John Woolman

John Woolman (1720–1772)

John Woolman was born on October 19, 1720, in Northampton, in Burlington County, West Jersey, the fourth of thirteen children in a Quaker farming family. The household was devout and orderly, and the boy was formed early by the Friends' habit of attending inwardly. His Journal recalls a childhood moment that stayed with him all his life: he killed a mother robin with a stone, then found he could not bear the thought of her orphaned young, and ended their suffering himself. He wrote that he "was fully convinced that there was a Principle which is pure placed in the human mind." His schooling was plain and brief, a few years of reading and writing, and his real education came from the Bible, from Friends' meetings for worship, and from the long silences in which Quakers waited on the Inward Light.

At twenty-one he left the farm to work as a shopkeeper's assistant and bookkeeper in Mount Holly, and he later learned the tailor's trade, which allowed him to live simply and keep his time his own. The turning point of his conscience came there. His employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. He complied, and the act troubled him deeply; he came to regard it as a wound to his integrity. From that day slavery became the burden of his life. Later, when asked to draw up wills transferring enslaved people, he refused, and he gently urged Quaker slaveholders to reconsider, often at their own tables.

He was recorded as a minister among Friends in the 1740s, a vocation that in Quaker practice meant no seminary and no salary, only the recognition of a meeting that his words arose from genuine leading. In 1746 he began the first of many journeys, traveling with a companion through Virginia and the Carolinas. What he saw there, the cruelty of the system and the moral corruption of the households that depended on it, confirmed his course. He traveled on foot or horseback, refused to benefit from slave labor even in hospitality, and paid for his lodging so as not to profit from it. He once wrote a letter to a host explaining that he could not accept the meal in good conscience. This was not self-righteousness; it was the slow cost of integrity.

His witness grew into a remarkable consistency. He wore undyed clothing to avoid the sense of complicity in dyes produced by slave labor, and he gave up luxuries and trade goods that came from the same source. He went to the Quaker meeting at Philadelphia and pressed his case with such patient seriousness that, over decades, Friends moved from tolerating slaveholding toward disciplining it, and by the 1770s the Society had effectively purged it from its membership. He also traveled among Native peoples, notably at Wyalusing in 1763, in the middle of frontier war, seeking to understand rather than convert.

He was no recluse, but he was solitary in a particular way. He married Sarah Ellis in 1749, and they had a daughter, Mary, who survived him. His tailoring and small orchard gave the family a modest living. He was often away on journeys that cost him comfort and, at times, the nearness of those he loved.

In 1772 he crossed the Atlantic to England, traveling in the steerage with the sailors rather than in the cabin, because he judged the cabin's luxury a part of the world's excess. He visited Friends across Yorkshire. In York he contracted smallpox and died there on October 7, 1772, at fifty-one, having refused to be treated as an invalid until the end.

His Writing and Its Influence

Woolman began writing in earnest in the 1740s, and his first published work, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, appeared in 1754, with a second part following in 1762. These were short, unadorned tracts addressed to his fellow Friends, and their method was the method of his life: no invective, no appeal to outside authority, only a patient insistence that a people who professed the Inward Light could not hold human beings as property without darkening it. He argued that the slaveholder's own household was corrupted by the habit of command, and that the trade rested on a refusal to feel what the enslaved felt. He wrote also on the cost of luxury, in A Plea for the Poor, composed around 1763 and not published until 1793, and in Considerations on Pure Wisdom and Human Policy and the essays gathered with it. These extended his conscience from slavery to the whole web of commerce, labor, and consumption in which a pleasant life is purchased by another's hardship.

His principal book is the Journal, which he began in 1756 and kept until shortly before his death. It was not written for publication; it is a record of leadings, scruples, and journeys, set down in the plain language of the Friends, and it reads as a spiritual autobiography stripped of ornament. Its power lies in its restraint. Woolman describes visionary moments, including a sense of being dissolved into the divine life during a fever, with the same level voice he uses for the price of lodging. Friends published the Journal in 1774, two years after his death, and it has never gone out of print. It stands among the foundational documents of Quaker spirituality, and it has outlived most of what was written in its century.

Its immediate effect was among Friends, who were already moving, partly under Woolman's own influence, toward disowning slaveholding members. Beyond the Society, the Journal traveled slowly. Readers in the nineteenth century, among them the abolitionist and Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, who edited it in 1871, and Charles Lamb, who urged readers to "get the writings of John Woolman by heart," recognized a moral seriousness that needed no embellishment. Later readers have drawn on him as a model of costly, patient nonviolent witness, and his insistence that spiritual and economic life cannot be separated has found new hearing in each generation concerned with consumption, labor, and complicity.

Reception has shifted over time. For a long period he was read chiefly as a saint of the Quaker tradition, gentle and a little remote. More recent scholarship has restored the sharpness of his critique: he was not merely tender but exact, and his refusal to profit from evil was a considered economic judgment as well as a devotional habit. Some find his scruples excessive, and the Quaker discipline that grew from them was itself slow and uneven in practice. Yet the consistency between what he wrote and how he lived remains the main reason his words carry authority.

Who should read Woolman: Readers who suspect that their comfort is being paid for by someone they will never meet, and who are willing to have that suspicion made specific. He is especially valuable for those in traditions of silence, discernment, and inward listening who want to see such a practice carried into ordinary commerce and public life. He is not for readers seeking argument by system, rhetorical energy, or a quick resolution; Woolman works by quiet persistence, and he asks his reader to do the same.