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1. Origins and Influences
- University of Massachusetts Press
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o 1 Origins and Influences Out of Nantucket MARTHA COFFIN was born in Boston on Christmas Day, 1806. Yet after her death, even her close friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton mistakenly wrote that she was born in Nantucket.1 Each probably thought that Nantucket was Martha’s birthplace because it was her older sister Lucretia’s, and in her adult years, Lucretia Coffin Mott often spoke of how her childhood on the island had developed her interest in abolition and woman’s rights. Moreover, all of Martha’s siblings were born on Nantucket, as her father, Thomas Coffin, and her mother, Anna Folger Coffin, had been. Thomas and Anna were descendants of two of the men who had settled Nantucket in 1659, Tristram Coffin and Peter Folger. (Anna’s grandfather Abisha Folger was a first cousin of Benjamin Franklin’s, whose mother was a Nantucket Folger.) Six generations of Coffins and Folgers had lived on the tiny island twenty-five miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and were imbued with the ideas and values that developed there. So, too, through her parents and siblings, was Martha Coffin Wright. Within a half century of its founding, Nantucket had become the center of the American whaling industry. Many Nantucket husbands sailed off on whaling or trading expeditions to places as far away as China, which kept them 8 chapter one away from home for many months, often for a year or more. While their husbands were away at sea, Nantucket wives were required to maintain their households on their own, and many also operated shops and stores to generate income. So many shops of the village were managed by women that the main street became known as Petticoat Row. Thomas Coffin was a ship captain when he married Anna Folger in 1779, and Anna became one of Nantucket’s many female shopkeepers. Like these other women who managed a household and a business during their husbands’ long absences, she became an independent , self-reliant woman. Through Anna’s example, her daughters, including Martha, grew up with the belief that a woman need not be a helpless, subordinate creature, permanently dependent on the care and protection of a man.2 Another important influence on the Coffins and Folgers, including Martha , was the Quaker religion. For several decades after its founding, Nantucket had no organized church; the only religious observances on the island were those of the Wampanoag Indians. But early in the eighteenth century, Mary Coffin Starbuck, the dominant social figure on the island, was converted by a visiting missionary to the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers. Soon Quakerism became the dominant religion of Nantucket, and the religion of many Coffins and Folgers.3 The Quaker religion places a strong emphasis on the individual and holds that each person, male and female equally, has an Inner Light that shows the way of God. Thus, historically, Quaker women have played a more important role in church affairs than women in most other religions. Also among the Quaker teachings in the nineteenth century were pacifism, temperance, simplicity in dress, and opposition to slavery. (As early as 1729, Anna Coffin’s Folger cousin Benjamin Franklin had published Quaker tracts in Philadelphia against slavery and the slave trade.) These beliefs and values remained with Thomas and Anna Coffin and their family after they moved from Nantucket to Boston in 1804, two years before Martha’s birth. As an adult Martha gradually discarded some of these Nantucket Quaker values . Others remained an important part of her character throughout her life, including temperance, a belief in sexual equality, an individualistic approach to religion, and a deep hatred of slavery. The Coffins’ move to the mainland resulted primarily from a disastrous voyage that took a heavy financial and emotional toll on the family. A few years earlier, Thomas had purchased a ship of his own, called the Trial, and soon set 9 origins and influences sail for the Pacific. His ship had rounded Cape Horn and sailed over a thousand miles along the coast of Chile when it was seized by a Spanish man-of-war, charged with “violation of neutrality,” forced into the port of Valparaiso, and impounded by the authorities.4 For many months, Thomas argued his case in Chilean courts, having learned enough Spanish to serve as his own attorney. But his attempts to regain his...