John Woolman, His Clothes and His Journal Geoffrey Plank

Home , Anthony Benezet, Barefoot, Benjamin Lay, Dora Greenwell, Howard Brinton, John Woolman

Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 67–91

The First Person in Antislavery Literature: John Woolman, his Clothes and his Journal Geoffrey Plank

In his lifetime John Woolman (1720–1772) drew attention to himself with his unusual behavior, his expressive demeanor and his clothes. He sought to become a ‘sign’ directing others toward a way of life without exploitation or slavery. After his death and the publication of his journal, he was celebrated as the most important ﬁgure in the campaign to turn the Quakers against slaveholding. Woolman’s self-presentation, contemporary responses to him, and the posthumous commemoration of him provide an indication of the power and signiﬁcance of personal narrative within Quakerism and in antislavery politics in Britain and America.

In 1847 John Greenleaf Whittier published a series of essays entitled “Quaker Slave- holding, and How it Was Abolished.” Whittier identiﬁed 1742 as a critical year, when “an event, simple and inconsiderable in itself, was made the instrumentality of exerting a mighty inﬂuence upon slavery in the Society of Friends.” Some time during that year a shopkeeper in Mount Holly, New Jersey sold a slave woman and asked his clerk to write up the bill of sale.

On taking up his pen, the young clerk felt a sudden and strong scruple in his mind. The thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one of his fellow creatures oppressed him. God’s voice against the desecration of His image spoke in his soul. He yielded to the will of his employer, but, while writing the instrument, he was constrained to declare, both to the buyer and the seller, that he believed slave- keeping inconsistent with the Christian religion. This young man was JOHN WOOLMAN. The circumstance above named was the starting point of a life-long testimony against slavery.1

Whittier’s essays detailed John Woolman’s antislavery work and suggested that he was the most inﬂuential opponent of slavery in his era, and indeed that his individual

Geoffrey Plank is Professor of History in the Department of History, University of Cincinnati, OH, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0144-039X print/1743-9523 online/09/010067–25 DOI: 10.1080/01440390802673849 # 2009 Taylor & Francis 68 Geoffrey Plank efforts had culminated with the Quakers resolving to denounce slaveholding and the slave trade. Whittier continued to write about Woolman intermittently over the next 25 years, using increasingly extravagant language. By the end of the American Civil War he was asserting that Woolman had been a world-historical figure with few equals. He cred- ited Woolman with initiating “a far-reaching moral, social, and political revolution, undoing the evil work of centuries,” and claimed that his influence could be seen “wherever a step in the direction of emancipation has been taken in this country [the United States] or in Europe.”2 Others made similar claims. One writer, following Whittier’s lead, compared Woolman’s historical significance to that of Napoleon.3 Woolman belonged to a group of Quakers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who organized the first effective campaign to turn the Society of Friends officially against slavery. They were not the first Quakers to oppose slaveholding. At least since 1688, when the Monthly Meeting in Germantown, Pennsylvania issued a protest, several Quaker meetings and individuals had insisted that slavery violated the tenets of Christianity.4 Woolman and his associates distinguished themselves from their prede- cessors by working within the central structures of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, securing that meeting’s approval for their antislavery efforts, and eventually mobilizing its disciplinary procedures to convince recalcitrant Quakers to free their slaves. Woolman began writing his first antislavery essay, ‘Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes,’ in 1746, but he withheld the piece from publication for several years, apparently waiting until the time was propitious for obtaining approval from the Yearly Meeting. In 1753 he submitted his essay to the meeting’s Publications Com- mittee, which made some “small alterations” and arranged to have it published for distribution “amongst Friends.”5 Later in 1754 the meeting published An Epistle of Caution and Advice concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves, its pivotal corporate declaration against slaveholding.6 From that time forward Woolman was part of an ever-expanding community of Quakers campaigning against slavery. He traveled from North Carolina to Massachusetts visiting Quaker meetings, holding private con- ferences with slaveholding Friends, writing further essays and petitioning Quaker meetings. In none of these activities was he alone. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting gave a voice of authority to antislavery Quakers and amplified their influence within the Society of Friends. As Whittier rightly recog- nized, this was a turning point in the political debate over slavery. Though the Quakers remained divided amongst themselves on both sides of the ocean, and the various Yearly Meetings differed in their level of commitment to antislavery, increasing numbers of Quakers embraced abolitionism, and Quakerism produced some of the most influential opponents of slaveholding in the Atlantic world. At least since the publication in 1985 of Jean R. Soderlund’s Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit, historians of early Quaker abolitionism have emphasized the evolution of the Quakers’ antislavery stance over several decades beginning in the seventeenth century, and the contributions of a variety of Quaker meetings and individuals.7 Woolman has received less attention than he used to, because scholars have become more aware of the number of Quakers who worked to turn the Society of Friends Slavery and Abolition 69 against slaveholding. Implicitly, this recent scholarship raises a new question about Woolman. If he was part of a group, if he was neither the earliest Quaker to call for an end to slavery nor at any time in any practical sense the “leader” of the Quaker abolitionists, why was he praised so extravagantly by those who remembered him after his death? Part of the explanation involves the drama of his life story. Whittier was not alone in feeling moved by that episode when, as a young clerk, Woolman felt uneasy about assisting in the sale of a slave. Woolman’s journal indicates that he was plagued by similar misgivings for the rest of his life. The tales he told about himself almost invari- ably contained an element of confession, an acknowledgement of his own failings and weaknesses, and the difficulties he faced in asserting himself. Fearful of giving offense, he hesitated before challenging the views of slaveholding testators and Quaker elders. Though he long felt uncomfortable staying at houses with enslaved servants, years would pass before he found the resolution to refuse the hospitality of slave masters. Once he had found the courage to express himself, however, he did so dramatically, and eventually he decided to travel like a slave. By the late 1760s, whenever he went south he insisted on going on foot.8 Of course this was a symbolic gesture. Woolman did not live among the slaves, and he acknowledged that he had difficulty communicating with them.9 Nonetheless, long after he had died he was praised for the depth of his sympathy. An anonymous poem addressed to Woolman in 1832 asserted, “the wrongs and sufferings of the slave/Stirred the deep foundations of thy pitying heart...Until it seem’d that thou hadst taken a part/In their existence....” 10 For many readers of Woolman’s journal, his story was an object lesson demonstrating how global issues could become personal. He had become aware his own complicity with slavery and the discovery had changed him. In Britain and America, many readers of the journal identified with him in his agonies over participating in an economy dependent on the labor of slaves. The Quakers and abolitionists who honored Woolman’s memory knew his story from the pages of his journal, which was, at best, a partial account of his life. Woolman wrote the journal with an instructive purpose in mind, and after his death it was edited extensively by two separate committees in Britain and America. Woolman wanted his life to teach lessons, but during his lifetime he could not rely on the journal as his medium of instruction. Instead he tried to embody a message. He believed that he had a duty to “bear testimony not in words only, but to be a sign to the people.”11 He sought to fulfill the charge given to Quaker ministers by the religious society’s founder George Fox, to make his “carriage and life ... preach among all sorts of people, and to them.”12 The readers of Woolman’s journal would encounter him first as a humble young man, and many, like Whittier, interpreted the rest of his life as the fulfillment of lessons he had learned at an early age. This, however, was not the way Woolman was understood in his own lifetime. Woolman’s journal was not published until after his death, and during his life he was a challenging figure, and