John Woolman

John Woolman was born in 1720 in Rancocas, in the colony of West Jersey, into a Quaker farming family. As a young man he worked as a clerk for a shopkeeper in Mount Holly, New Jersey, and later as a tailor. When his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman, he did so but told his employer that he thought slaveholding was inconsistent with Christianity, and he later refused to write the part of a customer's will that would have transferred ownership of an enslaved person. He became a traveling minister and journeyed through the American colonies urging fellow Quakers to free the people they held in slavery. His essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754) argued against the practice. He lived simply and refused to wear dyed cloth, having learned that dye workers were harmed by the chemicals they used. His Journal, published after his death, is regarded as a classic of American spiritual writing. In 1772 he sailed to England to visit Quakers there, and he died of smallpox in York that year.

John Woolman is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Quaker essayist, son of a Quaker farmer in West Jersey. Source: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) (via Wikisource)