“Everything Depends Upon Going to the Root of the Matter and Speaking of Radical Principles”: Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) on Peace and the Transforming Power of Love1

Histories of American reform movements often underestimate the central and unifying role of a commitment to peace in energizing and inspiring a plethora of interrelated social reforms. Lucretia Mott (1793–1880), a leading voice in American national reform from the 1830s through the 1870s, worked for social change across a spectrum of causes including abolition, women’s rights, labor rights, and education. She challenged the status quo in religion and politics, called out national crime and corruption where she saw it, and was indefatigable in her work to bring about “a radical change in the system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.”² Mott built networks of connection among reformers; the home she and husband James Mott shared was a gathering place for leading nineteenth-century activists including William Lloyd Garrison, James Miller McKim, James Forten, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others. And underlying all that Mott did there ran a sustained and generative commitment to peace that was integral to a radical Quaker religious worldview that animated Mott’s lifelong work at the cutting edge of social change.³

Mott was vociferous in her prophetic critique of the dominant American culture of her time. She and like-minded reformers labored to bring to reality an alternative vision of America, one that would hold all people in equal regard.⁴ The divine injunction to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” was for them a fundamental principle guiding the formation of the new society. Within this ethical lineage, concerns for reform were not generally focused on any one single issue, because the source that gave rise to the passion for reform was a spiritual vision of creating a new and universal society with the “do unto others” ethic at its center.

Unshakeable confidence in the divine injunction to “do unto others” opened up a world rich in consequence, strategy, and transformation focused on pushing the boundaries of morality forward by advocating for those overlooked and oppressed. Mott sought to awaken people to the injustices of a society in which what she called “monopolies” and “the aristocracy” were in ascendancy. To a society she viewed as increasingly dominated by a model of economic gain and social standing, Mott preached “Let there be that which shall proclaim justice for all.”⁵ She and likeminded reformers were concerned about people’s complicity in gaining their own goods at the expense of others: “we must not build our house by unrighteousness. . . . We all ought to be laborers for it is not God’s design that some of us should live in luxury and unbounded indulgence, while others are toiling morning, noon, and night for bread.”⁶ Mott described America as a “guilty nation,”⁷ and consistently advocated for soul-searching and reformation at both a personal and a national level.

Mott worked at the vanguard of radical American reform movements, often in highly contentious circumstances, for more than sixty years.⁸ Her social and political activism can only be fully understood in the context of the religious worldview that motivated and sustained her. This article explores the network of interconnected theological ideas that links together the breadth of Mott’s reform activism. Mott’s fundamental impetus and essential guide, as she charted her steady course through the nineteenth-century tumult of reform and resistance to reform, emerged from the intersection of her conviction that the Creator God loved all humans equally, her commitment to loving God and humanity as a way of life, and her commitment to peace as an expression of love, an avenue to justice, and the embodiment of the concept of the kingdom of God on Earth. The concept of peace was a theological cornerstone: Mott’s ethical vision was characterized by an uncompromising testimony against war, and most fundamentally by a commitment to peace in which peace did not refer to temporary peace, an interlude in the cycle of oppression, but rather named an enduring state...