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Updated: May 14, 2025
At the close of the Yearly Meeting, John Woolman requested those members of the Society who held slaves to meet with him in the chamber of the house for worship, where he expressed his concern for the well-being of the slaves, and his sense of the iniquity of the practice of dealing in or holding them as property.
The next man glorified by Coleridge was John Woolman, the Quaker. Him, though we once possessed his works, it cannot be truly affirmed that we ever read. Try to read John, we often did; but read John we did not. This, however, you say, might be our fault, and not John's. Very likely. And we have a notion that now, with our wiser thoughts, we should read John, if he were here on this table.
But there can be no question, on the other hand, that his warm and enthusiastic manners awakened the attention of many to the cause, and gave them first impressions concerning it, which they never afterwards forgot, and which rendered them useful to it in the subsequent part of their lives. The person who laboured next in the society, in behalf of the oppressed Africans, was John Woolman.
A very large proportion of my dearest personal friends are outside of our communion; and I have learned with John Woolman to find "no narrowness respecting sects and opinions."
He was born before, and he lived after, John Woolman; of course he was cotemporary with him. I place him after John Woolman, because he was not so much known as a labourer, till two or three years after the other had begun to move in the same cause. Anthony Benezet was born at St. Quintin in Picardy, of a respectable family, in the year 1713.
With such workers as Woolman in the field it is little wonder that Quakers thereafter treated slaves as brethren, alleviated their burdens, enlightened their minds, emancipated and cared for them until they could provide for themselves.
The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Edward Woolman, a Quaker preacher and tinker, whose character is one of the finest I ever met. He tells a story or two about negro slaves that brought the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure but then Hazlitt is worth all the modern prose-writers put together."
Poetry demands a richer and more various culture, and, however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the salt of the earth is something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of the same mineral.
Part I: a Journal of the Life, Gospel-Labors, and Christian Experiences of that Faithful Minister of Christ, John Woolman, Late of Mount Holly, in the Province of New Jersey. Same. Part Second. Containing his Last Epistle and other Writings. Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of every Denomination.
John Woolman, of course, was present, a man humble and poor in outward appearance, his simple dress of undyed homespun cloth contrasting strongly with the plain but rich apparel of the representatives of the commerce of the city and of the large slave- stocked plantations of the country.
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