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Lucretia Mott

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton Met Lucretia Mott, the Women’s Movement Began (Supposedly)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a skilled propagandist who sometimes creatively remembered events in order to make a point. Or, to put it bluntly, she told some tall tales. The story of how the women’s movement started when Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott in 1840 is one such tale.

Mott herself might have argued that the women’s rights movement started in 1792 with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Or maybe at a New York convention in 1837 – or was it Boston in 1841?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The two women did meet in London in 1840, as Stanton claimed. Their friendship did help shape the women’s movement. But eight years would pass before they met again and actually decided to hold the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls.

Historian Lisa Tetrault argues it may even be a stretch to call the Seneca Falls Convention the beginning of the campaign for women’s rights.

“Seneca Falls is perhaps the most enduring and long-standing myth ever produced by a U.S. social movement,” write Tetrault. Elizabeth Cady Stanton created that myth, and she had her reasons.

The London Convention

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott, Mott had reached her 47^nd year. Born into a Quaker family on Nantucket in 1793, she learned from an early age to hate slavery and to resist authority. At 13, she went to Nine Partners, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. After graduation she taught at the school and learned male teachers made three times as much as she did.

Lucretia Mott

James Mott, a Quaker who felt about slavery as she did, also taught at Nine Partners. They married in Philadelphia on April 10, 1811, and devoted themselves to the abolitionist cause. Lucretia had five children who lived to adulthood, but she managed to speak frequently on abolition and racial equality. Though people considered her views radical, even heretical, the Society of Friends recognized her as a minister in 1821. She recalled that the early Quakers had tried to disrupt society, and urged her followers to do the same.

Another women’s rights lecturer remembered Mott as a velvet glove in an iron hand.

“While Lucretia Mott’s character was gentle, sweet, and lovely, let her record also be ‘a fearless rebuker of evil and error in both high and low places’,” wrote Phebe Couzins.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott, she was a long way from the Victorian dowager depicted in photographs. In 1840, she was a lively young newlywed on her honeymoon.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a young mother.

Elizabeth Cady was born two decades after Lucretia Mott in the stodgy small town of Johnstown, N.Y. Her father, a prominent local lawyer and politician, owned slaves. Elizabeth, formally educated until she reached 16, liked to read her father’s law books. Her biographer, Lori D. Ginzberg, described her as “tempestuous and spoiled.” Her cousin, Gerrit Smith, introduced her to the abolition movement.

In 1839 she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an abolitionist on a speaking tour of upstate New York. Both had illustrious ancestors. Stanton was a direct descendant of William Brewster, the spiritual leader of the Mayflower Pilgrims. Cady’s grandfather was James Livingston, a revolutionary war soldier who helped unmask Benedict Arnold.

Though 10 years her senior, she fell for Stanton. She found him good looking, an exciting orator and a brilliant conversationalist. He found her lively and adorable. Soon they got engaged.

Her father talked her out of the marriage, emphasizing the financial sacrifice she’d make by marrying Stanton. But then Henry announced he would sail to London for a meeting of the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Elizabeth decided to go with him as his wife. She would not, however, use the word “obey” in her marriage vows.

How Elizabeth Cady Stanton Met Lucretia Mott

About 40 American abolitionists set sail for London for the convention. Before the ship got under way, Elizabeth Cady Stanton played tag with her brother-in-law on deck. When the captain dared her to be hoisted to the top of the mast in a chair, she accepted.

When they arrived in London, a schism had already formed among abolitionists over the role of women. Some, like Harry Brewster Stanton and Wendell Phillips, wanted to admit women to the convention. Others did not. A vote was taken, and the pro-women faction lost.

Lucretia Mott, a veteran of the controversy over women, wasn’t surprised. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a neophyte, viewed it as a turning point in her life.

She later described her conversation about it with Lucretia Mott:

“As Mrs. Mott and I walked home arm in arm, commenting, on the incidents of the day, we resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and to form a society to advocate the rights of women.”

Maybe Not

Mott doesn’t quite remember it that way. She dated the beginning of the women’s movement to another abolitionist meeting, the First Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention in New York City in 1837. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had not attended that one, though many of the American abolitionist women in London had.

Lucretia Mott also recalled the first time Stanton suggested a convention on women’s rights – in Boston in 1841.

But perhaps the London meeting of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a deeper significance. For, as Ginzberg writes, “In Mott, Stanton discovered her first female role model: a freethinker, an advocate of women’s rights, and a patient mentor…”

Waterloo

Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott eight years later. Stanton had given birth to several of her seven children, moved to Boston and then to Seneca Falls, N.Y.

The Hunt house in Waterloo, N.Y.

