Lucretia Mott's Heresy by Faulkner Carol;

Author:Faulkner, Carol;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2011-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Fugitives

ROBERT PURVIS ONCE CALLED LUCRETIA MOTT “the most belligerent Non-Resistant he ever saw.” She liked the characterization, telling an audience of abolitionists, “I am no advocate of passivity”: “I have no idea, because I am a Non-Resistant, of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave.”1 Her refusal to link pacifism to inaction informed her response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. After the failure of Wilmot’s Proviso, Congress spent two years debating how to incorporate lands gained from Mexico. The resulting Compromise of 1850 abolished the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia, instituted the doctrine of popular sovereignty in the New Mexico territory, allowing these new states to decide whether to legalize slavery, and implemented a drastic fugitive slave law. The law gave slave catchers the power to force any individual—regardless of political or religious beliefs—to participate in the capture of a fugitive. It also established harsh fines and jail terms for anyone who aided an escaped slave. Finally, the law placed the onus on the alleged fugitive to prove he or she was a free person. In other words, Fugitive Slave Act presumed any African American claimed by a southerner was a slave. Though all abolitionists shared Mott’s vehement opposition to the law, they disagreed over the best way to resist its enforcement.

Ongoing divisions in the anti-slavery movement did not affect Mott’s close friendship with Robert and his wife Harriet Forten Purvis. In July 1850, Lucretia and Harriet traveled to New York Central College in McGrawsville. The college was one of the few institutions in the country to accept women and African Americans. Harriet’s sons, Joseph and Robert, were students at the college, and Lucretia was invited to deliver the commencement address. On the way, Mott delighted in shocking her fellow rail passengers by sitting with Harriet Purvis as an equal. Mott’s speech also upset the trustees by “denying the doctrine of human depravity,” but Charles Reason, an African American professor of Greek, Latin, and French, defended her to the anti-slavery Baptists and Methodists in the audience. Lucretia’s comments did not offend Harriet, who with her husband later joined the Progressive Friends, an offshoot of the Congregational Friends. The Progressive Friends welcomed “all persons who recognize the Equal Brotherhood of the Human Family, without regard to sex, color, or condition.”2

Shortly after Lucretia and Harriet left central New York, the state’s abolitionists offered a public response to the impending passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Gerrit Smith, the political abolitionist and benefactor of New York Central College, sponsored a “Fugitive Slave Convention” in Cazenovia. The convention drew two thousand people, including black and white abolitionists, female reformers, and escaped slaves. Frederick Douglass, Samuel J. May, and other members of the convention endorsed Smith’s “A Letter to the American Slaves,” which advocated violent resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Like Elias Hicks in 1811, the letter described American slaves as “prisoners of war,” but Smith deviated from the Quaker minister

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