difficult to interpret. A journey he took through Maryland in 1757 changed him. It was during that trip that he entered into his lifelong, rigorous struggle to distance himself from the operations of the slave economy. Though 70 Geoffrey Plank he had planned to stay with Quakers during his travels, he could not bring himself to accept the hospitality of slave masters or receive the services of slaves, and in the land- scape of Maryland this left him feeling profoundly alone. He took solace in the idea that he was following in the footsteps of the prophets.13 This was a conviction that over- whelmed him and gave structure to the rest of his life. His economic thinking—his determination to minimize the damage he caused by participating in commerce— arose simultaneously with a heightened sense of his prophetic calling. In the early 1760s Woolman began living in an increasingly self-conscious manner, as his politics became at once more intimate and more globally diffuse. Professing that eating sugar was a culpable act because it was produced by slave labor, he refused cakes and sweetened tea. As he aged he became increasingly fastidious. While continuing to protest against slavery, he developed a comprehensive critique of the Atlantic economy, associating transatlantic commerce with warfare, economic inequality, god- lessness, intemperance and cruelty to animals. By the end of his life he believed that the clothes he wore, his manner of speaking, the gifts he accepted and refused, the way he traveled, where he slept, the food he ate and his choice of spoons were freighted with moral significance. It seemed that he wanted to be noticed in every detail of his life. Woolman spoke frequently at Quaker gatherings, and he wrote prolifically, but he did not want to communicate only through words. He hoped to teach by example, and he believed that his appearance, demeanor and behavior could provide instruction to those around him. He dressed strangely, in undyed, minimally tailored clothing, and wherever he went in the last years of his life, even when he chose not to speak, his unusual garments provided a clue to his character and his relationship with the wider world. Until his death in 1772, Woolman’s clothing had more influence than his autobiography in determining what others thought about him. His attire was a part of his critique of the Atlantic economy, a protest that included, but was not restricted to, his objections to slavery. If we examine the way Woolman presented himself during his lifetime, contemporary responses to him, and the manner in which he was remembered after his death, we can learn a great deal about distinctive British and colonial perspectives on Quakerism, politics, slavery and reform. His story can also tell us much about the significance that the generation that came of age just before the American Revolution attached to its clothes. Woolman arrived in England in 1772 dressed almost entirely in white, and at the moment of his first appearance at the London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends, a struggle to comprehend him began. According to one witness,

His shoes were of uncured leather, tied with leather strings, his stockings of white yarn, his coat, waistcoat, and breeches of a strong kind of cloth undyed, the natural color of the wool, the buttons of wood with brass shanks; his shirt of cotton unbleached, about 14d. per yard, fastened at the neck with three large buttons of the same stuff, without either cravat or handkerchief about his neck; his hat a very good one was white.14

Those who saw him were fascinated by his outfit, and their descriptions of his clothing were meticulous, even if they varied slightly. One witness asserted that Woolman’s hat Slavery and Abolition 71 was “drab,” while another claimed that the buttons on his coat were made of wool. One writer indicated that his shirt was “coarse raw linen,” and that his “coat, waistcoat and breeches” were made from a “white coarse woolen cloth.” All agreed that he had “no cuffs to his coat.” Two witnesses were struck by Woolman’s failure to wear a “neck-cloth,” while another was impressed by the absence of buckles on his shoes. Nonetheless, every surviving description of his clothing agrees on one issue: as one writer succinctly put it, “he was all white.”15 Woolman’s dress was unusual, even for an American or a Quaker. He was not wearing the traditional Quaker costume, which, while austere, was typically made of good material, and the Quakers generally wore collars and cuffs.16 It is unlikely that many of the English Quakers had ever met an American Patriot wearing homespun, but even if they had it is unlikely they would have noticed any resemblance between Woolman’s costume and the Patriots’ garb. American homespun was generally simpler than other fashionable clothing, with fewer ruffles and coarser cloth, but choos- ing to wear homespun did not necessarily entail a rejection of the conventions of clothing design or tailoring, nor did it require a rejection of dyes.17 At least one English witness interpreted his costume as an uncomplicated protest against slavery. A short article in the Leeds Mercury suggested that Woolman’s decision to wear undyed clothing stemmed from the “exquisite” feelings he felt for the “bondage and oppression of the poor enslaved negroes.” The writer argued that Woolman’s manner of dressing himself fit into a coherent pattern because he “refused every accommo- dation, both in diet and apparel, which was produced by [slave] labour.”18 Woolman never advanced this argument, because it did not make sense. He could have dressed himself easily in conventional attire without relying on the products of slave labor. Woolman’s costume confused the English Quakers. When he arrived at Quaker meetings children pointed at him and he attracted crowds.19 Adults complained that he was making himself “singular” and unnecessarily disrupting the decorum of their assemblies.20 Some interpreted his clothing a symbol of moral purity, and suggested that he was presumptuous in assuming such a mantle.21 Others were impressed by his willingness to humble himself, but even if they admired his discipline, they insisted that they would never follow his example.22 Woolman had adopted his costume in 1762 after undergoing an intense introspec- tive struggle. While visiting slaveholding Quakers he had become aware of the insi- dious power of conventionality, and he had concluded that he had to disentangle himself from those “customs” which were “distinguishable from pure wisdom.” He acquired his new clothing in pieces, starting with his hat, which retained “the natural color of the fur.” The hat worried him because in the early 1760s white hats had become popular among “some who were fond of following the changeable modes of dress,” and he did not want to be fashionable. He became progressively less stylish over the next several months, as he gradually wore out his remaining colored garments and replaced them with distinctive, undyed, off-white clothes. Initially Woolman had found it difficult to wear his new outfit. He worried that other Quakers might interpret his clothes as an affectation, and for the first few weeks his self-consciousness had made it difficult for him to wear his new clothing 72 Geoffrey Plank in public and speak. Eventually, however, he “felt an inward consolation,” and by the end of 1762 he had become confident enough to tell any Quakers who asked him that he wore white garments in obedience to God’s will.23 The English Quakers’ descriptions of him suggest that by 1772 he wore his clothes with ease. When asked to explain why he dressed as he did, he told the Quakers at Sheffield that his clothing served as a statement against the “pride and extravagancy” of his day. The times, he said, “greatly abounded with superfluities.”24 A man who saw him praised his “steady uniform deportment, his meekness and unaffected humility.” It all corre- sponded well, the man said, with Woolman’s “appearance.”25 Woolman saw his clothing as a manifestation of his lowliness, his willingness to distance himself from those around him, and his ultimate devotion to God. Quaker teaching had long emphasized that men and women could receive direct messages from God, and those who received divine commands were expected to disregard self-respect in order to obey God’s will. Since the mid-seventeenth century Quaker ministers had occasionally concluded that God required them to violate social norms, sometimes to the point of embarrassment. More than a century earlier Fox had walked through Litchfield with stockings on his feet but no shoes, pronouncing, “woe unto the bloody city of Litchfield.”26 Other early Quakers, imbued with millenarian enthusiasm, had worn sackcloth and ashes, or preached in so little clothing that they were described by contemporaries as naked.27 Strangely dressed prophetic figures continued to arise from among the Quaker meetings in the eighteenth century, though especially in England they had become rare. In the 1750s an itinerant Quaker preacher named Joseph Rule tried to enter Buckingham Palace dressed in white robes that resembled, it was said, the clothing worn by the “patriarchs” and “old philosophers.”28 Woolman, however, differed from these earlier figures in that he wanted his costume to be emulated. When Fox preached