The two ladies received an invitation to have tea in nearby Waterloo, at the home of Jane Hunt on July 9, 1848.

Jane had grown up a Philadelphia Quaker and married Richard Hunt, one of the richest men in Seneca County. They lived in an imposing, 11-room Federal style house. N.Y. Hunt also invited Mott’s sister Martha Wright and Mary Ann M’Clintock.

At that tea party, according to Stanton, they poured out their grievances about their second-class status. Then they decided to hold the Seneca Falls Convention 10 days later.

The Myth of How Elizabeth Cady Stanton Met Lucretia Mott

It took another 33 years for Stanton to place Seneca Falls as the launching pad for the women’s right movement. She did it with Susan B. Anthony when they wrote Volume I of their history of the women’s suffrage movement,

But they neglected to mention another important convention, the National Women’s Rights Convention of 1850 in Worcester. That convention, which invited people from every state, had an impact throughout the country. But Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t go to that one.

The women’s movement had split, just as the abolitionist movement had in 1840. Stanton, Mott and Anthony stood on one side, Lucy Stone and Abby Kelley Foster on the other. The cause of the break: Stanton and Mott accepted the 14th and 15th amendments, which guaranteed black men but not women dur process and the right to vote. Stone and Foster did not.

As Tetrault noted, Stanton created the Seneca Falls myth for a reason. She wanted to consolidate the movement to direct it toward one goal: the vote. The story of how Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott belonged to that myth.

That’s not a bad thing, concludes Tetrault. A myth is a ‘venerated and celebrated story used to give meaning to the world.’

With thanks to Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America by Carol Faulkner, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life by Lori D. Ginzberg and The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898 by Lisa Tetrault.

Image: Elizabeth Cady Stanton with two of her sons, By unknown – Library of Congress, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22568316. Hunt house By JERRYE & ROY KLOTZ MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23251826. This story was updated in 2022.

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In 1863, Anna Dickinson Takes New England by Storm

In 1863 with the country locked in Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s party desperately needed political support. To get it, the Republicans turned to a 19-year-old Quaker girl, Anna Dickinson. She was a fast talker with radical ideas.

Anna Dickinson (Library of Congress)

Across the North that year, Democrats were trying to unseat Republican incumbents who supported the fight with the South. In Connecticut, Gov. William Buckingham was on shaky ground in an election that was flat out about war vs. peace.

Buckingham had won the election of 1860 by one half of one percent (541 votes). Support for the war was anything but assured in 1863 after Connecticut soldiers had actually begun dying in battle.

Into this mix, the Republicans wisely invited a young woman from Pennsylvania to barnstorm the state and raise support for Buckingham.

William Buckingham

In-person speeches by candidates and their surrogates were important for informing and firing up voters. While many women aided the war effort as nurses, Dickinson was a rare bird at that time: a fire-breathing, fearless speaker who could out-talk and out-think any man.

Anna Dickinson

She was born on Oct. 28, 1842, in Philadelphia, Pa., to a Quaker family. The Dickinson home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Her father died when she was two years old, leaving the family in poverty. Her mother opened a school and took in boarders. Anna attended the Friends Select School in Philadelphia and then, briefly, at Westtown School. She studied hard and spent the money she earned on books. At 14 she converted to the Methodist Church.

Anna Dickinson carte de visite

Anna went to work at the age of 15 as a copyist, then got a job as a teacher in Berks County, Pa. Then in May 1861 she got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Mint, one of the first female employees. Then she lost her job five months later for criticizing Union Gen. George B. McClellan.

She honed her debating skills in church arguing the issues of equality for women, speaking in public for the first time in 1857. Lucretia Mott encouraged her speaking career.

On the Road Again

After she lost her job, Dickinson began a full-time speaking tour, sometimes making sequential speeches for days running. Twenty times she spoke in New Hampshire, where Republican governor James Gilmore narrowly hung on to his seat after the legislature settled the election in which no candidate won a majority.

Lucretia Mott encouraged Anna Dickinson

Benjamin Franklin, New Hampshire’s Republican party leader, urged Connecticut to bring Dickinson to that state to stump for Buckingham. Connecticut party leaders were wary of using a young woman as their champion. They had a full schedule for four former governors to speak on his behalf. But concerned about strong support for the Democrat, former governor Thomas Seymour, they offered Dickinson one speaking spot at Hartford.

While some Republicans were still wary of fully embracing the notion of equality for African Americans, Dickinson had no such reservations. She said so in plain terms.

“Eighty-six years ago the world looked upon our fathers struggling for independence, now the sublime sight of a nation struggling for the liberty of all mankind forever is witnessed,” she said.

