In 1847 the poet John Greenleaf Whittier published a series of essays entitled “Quaker Slaveholding, 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 woman as a slave 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...

In 1755, when at age thirty-five John Woolman began to write an account of his life, he started with a Saturday afternoon when he was a schoolchild, perhaps as young as six. The children were dismissed from their lessons, and Woolman joined a group walking in the direction of his family’s farm. None of the boys and girls were in a hurry to get to their homes. After going a short distance along the road, most of them ran into the fields to play, but Woolman did not follow them. He kept on walking by himself until he was “out...

On a spring day when he was approximately nine, Woolman was walking down the road toward a neighbor’s house when he saw a mother robin sitting by her nest. She flew off the instant she saw him, but did not go far for fear of abandoning her chicks. Instead she “flew about,” and “with many cries expressed concern” for her young ones. Woolman responded just as she feared. He began throwing stones at her and eventually hit and killed her. At first he was pleased, but then he was struck with remorse. To free the motherless chicks from a slow...

In 1740 Elizabeth Woolman, John’s oldest sister, attained the age of twenty-five. Eber, the youngest of the Woolman children, had been born a year earlier, and there were now thirteen brothers and sisters living with their parents in the house by Rancocas Creek. Elizabeth decided that it was time for her to leave. This changed the dynamics of the household, because Elizabeth had taken a hand in helping to raise her younger siblings. John remembered her giving them moral advice in rhyme. Elizabeth left home just as John was considering a similar move. He was turning twenty and finding it...

Families occupied a central place in the eighteenth-century Quakers’ vision of a moral social order. In his description of his parents’ home at the beginning of his journal, Woolman vividly described what he thought a good Quaker family should do. The ideal family gave all its members security, instruction, and spiritual discipline. Without partiality, husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters lived together in one circle of love. In reality, however, the Quakers often failed to live up to this ideal. In such cases, the meetings frequently felt compelled to intervene. When Samuel Garwood “differed with his wife...

Elizabeth Woolman, John’s oldest sister, died at thirty-one on March 17, 1747.¹ This was a formative event for John, emotionally trying and instructive at the same time. Elizabeth had contracted smallpox, and during her waning days John had gathered reports from those who were with her and kept a record of the stages of her demise. He hoped to learn from Elizabeth’s death, and years later when he wrote his journal he expected that his readers would gain from her example as well. Initially, Elizabeth responded to her illness with “sadness and dejection of mind,” and she expressed regret for...

On a night in February 1754 Woolman dreamed that while walking through an orchard he saw two lights in the sky resembling dull suns. Suddenly a storm of fire swept over the orchard from the east. Woolman was surprised, but not afraid. He noticed a friend standing nearby who was “greatly distressed in mind at this unusual appearance,” and Woolman tried to be reassuring. He said, “We must all once die, and if it please the Lord that our death be in this way, it is good for us to be resigned.” Woolman left the orchard and entered a house....

The Seven Years’ War made many Delaware Valley Quakers uneasy about serving in government. In New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the war forced some Quaker officer-holders into difficult dilemmas, because they were responsible for punishing other Friends who had violated provincial laws on principle. This problem was acute in Pennsylvania, where in some instances Quaker sheriffs seized property from conscientious tax evaders in their own meetings. Woolman observed that when two Quakers confronted each other in such a situation, the “difficulty was considerable.”¹ In 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting decided that no Quakers should accept any office “in civil society or government”...

Woolman’s view of travel across the ocean darkened over the course of his life. With his boyhood home near the Delaware River and the port of Burlington only a few miles away, he grew up familiar with long-distance sailing ships. His first experience on the open seas came when he traveled to New England at age twenty-six. He recounted that trip in his journal with a precision that reflected an element of excitement. He took sailing vessels from Long Island to Connecticut, from Rhode Island to Nantucket and back, and then from New London to Long Island. He calculated that...

Woolman monitored his health closely and in the late 1760s, to ward off illness, he started to avoid many foods.¹ Under ordinary circumstances, his diet was “plain, chiefly consisting of bread and milk or butter &c.”² During his voyage across the Atlantic in 1772, he was reduced almost entirely to eating bread, though he sometimes indulged in a wayward snack. Samuel Emlen sailed with him and reported that he “kept I think much within his usual [dietary] restrictions on board, though [he was] not so confined as to be unwilling to partake of some parts of our stores.”³ During the...

On October 9, 1772, Woolman’s body was buried in York. William Tuke made the arrangements, doing his best to follow the deceased’s instructions. Woolman had wanted his clothing traded away to defray the costs, and although Tuke had tried to exchange Woolman’s hat, shirt, and trousers for a coffin and a shroud, there had been little time. The carpenter and the clothier he approached made it clear that they preferred money, so at that point Woolman’s former student John Bispham intervened. Bispham paid the two tradesmen cash and arranged to have Woolman’s peculiar costume shipped back to America. The gravedigger...