The Journal of John Woolman
by John Woolman
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists
The spiritual journal of a New Jersey Quaker tailor, written over the last twenty years of his life and published in 1774. Woolman records his growing conviction that slaveholding is incompatible with Christianity, and the decades he spent travelling the American colonies persuading Friends one household at a time to free their slaves, refusing to write wills that conveyed them and declining hospitality paid for by slave labour. He also refuses dyed cloth, silver vessels and war taxes, travels among the Delaware at Wyalusing, and dies of smallpox in York on a visit to English Friends, and the whole is told in a prose of unusual plainness.
We recommendThe Harvard Classics, Volume 1P. F. Collier, 1909Prints the Journal with A Plea for the Poor, as the Harvard Classics list assigns it.
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- Written
- 1774
- Language
- English
- Length
- Medium · 230 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Moderate2 of 5 for a first-year reader
Why it's on the list
Persuading Friends one household at a time to free their slaves, over twenty years of quiet conversation, made Woolman the most effective abolitionist of the colonial period without a single public campaign, and the Quaker renunciation of slaveholding he brought about was the first by any religious body in America. Refusing to write wills that conveyed slaves, and paying the enslaved for their service in the houses where he stayed, showed a conscience worked out in the smallest transactions, so that the journal is a record of how a principle becomes a way of life. Extending the same scruple to dyed cloth, silver vessels and war taxes connected the sin of slavery to the ordinary economy that depended on it, and A Plea for the Poor is an early argument that wealth itself is a form of injustice. Writing in a prose of such plainness that Charles Lamb told readers to get Woolman by heart made the journal the classic of Quaker spirituality.
Key themes
- Justice
- Persuading Friends one household at a time to free their slaves, over twenty years of quiet conversation, made Woolman the most effective abolitionist of the colonial period.
- God and faith
- The journal is a record of the inner light followed in the smallest transactions, so that a principle becomes a way of life.
- Virtue and character
- Refusing to write wills that conveyed slaves, declining hospitality paid for by slave labour and paying the enslaved for their service show a conscience worked out in detail.
- Money and class
- Extending the same scruple to dyed cloth, silver and war taxes connected slavery to the luxury that depended on it, and A Plea for the Poor argues that wealth itself is a form of injustice.
- Liberty and rights
- The Quaker renunciation of slaveholding that Woolman brought about was the first by any religious body in America, and it came by persuasion rather than decree.
Which edition to read
Our pick
The Harvard Classics, Volume 1
P. F. Collier, 1909
Prints the Journal with A Plea for the Poor, as the Harvard Classics list assigns it.
Amazon: the P. F. Collier edition, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: the P. F. Collier edition, opens in a new tab
Overview
About two hundred and thirty pages with A Plea for the Poor, the spiritual journal of a New Jersey Quaker tailor, written over the last twenty years of his life and published in 1774. Woolman records his growing conviction that slaveholding is incompatible with Christianity, and the decades he spent travelling the American colonies persuading Friends one household at a time to free their slaves, refusing to write wills that conveyed them and declining hospitality paid for by slave labour.
He also refuses dyed cloth, silver vessels and war taxes, travels among the Delaware at Wyalusing, and dies of smallpox in York on a visit to English Friends.
What happens
Youth and calling. Woolman describes his childhood in New Jersey, his early sense of the divine presence, a boyhood cruelty to a robin that he never forgot, and his settling as a shopkeeper and tailor, deliberately keeping his business small so that it would not consume him.
The bill of sale. Asked by his employer to write a bill of sale for a slave, he writes it but declares his belief that slavekeeping is inconsistent with Christianity, and afterward refuses every such instrument, including wills, explaining his reasons to the men who ask.
The southern journeys. Woolman travels to Maryland, Virginia and Carolina, stays with slaveholding Friends, speaks with each about the weight on his conscience, and pays the enslaved who serve him, publishing Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes on his return.
The yearly meetings. At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting he speaks against slaveholding, and the Society moves over years from discouragement to prohibition, Woolman visiting slaveholders in committee to labour with them.
Plainness and Wyalusing. He gives up dyed clothes, silver and the payment of taxes for the French and Indian War, and travels in 1763 to the Delaware town of Wyalusing to sit with the Indians in their meetings and learn from them.
England and death. Woolman sails to England in steerage in 1772, refuses to ride in the painted coaches, walks between meetings, and dies of smallpox in York, tended by Friends.
How to read it
Read the episode of the bill of sale as the journal’s turning point, a principle first acted on in a small transaction and then carried into every later one.
Pay close attention to the method of the southern journeys, one household at a time, and consider what it accomplished that public campaigns did not.
Notice the extension of the scruple from slavery to dyed cloth, silver and war taxes, and read A Plea for the Poor as the argument that connects them.
Consider the prose, so plain that Lamb told readers to learn it by heart, and ask what the plainness does that eloquence could not.
Read this journal alongside Franklin’s Autobiography to compare two Pennsylvanians of the same generation keeping account of their lives, one for worldly improvement and one for the inner light.
Questions it raises
- Is persuasion one household at a time a model for reform or a method that only works within a community already disposed to listen?
- What does it mean that the Quaker renunciation of slavery came by conscience rather than decree, and did it make the renunciation more or less secure?
- Is Woolman’s connection of slavery to luxury, dyed cloth and silver, a moral insight or a scruple that risks making every comfort a sin?
- What does the journal’s plainness of style tell us about the relation between the way a man writes and the way he lives?
- How should a reader take the visit to Wyalusing, where Woolman goes to learn from the Indians rather than to convert them, in the year of Pontiac’s war?
- Why does a tailor’s spiritual journal stand at the head of the Harvard Classics, and what did Eliot want readers to take from it first?
Highlights
Asked as a young man to write a bill of sale for a slave, Woolman wrote it but told his employer that he believed slavekeeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion, and afterward refused to write any instrument that conveyed a human being.
Paraphrase of the episode in which the journal's central conviction first appears.
Travelling among Friends in Maryland, Virginia and Carolina, Woolman stayed in slaveholding households, spoke with the masters one by one about the burden on their consciences, and left money for the enslaved who had served him.
Paraphrase of the method by which the journal's work was done.
Woolman gives up dyed cloth, silver vessels and the payment of war taxes, seeing in luxury the root of oppression, and A Plea for the Poor argues that the wealth of the few is taken from the labour of the many.
Paraphrase of the extension of the journal's scruple from slavery to the whole economy.