And she was outspoken on the need to let black soldiers serve in the Union Army: “You have suffered enough. You have died enough. Henceforth we will stand out of the way and let you fight for your own manhood and race.”

Dickinson gave a pro-war speech at the Boston Music Hall in 1862

Prince of Darkness

She was also far too quick-witted for her critics. In one instance, opponents of the war tried to disrupt her speech by shouting “fire” in the jam-packed hall where she spoke. Failing, they then shut out the lights.

“I see…that there are those here who evidently love darkness better than light because their deeds are evil,” she said. “I read my Bible.”

And then: “I read of the Prince of Darkness, and judging from the present display, some of his children are present.”

The rebuff provoked a deafening roar in the hall and Dickinson continued.

Anna Dickinson, America’s Joan of Arc

The press dubbed her America’s Joan of Arc, and the Connecticut Republicans extended her speaking tour by 20 dates.

Editor of the pro-Republican Hartford Press was jubilant: “This woman is sent from on high to save the state.” Democratic-controlled newspapers, meanwhile, labeled her a “political witch,” “parrot” and “a crowing hen,” among other things.

Buckingham won reelection, this time by more than three percent. Newspaper editors praised Dickinson and said the margin would have been greater if she could have spoken on more stages. She was animated, attractive, opinionated, smart, young and vibrant – a winning combination.

Dickinson’s career as an orator lasted more than 10 years. People throughout the country clamored to hear her opinions on equal pay and suffrage for women. She also delivered an historical account of the life of Joan of Arc.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Cobwebs Before a Whirlwind

Elizabeth Cady Stanton had high praise for Anna Dickinson.

“She poured out such volleys of invective, sarcasm, and denunciation, painted the helplessness of women with such pathos and power, giving touching incidents of her own hard experience, that her antagonist sank lower and lower into his seat and bowed his head in silence and humiliation, while those who witnessed the scene were melted to tears,” wrote Stanton.

“Never was an audience more electrified and amazed than were they with the eloquence and power of that young girl,” wrote Stanton.

Stanton described how Dickinson responded to a man in the audience who challenged her.

…Pointing straight at him, and, with each step approaching nearer where he sat, saying, ‘You, sir, said thus and so,’ she swept away his arguments, one by one, like cobwebs before a whirlwind, and left him not one foot of ground whereon to stand. When she finished, he took his hat and sneaked out of the meeting like a whipped spaniel, to the great amusement of the audience, leaving their sympathies with the brave young girl.”

Too Progressive

But Dickinson was always too progressive for her times. Privately, she thought President Lincoln was “an ass.” She believed he worried too much about southern sensibilities and too little about the rights and freedoms of slaves and women.

Dickinson was not a fan

Then, when it became clear the South was losing the war, she blasted anyone who wanted to accept anything less than total victory:

“Let no man prate of compromise,” she said. “Defeated by ballots, the South had appealed to bullets. Let it stand by the appeal. There was no arm of compromise long enough to stretch over the sea of blood, and the mound of fallen heroes, to shake hands with their murderers. They suffered that the cause might proceed. Their bodies were shattered that the body politic might be preserved. We must continue the work dropped from their nerveless hands.“

Eventually, Dickinson’s career as an orator petered out as she became too radical for the Republicans. And she herself noted: “A lecturer who has nothing more to say should stop lecturing.”

Anna Dickinson 2.0

She turned to writing, both books and plays, and she even took a stab at acting: “The stage is more powerful than the platform, the press or the pulpit,” she said. Her most radical book was a novel that was supportive of interracial marriage.

However, she never gained the success in other fields that she enjoyed as a public speaker. One reviewer of her work put it this way: “She was a first-rate orator who became a third-rate writer and a fifth-rate actress.”

Anna Dickinson later in life

Dickinson’s personal life was also troubled. Her sister had her committed to an insane asylum in 1891 because of her paranoia. The court eventually ordered her release, and she won several lawsuits against her critics who had libeled her.

Her confidence shaken, she spent her remaining years relatively serenely living with friends in Goshen, N.Y. She died there in 1932.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Capt. Austin Bearse, Conductor on a Watery Underground Railroad

Austin Bearse sailed the waters of the southern coast of America between 1818 and 1830. The sea captain of Barnstable on Cape Cod had started out as a mate on coastal schooners. In the winter months, the schooners would often linger in the South. They then served the ports between Baltimore and New Orleans doing warm-weather duty.

The trips gave Bearse an up-close look at slavery in the United States, and a fervor for the abolition movement.

The ships would travel up rivers to plantations to pick up rice and cotton to come to market. They would also bring the necessities for the plantation, including at times slaves sent to the fields. Sometimes they brought one or two and sometimes as many as 80.

