American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Slavery grew out of indentured servitude, which, in the beginning, provided a legitimate means for an individual without resources to establish a new life in America.

  The bound or indentured servant was thus an integral aspect of life in the colonies, and the line between indenture and outright slavery was often a murky one. If a man ran away before his agreed-upon time was up, and if apprehended, he was subject to a flogging at the public whipping post in the center of town. Newspapers regularly ran advertisements for runaways. John’s uncle Burr had advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette when John was nineteen: “Run away on the 12th inst from Mount Holly Iron Works in Burlington County, a Servant Man named Cornelius Kelly, about 21 Years of Age, tall & slim, thin face, short brown Hair… Had on when he went away a Felt Hat, a new brownish colored Coat much too big for him.”

  Gradually, however, as the commerce of the colonies expanded, especially in the southern colonies, and as trade in slaves from Africa became more and more a lucrative commercial enterprise, conditions of slaves in the colonies deteriorated.

  Nor was there universal condemnation of slavery among Quakers. Indeed, some Quakers bought slaves in order to give them a better life. Yet on the whole there existed a general discomfort on the matter that kept the collective Quaker conscience stirred.

  Many owned slaves in Mount Holly. Negroes were a familiar sight going about their errands. John Woolman’s employer kept a Negro woman in the home as a slave and part of the household. Yet from early in his life, John was distressed about slavery. His objection was not primarily based on the treatment of slaves among Quakers, for in general Quakers were kind to their slaves as befitted their beliefs. He considered slavery itself wrong, and felt that it was spiritually damaging to slave owners themselves as well as oppressive and degrading to those trapped in slavery. His concern was equal for slave and owner.

  Then arose a crisis that would change John Woolman’s life. He was doing bookkeeping and legal business for his employer. His father had trained him to draw up wills and deeds and to carry out other duties of an attorney. One day his employer appeared in the shop with his slave woman beside him whom he was selling. He asked, almost casually as a matter of course, that John make out a bill of sale for the transaction. The woman was to be purchased by a Quaker of good standing in town.

  Inwardly John recoiled. The prospect of writing out a bill of sale for a fellow human being repulsed him. But after brief deliberation, and as the buyer was an elderly Quaker known to him, he wrote out the document. His conscience was not easy about it, however, and the next time he was asked by another in his Meeting to write up a similar document, he declined.

  “My employer,” he wrote, “having a negro woman, sold her, and desired me to write a bill of sale, the man being waiting who bought her. The thing was sudden; and though I felt uneasy at the thoughts of writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures, yet I remembered that I was hired by the year, that it was my master who directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of our Society, who bought her; so through weakness I gave way, and wrote it; but at the executing of it I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my master and the Friend that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion. This, in some degree, abated my uneasiness; yet as often as I reflected seriously upon it I thought I should have been clearer if I had desired to be excused from it, as a thing against my conscience; for such it was. Sometime after this a young man of our Society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a slave to him, he having lately taken a negro into his house. I told him I was not easy to write it; for, though many of our meeting and in other places kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and desired to be excused from the writing. I spoke to him in good-will; and he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether agreeable to his mind; but that the slave being a gift made to his wife he had accepted her.”*

  The two incidents crystallized John’s position. Quickly now the conviction took shape and settled into what would become the predominant focus of his “public ministry.”

  By John Woolman’s day, the name George Fox was legendary among Quakers. Many Quaker ministers followed his example, in the tradition of the spiritual pilgrimage of old, guided by a common “leading” from the Light Within, of traveling about, meeting people, attending meetings, writing journals, listening, speaking when led, and thus finding the way, alone with God, into deeper and more personal faith. Usually they traveled in pairs, one of the two having felt the “burden of concern,” and the other accompanying him as a companion.

  Shortly after the incident of the bill of sale, Woolman was asked to accompany one of the elder Quakers of the area, on a short journey around New Jersey. Woolman agreed, mostly remaining silent at the meetings and learning what he called “some profitable lessons.”

  Returning from the brief travels, he settled again into the business of his employer’s shop. Other business offers came his way but he turned them down. He decided instead to learn the tailor’s trade as a simpler profession “so to pass my time,” he writes, “that nothing might hinder me from the most steady attention to the voice of the true shepherd.” He was henceforth known in town as “the shopkeeper” or “the tailor.” Gradually he shifted his emphasis to tailoring during what time he had available and to the extent his shopkeeping duties would allow.

  After some time his employer’s wife died and his employer retired and closed his shop. John Woolman thus set off on four lengthy journeys through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and north through New York and Long Island to New England. As he went, especially in the South, the evil of slavery grew steadily stronger upon his mind. He saw the slave markets in nearby Perth Amboy and Cooper’s Ferry through newly horrified eyes. Even as a boy he had seen the slave ships sailing up the Delaware as had his ancestors, and their stench could be smelled even from the shore. But among those slaves who were fortunate enough to be sold in the North to be trained as house slaves or coachmen or grooms or gardeners or stablemen, life was not too bad. They were treated well enough, even loved, by their owners. But settling all the more deeply into the marrow of John Woolman’s being was the fundamental question: Was it right?

