(1720–1772), American Quaker and reformer

Born near Mt. Holly, New Jersey, Woolman traveled as a minister through the colonies and England. Best known for his Journal and for his antislavery efforts, he became involved in peace issues during the French and Indian War, becoming a war tax refuser, and joining others in 1755 in signing An Epistle of Tender Love and Caution. In 1759, he wrote a second letter, sometimes called the Pacifist Epistle. In response to the draft, Woolman emphasized principled objection, decrying objectors who merely “pretend scruple of conscience.” He did not refuse to quarter soldiers, but would not accept pay, explaining that he acted “in passive obedience to authority.” During the frontier violence after the war, he visited the Indians at Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, “to feel and understand the spirit they live in” and to promote peaceful relations. His essay A Plea for the Poor shows unusual insights into the causes of war, urging people to look at their possessions and “try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in them.”

[See also Conscientious Objection; Nonviolence; Pacifism; Quakers.]

Bibliography

• Edwin H. Cady, John Woolman, 1965.
• Phiilips P. Moulton, The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, 1971

John Woolman (1720-1772), American Quaker merchant and minister, was known for his opposition to slavery, poverty, and war. His journal is one of the finest statements of Quaker inner life.

John Woolman was born in Ancocas, N.J., and raised in Quaker schools and meetings. He read widely and prepared himself for a variety of occupations. Primarily a tailor and shopkeeper, he also kept an apple orchard, taught school, wrote, maintained a lending library, and was a surveyor and conveyancer. As conveyancer, he wrote bills of sale for slaves; this was his introduction to slavery. His meeting recorded him as a minister in 1743.

Woolman's was an itinerant ministry; his territory included the Atlantic seaboard, England, and Ireland. He traveled twice to the South, where he witnessed plantation life. His advocacy of the abolition of slavery, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, was published in two parts in 1754 and 1762. In 1763 Woolman visited the Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier, converting many to the Quaker ideals of peace and Christian brotherhood. In 1772, in Yorkshire, England, he made a walking tour in protest against the treatment of postboys. He died of smallpox at York on Oct. 7, 1772.

The mystical experience underlies Woolman's positions on social and economic questions. Convinced of the universal brotherhood of man with Christ, he regarded no distinction of nationality, race, or education as more basic to human nature. Woolman identified with the evildoer and with the slaveholder as well as the slave. He was a keen student of his own motives. He located first in himself the tendencies he sought to eradicate from the world. He devised a theory of action, which he called "passive obedience," similar to contemporary nonviolence. Woolman found the causes of war in the economic self-aggrandizement of nations.

Woolman strove to strengthen his community at Mount Holly, N.J., and resisted oppression by every lawful means. He gave up dyed clothes when he discovered the dyes were harmful to the workers. He ate no sugar because of his convictions about slavery. When his own merchandising business succeeded, he withdrew to concentrate on the "inward business" of living.

Woolman's publications included An Epistle (1772), defining his religious beliefs; his Journal (1774); and Plea for the Poor (1793). Modern peace and civil rights advocates feel akin to this quiet radical.

Further Reading

Biographies of Woolman are Janet (Payne) Whitney, John Woolman, American Quaker (1942), and C. O. Peare, John Woolman (1954). Reginald Reynolds, The Wisdom of John Woolman (1948), is the most perceptive appreciation of Woolman. For general background on Quakerism see Frederick B. Tolles, Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (1960).

Additional Sources

Kohler, Charles., A quartet of Quakers: Isaac and Mary Penington, John Bellers, John Woolman, London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1978.

(1720-1772), Quaker minister and essayist. Woolman was an early critic of slavery and materialism, whose Journal is an American classic. His essays against slaveholding were instrumental in awakening antislavery sentiment in the North American colonies and Great Britain.