Bearse later recalled how slavers separated them from their families and connections “with as little concern as calves and pigs are selected out of a lot of domestic animals.”

Austin Bearse

The traffic grew to disgust Austin Bearse.

“Our vessel used to lie at a place called Poor Man’s Hole, not far from the city. We used to allow the relatives and friends of the slaves to come on board and stay all night with their friends, before the vessel sailed. In the morning it used to be my business to pull off the hatches and warn them that it was time to separate, and the shrieks and cries at these times were enough to make anybody’s heart ache.”

Bearse’s travels took him around the world. and he knew about slavery in foreign ports. And in the American South, he saw the brutal conditions of the plantations. While northern visitors to southern cities might meet an occasional domestic slave, they rarely saw the way the slaves on plantations lived and died.

“My opinion is that American slavery, as I have seen it in the internal slave trade, as I have seen it on the rice and sugar plantations, and in the city of New Orleans, was fully as bad as any slavery in the world — heathen or Christian.”

Austin Bearse

Resolute Fellows

On one voyage in 1828 aboard the brig Milton, two slaves boarded the vessel in South Carolina, bound for New Orleans.

“When we were in the Gulf Stream, I came to the men and took off their handcuffs. They were resolute fellows, and they told me I would see they would never live to be slaves in New Orleans.

“One of them was a carpenter and one a blacksmith. We brought them into New Orleans, and consigned them over to the agent. The agent told the captain that in forty-eight hours afterwards they were all dead men, having every one killed himself as they said they should. One of them I know was bought for a fireman on the steamer “Post Boy,” that went down to the Balize. He jumped overboard and … drowned.

“In my past days, the system of slavery was not much discussed. I saw these things as others did, without interference. Because I no longer think it right to see these things in silence, I trade no more south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

Smuggler

After Austin Bearse converted to the abolitionist movement, he began taking more direct action. And by July of 1847, now a captain in his own right, Bearse could do more. He began a long career as a smuggler of slaves to freedom.

Lucretia Mott, one of the Mott sisters

“In July, 1847, I sailed with a loaded vessel bound to Albany, N. Y. On my arrival there, I called on the Mott sisters, ladies well known to the Anti-Slavery friends in Boston and elsewhere. Miss Mott told me they had a slave secreted just out of the city, who was in danger. His name was George Lewis.”

A court had issued a writ for him, she said, and she wished Bearse to take him to Boston.

“As soon as I was ready to sail, she brought him to my vessel at night, with his baggage and I stowed him away. In three days I passed New York, and on getting into Long Island Sound, I told George Lewis he could safely show himself on deck, which he was glad to do.”

George Lewis

On the passage, he told Bearse his story, and Bearse found him very intelligent. George Lewis was not only a Baptist preacher, but a house and ship carpenter and bridge builder. Enslaved at City Point, Va., his master was his half-brother.

“He had a wife and seven children, and being entrusted with all the overseeing, often made trips to Washington, where his eldest daughter Lizzie was living with his master’s mother,” wrote Bearse. “In his absence, the Baptist minister came and took his second daughter from his house for base purposes.”

Lewis cried out upon his infamy, and the minister had him hauled up and flogged. George, who had never before been whipped, told his wife he could do nothing more for them. He must leave them, he said, to go to a land of freedom.

The North Star

“At night he kneeled down and prayed with them. He then took his saw and a bundle of clothes, and went to the ferry. The ferryman pulled him across James River, and. hiding by day, and travelling by the North Star at night, he reached the Potomac River, where he found a sloop loaded with wood bound for Alexandria. The captain, knowing him, took him on board, and after dark George made his way over the long bridge to Washington, where his daughter Lizzie hid him in her mistress’ attic all winter.

In April, wrote Bearse, George Lewis took the newly-completed Underground Railroad for Baltimore. He bade Lizzie good-by, and she told him she should soon start herself for a land of freedom.

“At Baltimore, he was continued on by the same mysterious route to Philadelphia, and so on to New York, where friends forwarded him to the care of the Misses Mott, at Albany. They procured him work, and protected him from the hunters. His master heard of him in this way.”

“When the warm weather came, Lizzie took the same railroad, and followed her father to New York; there she lost track of him, and the Anti-Slavery friends concluded to send her to Boston. A coast survey steamer came into Boston for repairs. One of the crew, a colored man who had known her in Washington, met her where she was stopping, at Mr. Thacker’s in Southac Street, and found out from her that, her father was in Albany. He told an officer on board the “Bibb,” who was a brother of the master.”

