John Woolman (1720-1772) was born at Northampton in Burlington County, West Jersey, to a Quaker farming family, and spent his life at Mount Holly, New Jersey, where he worked as a clerk, a retailer and a tailor and kept an apple nursery. Recognized as a minister by the Society of Friends while still a young man, he travelled on foot and horseback through the colonies from North Carolina to New England, visiting Friends who held slaves and urging them to set them free. His tracts Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754 and 1762) were among the earliest American writings against slaveholding. In 1772 he sailed to England in the steerage of a ship to visit Friends in the north, and died of smallpox at York in October of that year.
Frequently Cited
“I have often felt a Motion of Love to leave some Hints in Writing of my Experience of the Goodness of God”
“Love was the first Motion, and thence a Concern arose to spend some Time with the _Indians_, that I might feel and understand their Life, and the Spirit they live in”
The Journal of John Woolman is the spiritual autobiography of a New Jersey Quaker tailor and minister, begun in his thirty-sixth year and continued until a few days before his death. He opens in Northampton, Burlington County, where as a child he reads the twenty-second chapter of Revelation by the roadside and, soon after, kills a mother robin with a stone and then her nestlings, an act whose horror teaches him that God has placed in every mind a principle of goodness toward all creatures.
