John Woolman

John Woolman was a New Jersey Quaker tailor and shopkeeper who, asked as a young man to write a bill of sale for a slave, wrote it and said he believed the practice inconsistent with Christianity, and spent the rest of his life travelling the colonies persuading Friends, one household at a time, to free their slaves, until the Society of Friends renounced slaveholding. He gave up dyed cloth, silver and war taxes, sat with the Delaware at Wyalusing, and died of smallpox in York on a visit to English Friends. The Journal, published in 1774, opens the Harvard Classics, and Lamb said to get it by heart.