Austin Bearse Reminisces

“George Lewis heard of his daughter’s being in Boston from the Rev. Mr. Grimes, who was at a meeting near Albany, and said, to the father’s great joy, Lizzie was safe in Boston. He also took the news to Lizzie that her father was in Albany.

Rev. Leonard Grimes

“When we reached Boston, Mr. Wallcutt took us to Southac Street, and while we were looking for the number of the house, I heard someone say “Well, there’s father!” We turned to look, and it was indeed Lizzie calling “Father!”

The next day, Bearse took George Lewis to Samuel Hall’s shipyard in East Boston. Hall then employed him for three years. Some of his ship carpenters left on account of it, but Hall kept George.

“When George’s master found he could not get George back from Albany, he sold his wife and five children to Richmond, Va. The money was raised, and Rev. Mr. Grimes went on to Richmond and bought them, and brought them all to Boston, when George was made a happy man.”

“In 1850, George Lewis went to Nova Scotia, afraid to stay in Boston after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. He stayed in Nova Scotia till the Proclamation of Emancipation. His daughter Lizzie married Mr. Richard S. Brown, of the Boston Custom House, well known as a good citizen, and a credit to his race.”

After delivering George Lewis to Boston, Austin Bearse made many more interventions during his career. He set them down in his memoir, Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston.

This story was updated in 2023. Image of Austin Bearse By Unknown – Original publication: UnknownImmediate source: http://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=862&img_step=1&mode=large, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54788043.

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The Nantucket Childhood of Lucretia Mott

Many of her contemporaries considered Lucretia Mott the greatest woman of the 19^th century. A Quaker minister shaped by her Nantucket upbringing, she didn’t compromise her abolitionist beliefs. She also advocated women’s rights well before almost anyone else.

Lucretia Mott by Joseph Kyle. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

She mentored Elizabeth Cady Stanton, lectured widely and raised money to eliminate slavery, organized the Seneca Falls Convention and helped incorporate Swarthmore College. Another pacifist, Pablo Picasso, commemorated her work with a sculpture in Syracuse, N.Y.

Nantucket women learned independence because their husbands spent years at sea. When her father sailed to China, Lucretia Mott’s mother kept a small store, and traveled to the mainland to trade oil, whalebone and candles for dry goods and groceries. Acting like a man in that way wasn’t unusual for Nantucket Quaker women. Quakers also gave girls the same education as boys and allowed them to become ministers – which is exactly what Lucretia Mott did at 28.

New England whalers attacking a right whale.

Lucretia Mott

Lucretia Coffin was born Jan. 3, 1793, the second of eight children by Anna Folger and Thomas Coffin, a ship captain and later shipowner.

Early on, Lucretia Mott had a problem with authority. As a child, her grandmother told her she couldn’t go on a hayride because she’d misbehaved. Lucretia Mott talked about the incident 40 years later.

More importantly, she resisted the authority of the Quaker elders who didn’t mind women’s independence but didn’t embrace women’s equality.

“We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth,” she said.

She received the same education as the Quaker boys on the island. She later wrote, “education & intellectual culture have been for years equal for girls & boys — so that their women are prepared to be the companions of men in every sense — and their social circles are never divided.”

A Nantucket Childhood

The whaling industry influenced her in another way: The Nantucket Quakers not only tolerated but employed Wampanoag Indians and African-Americans as crews on whaling ships. The Nantucket Society of Friends was the first in America to oppose slavery. And shortly after the American Revolution, Nantucket freed all enslaved people on the island.

As a child, Lucretia Mott saw this diagram of the way slaves were packed about a transatlantic slave ship.

Lucretia Mott saw this diagram of slaves packed into a transatlantic slave ship.

At four years old, Lucretia Mott saw a British abolitionist’s diagram of the 482 slaves packed aboard the Brooke on their voyage from Africa to Jamaica. She told her children and grandchildren about it. She also renounced the use of products made by slaves, such as calico, sugar, rice and indigo dye – something she learned in her Nantucket school.

In 1801, her mother invited Rhode Island Quaker minister Elizabeth Coggeshell to her home. Lucretia found Coggeshell, a minister unafraid to challenge authority, intriguing.

Mott then attended a Quaker boarding school in Dutchess County, N.Y. Becoming a teacher inspired her interest in women’s rights, as she found out men were making three times as much as she did.

NASA satellite photo o Nantucket Island.

Lucretia Mott would move with her family to Philadelphia, marry James Mott and become a Quaker minister. But as Elizabeth Cady Stanton later said, her 11 years on Nantucket inspired the public activism that would make her famous.

With thanks to Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century by Carol Faulkner. This post was updated in 2023.

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