barefoot he had not expected his listeners to give up their shoes. Similarly, Rule had never advocated the general use of togas. Woolman, by contrast, condemned the practices of the textile industry and the currents of contemporary fashion. He wanted others to dress like him, or at least to stop using dyes. Woolman associated colorful clothing with self-aggrandizement, competitiveness, injustice, impoverishment, triviality and impiety; a catalog of evils that he identified as “the unquiet spirit in which wars are generally carried on.” He was trained as a tailor, and he designed his clothing with expense and “serviceability” in mind. To keep costs down, he rejected useless appendages such as ruffles, collars or cuffs, and he objected to cloth dyes because he thought that they damaged cotton, linen and wool.29 While he insisted that fashionable clothing promoted violence and greed, he wore his austere, practical outfit as a sign of his commitment to an alternative approach to life. Woolman associated white clothing with moral purity, but he also valued whiteness because it accentuated stains.30 He believed that white garments kept a person honest because they required constant cleanliness, while colored or patterned textiles disguised dirt.31 His avoidance of dyed cloth was the principal reason that his clothes were so white, but he was also conscientious about keeping himself clean.32 Woolman’s clothing demanded the kind of meticulousness that he sought to maintain in all aspects of his life. He believed that if others followed his example, Slavery and Abolition 73 not only in his clothing but in his entire manner of living, the global economy could be rebuilt on new foundations, satisfying humanity’s material needs without exploitation, warfare or slavery. Woolman discussed his objections to colored clothing in an essay entitled “AWord of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich” which he wrote in 1763 or 1764.33 The essay was not published in his lifetime, but he showed it to other Quakers in manuscript form. He also, almost certainly, discussed his objections to cloth dyes with fellow Quakers and others in New Jersey and elsewhere in America.34 Nonetheless Woolman reserved his most detailed written commentary on clothing, and his shar- pest criticisms of the textile industry, for his journal. Journal-writing was a common way for eighteenth-century Quakers to teach by example. Quaker journal-keepers revised their entries with the advice of others, and they always wrote with the expectation that their final drafts, if approved for publication, would be edited by a committee of Quakers appointed by their Yearly Meeting.35 Once that committee had corrected and endorsed the text, the journal would be published after the journal-keeper’s death in the expectation that it would serve an instructive purpose for the next generation. This process had the effect of interpreting behavior in accordance with Quaker orthodoxy, controlling idiosyncrasy while at the same time bolstering the first person “I” with something of the spirit of a corporate “we,” since the writer’s account of his or her life would be filtered through a rigorous editorial process. It also allowed the journal-keepers to explain their behavior without appearing inappropriately self-important. Woolman in particular found it difficult to draw attention to himself in a self-effacing way, in effect celebrating his own humility.36 He began writing his journal in 1755 or 1756, but it would not appear in print until 1774, two years after his death.37 Journal-writing, as the Quakers practiced it, was a slow process which significantly delayed the publication of the writers’ thoughts, but Woolman was confident that the editorial processes would add to his book’s eventual moral authority. Understanding this, and relying on the wisdom of his posthumous editorial committee, perhaps unsure whether the words he wrote would ever be published, he inserted an extended, critical discussion of the English cloth industry in a few of the last entries he wrote for his journal, passages he composed as he traveled on foot through the north of England. In objecting to dyed cloth, Woolman implicitly condemned nearly every suit of clothes in the country. The English wore clothing made from standardized, commer- cially produced textiles. Whether they bought their garments ready-made or sewed them at home, the cloth they wore was nearly always dyed.38 Woolman considered this wrong, and as he walked toward York he became increasingly disgusted with the English practice of dying cloth. He saw it everywhere. In textile-producing towns, dyes even stained the mud under his shoes. The prevalence of dying was emble- matic of larger problems he observed in the English economy. It was wasteful, deceitful, damaging, and a misallocation of resources, but its very irrationality suggested the possibility of easy reform. Though Woolman was unhappy in the cloth-producing towns, he ruminated optimistically about what might be accomplished “if the value of dye-stuffs, the expense of dying, and the damage done to cloth were all added 74 Geoffrey Plank together and the expense applied to keep all sweet and clean....” 39 He recorded these thoughts in his journal. Woolman contracted small pox at the end of his walk through Yorkshire, and his realization that death might be near inspired him to work more urgently on his journal. He retired to a bed and spent the next two weeks, almost literally until the moment of his death, writing notes, drafting correspondence, and dictating messages to the people attending him in his illness. In the first part of that period he worked on his journal. He had left the manuscripts of his first ten chapters with a friend in Phi- ladelphia for safe-keeping before he left for England, but since that time he had written two more chapters.40 He had spent a week in London revising his account of his sea voyage, and had left a copy of that chapter with Sophia Hume, an American traveling Quaker.41 His final chapter, describing his travels in England, remained unfinished, and he dictated its last passages to attendants at his bedside.42 Then he wrote a letter to John Eliot, a member of the London Yearly Meeting’s Committee on Friends’ Books, asking him to retrieve his draft of Chapter Eleven from Hume, assemble, edit (if necessary), and copy over the manuscripts of both of his final chapters, and send them to America to join the manuscripts he had left behind. He wanted the entire journal reviewed prior to publication by a committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.43 After he had finished his work on the journal, Woolman spent his remaining ener- gies teaching by example. He had been intermittently sick for some time, and had come close to death two years earlier.44 As a consequence, he had thought about how he wanted to die. He prepared himself piously, describing his preparations to those who waited upon him by his bed. He prayed for them, expressed remorse for his own youthful follies, thanked God for salvation, and lamented the extent of poverty, suffering, and infidelity in the world. Those who heard him wrote his messages down. After approximately one week in bed, he declared that he was ready to submit to God’s will. He had lost his eyesight in his last days and eventually he lost the ability to speak, but he continued to communicate through writing. His final words were not uttered but scrawled on a note. “I believe my being here is in the Wisdom of Christ,” he wrote, “I know not as to Life or Death.”45 After he died his last statements, spoken and written, were collected like the manuscripts of his journal. Selections were made from his words, and various collections were distributed in manuscript form among Quakers across England.46 A published edition, entitled “Some Expressions of John Woolman in his Last Illness,” appeared in England a few months after his death.47 Like journals, collections of “dying sayings” were familiar publications among eighteenth-century Quakers. The Quakers believed that a person’s dying moments could be a time of acute insight, and that those who died well could provide an instructive example for the living by demonstrating a pious resignation to God’s will.48 Woolman had died unusually well, and immediately after his death, partly under the influence of his last remarks, he was remembered in England primarily for his piety. Some of the most extravagant tributes paid to him made no reference to slavery. Mary Barnard, for example, wrote a poem less than two months after Slavery and Abolition 75 Woolman died emphasizing his Christ-like habit of self-denial and suggesting that his travels on foot had re-enacted the last walks of Jesus.49 Barnard’s poem circulated for years, and helped sustain Woolman’s reputation for piety and meekness. A later poem, published in 1784, similarly ignored Woolman’s opposition to slaveholding but con- centrated instead on his humility. The introduction to the poem explained in prose that he had seldom drunk wine or beer, “but chiefly water, and ate the plainest food. He would wear nothing that was dyed, his dress was of linen or woolen undyed, and his hat was white. He had so great an aversion to the luxuries of life, that it was with great reluctance he would drink out of any vessel of silver.”50 Still another