing, not always worse for the slave, but quite often it was. By this time, Mott was in a rather fundamentalist version of the Quakers called the Hicksites, which believed the presence of God was in every person and also demanded a moral purity of its followers. That had a strong political vision to it and Mott preached against using any product made of slave labor. That wasn’t easy. Imagine not using sweatshop labor today. First, you’d have to figure out just what was made by exploited Asian workers, not only clothing of course, but food and everything else. It’d be hard. So Mott preached against wearing or using anything that included cotton, eating sugar, or using anything else that might have come from slave labor.

Mott became one of the loudest voices against slavery in the country, including founding the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. But then the fact that this was a female anti-slavery society also mattered; even many abolitionists were really uncomfortable with the idea of working with women. Given how many of these men were also Quakers, it not only suggests the level of misogyny in American society, but also reflects the divide between the Hicksite and orthodox Quaker branches. But her idea spread throughout the north and other women started founding women-centric anti-slavery societies such as Elizabeth Buffum Chace in southern New England. Being an abolitionist period and a woman abolitionist especially meant putting your life at risk. Some abolitionists, such as Elijah Lovejoy, were murdered by infuriated northerners. That nearly happened to Mott. In 1838, after a big anti-slavery convention, a mob came to her home and wanted to destroy it entirely. They were moved away, but the whole time, Mott just sat in her house and waited for them, willing to confront them directly and take whatever happened. Brave woman.

In 1840, Mott traveled to London for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. The men excluded women from participating when she and others arrived. This was quite controversial within the larger abolitionist community and quite a few leading male abolitionists stood with her and the other women (they were still allowed in the building), including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Lenox Raymond. Later, Mott and her husband would offer their house on the Underground Railroad and were pretty active, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, in getting escaped slaves farther to the north when they were no longer safe in Philadelphia.

I’d also like to note that Mott stood up against the growing scientific racism of the 19th century. It’s important to remember something about the Enlightenment that should surprise no one but always does. See, science is never pure. It’s inherently corrupted by the people engaging in it because they bring their ideas about society into the science. So when these figures were bringing the scientific method into their studies, they weren’t asking questions like “Are there differences between the races?” Their questions were “Since whites are obviously superior to Africans, how can science show me how this is true?” That was morphing into Social Darwinism and then eugenics later in the 19th century, both of which were completely 100% scientific endeavors. Wrong science, but science. And you don’t get to handwave that away just because it was wrong.

Anyway, Mott called this out as bullshit. In 1849 spoke to medical students against bringing racial prejudice into their studies, saying, “May you be faithful, and enter into a consideration as to how far you are partakers in this evil, even in other men’s sins. How far, by permission, by apology, or otherwise, you are found lending your sanction to a system which degrades and brutalizes three million of our fellow beings.”

Of course, Mott was as committed to women’s rights as she was to ending slavery. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 that was not in fact the first time women got together to demand rights, but was certainly the most important early gathering. Mott did not believe in voting or participating in corrupt American institutions–in this she was very much on the Garrison moral suasion side of things. So women’s voting was not something she particularly cared that much about here, not in a society where slavery existed. But there were plenty of women’s rights issues outside of voting that mattered a lot more to her and others.

After the Civil War, Mott continued her work. She largely worked on peace-based efforts. She was a pacifist through and through and so the war itself put her and others like her in a difficult position. She helped found women’s colleges, including Swarthmore, to provide higher education opportunities for women in a sexist society. She helped found the Universal Peace Union in 1866 to try and stop future wars from happening. That wasn’t so successful.

Mott died in 1880, at the age of 87.

Lucretia Mott is buried in Fairhill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Alas, the cemetery is in a pretty rough part of Philadelphia today and is locked except for special tours. Since I don’t live in Philadelphia, this is as close as we are going to get to covering her in this series. Here’s a picture of her actual grave from the internet, for those of you who are interested in such things (I actually don’t care about cemeteries one iota, it’s just another way to tell a story about the past and that’s it from my perspective).

If you would like this series to visit other abolitionists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sarah Parker Remond is in Rome, in case anyone has some extra lira floating around they need to get rid of. In the U.S., Prudence Crandall is in Elk Falls, Kansas and Maria Stewart is in Washington, D.C. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.