An act providing for the furnishing of the State Capitol was approved March 30, 1821: Section 1. The Governor, Auditor General, State Treasurer, William Graydon, Jacob Bucher, Francis R. Shunk and Joseph A. McGinsey were appointed Commissioners to superintend the furnishing of the State Capitol. This able commission expended the $15,000 appropriated, and the new Capitol was a credit to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania when the General Assembly formally occupied it January 2, 1822.
Lucretia Mott, Celebrated Advocate of
Anti-Slavery, Born January 3, 1793
From the earliest settlement at Germantown, and especially in the period following the Revolutionary War, there were many thoughtful people in all walks of life who considered slavery to be an evil which should be stopped. But the question of actually freeing the slaves was first seriously brought forward in 1831, by William Lloyd Garrison, in his excellent paper, “The Liberator,” published in Boston.
Seventy-five delegates met in Philadelphia in 1833 to form a National Anti-Slavery Society. It was unpopular in those stirring days to be an abolitionist. John Greenleaf Whittier acted as one of the secretaries, and four women, all Quakers, attended the convention.
When the platform of this new society was being discussed, one of the four women rose to speak. A gentleman present afterward said: “I had never before heard a woman speak at a public meeting. She said only a few words, but these were spoken so modestly, in such sweet tones and yet so decisively, that no one could fail to be pleased.” The woman who spoke was Lucretia Mott.
Lucretia Coffin was born in Nantucket January 3, 1793. In 1804 her parents, who were Quakers, removed to Boston. She was soon afterward sent to the Nine Partners’ Boarding School in Duchess County, N. Y., where her teacher (Deborah Willetts) lived until 1879. Thence she went to Philadelphia, where her parents were residing.
At the age of eighteen years she married James Mott. In 1818 she became a preacher among Friends, and all her long life she labored for the good of her fellow creatures, especially for those who were in bonds of any kind.
She was ever a most earnest advocate of temperance, pleaded for the freedom of the slaves, and was one of the active founders of the “American Anti-Slavery Society” in Philadelphia in 1833.