widely disseminated poem in the nineteenth century, without mentioning slavery, dramatized Woolman’s saintliness by making reference to symbolic clothes. “A Memorial to John Woolman,” written in 1823 and reprinted over the next seventeen years in England and America, suggested that he would be part of the chorus singing with the angels when Christ returned to raise the dead. Woolman was immortal, the writer insisted, and would stand in that small circle of saints “Whose spiritual garments are pure by lavation/In the cleansing blood of THE LAMB!”51 From the time of Woolman’s death forward, some Quakers have celebrated his saintliness without directly associating his apparent moral purity with his predilection for controversy or his stance on the slavery issue.52 Many have asserted that his holiness was revealed through extraordinary humility, and just as he found it difficult to be humble and assertive at the same time, those who first commemorated him, particularly among the English, had difficulty praising him for being self-effacing while at the same time acknowledging his self-consciously prophetic demeanor and the uncompromising stance he took on slavery and other economic issues. One solution was to discuss the different facets of Woolman’s character separately, ignoring his lifelong engagement with controversy when celebrating his patience or his lowliness. The London Yearly Meeting adopted this approach when it first decided to publish an extract from his journal. In June 1773, the London Yearly Meeting received a manuscript which was described as an “extract from John Woolman’s journal concerning the ministry.”53 The piece was a distinct, self-contained essay, and some scholars have since questioned whether Woolman intended it to be part of his journal.54 The extract, if that is what it was, con- cerned vocal ministry, and cautioned against uninspired but seductive and emotionally moving eloquence. Woolman emphasized the importance of waiting for divine guidance before speaking, and indicated that after his arrival in England in 1772 he had no longer been motivated by the “concern which I felt in America,” but rather by “the fresh instructions of Christ” which he had received “from day to day.”55 The “extract” did not specify what those new concerns had been, but instead admonished Quaker ministers to wait for inspiration, and to be ready to respond immediately when moved by God. The elders of the Yearly Meeting approved of this message, and sent it to the committee responsible for Quaker publishing in England, with direc- tions to “correct” the piece and “get a sufficient number printed” for distribution in all of the Quaker Meetings in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.56 One thousand, five hundred copies of the 7-page essay were printed and distributed under the title ‘An 76 Geoffrey Plank Extract from John Woolman’s Journal in Manuscript, Concerning the Ministry.’57 The piece may not have identified Woolman’s principal concerns while he was traveling in England, but it accorded well with the preoccupations of leading English Quakers at the time.58 The publication and wide distribution of the ‘Extract’ had the effect of associating Woolman with caution. It presented him as arguing against stridency and resolution, and failed to mention his longstanding opposition to slavery or the positions he had taken on other contentious issues of the day. After Woolman died, copies of his antislavery pamphlets and essays on other topics continued to be read in England, though their circulation was miniscule compared to that of other writers’ anti-slavery works, and in 1773 and 1774 the number of available copies of the London Yearly Meeting’s ‘Extract’ outnumbered the total distribution of any of Woolman’s other essays by a ratio of at least ten to one, and perhaps by as much as one hundred to one.59 To be sure, Woolman’s influence did not depend only on the publication of his essays. He directly touched the lives of many Quakers during his travels, and he helped inspire Anthony Benezet and other abolitionists whose writings, by 1773, had reached a wider audience. Nonetheless, Woolman’s written work secured a large transatlantic readership only after he died, first with the ‘Extract’, which was reprinted in Philadelphia shortly after it appeared in London, and then with the full journal, which was published first in America in 1774 and one year later in abridged form in Britain.60 The American edition of Woolman’s journal appeared in the spring of 1774. A committee appointed by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting spent several months assembling the necessary manuscripts, editing them, and preparing them for publication. In January, 1774, the committee authorized the publication of 1,200 copies.61 Within a short time, several copies of the American edition had been shipped to England. On February 13, 1775, after receiving a copy of the American imprint, the London Yearly Meeting appointed a special committee to consider producing an “abbrevi- ation” of the journal. One of the committee members was a magazine publisher named Thomas Letchworth, who was to oversee the publication process.62 The first order of business was to identify parts to omit, and within three days the committee had identified “various passages” to cut from the British edition, entries which, the committee members asserted, related only to the concerns of Americans.63 Letchworth received authorization to proceed with publication on February 27, and sent out a circular letter asking for subscribers.64 In his effort to generate interest he announced that Woolman’s writings contained “the noblest and most rational Christian doctrines, expressed in good language.” “In religion he was of no party, nor a lover of party spirit, but the friend of all mankind.” Woolman was, Letchwroth wrote, a “Christian Socrates.”65 Even though he praised Woolman extravagantly, his letter also mentioned that the journal would be abridged. One of the recipients of the circular letter was a Yorkshire Quaker named William Tuke, who had attended Woolman on his deathbed and had transcribed some of the last, dictated portions of the journal.66 Along with some other Quakers in York, Tuke had seen the American edition of the journal, and perceived no need to shorten it. Slavery and Abolition 77 Tuke showed Letchworth’s letter to the Friends’ Quarterly Meeting at York, which immediately sent an epistle to London requesting republication of the American edition “whole.”67 Despite this request, in the early summer of 1775 Letchworth produced an edition of the journal that excised several extended passages that had been published in America, including descriptions of two of Woolman’s supernatural visions,68 his discussion of his misgivings about paying taxes in wartime,69 his commentary on small pox inoculation,70 his refusal to drink from silver cups,71 some of his harshest criticisms of British maritime culture,72 his comments on low wages and the high cost of living in England, his complaints about the accumulation of filth in English towns and the abuse of horses on England’s roads.73 The abridgement also deleted Woolman objections to dyed cloth.74 The new edition began with an “Advertisement to the Reader” explaining why it had been necessary to shorten the journal. Concentrating almost entirely on the last two chapters, Letchworth cited Woolman’s letter to John Eliot in which the author had asked Eliot to assemble and copy over his manuscripts, granting him permission to “leave out such [material] as he should think proper.” “Notwithstanding” these instructions, Letchworth declared, Eliot had sent the two chapters “entire, without any alteration” to America, though some of their contents may have been intended as “private memorandums only,” and others were “not expedient to be preserved on record in this nation.”75 It is not clear when the first copies of the abridged edition reached York, but on June 29, declaring their unanimity on the issue, the Yorkshire Quakers repeated their earlier statement. They expressed their wish that the “whole works of John Woolman” be published, “as printed in America, unless some small parts appear upon further exam- ination exceptionable.”76 This second epistle led to several more discussions in London. Letchworth’s editorial committee was reassembled and asked to justify its actions in shortening of the journal.77 Eliot, who had not participated in the abridgement process, was now asked to join in the deliberations as the editors drafted their answer to the Quakers in York.78 The London Quakers responded by declaring that their edition contained “the most important parts of the journal.” Some of the excised passages were “of a private nature,” while others “did not relate so particularly to the state of things in this nation as they did to some other places.” Furthermore, some of Woolman’s observations seemed “to proceed from want of better infor- mation.”79 After receiving this response the Yorkshire Quakers desisted.80 The Amer- ican edition was reprinted in Ireland in 1776, but the next several English imprints would be abridged.81 The London edition cut from the journal passages that would speak to the concerns of later generations. In the late nineteenth century, Fabians and other socialists would draw on Woolman’s comments on