LITMIR.BIZ

       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 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 Thomas Jefferson 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 member 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. Yet, despite the presence of this vibrant anti-slavery community, the majority of Philadelphia residents were openly hostile to abolitionism. In the previous decades, the City of Brotherly Love had witnessed multiple race riots. Philadelphia’s elites cultivated ties with their southern counterparts. Southern slave owners were welcomed in the city’s churches, museums, concert halls, and universities. Philadelphia’s free blacks were not.

      In order to appeal to these young southern gentlemen, Mott relied on the striking contrast between her virtuous femininity and her anti-slavery radicalism. Walking the streets of Philadelphia, and seeing these young men “separated from the tender care, the cautionary admonition of parents, of a beloved mother or sister,” Mott communicated her maternal interest in their lives. She wished to guard their “innocence and purity” against the “allurements” and “vice” of the city. But she did not dwell on the predictable topic of sexual immorality. Instead, she declared, “I am a worshipper after the way called heresy—a believer after the manner which many deem infidel.” Mott challenged the medical students to question the received wisdom of organized religion and polite society on the “great evil” of slavery. She prayed that they were “willing to receive that which conflicts with their education, their prejudices, and their preconceived notions.” Mott wanted to open their hearts and minds to the degrading and brutalizing reality of plantation slavery. This sermon was not the first, or last, time she addressed white southerners on the topic. Her demure appearance as a Quaker matron enabled her to preach her radical message of individual liberty and racial equality to a wide variety of audiences, including those hostile to her views.²

      Throughout her long career, Mott identified as a heretic, adopting the term to explain her iconoclasm as much as her theology. In another speech, she declared that it was the obligation of reformers to “stand out in our heresy,” to defy social norms, unjust laws, and religious traditions. Her choice of the physical verb “to stand” was deliberate. Mott rejected the idea that the peace testimony of the Society of Friends meant quietism. She told an audience of abolitionists that, “the early Friends were agitators; disturbers of the peace.” She advised them to be equally “obnoxious.”³ Lucretia followed her own counsel. She used her powerful feminine voice and her physical body to confront slavery and racial prejudice as well as sexual inequality, religious intolerance, and war. Though she demonstrated enormous personal bravery, she did not advocate violence. Instead, as she did in her sermon to the medical students, she used reason and example to contrast “moral purity” to the “moral corruption” of slavery.⁴

      Too often Lucretia Mott is misunderstood as a “quiet Quaker.”⁵ Scholars have followed the lead of nineteenth-century commentators

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