Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

308 Pages·2011·22.32 MB·English

by  Carol Faulkner

Lucretia Mott’s Heresy
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Lucretia Mott’s Heresy
Abolition and Women’s Rights
in Nineteenth-Century America
Carol Faulkner

university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or
scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Cataloging-in-Publication Record in available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-8122-4321-5
With much love
For my husband
Andrew Wender Cohen
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contents
Introduction: Heretic and Saint 1
1 Nantucket 8
2 Nine Partners 25
3 Schism 41
4 Immediate Abolition 60
5 Pennsylvania Hall 75
6 Abroad 87
7 Crisis 109
8 The Year 1848 127
9 Conventions 148
10 Fugitives 161
11 Civil War 176
12 Peace 197
Epilogue 213
Notes 219
Index 265
Acknowledgments 289
Gallery appears after page 108
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introduction
Heretic and Saint
On February 11, 1849, Lucretia Mott gave an unusual sermon in her
usual place of worship, Cherry Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia. The pe-
tite 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 au-
dience on that winter day was filled, not with Quakers, African Americans,
reformers, or politicians, but with white medical students from Thomas Jef-
ferson Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.
Many of these students were born in the south. And, although a female
medical school would open in Philadelphia the next year, all these students
were men.1
Her sermon was unique to its time and place. In 1849, Philadelphia was
the fourth largest city in the United States, with a population of 121,376. The
diverse city was home to the largest population of free blacks in any northern
state. It also contained the oldest and most prestigious anti-slavery society in
the country, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, founded by Quakers. With
borders touching the slave states of Delaware and Maryland, Pennsylvania
was regularly infiltrated by fugitive slaves. Philadelphia’s black abolitionists
established a Vigilance Committee to aid these fugitives. Mott was a mem-
ber of two anti-slavery organizations, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery
Society and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Both of these interracial
organizations denounced slavery as a sin and called for its immediate end.