the plight of the laboring poor in an effort to build support for wide-ranging economic reform.82 In the twentieth century, animal rights activists and vegetarians, citing entries that had been omitted from the original English edition of the journal, would celebrate Woolman as one of their own.83 Nonetheless, while the editors in London had deleted potentially significant passages, they had given the journal a sharper focus, retaining those entries that they considered most “important.” According to Letchworth’s “Advertisement,” one of the great contributions of the 78 Geoffrey Plank journal was the “many weighty and pertinent advices” it contained “relative to slavery and the oppression of the Negroes in the plantations.” Woolman’s account of his life was so persuasive, Letchworth insisted, that there was no need to include his antislavery essays in the appendix, as had been done in America. The British abridgement of the journal functioned well by itself as an antislavery tract.84 Intermittently since the seventeenth century, antislavery activists had been seeking to advance their cause with a compelling personal narrative. Some had adopted a tactic that scholars have called “ventriloquism,” creating fictional characters to tell the story of the slave trade from the slaves’ perspective.85 It would not be not until the late 1780s, however, with the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, that the antislavery movement found an extended, compelling, apparently authentic, and popularly effective life story written by a former slave.86 Similarly, the antislavery movement had not yet discovered an affecting personal account written by a thoroughly repentant former slave master or slave-trader.87 Woolman’s story, with its insistent expressions of personal guilt for his participation in an economy based on slavery, satisfied a perceived rhetorical need. Though it was published in different forms in Britain and America, the journal was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic. Before the end of 1775, two editions of the American version had been printed in Philadelphia, and three editions of the British abridgement had been published in London. The controversies that preceded the publication of Woolman’s journal in England had no corollary in the colonies. There is no record of anyone in America suggesting that the text published by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting contained entries that Woolman had intended as “private memorandums” only, or that any of his words were misinformed. While the English Quakers worried that some parts of Woolman’s journal were only of “local interest” to the colonists and of no concern to the British, it seems that no parallel objection was ever made. No one suggested that Woolman’s discussion of English life was irrelevant to Americans. Though the committee members appointed by the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took care in revising Woolman’s text, removing some passages and revising others in an effort to enhance the text’s instruc- tional value, they were considerably more willing than their London counterparts to publish the work “whole.”88 The Americans were better prepared to accept the broad range of Woolman’s economic and social commentary for a variety of reasons. First, they had no cause to reject anything he wrote as of “local” concern only. On the contrary, in his journal Woolman had emphasized his New Jersey roots, and his entire life story made it unmistakable clear, as Letchworth’s “Advertisement” put it, that “America” was Woolman’s “native country.” Additionally, by the 1770s the colonists had an increasingly strong sense— perhaps an exaggerated perception—of the role they played in the economic life of Britain. They were therefore unlikely to dismiss the discussion of British economic practices as alien to their own concerns.89 Furthermore, because of the prevalence of slaveholding in the colonies, the Americans were quicker to think of slavery as an integral part of their economy, and to associate emancipation with profound social change. Woolman and other like-minded American Quakers believed that abolition Slavery and Abolition 79 would affect more than the status of slaves. It would alter the fundamental premises of economic and social life. The Americans were in a better position than the British to think this way, not only because they had a more intimate and constant familiarity with slavery, but also because the colonies over the years had attracted many of the most ambitious refor- mers within Quakerism. A millenarian tradition had arisen among Quakers in America that suggested that the Society of Friends, with God’s assistance, could change the world starting with the Delaware Valley. Quakers like Woolman retained this outlook even after they became disillusioned with Pennsylvania’s formal politics during the Seven Years’ War.90 Seeking a way to affect change without resorting to gov- ernmental action, Woolman and others like him resolved to apply an axe “to the root of corruption,” and make the world better by living well, trusting God, and serving as examples to others.91 There remained many Quakers, however, especially in Britain, who were predis- posed to treat slavery as a discrete issue which could be addressed effectively through judicial or parliamentary channels. One of the peculiarities of the British accounts of Woolman’s ministry is the emphasis that the Yorkshire Quakers placed on one comment he made at the end of his walk, in which he declared that it would be good to alert “those in authority” to the “hardships and sufferings” of the slaves.92 Woolman’s purpose in making this remark may have been to chastise the British Quakers for their preoccupation with their own parochial problems when other issues were more pressing.93 Be that as it may, a legend spread in Britain that Woolman had been a champion of legislative action. A writer in 1810 claimed that he had acted in unison with Benezet and others “in application to the British government for the abolition [of the slave trade].”94 As others would later notice, this was simply inaccurate.95 In contrast, for example, to Benezet, Woolman never corre- sponded with prominent English antislavery activists, or with any religious or political leaders outside of the Society of Friends. Neither, as far as the historical record indicates, was he noticed by prominent non-Quakers during his lifetime. Furthermore he was almost entirely oblivious to the currents of contemporary British politics. There is no evidence that he was aware of the case of Somerset v. Stewart, for example, which was decided in 1772 while he was traveling in England. Slaveholders and opponents of slavery alike interpreted the Somerset ruling as effectively freeing all of the slaves in the country.96 In the last years of his life Woolman identified less with lawyers and legislators, or the people who influenced them, than he did with Old Testament prophets, and one of the ways he emphasized the urgency of his message and his rejection of conventional legal and political action was through his clothes. In dressing as he did he aligned himself within an old English Quaker tradition, but it was a tradition that had gained new vitality in America. In the late seventeenth century, the antislavery activist Thomas Tryon had advised the Quaker colonists in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to dress only in locally made textiles, with natural, locally produced colors, as part of his broad scheme to promote a just and simple economy.97 Similarly in the 1730s, two of the most prominent opponents of slavery in the Delaware Valley had expressed 80 Geoffrey Plank their convictions by wearing coarse and simple clothes. Ralph Sandiford insisted on wearing clothing “of the natural color of the material,” while Benjamin Lay went barefoot and wore “tow trousers and a tow coat, very much darned.”98 By the 1760s, in addition to Woolman there were other American opponents of slavery who believed that applying color to cloth was intrinsically wrong. Joseph Nichols, a religious leader and opponent of slavery in Maryland, convinced his followers to “keep from making or buying any dyed, striped, flowered, corded or mixed stuff,” and to avoid “all needless cuts and fashions” in their clothes.99 According to a man who visited the “Nicholites” in 1780, they dressed only in white, strove to “take everything from nature,” and refused to listen to anyone who did not conform to these rules. “If a man were to speak like an archangel ... and wore a black, or colored coat, he would not be received by these people.”100 In 1762, at the same time that Woolman decided to avoid cloth dyes, another New Jersey Quaker abolitionist, Joshua Evans, came to a similar resolution, and began wearing clothing “of domestic fabrication, altogether in its natural color, and clear of superfluous appendages.”101 By dressing in this way Evans demonstrated, as he put it, that he was “willing to be accounted a fool.” His clothing dramatized his self-deprecation and served as a declaration of his rejection of trivial fashion and his wholehearted devotion to God. But Evans did not merely want to stand apart. He advanced general arguments against patterned and colored clothes. He argued that colorful garments were deceitful because they