[p. 95] except under the patronizing shelter of church organization, they formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and new to such undertakings, were obliged to ask a man to preside at the first meeting, no woman feeling capable of taking the chair and calling the meeting to order. ‘Friends’ were increasingly averse to the agitation of so unpopular a subject as anti-slavery, and exhorted their members to ‘avoid all contention,’ even closing their meeting-houses against such discussions.
Lucretia Mott, who had become an influential minister among Friends, persisted in ‘lugging in’ the distasteful subject, and brought herself into such disfavor she several times narrowly escaped disownment, but she was adroit enough to keep her membership, which she greatly valued. She felt that she was above all a Friend, and that she could do more good within the fold than outside. As a visiting Friend she travelled largely. On one of these journeys she attended seventy-one different meetings, speaking at each, and travelled a distance of two thousand four hundred miles, most of it in a stagecoach, generally taking her knitting with her. The generation of today would find it difficult to conceive of the savage form of opposition to the abolitionists which prevailed during many years. In these perilous periods Mrs. Mott proved her fidelity to her non-resistant principles as well as to her anti-slavery faith. In the year 1838, when Pennsylvania Hall was burned by a mob, her own house barely escaped, the excited throng having been headed by a Friend, who shouted, ‘On to Mott's,’ and led them up the wrong street. This was not the only mob through which her courage carried her unhurt. At one time, in Virginia, the gentleman who was with her was tarred and feathered, while she protested that she only was the offender and besought them to spare him. On another memorable occasion, several years later, when the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society in New York was broken up by rowdies, some of the speakers as they left the hall were roughly handled by the
