"THE MOST BELLIGERENT NON-RESISTER"

 “THE MOST BELLIGERENT NON-RESISTER”

My most recent encounter with her was a couple of years ago when Caroline and I were traveling back from a trip to see Susan in Baltimore.  We drove the more “rural” route out of Frederick, Maryland, heading down Highway 340 towards Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. It was there that John Brown made his famous raid in 1859, where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet in a beautiful setting.  We visited the Charles Town Court House where Brown was tried and convicted.  In the halls of that courthouse was a drawing by Albert Berghaus of two women in a horse-drawn wagon in Charles Town.  The women were Mary Brown, wife of John Brown, and Lucretia Mott, who was accompanying her to make a visit to Brown.  Brown had not allowed his wife to come down for the trial, and she had stayed with Lucretia Mott and her family, until Brown finally relented right before his execution.  

Brown had written his wife from jail that he was glad she was with Lucretia Mott saying, "I remember the old lady well; but presume she has no recollection of me...I am glad to have you make the acquaintance of such old Pioneers in the Cause." Lucretia Mott was indeed a pioneer, and was in the middle of many justice movements.  She had been born in 1793 in Massachusetts into a Quaker family, raised in the anti-slavery sentiment of the Friends Society.  She married her father’s business partner in 1811, but in 1815, her father died, leaving a mountain of debts for her mother and the family.   Everybody went to work pay off the debts, keeping the family out of prison.  

Lucretia Mott also went to work against slavery.  She was a powerful orator, but faced harsh resistant to women’s leadership in the anti-slavery movement.  Rather than diminishing her work, the resistance intensified it.  She became devoted to both anti-slavery and women’s rights.  William Lloyd Garrison welcomed her into the American Anti-Slavery Society, and she became a speaker on that circuit, indeed a fiery speaker, so much so that African-American abolitionist Robert Purvis called  her “the most belligerent Non-Resistant I ever saw."  She did this while raising six children.

In 1840, Mott joined several other American women as delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, but the males in charge of the Conference refused to seat the women as delegates.  There she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and they worked hard to overturn the ruling, but they were not able to do it.  They vowed that upon their return to the States, they would organize a gathering devoted to women’s rights, emphasizing that rights for women was not a competition for abolition but rather part of the same river of equality.  Upon their return, they began the work, and 1848 welcomed delegates to the first official women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.  There they developed and passed the “Declaration of Sentiments” demanding equal rights for women.

Mott continued to work for both abolition and women’s rights.  In 1850 Congress  passed the heinous Fugitive Slave Act, which required people escaping slavery to be returned to the enslavers.  Mott and her husband assisted several people escaping slavery to get away from the “slave-catchers” who came north to retrieve human beings and return to the cruelty of slavery.  

After the Civil War, Mott re-dedicated herself to helping those who had been held as slaves and to rights for women.  She got involved in the fight over the 15th Amendment, which gave the explicit right to vote to Black men but not to women.  There was a fierce and nasty debate between allies over this Amendment and the refusal to include women in its granting of voting rights.  As often happens, the women were left out, and the Amendment passed.  It would be 50 years before women were finally included in voting rights in the 19th Amendment.  

Mott was also one of the founders of Swarthmore College.  She died in 1880, having left behind a powerful legacy of abolition, suffrage, equity and accompaniment.  The “Declaration of Sentiments” has not yet been fulfilled – we still await the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment after 173 years.  As we start this Women’s History Month, let us give thanks for this most belligerent witness named Lucretia Mott, and let us find our places in the path that she and many others have laid before us.