Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880)
FamilySearch PID: LRBB-TZH
Lucretia Coffin Mott is the Long brothers’ 4th cousin, 7 times removed. Both lines descend from Tristram Coffin (c. 1605), founder of Nantucket, hers through Tristram’s son James Coffin (1640) → Capt. Nathaniel Coffin (LZN4-BJG, 1671) → Benjamin Coffin (LZG8-84H, 1705) → Capt. Thomas Bartlett Coffin (LJGB-X29, 1766) → Lucretia; the brothers’ through his son John Coffin (KNZ2-13G, 1647) → John’s daughter Hannah Coffin → Robert Gardner → Eunice Gardner → Peggy Macy → Frederick William Folger → Harriet Ann Folger → the Perrys. The Benjamin Coffin (1705) → Thomas Bartlett → Lucretia segment is on her side only; it is not in the brothers’ direct line. A 2026 review read Hannah’s father as James; Starbuck and Allen Coffin name John.
Lucretia Coffin Mott was born January 3, 1793, on Nantucket, the daughter of sea captain Thomas Coffin and Anna Folger Coffin. She is one of the most important figures in American history: a Quaker minister, a leader of the abolitionist movement, a co-founder of Swarthmore College, and the driving force behind the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where the women’s rights movement was born.
She connects to the family through two lines. Through her father, she descends from Tristram Coffin (PID: L8BH-G24) via James Coffin → Capt. Nathaniel Coffin → Benjamin Coffin → Thomas Coffin → Lucretia. Through her mother Anna Folger, she descends from Peter Folger (PID: 99BX-1P2), the same ancestor who connects the family to Benjamin Franklin. Tristram Coffin and Peter Folger are both in the brothers’ direct line, making Lucretia a cousin through two independent Nantucket founding families.
Lucretia’s grandfather Benjamin Coffin (1705-1780) was a Quaker elder and the first banker on Nantucket. His brother William Coffin (b. 1699) moved to Boston and became the patriarch of the Loyalist Coffins who fought for Britain in the Revolution. The same father, Captain Nathaniel Coffin (1671-1721), produced both the line that gave America its greatest reformer and the line that gave Britain its generals and admirals.
Lucretia became a Quaker minister at twenty-eight. She helped organize the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, sheltered fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, and in 1840 was denied a seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London because she was a woman. That insult led directly to the Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848, where she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments demanding equal rights. Her sister Martha Coffin Wright co-organized the convention. Frederick Douglass attended and helped pass the suffrage resolution.
In 1848, five delegates at the Liberty Party convention voted for Lucretia for Vice President of the United States, making her the first woman nominated for that office. She was among the women named for the 2016 redesign of the U.S. $10 bill, a redesign ultimately shelved. She died November 11, 1880, at her farm near Philadelphia. At her funeral, a long silence was broken when someone asked:
Who can speak? The preacher is dead.
In Their Own Words
“I always loved the good, and in childhood tried to do right, praying for strength to overcome a naturally hasty temper. Being trained in the religious Society of Friends, I had no faith in the generally received idea of human depravity. My sympathy was early enlisted for the poor slave by the class books read in our schools, and the pictures of the slave-ships as presented by Clarkson.”[1]
From a short autobiographical sketch she wrote many years later; the book gives no date.
“There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large — of man as well as woman — than the true and proper position of woman. Much has been said, from time to time, upon this subject. It has been a theme for ridicule, for satire, and sarcasm. … This subject has claimed my earnest interest for many years. I have long wished to see woman occupying a more elevated position than that which custom for ages has allotted to her.”[2]
The opening of her address, printed as "Delivered Twelfth Month 17th, 1849," in answer to a lecture by Richard H. Dana.
Sources
- Anna Davis Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 31. archive.org
- Anna Davis Hallowell, James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 487. archive.org