Woolman's upbringing and education were in many ways unexceptional for an eighteenth-century Quaker. He was raised on a New Jersey farm, attended the local Quaker school, and was apprenticed to a tailor. In his late teens, he experienced a period of spiritual turmoil that eventuated in his becoming a lay Quaker minister. Unlike many members of the Society of Friends who immersed themselves in politics and commerce, Woolman limited his business in order to devote himself to the ministry. He took seriously the Quaker dictum to live simply and warned others that excessive worldliness would impede communion with the Holy Spirit. A Plea for the Poor (1793), which he wrote in the mid-1760s, addressed this concern.

Woolman's greatest work was his crusade against slavery. He was not the first to argue that slavery was inconsistent with the Quaker tenet that all people are equal before God, but he took up the challenge at a time of ferment among Friends. Many of the older generation of Pennsylvania and New Jersey Quaker leaders were dying; they had owned slaves and blocked earlier efforts to censure the practice. In the 1750s, new leaders, including Woolman and Anthony Benezet, promulgated a reform program that included opposition to slavery. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was the first religious body to denounce slaveholding (in 1754) and prohibit members from buying and selling slaves (in 1758).

Woolman had first awakened to the evils of slavery during the early 1740s when he was asked to write a bill of sale for a black woman. In 1746, he made his first journey to Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina, returning home full of remorse because, as he explained in his Journal, he had eaten and "lodged free-cost with people who lived in ease on the hard labour of their slaves." He saw in the "southern provinces so many vices and corruptions increased by [the slave] trade and this way of life that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land." His essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754) held that blacks had not forfeited "the natural right of freedom" and warned that slaveholders tested divine benevolence by treating slaves "with rigour, to increase our wealth and gain riches for our children."

Woolman made about thirty journeys to proselytize among slaveholders from New England to the Carolinas, and he was among the first to abstain from using products of slave labor. In 1762 he published Considerations on Keeping Negroes: Part Second. His Journal, which was published posthumously in 1774, has remained in print, providing to successive generations the example of a Quaker "saint" who sought to live according to the dictates of religion and his conscience.

Bibliography:

Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (1971); Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (1985).

Author:

Jean R. Soderlund

See also Abolitionist Movement; Quakers.

1720–72, American Quaker leader, b. near Mt. Holly, N.J. Originally a tailor and shopkeeper, Woolman was recorded a minister (1743) by the Burlington, N.J., Meeting. Thereafter he made many journeys throughout the colonies, preaching and advancing the antislavery cause. Keenly aware of social injustice, Woolman was one of the first protesters against slavery. He personally boycotted products made by slave labor, and was responsible for convincing many Quaker communities to publicly denounce slavery. He died at York on a visit to England. Among his published works is Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754, 1762, repr. 1969). Woolman is best remembered for his journal (1774; ed. by J. G. Whittier, 1871, and P. P. Moulton, 1971).

Bibliography

See study by R. Reynolds (1981).

(1720-1772)

1754	Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. The Quaker preacher issues the first part of his antislavery essay, to be completed in 1762. Abolitionists in the nineteenth century later would cite it as predicting the Civil War. It is one of the first documents to argue that slavery demoralizes and enslaves both blacks and whites.
1762	Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. Published in two parts (the first in 1754), this essay would have a lasting effect on the antislavery movement for the following one hundred years. The author appeals to all Christians in an attempt to change their understanding of slavery. Woolman's call for abolition is based mainly on moral and religious reasoning and seeks to end slavery through voluntary reform.
1763	A Plea for the Poor. In this treatise concerning poverty and slavery, Woolman shows that his concern with oppression goes beyond slavery to economic considerations as well. Not published until 1793, it emphasizes a religious solution to the problems raised.
1768	"Considerations on Pure Wisdom and Human Policy." An essay on the corruption of wealth and the need for charity. Woolman had spent most of his life spreading his message that all problems have religious answers. Like most of his writing, this essay is passionate and unwavering in its support for the downtrodden.
1793	A Plea for the Poor; or, A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich. Published thirty years after its composition, this is the Quaker minister's plea for simple living and freedom from the spiritual constraints of worldly gains. Radical in its positions on the lower classes and slavery, the influential work would be republished more than a hundred years later by the Fabian Society.

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