hid dirt, and furthermore he believed, taking the word of others who had “knowledge herein,” that cloth dyes damaged linen and wool. More generally he thought that dying cloth was a wasteful diversion of economic resources. Wearing undyed clothing became an element in Evans’ broader project for economic and spiritual reform, his vision of a future without exploitation or slavery. His inexpensive, utilitarian and unfashionable clothing humbled him, and Evans advocated humility not only as an intrinsic virtue but also with the conviction that if everyone avoided self-indulgence the “hungry would be fed, and the naked, clothed.”102 Evans was nine years younger than Woolman and had known him from an early age. For a time they were neighbors, worshipping together every week.103 It is likely that they met and discussed cloth dyes in 1761 or 1762, because the two men resolved not to wear colored cloth almost simultaneously and for similar reasons. Woolman may have also influenced the Nicholites, but even if they came to their resolutions on their own, their manner of dressing themselves is significant. It suggests that Wool- man’s behavior, his way of linking slavery issue fashion and his call for a thorough- going change in life, resonated within a vibrant, if small, American tradition. It was a tradition with peculiar significance in the middle years of the eighteenth century.104 During Woolman’s lifetime, the rich and the poor alike acquired greater choices in the ways they could dress, and this made nearly everyone aware of the importance of clothing as a declaration of a person’s values, aspirations, and sense of communal iden- tity. One of the most significant manifestations of this trend came in the late 1760s when colonial protestors against Parliamentary taxation used their clothes as a statement of their patriotism by insisting on wearing homespun.105 Those who wore Slavery and Abolition 81 clothing made from American textiles dramatized their dedication to the Patriots’ cause, and indeed they did more than proclaim their allegiances; they wordlessly shamed others in an effort to get everyone to dress in the same way. The message embedded in Woolman’s clothing was different from that of the colonial Patriots. Compared to them he attracted fewer imitators, and much of his written commentary on the textile industry was forgotten a few years after his death.106 Woolman’s specific concerns about the dying of cloth confused his contemporaries and made even less sense outside of their original historical context. Nonetheless, the more abstract message he conveyed through his clothing, his vision of comprehensive reform, struck a chord in nineteenth-century America and contributed to his lasting fame. When Woolman decided to “bear testimony not in words only,” but to teach through his behavior, he left open the possibility that his lessons would be remembered selectively, with some elements emphasized and others erased. Later, when he delivered the manuscripts of his journal to Quaker editors, he made a similar conces- sion, allowing those who survived him to choose from his words, to amend his messages, and to alter the structure of his life’s work. He expected to be reinterpreted. After Woolman died, nearly everyone who remembered him sought instruction from his life, but the lessons they drew differed. On the one hand there were those who wanted to commemorate him for his humility and his reticence, his piety and his sensitive conscience. The publication of his dying words and the London Yearly Meeting’s extract from his journal promoted an image of Woolman as a quiet, good man, and the publication of the full journal, particularly as it appeared in America, led some Quakers to celebrate him as “our Quaker saint.”107 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, he was so widely revered among the Quakers that he was frequently listed anachronistically among the founders of their movement.108 Eventually when the Quakers in America split into separate communities with distinct religious practices, Woolman was revered by nearly all of the factions.109 In some circles, in Britain and America, the celebration of his saintliness had the effect of all but disengaging him from controversy.110 On the other hand there were those who remembered Woolman almost exclusively for his stance on the slavery issue. Antislavery activists were drawn to his story because it seemed to explain the origins of their movement in an emotionally satisfying way. He had been “one of the weak and poor of this world,” yet as abolitionism spread in the nineteenth century, “the little one” (Woolman) had “become a thousand.”111 Assigning Woolman primacy, some commentators all but ignored the contributions of other early opponents of slaveholding. An abolitionist poet in 1790, for example, suggested that “Europe” had been unaware of the suffering of slaves until Woolman appeared on the scene.112 Singling him out served a rhetorical purpose. If Woolman was the man who started the antislavery movement, the event seemed to demonstrate the latent power of humble human beings. On January 1, 1808, a black pastor named Peter Williams, Jr. gave a sermon in New York City celebrating the end of the transatlantic slave trade in which he declared that Woolman had established a “pattern of piety and brotherly kindness” that had been adopted by “the humane of every denomination.” The results had been 82 Geoffrey Plank momentous. The abolitionists after Woolman had “assailed the dark dungeons of slavery; shattered its rugged wall, and enlarging thousands of captives, bestowed on them the blessings of civil society.”113 Williams took advantage of Woolman’s reputation for piety and kindness to suggest that opposing slavery had become a necessary element of the Christian life. He implicitly shamed those who disagreed with him by claiming that Woolman’s perspective had been adopted by all good Christians regardless of the details of their creeds. In 1833 when the Quaker poet Whittier became an abolitionist, he adopted a similar strategy. He promised William Lloyd Garrison that he would invoke Woolman’s “holy” memory to convince America’s recalcitrant Quakers to demand the immediate emancipation of the slaves.114 Whittier also promised Garrison that he would remind the Quakers of Ben- ezet’s contributions, but in subsequent years he would cite Woolman’s example much more emphatically. His campaign began in 1834 and continued through the period of the Civil War.115 By associating Woolman with uncompromising opposition to slaveholding, he sought to transform immediate abolitionism into an essential tenet of Quaker belief. When Benezet read Woolman’s journal in 1773 as a member of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s editorial committee, he praised the author as a man who had “rid” himself of “selfishness and carnality of every kind.”116 Nonetheless, the journal had left him uneasy. Pondering the example that Woolman had set for him, he declared that he did not consider himself so saintly, and he did not wish to join Woolman in the world’s collective memory.117 Though Benezet had arguably done more for the antislavery cause than Woolman had, he did not keep a journal and partly as a consequence, he would never be remembered so affectionately or honored so fervently.118 Later abolitionists had more to gain by concentrating on Woolman and associating the origins of their movement with the life of a reputed saint.

Notes [1] Greenleaf Whittier, “Quaker Slaveholding, and How it was Abolished” April 8, 1847, 1:14, p. 2. See also ibid, April 15 and 22, 1847, 1:15, p. 2, 1:16, p. 3. [2] Whittier, ed., The Journal of John Woolman, 2, 31. [3] The writer prefaced his assessment with an elaborate qualifier. See Andrew Smellie’s introduction to John Woolman, The Journal of John Woolman, xiv. Individually or in groups, abolitionists had been compared to Napoleon before. See Louis Taylor Merrill, “The English Campaign for Abolition of the Slave Trade”; Brown, Moral Capital,7–8. [4] See J. William Frost, ed., The Quaker Origins of Antislavery; Frost, “John Woolman and the Enlightenment,” in The Tendering Presence, 167–189. [5] Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, 44, 47, 195; Woolman, Some Considerations. [6] An Epistle of Caution and Advice. [7] Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit. [8] I have taken as my template for this summary of Woolman’s life a short “Biographical Sketch of the Life of John Woolman” published in the Quaker Juvenile Magazine 4 (1813) 1–8. [9] See, for example, Woolman, “A Plea for the Poor, or AWord of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich,” in Moulton, ed., Journal 238–272, 271. Slavery and Abolition 83 [10] Gertrude [pseud.], “From the Genius of Universal Emancipation, John Woolman.” June 23, 1832, 5:32. [11] Cadbury, John Woolman in England: A Documentary Supplement, 96. [12] George Fox, Journal 1: 363. [13] Moulton, ed., Journal, 59–60. [14] Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 95. [15] Ibid., 95, 97, 102. [16] Gummere, The Quaker: A Study in Costume; Frost, “From Plainness to Simplicity” 16–40, 19–21; Lee-Whitman, “Silks and Simplicity”, 35–56. [17] On the contrary, some wealthy Patriots sought to demonstrate that they could wear Ameri- can-made suits and dresses and retain “a genteel