John Woolman, His Clothes and His Journal Geoffrey Plank
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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 pub- lication 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 dis- tribution “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.