Lucretia Mott's Heresy - Carol Faulkner

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to education was not unusual in the age of revolution. His pamphlet was one entry in a flood of child-rearing tracts published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Influenced by John Locke and other philosophers, these experts argued that children too had inalienable rights that should not be abused. Instead of physical discipline, they advised parents to use psychology and reason to teach their children the essential values of morality, self-control, and good citizenship. British writer Maria Edgeworth urged parents to practice preventive methods rather than creating unreasonable restrictions. For example, she suggested parents place valuable china and tempting sweets out of reach. Teach habits of obedience, she recommended, by asking children to do things they were already inclined to do. Once children were old enough, parents should use reason. In this way, Edgeworth wrote, “children, who have for many years experienced, that their parents have exacted obedience only to such commands as proved to be ultimately wise and beneficial, will surely be disposed from habit, from gratitude, and yet more from prudence, to consult their parents in all the material actions of their lives.”11 Despite the proliferation of such advice books, Lucretia especially valued Mott’s words. Later, as a new wife and mother, she corresponded regularly with her husband’s grandfather. She read his “instructive” and “useful” book when it was published, and later reread it when she had a house full of young children.12

      As Anna Coffin prepared Lucretia and Eliza for the journey to Nine Partners, she followed the school’s guidelines for simplicity. Each girl packed 2 bonnets, 1 cloak, 2 gowns for winter and 2 for summer, 4 handkerchiefs to wear around her neck, 4 shifts, 4 pairs of stockings, and 4 aprons. The girls brought no books or money, as the school discouraged inappropriate reading material and class distinctions among students. The school also advised parents not to demand frequent visits from their children. The school committee regarded such visits as disruptive to the education of their students and potentially dangerous to their model Quaker community. Just a few decades earlier, Quaker reformers had accused parents of encouraging their children’s desire for material rather than spiritual happiness. Indeed, returning students might bring worldly influences, or, alternatively, lose the “polish” that Nine Partners wished to instill. The Coffins carefully followed the school’s instructions; Lucretia and Eliza not only missed the birth of their youngest sister Martha in 1806, they did not go home for two years.13

      Nine Partners provided Lucretia and Eliza with a substitute family of like-minded Quakers. Lucretia recognized the school’s reader, Mental Improvement, and the illustration of the slave-ship Brookes, from her school days on Nantucket, but she was also exposed to new ideas. Despite the school committee’s concern that their students read only Quaker authors or the Bible, Susanna Marriott, a British Quaker in charge of the sewing room, introduced Lucretia and her peers to the didactic poetry of William Cowper. Lucretia quoted Cowper’s most famous poem, “The Task,” from memory throughout her life, applying its criticism of blind adherence to social norms to the problem of slavery and women’s rights:

      Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

      To reverence what is ancient, and can plead

      A course of long observance for its use,

      That even servitude, the worst of ills,

      Because delivered from sire to son,

      Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.

      Importantly, Cowper also wrote anti-slavery poems, which Marriott, an abolitionist, probably shared with her students. “The Negro’s Complaint” began,

      Forced from home and all its pleasures

      Afric’s coast I left forlorn

      To increase a stranger’s treasures

      O’er the raging billows borne.

      The image of the African being taken from home for the profit of another appealed to this Nantucket Quaker, who disapproved of the accumulation and display of wealth for its own sake. Another Cowper poem, “Pity for Poor Africans,” reinforced Priscilla Wakefield’s admonition to boycott slave produce:

      I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,

      For how could we do without sugar and rum?

      Especially sugar, so needful we see;

      What! Give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea?

      Marriott later taught New York suffragist and reformer Emily Howland, who likewise credited Marriott for introducing her to the anti-slavery movement.14

      As the founders intended, Lucretia’s instructors taught Quaker doctrines, of which opposition to slavery was one. Students learned how the Society of Friends differed from other Christian denominations:

      We decline the use of ordinances, viz. baptism and the sacrament, believing that worship can be acceptably performed in silence; that war and oaths are unlawful; that no human appointment can qualify a person to preach the gospel; and our ministers receive no pay for preaching.

      They acknowledged and defended their peculiarities of “plainness of dress, simplicity of language, and avoiding complimentary expressions,” and their belief that all days of the week were equally holy.15

      The Society of Friends believed in religious and human progress, and part of this progress was the recognition of slavery as wrong. Students at Nine Partners were drilled in the success of the British abolition movement, which by 1807 had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade (the United States followed suit in 1808). The example of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson taught Lucretia and other students that “zeal and perseverance, in a right cause, seldom fail of success.” Students also learned that many Quakers continued to use the products of slave labor, and attributed this lapse, as did Cowper, to the “bias of custom.” But they learned the immorality of slave products from their teachers. James Mott Sr. limited his family’s consumption of sweets to maple sugar, produced without the aid of slaves.16

      Students also studied the Bible, but Friends disagreed over the appropriate place of Scripture and the inner light in their discipline. Joseph Tallcot, former superintendent of Nine Partners, promoted the reading of the Bible in all schools, Quaker and non-Quaker alike; most Protestants in early nineteenth-century America accepted the wisdom of this position without question. Other Quakers, however, believed that the Scriptures were subordinate to the inner light. Abigail Mott, a member of the Nine Partners school committee, wrote: “attend still more to that divine principle in your own hearts … it is by submitting to the teachings of this inward monitor, that we both learn, and are enabled to fulfill, our duty to God and to one another.”17 In the ensuing decades, such divisions among Friends grew increasingly important. Like most American Protestants, Lucretia and other Quakers had a deep familiarity with the Bible, reciting passages from memory. But they declined to allow their knowledge to become veneration, as it had among mainstream Protestants.

      Such immersion in Quaker values shaped students into devoted believers, but it also provided the basis for the individual subjectivity that had threatened religious unity throughout their history. For fun, Lucretia and her friends played “meeting,” as other American children might play church or school, imitating the women’s meeting for discipline by monitoring their schoolmates’ behavior. Such games trained young women for leadership in the Society of Friends, and reinforced the individual moral authority of the inward monitor. Following their conscience, each Quaker student had the ability—even the duty—to take a position on issues of pedagogy and doctrine. As a result, her education gave Lucretia a sense of agency and purpose that led her to clash with her Quaker teachers.18

      Nine Partners struggled with one of the signal questions of post-Enlightenment reform, namely how best to replace the punishment of the physical body with the discipline of the mind. Eighteenth-century British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham argued that prisons could control convicts more efficiently if they arranged their cells in a circle with a jailer at the center. Believing themselves watched at all times, prisoners would feel compelled to behave. Bentham saw his so-called “Panopticon” as humane innovation that reduced the need for brutal punishments. Though inspired by the same premises, Quakers

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