7 October: Boreham on John Woolman

The Dawn of Freedom
It has been pleasant to notice the more frequent mention of late of a name that, without rhyme or reason, had been allowed to fall into undeserved obscurity. Charles Lamb declared that John Woolman's Journal should be learned by heart. Whittier devoted to Woolman an essay of 50 pages and a poem of 40 stanzas; whilst Channing insisted that the famous Journal is incomparably the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language. John Woolman did a work that moved the world but he did it when nobody was looking. On this, the anniversary of his death, we may profitably recall his notable record.

At the moment, the nations were preoccupied with quite other excitements. Clive, Wolfe, Cook, and that little band of adventurers who, simultaneously, added India, Canada, and Australia to our British Dominions, were at the zenith of their renown. England, moreover, was in the throes of the Great Revival; nobody was concerned about a young tailor who, wretchedly uncomfortable himself, was making everybody within his influence uncomfortable at the contemplation of the miseries of the negro slaves and the spiritual plight of the North American redskins.

Woolman was the pioneer of the emancipation movement. He set rolling the ball which, gathering momentum with the years, destroyed slavery a century later. One of our most eminent and critical authorities, George Trevelyan, shudders as he asks himself what would have become of the world if John Woolman had never come into it; Alexander Smellie declares that no man, of any age or country, better deserves to be everlastingly remembered.

Child Of All The World
Like William Carey, his English contemporary, Woolman played many parts. Carey was a cobbler, Woolman a tailor. Both added to their avocations the duties of schoolmaster. Both become missionaries. Carey was eventually appointed Professor of Oriental languages; Woolman attained to no such academic distinction, but he wrote a book that has taken its place among our classics. Crabb Robinson, the friend of both Goethe and Wordsworth, describes it as a perfect gem, only lamenting that it conceals important events in which Woolman himself figured conspicuously.

Trevelyan ranks it with "The Confessions of St. Augustine" and "The Confessions of Jean Jaques Rousseau" as one of the three most illuminating autobiographies ever written. Each of these men, he points out, gave the vital impulse to a great current in the world's affairs—Augustine to the Medieval Church, Rousseau to the French Revolution and Woolman to the abolition of slavery. And Trevelyan likes to think that, of the three, Woolman, the Anglo-Saxon, is by far the most attractive.

Beside the waters of the Delaware, Woolman was born in 1720. Revelling in his environment, he became a child of the open air. In his rambles in the endless woods he surprised furry creatures of all sorts and sizes and became fondly familiar with their haunts and ways. He learned the habits of the beaver and the rattlesnake, the woodchuck and the porcupine. He knew where to look for the bluebird and the prairie hen, the parrot, and the humming bird. His Quaker instincts taught him the preciousness of quietness; and, in the silent woods, the solitudes took him into their confidence and poured into his heart their secrets.

In the year in which he came of age his destiny took shape. Having obtained a position in a store at Mount Holly, he developed a remarkable genius for drafting all kinds of legal instruments—wills, contracts, and the like. One day, his employer owning a negro woman, sold her and ordered Woolman to make out the bill of sale. The idea of preparing a document that transferred a fellow creature from the ownership of one man to that of another filled him with sudden horror. He told his master and the prospective purchaser—both Quakers—that he could not do it. He resolved to throw up his situation and to trudge from settlement to settlement urging the Quakers to lead the world by wiping their hands of the hideous traffic in slaves.

Friend Of The Black Man And The Red
For the next few years he persisted in this self-imposed pilgrimage. Sleeping in the woods and living, for the most part, on the hospitality of those on whom he called, he aroused a storm of resentment, but awoke a multitude of consciences. In the very year in which Wolfe died his triumphant death on the heights of Abraham, Woolman was sickened by the sights that he saw on the slave ships arriving in New England and prosecuted his campaign with fresh fervour. Before long, great number of Quakers liberated their slaves of their own free will, and, in the process, a national sentiment on the question was generated.

Woolman was 43 when he conceived the novel idea that the problem of the Red Indian massacres could be solved, not by annihilation, but by evangelisation. He talked it over, first with his wife, and then with some of the other Quakers. They reminded him of the barbarities that the redskins had recently perpetrated. Farms had been raided; forts had been destroyed; villages had been set on fire; the scalping knife was never at rest. But Woolman never faltered. He set out for the Indian settlement at Wehaloosing on the Susquehannah; mastered the language and won the hearts of the Indians; and then, for some years, John Woolman, with his Quaker garb, his tall form, and his stooping shoulders, was a familiar and honoured figure in the wigwams and at the camp fires of the red men.

He was not altogether destitute of means. In the course of his travels he worked at his trade and earned an enviable reputation for the suits that he created. Always interested in fruit, he kept his eyes wide open, learned a good deal about the care of the trees and saw that his knowledge was applied to the orchards that he had planted round his own home. And his services were constantly in demand when men were drawing up indentures of apprenticeship, deeds for the conveyance of property, inventories, wills, marriage settlements, and the like.

In his 53rd year he set out to realise a lifelong dream; he would visit England! On the voyage across the Atlantic the sailors became very fond of the quaint backwoodsman who insisted on travelling steerage and sharing their company. He contracted smallpox, however, and died soon after his arrival. But those who met him during that last week or two ever afterwards spoke of the indescribable charm of his society and of the pleasure with which they remembered it.

F W Boreham

Image: John Woolman