appearance.” Pennsylvania Gazette, January 4, 1770; see also George Washington quoted in Cunninghmam, “Simplicity of Dress”, 180–99, 192. [18] Leeds Mercury, October 13, 1772, quoted in Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 132. [19] Diary of Elihu Robinson, and Tabitha Hoyland to Sarah Tuke, August 9, 1772, quoted in Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 70, 94. [20] William Hunt to Uriah Woolman, June 25, 1772, in Memoirs of William and Nathan Hunt, 88–90, 88–9; John Fothergill to Samuel Fothergill, June 9, 1772, Port. 22, f. 126, Friends House Library, London (hereafter FHL). [21] Letters from Samuel Emlen, July 2, September 5 and 15, 1772, quoted in Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 17–18. [22] Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 58. [23] Moulton, ed., Journal, 119–121. [24] Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 95–96. [25] William Forster to Rebecca Haydock, August 16, 1772, MS Vol. 77, f. 2, FHL. [26] Fox, Journal, 1: 107–108. [27] Carroll, “Sackcloth and Ashes and Other Signs and Wonders,” 314–325; “Quaker Attitudes Towards Signs and Wonders,” 70–84; “Early Quakers and ‘Going Naked as a Sign’,” 69–87; Gardina Pestana, “The City upon a Hill under Siege: The Puritan Perception of the Quaker Threat to Massachusetts Bay, 1656–1661,” 323–353, 331. See also Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 115–176. [28] A copy of verses in praise of an eminent old speaker ...Joseph Rule, Catchpool manuscripts, 1:313, FHL; Fox, “Joseph Rule, The Quaker in White” 36–38. See also “A poem composed by Joseph Rule on his sweet experience of a retired life in a hermit like manner, among the moun- tains, woods, and bushes in Wales,” Catchpool manuscripts, 1:73, FHL; Green, “Joseph Rule, The Quaker in White,” 64–8; “Joseph Rule, the White Quaker,” 165–7; Dr. Free’s Remarks Upon Mr. Jones’s Letter, 63–64; Francis De Valangin, A Treatise on Diet, or the Management of Human Life, 340–41. [29] Moulton, ed., Journal, 119–120, 190; Woolman, “Plea for the Poor,” in ibid, 255, 266. [30] See Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams, 64. [31] Moulton, ed., Journal, 190. [32] For indications of Woolman’s preoccupation with cleanliness see Moulton, ed., Journal, 168, 190. [33] Woolman, “Plea for the Poor,” in Moulton, ed., Journal, 250, 259, 266; Philip Boroughs, “John Woolman’s Spirituality,” in Heller, ed., Tendering Presence, 1–16, 7. [34] See the discussion of Joshua Evans and the Nicholites, below. [35] See Woolman to Sophia Hume, June 13, 1772, in Amelia Mott Gummere, ed., The Journal and Essays of John Woolman, xii; John Pemberton to Joseph Row, October 28, 1772, Mss. 163, f. 5, FHL. [36] See Michael Meranze, “Materializing Conscience,” 71–88; Howard Brinton, Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience,1. [37] Moulton, ed., Journal, 18, 23, 283–284; Woolman, The Works of John Woolman, in Two Parts. 84 Geoffrey Plank [38] Styles, “Clothing the North: The Supply of Non-e´lite Clothing in the Eighteenth-Century North of England,” 139–166; Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce. [39] Moulton, ed., Journal, 190. [40] See Gummere, ed., Journal, xii; John Pemberton to Joseph Row, October 28, 1772, Mss. 163, f. 5, FHL. [41] Woolman to Hume, June 13, 1772, in Gummere, ed., Journal, xii. [42] Moulton, ed., Journal, 189–192. [43] Woolman to John Eliot, September 27, 1772, Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 34:138-9, FHL; Letter from Emlen, November 4, 1772, quoted in Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 19. [44] See Moulton, ed., Journal, 159–162, 185–186; Memorandum of Mary Woolman, quoted in Gummere, ed., Journal, 112; see generally ibid., 111–114. [45] William Tuke’s postscript to Woolman’s journal, in Gummere, ed., Journal, 317–325, 324. See also Account of Woolman’s illness and death, in Moulton, ed., Journal, 301–306, 305; Testi- mony of the York Quarterly Meeting, March 25, 1773, in Gummere, ed., Journal, 326–329, 327; Some Account of the Life and Religious Labours of Sarah Grubb, 3, 140; Samuel Tuke to Henry Tuke Mennell, 1851, Mss. Box 13/14, FHL. [46] William Tuke to Eliot, October 7, 1772, Port 15/4, FHL. See also “Some Expressions of Jno Woolman during his illness,” Port 15/5-8, FHL; Esther Tuke to Emlin, October 14, 1772, in Whitney, John Woolman, 464–467; Letter from Esther Tuke, n.d., in ibid., 467–468; William Forster to M. Fairbank, November 3, 1772, Mss. 77:16, FHL. See also William Forster to Elizabeth Forster, November 3, 1772, Mss. 77:17, FHL. [47] “Some Expressions of John Woolman in his Last Illness,” in Woolman, Remarks on Sundry Subjects, 131–137; Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:178, FHL. [48] See Margaret E. Stewart, “Thinking about Death: The Companionship of John Woolman’s Journal,” in Heller, ed., Tendering Presence, 105–130, 107–109. [49] Mary Barnard’s poem, October 25, 1772, quoted in Cadbury, John Woolman in England,98– 99, “Reflections arising from well-known events,” October 25, 1772, Port. 15/26-8, FHL; Memoirs of William and Nathan Hunt, 156–159. [50] “From Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser,” Village Record, or Chester Delaware Federalist, September 13, 1820, reprinting the poem and introduction from the European Magazine, 1784. [51] B. Barton, “A Memorial of John Woolman,” The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, 3:51. See also A Journal of the Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of that Faithful Minister of Christ, John Woolman, 337–339. [52] Whether they emphasize Woolman’s politics or his spirituality, many Quakers today continue to exalt him as the “Quaker Saint” or the “Quintessential Quaker”. See Edwin H. Cady, John Woolman: The Mind of the Quaker Saint; David Sox, John Woolman, 1720–1772: Quintessential Quaker, 56–67; Michael L. Birkel, A Near Sympathy: The Timeless Quaker Wisdom of John Woolman. [53] Minutes of the Meetings of Ministers and Elders, 2:295, FHL. [54] See Gummere, ed., Journal, 313, n.2. [55] An Extract from John Woolman’s Journal in Manuscript, Concerning the Ministry (London, 1773), 3–4. [56] Minutes of the Meetings of Ministers and Elders, 2:295, FHL. [57] Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 33:279, FHL. See also Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 2:191–193; Minutes of the Worcestershire Quarterly Meeting, Bevan-Nash Collection, 2759, 5K25, Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, Birmingham. [58] See, for example, Minutes of the London Yearly Meeting, 15:248-9, FHL. [59] In 1767 the London Yearly Meeting printed 1,500 copies of Anthony Benezet’s A Caution and Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies, and over the next few years distributed most of them. Of the original 1,500 copies of the Extract from John Woolman’s Journal printed, 256 Slavery and Abolition 85 remained in the possession of the London Yearly Meeting on August 30, 1776. Shortly after Woolman’s death, the publisher Mary Hinde received permission to print a collection of Woolman’s controversial essays. The collection appeared under the title Serious Considerations on Various Subjects of Importance. On February 23, 1773 the Yearly Meeting accepted delivery of 150 copies, and there is no record that any other copies were issued. On August 30, 1776, the Yearly Meeting still possessed 147 copies of this publication. See Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 32:69, 33:88, 33:172, 33:240, 34:320; Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:172-4, FHL. Other, individual copies of Woolman’s essays were enclosed with letters and sent across the ocean by individual Quakers, usually one or two copies at a time. See, for example, John Pemberton to Joseph Row, October 16, 1772, Mss. 163:4, FHL; Cadbury, John Woolman in England, 67. [60] See An Extract from John Woolman’s Journal in Manuscript, Concerning the Ministry; Woolman, Works; Woolman, The Works of John Woolman, in Two Parts. [61] Minutes of the Meeting for Suffering, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1756–1775, pp. 379, 384, 386, 392–394, 396, 399–401, 406, 413, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College; Gummere, ed., Journal, xiii-xiv. [62] Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:224 (February 13, 1775), FHL; William Matthews, The Life and Character of Thomas Letchworth (Bath, 1786), 24–25. [63] Report of February 16, 1775, recorded in Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:224-5 (February 20, 1775), FHL. [64] Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:225 (February 27, 1775), FHL; Minutes of the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting, 5:193 (March 30, 1775), Special Collections, Leeds University Library. [65] Matthews, Life of Thomas Letchworth, 25. [66] See Moulton, ed., Journal, 187, n.14. [67] Minutes of the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting, 5:193 (March 30, 1775), Special Collections, Leeds University Library. [68] Compare Woolman, Works 1775, 54, 197, with Woolman, Works, 1774, 52–53, 233–236, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 58, 185–186. [69] Compare Woolman, Works 1775, 74, 78, with Woolman, Works 1774, 75, 80–86, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 71, 75–87. [70] Compare Woolman, Works, 1775, 102–3, with Woolman, Works, 1774, 