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They cherished the names of Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and a host of other departed worthies, whose labors in behalf of the colored people reflected honor on their Society. But where was the need of being so active in the cause, as Isaac T. Hopper was, and always had been? "The way did not open" for them to be so active; and why should his zeal rebuke their listlessness?
The following is the testimony of the celebrated JOHN WOOLMAN, an eminent minister of the Society of Friends, who traveled extensively in the slave state. We copy it from a "Memoir of JOHN WOOLMAN, chiefly extracted from a Journal of his Life and Travels." It was published in Philadelphia, by the "Society of Friends."
The present age has also produced some zealous and able opposers of the colonial slavery. For about the middle of the present century, John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, two respectable members of the religious society called Quakers, devoted much of their time to the subject.
Visionary! Were not the good St. Pierre, and Fenelon, and Howard, and Clarkson visionaries also? What was John Woolman, to the wise and prudent of his day, but an amiable enthusiast? What, to those of our own, is such an angel of mercy as Dorothea Dix?
The Diary relates in simple, naïve style the experiences which befell the narrator as he followed his hard path of duty, and incidentally it reveals a fine and sensitive type of character, not unlike that which comes so beautifully to light in the Journal of John Woolman. This is plainly not the psychological moment to study the highly complex and delicate problem of conscience.
It was in a degree, at least, the influence of Stephen Grellet and William Allen, men deeply imbued with the spirit of Woolman, and upon whom it might almost be said his mantle had fallen, that drew the attention of Alexander I. of Russia to the importance of taking measures for the abolition of serfdom, an object the accomplishment of which the wars during his reign prevented, but which, left as a legacy of duty, has been peaceably effected by his namesake, Alexander II. In the history of emancipation in our own country evidences of the same original impulse of humanity are not wanting.
In this point of view, John Woolman found in Anthony Benezet the coadjutor whom, of all others, the cause required. The former had occupied himself principally on the subject of slavery. The latter went to the root of the evil, and more frequently attacked the trade. The former chiefly confined his labours to America, and chiefly to those of his own society there.
Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York, England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society of Friends. The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American Revolution." But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate poet.
John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some "inevitable presence." This cured me of Quakerism: I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling.
Brissot, in his New Travels in America, published in 1788, says: "John Woolman, one of the most distinguished of men in the cause of humanity, travelled much as a minister of his sect, but always on foot, and without money, in imitation of the Apostles, and in order to be in a situation to be more useful to poor people and the blacks.