SYMHC Classics: Lucretia Mott

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. In our episode on Rebecca Cox at Jackson, we talked a little bit about the anti black and anti abolitionist backlash that struck Philadelphia and other parts of the US in the early nineteenth century. We talked about this a bit more in our episode on Lucretia Mott, who was at an event at Pennsylvania Hall when it was attacked by an anti abolitionist mob in eighteen thirty eight. So we're gonna bring out our episode on Mott today as Saturday's Classic was originally came out on August, So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And today we're actually recording in studio an episode that we actually prepared for a live show at the Women's Rights National Historical Park as part of their Convention Days programming. As sometimes happens, live show recordings do not go according to plan, so we can't bring you the original version of that as it happened live. But that means that those people in attendance sort of get, you know, their memories of that special thing that unfortunately nobody else gets to share in, so let that be lesson to you come to live show. Also, if you listen to our Road to the Declaration of Sentiments episode that we did at the end of a little bit of this is going to sound familiar, there's not a whole lot of overlap. And that episode was actually catalyzed by then Chief Technology Officer of the United States Megan Smith, reaching out to the podcast to raise awareness of the missing women's rights document, the Declaration of Sentiments, and we gave a brief version of Lucretia Mott's life and a quick rundown of how she and Elizabeth Katie Stanton met at the World Anti Slavery Convention. Today's show is going to focus on Lucretia Mott in much more detain ilm But even so, her life is so well documented and she was such an important public figure in her time that we're really just hitting some of the highlights. So, for example, in eighteen sixty four, she helped found Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania as a co educational institution, But we're not even going to get into that because we're focusing instead a lot more on her activism, and she was a whole lot of activists packed into a diminutive frame. And while she advocated for peace, she was, in her own words, no advocate of passivity. Lucretia Mott was born Lucretia Coffin on January three, seventeen ninety three, on the island of Nance Huckett in Massachusetts. Her father, Thomas Coffin, was a sea captain. Her mother, Anna Folger, was related to Benjamin Franklin. Because Thomas was often at sea, Anna was managing things at home, and she ran a small store with Lucretia's help as Lucretia got older. Lucretia was their second child and they eventually had five children. In The Coffin family were Quakers, and the Quaker religion believed slavery was evil and had a particularly progressive view of women's equality for the time, so it is not surprising that Lucresia went on to campaign for women's rights, abolition, and social reform. When she was ten, her parents decided on a change for the whole family. Thomas left his job as a mariner and the family moved to Boston, where he became a merchant, all with the intent of creating a much more stable family life. In addition to how he was away all the time as a sea captain, that was also an incredibly dangerous job. Yeah, there was always the chance that he would not come back, uh, and they didn't want to live with that risk anymore. When she was thirteen, Lucretia began attending a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York called Nine Partners School, along with one of her sisters, Eliza, and Lucretia did really well there, so much so that she became an assistant teacher. When she aged out of the available curriculum, Lucretia was thenly there after promoted into a teaching position, and this meant that sort of in an in kind trade on her work, that another one of her sisters could then attend the school. And it was during this time that, even though she was at a Quaker school where equality was being taught, Lucretia got a really harsh dose of reality. Later, she wrote of women in education, quote, I learned at school that their education cost the same as that of men, while they received as teachers but half the salary. While she was at Nine Partners, Lucretia made the acquaintance of a young teacher named James Mott, who was the son of the school superintendent. The two of them grew close, and then they fell deeply in love, and the Coffins moved once again in eighteen o nine, this time to Philadelphia. Lucretia and James Mott joined them there, and James was invited by Lucretia's father, Thomas, to become a partner in his merchant business. Lucretia married James Mott on April tenth, eighteen eleven. She was eighteen at the time and he was five years older. This seems to have been a very good match. They had similar ideologies when it came to equality for women. They were both abolitionists. They had a passionate and devoted relationship, which Lucretia referred to as a perfect love. Four years after Lucretia and James were married, Thomas Coffin died. This was not only an emotional blow, it created a very real financial problem for Lucretia's mother Anna, who was suddenly burdened with Thomas's extensive debt, and also for James Mott due to his involvement in Thomas's business and coffin had made some pretty bad business decisions, and he was thousands of dollars in debt when he died. Among other things, he had loaned money to people he should not have, and he also had a lawsuit pending against him. Lucretia, James, and Anna all worked together to address this problem. They chipped away at the financial obligations that Thomas had left behind. Anna went back to work, returning to her former vocation of running a store, Lucretia worked as a teacher, and James worked as a bookkeeper, and the trio really managed to make some very real progress on this problem. But just as they were getting their feet back under them, there was another tragedy. Both Lucretia and her third child, two