111–116, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 102–105. [71] Compare Woolman, Works, 1775, 196–197, with Woolman, Works, 1774, 235–238, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 186–188. [72] Compare Woolman, Works, 1775, 184, 193 with Woolman, Works, 1774, 215, 226–227, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 171, 180. [73] Compare Woolman, Works, 1775, 196–198, with Woolman, Works, 1774, 229–233, 239, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 182–188, 190. [74] Compare Woolman, Works, 1775, 126–127, with Woolman, Works, 1774, 140–143, and Moulton, ed., Journal, 120–22. [75] Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:225, 6:230 (February 27 and May 15, 1775), FHL; Woolman, Works, 1775, iii–iv. [76] Minutes of the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting, 5:202 (June 29, 1775), Special Collections, Leeds University Library. [77] Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 34:114 (July 21, 1775), FHL; Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:234–5 (July 24 and 31, 1775), FHL. [78] Minutes of the Morning Meeting, 6:236 (August 14, 1775), FHL. [79] Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, 34:136–9 (September 8, 1775), FHL. [80] Minutes of the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting, 5:211 (September 27, 1775), Special Collections, Leeds University Library. [81] See Woolman, Journal, 1776. 86 Geoffrey Plank [82] See Moulton, ed., Journal, 14–15. The Fabians drew particularly on a shortened version of Woolman’s essay A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich, which had been published in Dublin in 1793. [83] See Arthur Brayshaw, “The Kindlier Way”, 210–219, 215; Joan Gilbert, “John Woolman (1720–1772): Abolitionist and Animal Defender” 24. For a discussion of Woolman’s commentary on animals see Geoffrey Plank, “‘The Flame of Life was Kindled in All Animal and Sensitive Creatures’: One Quaker Colonist’s View of Animal Life” 569–590. [84] Woolman, Works, 1775, iv. [85] See Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Anti- slavery” 609–642. [86] See Vincent Carretta, Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man, 270–367. [87] John Newton’s An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of ÃÃÃ, had appeared eleven years earlier, but as Brycchan Carey notes, Newton’s early work did not “amount to a full-scale attack on the [slave] trade.” Brycchan Carey, British Abo- litionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 108. [88] For a detailed discussion of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s editorial decisions see Phillips P. Mouton’s extensive footnotes in Moulton, ed., Journal. [89] See T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Inde- pendence, 195–234. [90] On the American Quakers’ partial withdrawal from formal politics see Ralph L. Ketchum, “Conscience, War, and Politics in Pennsylvania, 1755–1757,” 416–439; Jack D. Marietta, “Conscience, the Quaker Community, and the French and Indian War,” 3–27; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783. [91] The quotation is from “Memoirs of Joshua Evans,” in John and Isaac Comly, eds., Friends’ Miscellany, 1:299–312, 1:300. [92] Account of Woolman’s illness and death, in Moulton, ed., Journal, 301–6, 301. See also Testimony of the York Quarterly Meeting, March 25, 1773, in Gummere, ed., Journal, 328. [93] At London Yearly Meeting, Woolman had witnessed extended discussions of the government’s procedures for collecting tithes. See Elihu Robinson’s Diary, MS R3/2, FHL. For background on the political debates surrounding tithe collection see Stephen Taylor, “Sir Robert Walpole, the Church of England, and the Quakers Tithe Bill of 1736”. [94] Priscilla Wakefield, Excursions in North America Described in Letters from a Gentleman and his Young Companion to their Friends in England, 20–21. [95] See, for example, Henry Crabb Robinson, diary entry for January 22, 1824, quoted in Thomas Green, John Woolman: A Study for Young Men, iv. See also ibid., 3–4; Woolman, Journal (London, 1902, reprint of 1898 edition), xiv–xv. [96] On the Somerset case see William R. Cotter, “The Somerset Case and the Abolition of Slavery in England,” 31–56; James Oldham, “New Light on Mansfield and Slavery,” 45–68. On the reaction to the Somerset case see Carretta, Equiano, 206–209. [97] Philotheos Physiologus, The Country-man’s Companion, or, A New Method of Ordering Horses and Sheep, 123–124. [98] Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford, 67. John Hunt, “Notices of Benjamin Lay,” in Friends’ Miscellany, 4:275. Lay’s estate inventory reveals, however, that at the time of his death in 1759 he owned finer clothes than this. See Gummere, The Quaker, 44–45. [99] Moulton, ed., Journal, 145; Kenneth Lane Carroll, Joseph Nichols and the Nicholites: A Look at the ‘New Quakers’ of Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina, 42. [100] Carroll, Joseph Nichols, 43. [101] “Memoirs of Joshua Evans,” 1:303. [102] Joshua Evans’s Journal, in Friends’ Miscellany, 10:1–212, 10:21–24, 10:32. [103] Ibid, 10:5, 10:14. Slavery and Abolition 87 [104] For a theoretically informed discussion of the significance of clothing in the eighteenth century see Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Regime’,1–63. [105] See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 265–267; Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Home- spun to Ready-Made,” 1553–1586, 1554–1559; Cunninghmam, “Simplicity of Dress,” in Dress in American Culture, 191–192; Cole, The American Wool Manufacture, vol. 1: 61–63. [106] In 1793, for example, when A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich was finally published in Dublin, the Irish edition retained only brief references to clothing and omitted his discussion of dyes. See ibid, 30, 48, 58–59, 63, 71, 75, 80–81, 87. [107] John Greenleaf Whittier to Thomas Tracy, June 12, 1842, in John B. Pickard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 vols., 1:558. [108] See Charles Lamb, quoted in Thomas Green, John Woolman: A Study for Young Men, v; letter to John Waters, July 10, 1840, New Bedford Mercury, August 7, 1840. [109] In an English edition of Woolman’s journal published in 1840 there is a second-hand assertion that some Quakers objected to the text because Woolman had not placed adequate emphasis on “Christ crucified.” The editors quickly reject that assertion, however, and to my knowledge no similar objection to Woolman or his writings ever appeared in print. See A Journal of the Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of that Faithful Minister of Christ, John Woolman (Warrington, England, 1840), v. [110] The three poems discussed above make no reference to Woolman’s opposition to slavery. Other, longer tributes, such as Memoir of John Woolman (Philadelphia, 1817), Dora Greenwell, John Woolman (London, 1871) and Green, John Woolman: A Study for Young Men discuss his opposition to slavery briefly, but place greater emphasis on his humility and piety. For a recent discussion of Woolman with a similar emphasis on spirituality see Birkel, A Near Sympathy. [111] See Whittier to Charles Calistus Burleigh, September 24, 1840, in Pickard, ed., Letters, 1:446; Whittier, “To the Pennsylvania Freeman,” February 26, 1839, in ibid., 1:336. [112] Anonymous poem quoted in George S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet, 77. [113] Williams, Jr., An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 22; Murphy Baum, “Early American Literature: The Black Contribution,” 533–549, 539; Gravely, “The Dialectic of Double-Consciousness in Black-American Freedom Celebrations, 1808–1863,”, 302–317, 303. [114] Whittier to William Lloyd Garrison, November 12, 1833, in Pickard, ed., Letters, 1:133. On Whittier’s becoming an abolitionist see Charles A. Jarvis, “Admission to Abolitionism: The Case of John Greenleaf Whittier,”, 161–176. Though most nineteenth-century American Quakers celebrated Woolman’s holiness, they were not equally active in their opposition to slavery. See Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Antislavery Reminiscences; Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America, 133–166; Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–1865. [115] See Whittier (“A Friend”) “To the Members of the Society of Friends,” April 16, 1834, in Pickard, ed., Letters, 1:148. [116] Anthony Benezet to Samuel Allinson, December 14, 1773, quoted in Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810, 206. See also Benezet to George Dillwyn, February 15, 1774, in Irv A. Brendlinger, To be Silent... Would be Criminal: The Antislavery Influence and Writings of Anthony Benezet, 58–59; Gummere, ed., Journal, xiii. [117] Benezet to Allinson, July 16, 1774, in Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet, 313; see also Robert Vaux, Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Benezet, 137. [118] In Moral Capital Brown places Benezet’s antislavery work in its transatlantic context. For more on Benezet see Jonathan D. Sassi, “Africans in the Quaker Image: Anthony Benezet, African Travel Narratives, and Revolutionary-Era Antislavery,” 95–130; Srividhya Swaminathan, “Anthony Benezet’s Depictions of African Oppression: ‘That Creature of Propaganda,’” 115–129; David L. 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