On February 11, 1849, Lucretia Mott gave an unusual sermon in her usual place of worship, Cherry Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia. The petite fifty-six-year-old Quaker minister was one of the most famous women in America. During the previous year alone, she had addressed the first women’s rights conventions at Seneca Falls and Rochester, Seneca Indians on the Cattaraugus reservation, former slaves living in Canada, and the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. Yet her audience on that winter day was filled, not with Quakers, African Americans, reformers, or politicians, but with white medical students from...

In 1855, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton wanted information for a proposed history of the women’s rights movement, she asked Lucretia Mott about “Nantucket women.” Born in 1793 to Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin, Lucretia spent the first eleven years of her life on Nantucket Island, approximately thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. She always considered herself an islander, recalling the “social ties & happy realizations” of Nantucket society; as an adult, Lucretia attempted to recreate this community bound by kinship, religion, and politics.¹ Idealizing Mott’s upbringing, Stanton viewed Lucretia’s Nantucket childhood as central to her public career as an abolitionist...

In 1806, at the age of thirteen, Lucretia Coffin left the common schools of Boston for Nine Partners Boarding School in Dutchess County, New York, about 200 miles west. Nine Partners provided Lucretia and other girls with an extraordinary education, giving her skills superior to those of most men at that time. But the school offered more than book learning; it further exposed her to the tensions between Quaker simplicity and prosperity, their anti-slavery testimony and the slave economy, their peculiarity and their connections to the larger society. In the spirit of eighteenth-century reformers, Quaker educators tried to purify their...

Lucretia Mott began her long career as a Quaker minister at Twelfth Street Monthly Meeting in Philadelphia. In 1818, a year after her son Thomas’s death, she rose and prayed publicly for the first time. In her sweet and melodious voice, Lucretia appealed for strength to enable Friends to stand firm against the enticements of the larger world: “As all our efforts to resist temptation and overcome the world prove fruitless, unless aided by Thy Holy Spirit, enable us to approach Thy Throne, and ask of Three the blessing of Thy preservation from all evil, that we may be wholly...

Lucretia’s daughter wrote that her childhood home fulfilled the “prophecies of amalgamation” in the minds of their neighbors. In the 1830s, racial mixing, whether in private homes, churches, or voluntary associations, was rare and taboo. Yet when her daughter penned those words, Lucretia had a house full of white and black visitors, including a fifteen-year-old Haitian boy who sat in her front window all day. Quakers and reformers knew Lucretia as a generous host. The Motts regularly welcomed out of town guests, and held dinner parties attended by anywhere from ten to fifty people. Even as her politics grew more...

On November 7, 1837, a mob murdered anti-slavery newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy’s death shocked eastern abolitionists. They expected the violence—after all, mobs had already destroyed three of Lovejoy’s printing presses. But Lovejoy’s decision to use arms to defend his fourth press unsettled allies of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lucretia and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society expressed the views of most Garrisonians. While they blamed the system of slavery for the violence that destroyed both northern and southern homes, they deplored Lovejoy’s methods. Carnal weapons, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society declared, “are not the proper means...

The World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 transformed history, further dividing the abolitionist movement and connecting Lucretia with a young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet Mott’s very public trip to London as the “leader of the delegate women from America” was shaped in part by private concerns over money problems and poor health.¹ In September 1838, antislavery lecturer Charles C. Burleigh reported to his friend Miller McKim that the Penn Factory “was burned to the ground, & in it, part of the machinery, a considerable quantity of wool, & some manufactured goods.” James Mott owned one quarter of the business, and Burleigh estimated his...

On November 5, 1840, thePennsylvania Freemanreported that Lucretia Mott had addressed a few remarks to a recent meeting of the Female Vigilance Committee “in such a manner that her hearers wished they had been extended.” Associated with David Ruggles’s New York Vigilance Committee, the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, founded in 1837, assumed responsibility for hiding, feeding, clothing, and finding transportation for runaways. Robert Purvis was president of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee as well as a member of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, while Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society members Hester Reckless, Sarah McCrummell, and Margaretta Forten were active in the female...

The year 1848 offered the prospect of political and social transformation. In September, Lucretia reflected to George and Cecilia Combe that the past year had “seemed as though a new era was breaking in upon us.” Commenting on the revolutions in Europe, the “Slavery & Peace question,” “Agitation in all the Churches,” and the “enlargement of Woman’s Sphere,” Mott observed, “we can buthopefor some mighty overturning.”¹ Though Mott only read about democratic unrest in France, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Ireland, she helped lead the emancipatory struggle in her own nation that year, linking the anti-slavery, anti-Sabbath, and Indian reform...

In December 1851, Hungarian author Madame Terezia Walder Pulszky called on Mott at her new home at 338 Arch Street. During the winter months, Edward and Maria Davis, Thomas and Marianna Mott, and their children lived with Lucretia and James in the large brick townhouse. Lucretia’s new dining room was 30 feet long, perfect for hosting weekly Folger family gatherings. Lucretia treasured these reunions, especially after her brother Thomas Coffin died in 1849. One month before Thomas’s sudden death from cholera, Mott observed his fifty-first birthday, writing “we wish he had allotted the day to us here. We are growg....

Robert Purvis once called Lucretia Mott “the most belligerent Non-Resistant he ever saw.” She liked the characterization, telling an audience of abolitionists, “I am no advocate of passivity”: “I have no idea, because I am a Non-Resistant, of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave.”¹ Her refusal to link pacifism to inaction informed her response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. After the failure of Wilmot’s Proviso, Congress spent two years debating how to incorporate lands gained from Mexico. The resulting Compromise of 1850 abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District...

In March 1860, Lucretia helped her daughter Elizabeth Cavender pack “sundry boxes & trunks” for her move from nearby Chelton Corner to a farm called Eddington. Lucretia wanted to have “as frequent intercourse as possible, while they are within reach.” Her worries about losing touch with Elizabeth were well founded. The Cavenders were so busy managing the farm and taking care of Thomas’s elderly mother that Lucretia and Elizabeth didn’t see each other for months. In addition, Lucretia was concerned about her daughter’s marriage. Always skeptical about Thomas Cavender’s interest in electoral politics, she also questioned his abilities as a husband...

On March 10, 1870, the women of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society held their final monthly meeting. Four of the original members, Mott, Sarah Pugh, Margaretta Forten, and Sidney Ann Lewis, were present. For thirty-six years, they had circulated and signed petitions, sponsored lectures, published their resolutions and annual reports, and sewed in fair circles. From 1836 to 1861, their anti-slavery fairs had raised a total of $36,205.23, or $884,000 today. This interracial group had also endured scorn and violence from without, as well as ideological divisions within. All other female anti-slavery societies had collapsed under the pressure. During their...

Lucretia Mott—or rather her public image—had a curious afterlife. She was eulogized and memorialized across the country. Her papers at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College contain almost two boxes of sympathy letters, newspaper clippings, and a volume full of obituaries. Paeans to her benevolence and goodness abounded. TheUnitarian Review and Religious Magazinedescribed her “essential womanliness” as well as her “indescribable mingling of saintliness and sense.” Her friend William Henry Furness adapted the beatitudes to remember her “long and saintly life”: “Blessed was her spirit, lowly, in self-forgetfulness, for hers was the kingdom of heaven.”...