year old Thomas, became very ill with fever, and Lucretia recovered, but Thomas did not. He died, and Lucretia was naturally heartbroken. Despite her grief, though she returned to her teaching job not long after the loss, and that loss of her son made her even more devoted to her Quaker faith. In the late eighteen twenties, the Society of Friends split into two factions, the Orthodox Group and the Hickside group, which was named for Quaker abolitionist Elias Hicks. Hicks had actually been one of the founding members of the Nine Partners School, where Lucretia had been a student and a teacher. By this time, Lucretia was a Quaker minister, although this was not a vocation as a Quaker, she was not being paid for this work. Yeah. One of the things I had read one of the biographies suggested that when she realized that minister ers and other religions got paid to share their sermons, she was a little bit mortified. I thought that was not something that should be part of a financial transaction. Uh. There were a number of issues that led to that split within the Society of Friends, which is another UH word for the Quakers. Those reasons were both spiritual and some were a little bit more mundane. They had to do with power struggles that were going on. But the primary reason that was cited for the fracture was the Hicksite focus on the inward light as the guiding of faith, whereas the Orthodox group favored biblical authority above all other influences. And this split began at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Mots, along with approximately two thirds of their fellow Quakers, went with the Hicksites. That is a very paired down an extremely basic version of the schism, which of course had a lot more nuanced than that, but in relation to the Mots that had a very real impact. The Hicksites wanted to sever any possible connections to the slave trade, and as a consequence, James shifted his textile business away from selling cotton cloth, which was made with raw materials that had come from slave labor, and the transition to selling wool instead. The Mots and many Hicksites emphasized the importance of so called free goods and produced, meaning that they had been produced or grown without the use of slave labor. In the eighteen thirties, Mott was a member of the American Anti Slavery Society founded by William Lloyd Garrison, and that inspired her in eighteen thirty three to found a women's group within the movement, the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery Society, and there was to be clear plenty of controversy around Mott's outspoken nature in the abolitionist cause. While she had been raised in a household and a culture that treated women as more or less equal. Her passionate oration was not always well regarded in non Quaker circles, and sometimes even within the Society of Friends, there were some members who were not entirely comfortable with her direct and impact ash and rhetoric on abolition and kind of hoped she might leave the group rather than continue to stir up controversy. And there was also a very real danger in being a public vocal abolitionist. But Lucretia drew a great deal of strength from her faith, and when she spoke to groups about slavery, that strength really helped her to make her position clear, and it helped her to sway people to her cause. People who heard her speak described her as being eloquent, calm, and very persuasive and her use of logic to condemn the practice of slavery. Coming up, we're going to talk about a particularly frightening week for the abolitionist movement in Philadelphia. But before that, we are going to pause and have a little sponsor break. In May eight, Lucretia Mott participated in a series of events at Pennsylvania Hall in her hometown of Philadelphia. That hall was brand new. It had been designed by Thomas Somerville Stewart, a Scott's Irish architect living in Philadelphia, as a meeting place where abolitionists could engage in free discussion, and its opening was a really high profile event. The hall could hold three thousand attendees, and in the first few days the hall's use, both black and white abolitionists sat in the audience. Journalists and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison made a note, however, that there were no black speakers on the stage, which he claimed was the result of either prejudice or fear. I would point out that it could also have been related to prejudice, that the white organizers just not even considering that that would be a thing. Yeah, there could easily have been thoughtlessness in the mix as well, um, but there was definitely cause for fear. The opening of the hall had set off anti abolitionist agitators. Pennsylvania was a free state, but the issues of slavery inequality were still topics of strife. Signs began appearing in Philadelphia urging people to rise up against these abolitionists and one red quote, whereas a convention for the avowed purpose of affecting the immediate abolition of slavery in the Union is now in session in this city. It behooves all citizens who entertain a proper respect for the rights of property and the preservation of the Constitution of the United States, to interfere forcibly if they must, and prevent the violation of these pledges heretofore held sacred. There was also the ongoing issue of women's equality in the mix. With all of this, some abolitionists felt that open meetings with men and women, both black and white, all gathered together in the hall would seem inappropriate. At one point during the Wednesday evening of the week's events, Mott addressed the assembled mixed crowd and said she was not speaking on behalf of the women's Convention, but that she hoped that the quote false notions of delicacy and propriety would soon be a thing of the past. Yes, she really just wanted everybody to be able to come together and discuss these issues and not get watted up on what they thought was proper or not. And during some of the speeches in those first few days um there were bricks thrown through the windows of the hall by anti abolitionist protesters. There are different versions of that story. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a biographical sketch of Lucretia Mott right after she died, and in his version, he suggests that that was happening while she was speaking. I did not find indications that that was the case anywhere else. Other versions of the story of this hall suggests that it happened during other lectures. Others indicated happened after the fact. We do not know exactly the timing, but there was some scary stuff going on. An angry mob had steadily grown in numbers over the course of several days, and even as the crowd surged and threatened to enter the building, Mott, who was a very tiny woman. We said she was diminutive, but to be clear, she was about five ft tall. She weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. And while she was speaking to her fellow abolitionists in the Anti Slavery Convention of American Women who were meeting at the time, she urged them to remain true to the cause and to continue their work. Meanwhile, all of this scary stuff was going on literally feet from them, right outside the building. So when people describe Lucretia Mott as a fierce abolitionist, which is a phrase you will often see in relation to her. They are really not kidding. As the women were leaving, the danger to the black women that had attended as they walked through this crowd was just obvious. Mott and the other white women in the group linked arms with them as a way to help them move through the angry protesters while trying to also maintain their physical safety. They did still have to endure the racist epithets that were being yelled at them as they adjourned, but they were kept physically safe. Yeah, she was pretty clear that she believed that these protesters were not going to have the gall to come after for example, in her case, tiny white woman, So she was willing to put her body physically in the way to prevent black citizens from being hurt. And the next day the threat of violence was so great that all of the scheduled events were canceled. The mob had grown to a reported fifteen thousand people in Pennsylvania, Hall, described as one of the most commodious and splendid buildings in the city, was burned to the ground after the protesters broke in and lit a fire on the stage. The thing was like less than a week old at this point, right, Yeah, that's like the fourth day was when it was burned down. So there was ongoing violence over the next two days. The Mots home was in danger as a target because of Lucresia's high profile and the abolitionist movement. Their home was spared at the end, but the mob turned its ire towards black schools and churches. The following month, the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery Society, led by Lucretia Mott, hosted another anti slavery convention, and Mott once again reiterated the importance of the mission. The World Anti Slavery Convention in eighteen forty was a significant event in Lucretia Mott's life. That event took place in London, and when Mott arrived as a delegate, it became clear that she was not going to be allowed to participate because she was a woman. No women were being admitted to the proceedings. Mad was certainly not the only woman who had traveled to London with the intent of attending the World Anti Slavery Convention. All of the women there were told that they could not participate. Heated debate among the delegates arose over this issue, and the women were eventually granted admission, but this was not exactly a win. They had to sit in a special women's section at the back of the hall, and they were not allowed to participate in any way. They were allowed to observe, and to observe only. William Lloyd Garrison was so angry about this situation, as were other men, that he withdrew as a delegate and he opted to share observer only status with the women. Abolition is so he and several other men actually went back and sat in their section. But it was in that women's section that Lucresia Mott met the woman who would become one of her greatest allies, Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who had made the trip to London as her honeymoon with her new husband, Henry Brewster Stanton. I love that they did this on their honeymoon. It is quite charming. Uh Stanton made a description of Lucretia Mott at this convention, and I wanted to include this because there is a photograph of Lucretia Mott that is probably the most commonly seen in the modern era, and it is a photograph taken when she was older, and she looks a little dour, And I think that people have in their heads that she must have been a very sour woman, But in fact she was, by all accounts, really lovely. She was described as a very vivacious youth. But I wanted to read Stanton's description of her during the convention quote she was then in her prime, small in stature, slightly built, with a large head, high square forehead, remarkably fine face, regular teacher's dark hair and eyes. She was gentle and refined in her manners, and she conversed with earnestness and ease, commiserating over their anger and how women abolitionists for being treated at the convention. Mott and Stanton decided that when they were both back in the United States, they should arrange a women's rights convention. It was five years in the making, but they were true to their words. On July fourty eight, the following announcement ran in the Seneca County Courier under the headline Women's Rights Convention. A convention to discuss the social, civil and religious condition and rights of women will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls, New York on Wednesday and Thursday, the nineteenth and twentie of July current, commencing at ten o'clock a m. During the first day, the meeting will be exclusively for women, which all are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia and others both ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention. Of course, famously, the Declaration of Sentiments was signed at this convention. That's a document that was modeled after the Declaration of Independence that