during the Revolution, when she hid cattle from thieves and concealed the profits from coffee hidden in her father’s mill.30
Slavery also played a prominent role in James Mott’s family history. According to Lucretia’s granddaughter, the family genealogist, “most Friends” on Long Island held slaves prior to the American Revolution. New York Yearly Meeting prohibited slaveholding in 1774, but, as historian Graham Hodges writes, in an area with a large African American population of 21,000, “New York Quakers lagged behind their brethren elsewhere in the colonies in shedding their commitment to slaveownership.” The natural rights ideology of the Revolution helped further anti-slavery sentiment. Black New Yorkers participated in revolutionary uprisings and put pressure on their owners to free them. British influence also may have prompted Quakers to manumit their slaves. In Virginia in 1775, British commander Lord Dunmore issued his famous proclamation offering freedom to slaves who fought for the king. By 1776, the British army, supported by black soldiers, occupied New York City. As Hodges notes, “New York under British rule became an emporium for black freedom.” Accordingly, in 1776, James’s paternal great-grandmother Phebe Willets Mott Dodge, known as Grandmother Dodge, a traveling minister in the Society of Friends, freed her slave Rachel, after years of “concern of mind on account of holding negroes in bondage.”31 Dodge’s act was the first manumission in Westbury (Long Island) Monthly Meeting. In 1778, Dodge’s neighbor and friend Elias Hicks, then thirty years old, freed a slave named Ben. These belated manumissions still put Quakers ahead of their fellow New Yorkers, who instituted a gradual emancipation plan in 1799. On July 4, 1827, the state of New York released all slaves in its jurisdiction. But liberty remained unattainable for many former slaves. The children of So-journer Truth, a former slave from Ulster County, were bound as apprentices as late as 1851.32
In 1785, James’s parents Adam and Anne Mott married in Mamaroneck. After their wedding, they lived with Adam’s parents while he ran a flour mill in what is now Port Washington. Their second child and first son James was born in 1788. By 1790, they were living on their own on a farm near the mill. According to their great-granddaughter, Anna Davis Hallowell, the Motts prospered: “The simple, frugal, diligent habits of this rural life; the kindly, gentle manners and self-watchfulness inherited from many Quaker ancestors, added to much intellectual culture and refinement, made a model household.” 33 As on Nantucket, religious beliefs seemed to further, rather than impede, Quaker ability to prosper. Adam and Anne Mott strictly followed Quaker guidelines for simplicity in dress and manner and were respected members of their religious community. Adam served as clerk of the Westbury men’s meeting for business, while Anne served as clerk of the women’s meeting. In 1803, the family moved to Mamaroneck to live on a farm adjacent to that of James Mott, Sr., becoming partners in his mill. But Jefferson’s 1807 embargo of Britain and France caused the family some financial difficulty, and so young James became a teacher at Nine Partners.34
According to Lucretia, James Mott, Jr., “was never in his element” as a teacher, as he preferred not to be the center of attention. Once Lucretia and James decided to make their life together, Lucretia arranged for the couple to live with her family in Philadelphia, where they had moved in 1809. Thomas Odiorne, a Massachusetts native who brought the new and booming business in cut nails to Pennsylvania, had invited Thomas Coffin, whom he probably met through his second wife, Mary Hussey of Nantucket, to run one of his manufactories outside Philadelphia. Coffin invested $20,000 of his own money in the concern, and initially the factory, at French Creek in Chester County, did well, with sales reaching $100,000 per year. Coffin also continued his career as a merchant, establishing a commission, or wholesale, business in the city. Though James had no special experience with business, Thomas Coffin helped his daughter by inviting his son in-law to become a partner in the venture with an investment of $3000.35
Philadelphia had long been the hub of the Society of Friends in America, and the Coffins and Motts felt comfortable in the City of Brotherly Love, where Quakers still had significant, if declining, influence. Important for Lucretia, Philadelphia was home to a prominent anti-slavery movement, as well as the largest community of free blacks in the northern states. The most important anti-slavery society in the country, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, had been founded in Philadelphia in 1775, five years before Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery. Founded by Quakers, the organization grew to include prominent lawyers, politicians, and businessmen. Benjamin Franklin served as the society’s president in the 1780s. In the ensuing decades, Philadelphia became a “city of refuge” for blacks fleeing slavery from below the Mason-Dixon Line. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society offered legal assistance to these fugitives and otherwise promoted the end of slavery through moderate legal and political means. As a consequence, by 1810, people of African descent numbered 9,656, 10.5 percent of the total population of 91,877. James Mott joined the Abolition Society; Lucretia did not. Such organizations were closed to women and African Americans, and Lucretia’s new life as a wife, mother, and schoolteacher, left her little time for activism. But the city put her in contact with slavery and anti-slavery in ways that her childhood in Nantucket and adolescence in New York had not.36
In 1810, James wrote to his parents of his plans to make his connection to the Coffin family permanent. Of going into business with Thomas Coffin, he shared his reasoning: “when we take into view that the business here is an established one, and the person with whom connected, a man of experience and prudence, I believe you will say with me that this is the most eligible.” Like many young businessmen, James took into account Thomas Coffin’s reputation in the community. In a credit economy, economic success was built on such personal ties. He also informed his parents that he and Lucretia had decided to announce their intention to marry in their monthly meeting, setting off the period of inquiry by the meeting. Both parents gave their final approval, and James and Lucretia declared their engagement to their fellow Friends on February 20, 1811. Though James expressed his anxiety, he “felt as calm and composed during the whole operation as if I had been speaking before so many cabbage stumps.”37
After their monthly meeting investigated the suitability of the match, James and eighteen-year-old Lucretia were married on April 10, 1811, in Pine Street Meeting House, with both families in attendance. Like other Quaker couples, the two were married in a ceremony without a presiding minister to “consecrate or legalize the bond.” Instead, they stood before the meeting and vowed to be “loving and faithful.” Though it would become fashionable for nineteenth-century feminists in other denominations to drop the promise of obedience in marriage vows, there was no such clause in the Quaker ceremony because there was no, in Lucretia’s words, “assumed authority or admitted inferiority; no promise of obedience.” “Their independence is equal,” she continued, “their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.”38
Yet the backdrop for egalitarian Quaker marriages was a patriarchal marriage relation established by English and American common law. No matter how progressive her vows, Lucretia Mott was officially a feme covert. As an unmarried feme sole, she had enjoyed an independent legal status and the right to control her earnings. But after her wedding her husband became her legal, financial, and political caretaker. Mott and other married women were “covered” by their husbands.39
Lucretia and James shared a deep physical as well as emotional connection throughout their marriage. Under the close supervision of Lucretia’s parents, they may have kissed or shared some physical intimacy before their marriage, but they probably did not have sex. Though premarital pregnancy rates spiked in this period of American history due to a transition in courtship practices, Lucretia did not give birth until a very respectable sixteen months after her wedding. Their sexual relationship lasted for many years. She had her sixth and last child at age thirty-five, when she and James celebrated their seventeenth anniversary. Lucretia and James were together constantly, so few letters survive to document their relationship. But after James’s death in 1868, a devastated Lucretia refused to sleep in the bedroom they had shared. She once described her feelings for James as “perfect love.”40
The young couple’s anticipation of owning a “house of their own” faltered as their early marriage coincided with a turbulent economy. Jefferson’s embargo, intended to insulate America from the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars, had hurt