outlined eighteen injuries to women and was accompanied by eleven resolutions. Mott was one of the writers of this document. The most controversial of the eleven resolutions was getting women the right to vote. This is sometimes cited as the moment when the US suffrage movement was born. As a quick note slash reminder, the topic of the show we did in Seneca Falls last year was Frederick Douglas, and he also attended the Seneca Falls Convention and was also one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. But, perhaps surprisingly, Lucretia Mott was one of the people who was not a supporter of the Resolution for the Right to Vote for women. She felt that politics was inherently really flawed in immoral system, in part due to its connection with slavery. So she thought women really did not need to dirt themselves with that grossness. But she did sign the Declaration of Sentiments, and she did also managed to reconcile her concerns in a speech that was later published by Mott as Discourse on Woman. She said the following, It is with reluctance that I make the demand for the political rights of women, because this claim is so distasteful to the age woman shrinks in the present state of society from taking any interest in politics. Who knows but that if woman acted her part in governmental affairs there might be an entire change in the turmoil of political life. It becomes man to speak modestly of his ability to act without her. If woman's judgments were exercised, why might she not aid in making the laws by which she has governed. Far be it from me to encourage woman to vote or to take an active part in politics in the present state of our government. Her right to the elective franchise, however, is the same and should be yielded to her, whether she exercises that right or not. And we're going to talk next about the fugi of Slave Act of eighteen fifty, but first we are going to pause for a little sponsor break. When the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty was passed, Lucretia and James Mott protested vehemently against it. That act has come up with some regularity on the show, but just for a reminder, it required that enslaved people who ran away to non slave states had to be captured and returned to their enslavers, and that aiding a person who had escaped enslavement was a crime. The Fugitive Slave Act caused a lot of strife even within the abolishtionist movement. For one thing, there was the debates between following the law and following the principles of equality. Additionally, even non abolitionist Pennsylvanians were angry that this act took precedence over the state's personal liberty laws and instances were people who had been enslaved were retaken by forced Pacifist abolitionists grappled with their own principles of non violence as they came into conflict with their desire to protect formerly enslaved people, and one of the things that Mott continued to do during this time was to continue to use her physical presence for the abolitionist cause. She knew, as I said, that as a white woman she would likely be treated more respectfully or at least more gently than a white man or a person of color, making the kinds of statements that she made. In one instance, she rode in a carriage with a woman named Jane Johnson, who, in the course of fleeing enslavement, actually appeared to testify in court that the abolitionists who had helped her had not kidnapped her, but she had gone of her own volition. She did that knowing that the marshals were going to pursue her afterwards, so once she finished her testimony, she and Mott made a hasty exit from the court, and Mott helped Jane Johnson slip away from the authorities with a bit of misdirection. They wrote in a carriage around the streets. They ended up at the front of the Mott home. They both got out, went through the house, Jane left out the back door and picked up another carriage there with a little meal that Lucretia had handed her, and then she took off in that other carriage and fortunately was not apprehended, while Lucretia could be like, I don't know what you're talking about when the marshals got to the house um. In another instance, when a black man named Daniel Webster was captured in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and accused of being a runaway from a Virginia slave plantation, that was a case of mistaken identity. Lucretia Mott sat as near as she could to the defendants throughout his court case. She would sit there, knitting or sewing, but always simply being a presence, making it keenly apparent that an abolitionist was watching. And Webster was eventually declared a freeman. When the Civil War began, it was already a difficult time for the Mots. They weren't young by this point. Both of them were in failing health. James was losing his vision and Lucretia would read to him, but she was having dizzy spells and frequent digestive issues. And on top of that, even though this battle over slavery was obviously important and abolition had been a driving force, in Mott's license. She was a young girl. Her pacifism made this entire war extremely upsetting. She really had hoped that they could win over the hearts and minds of people through talking about the issue. In fact, she once wrote quote, the cause of peace has had a share of my efforts, leading to the ultra non resistance ground that no Christian can consistently uphold and actually engage in and support a government based on the sword. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society worked to help formerly enslaved people transition into freedom. We did an episode on the Civil War contraband camps two years ago. We talked about the Union's gap in their plans when it came to actually helping newly freed men and women make new lives. Lucretia's group attempted to help fill that gap by raising funds and helping to provide basic needs like clothing, and also offering educational assistance. But as the war came to a close, Lucretia's forty year old daughter, Elizabeth, moved back home. This was not a joyous occasion. Elizabeth was terminally ill. She was somewhat estranged from her husband, and the Mots at that point had already lost two grandchildren, including Elizabeth's son Henry, just before Elizabeth became ill, and so while Lucretia continued to stay informed about current events and keep an eye on what was going on with the war, her attentions were really split between her struggling family and the struggling nation. After the war, the issues of black suffrage and women's suffrage became the subject of debate for many abolitionists and women's rights advocates. While some women's rights advocates, including Elizabeth Katie Stanton, thought that the two causes should be promoted together, my was concerned early on that things were still really precarious. She thought that they might need to see one cause through to the end and and focus on the other. In eighteen sixty six, the American Equal Rights Association formed with a goal of quote universal suffrage, and Lucretia Mott was its first president, and she took that position somewhat tentatively, based largely on her loyalty to Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who had asked her to take that role, and she ultimately found this job really trying and unfulfilling because She spent most of the time trying to mediate the ongoing arguments among the members about where their focus should lie. They really were not getting into any actual activism, and when Stanton and Susan B. Anthony sought backing from Democrat entrepreneur George Francis Train, that became the last straw for Mott because Train supported women's suffrage, but he was a racist. Matt the news of this alliance. A horrified William Lloyd Garrison wrote to Susan B. Anthony begging her not to tie up her cause with Train. He wrote, quote, the colored people and their advocates have not a more abusive assailant than same Train. He is as destitute of principle as he is of sense. He may be of use and drawing an audience, but so would a kangaroo, a gorilla, or a hippopotamus. William Lloyd Garrison ended this letter by telling Anthony he thought she was just infatuated with Train. That could be a whole other podcast, and I kind of want to do one on Train because he is sort of gross and horrifying, but also very fascinating. So Mott's colleagues at this point wanted to prioritize women's suffrage over black suffrage and engage the help of this white supremacist to do so, and Mott, as a consequence, officially withdrew from her office in their organization in May of eighteen sixty eight. She also recommended that the entire group be disbanded. Leading up to her resignation, there were more immediate concerns in Lucrease's life. In January, James, who was seventy nine, got pneumonia and died suddenly. While he was mourned by the public as a figure of great regard, Lucretia felt a loan in the world without him. She refused to sleep in the bedroom that they had shared and instead moved into a smaller room in the house that they had moved to outside of the city. She wrote letters to relatives about her very deep sense of loss, and she stopped going to meetings of the various organizations that she continued to be a part of, not returning to them for several months. Eventually, though, she did return, and she became president of the Philadelphia Female Anti Slavery Society, which continued even though slavery was legally abolished. They had shifted towards focusing on securing the vote for freedmen, and while the fourteenth Amendment was passed by Congress, the group disparaged the lack of specificity in its language. While it defined citizenship in a broad sense, it didn't specifically grant political rights to black citizens, which they called out as being a clearly racist move, as it indicated that quote, the country and the government belonged to the white man. We spoke last year about the opposition that Elizabeth Katie Stanton had to the fifteenth Amendment, which stated, quote the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It did not grant women the right to vote, and in reaction, Stanton made some really unfortunate and frankly racist remarks about it. Mott did not share these views, and she had expressed regret that these two issues of women's suffrage and black suffrage had ever been joined together in activist groups. But Lucretia Mott still really loved both Elizabeth Katie Stanton and Susan B. Anthony despite their missteps. Uh. They had all been through a lot together, and so she was really saddened as she watched the group she had left, the American Equal Rights Association suffer from ongoing in fighting, which eventually led to fractures and rival women's suffrage groups forming. We've talked about that whole process in other episodes of the show. And the fall of eighteen eighty, ten years after the fifteenth Amendment was passed, Lucretia my aged eighty seven, developed pneumonia. She's always a very small woman, and she lost weight that she just didn't have to lose. She grew very frail, and she died on November eleventh of that year. But as a nice coda in three when the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced by Alice Paul in Seneca Falls during the seventy fifth anniversary of the Women's Rights Convention, Paul called it the Lucretia Mott Amendment. Once again, we want to thank the National Park Service and the Women's Rights National Historical Parks specifically for inviting us. It is always in the truest sense of the word awesome. It is an awesome treat to sit in Wesleyan Chapel and do a show where we talk about historical events that happened in that very space. Yes, so thank you so much. We genuinely have had a great time both times we have gone out to convention days. It's an awesome weekend of programming. So thank you again for including us. And we apologize that some of our recording of live shows there are elements of it that are not entirely within our control. So we always go into it hoping to get a usable recording for everyone, but knowing that there is a possibility that it will not work out. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. 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