  As he and his companions traveled south and witnessed field slavery for the first time, the vastness of the cancer became far more personally real to him. When opportunity presented itself, John gently attempted to bring the matter of slavery to the forefront of discussion with those he visited. Whenever he had, in his opinion, been served in any way by a slave, upon departure he left a small payment in the hands of his or her owner to be given them with his gratitude.

  As they moved south into the region of the Quaker Virginia Yearly Meeting, Woolman and his companions beheld a scene unfamiliar to their New Jersey eyes—Negroes at work in long rows of “the bewitching Vegetable Tobacco,” the men in red cotton trousers and battered broad hats, the women in faded dresses with white kerchiefs wound as turbans round their heads. A white overseer, whose job it was all day to prevent idleness, leaned against a tree in the shade. Close of day was approaching as they rode in, and cheerfulness was evident in the expression of the workers. Fatigue was forgotten in anticipation of the happy evening close at hand.

  Observing it all, John Woolman perceived no outward sign of unhappiness. The sweating black faces wore good-natured smiles. If now and then a groan sounded, it disappeared the moment the welcome whistle sounded and husbands and wives rejoined each other for the happy trek homeward. But the bare legs and feet scuffling along the dusty road were thin and covered with sores.

  Later as he attended to his horse in the stable, Woolman looked out behind the stable to the row of Negro cabins behind the house. The slaves who dwelt in the tiny village were grinding corn and preparing the evening meal. At first glance it was a scene of cheerful bustle. A voice was raised in song. Children who had been left behind all day in the care of an old gran
ny scampered about at the feet of their mothers.

  Woolman observed it all through the lens of one who had himself grown up on a farm and had worked long days in the fields on his father’s plantation. He knew both the joys and hardships of the farming life.

  “Do these people,” he asked his host later in the evening, “have to grind their own corn after they come in before they can get anything to eat?”

  “Of course,” replied the man.

  Woolman nodded but said no more. He was thinking.

  It being Saturday, the next day was the first day of the week. At the Meeting, though a number of planter families gathered, Woolman noted that no Negroes were present.

  After the meeting, as he spoke informally with the men, he asked if their slaves ever came to Meeting. The men glanced about at one another. A few shook their heads.

  “Do they then hold any kind of church meeting of their own?” he asked.

  Again the answer was in the negative.

  “What then is done for their religious enlightenment?” John persisted.

  “By us, does thee mean?” asked one of the men.

  “Yes, by thee who are responsible for their welfare.”

  “Nothing, I suppose,” shrugged another man.

  “Are they then, in fact, left to live like animals?” rejoined Woolman. “How does this affect their whole moral sense? What standards do they have of duty, honesty, right, or wrong? If they are not instructed in these things, how can they know them? And what about their marriages? If they never go to any church, who marries them, and when, and how?”

  The men had no answers to give. Their visitor pressed no further. He had sensed his own traveling companion squirming as well from his pointed questions. It was time to let his words settle.

  In such out-of-the-way plantations as these conversation was at a premium. Any discussion was welcome. Day after day passed monotonously with no mail, no newspapers. The hospitable, well-meaning, and unsuspecting hosts where the men from New Jersey stayed as they proceeded south were delighted to have visitors. They were fascinated, too, by John Woolman—so easy a talker, so open and friendly, so well-informed about events and stirrings in the outer world. Yet they found themselves getting more than they bargained for. In this graceful young man they found that they were entertaining a thief who robbed them of their complacency. Yet his manners were such that they took his questions and occasional probing remarks without offense, with usually a memory left after his departure of a conversation that searched the soul.

  Woolman’s method of exploring any thorny issue was by conversation. There was always give and take. Woolman was an inquirer, not a lecturer. He wished to learn about the slave system, and was anxious to have the owner state his case. He listened earnestly to all that was said. But invariably he brought the subject eventually around into the light of what seemed to the planters an impractical, and perhaps youthful, idealism. Chatting informally with his host—whether on horseback, or strolling about the plantation, or seated by candlelight after the evening meal—Woolman slowly and modestly unfolded his remarkable ideas to the planter.

  John Woolman’s acute perception made it impossible for him to observe slavery in a pained and discreet silence. Every comfort around him in a plantation house came as the direct result of the profit from the slave. Once you looked in that direction you could see nothing else. The slave grew the tobacco, and it was exchanged for the ornate furniture, the woven carpet, the glass and silver, the lady’s dress, the planter’s fine pair of boots, the book of poems or sermons—and the ever-present jug of rum. He could not take the existence of such things for granted.

  “Two things were remarkable to me in this journey,” he later wrote: “first, in regard to my entertainment. When I ate, drank, and lodged free-cost with people who lived in ease on the hard labor of their slaves I felt uneasy; and as my mind was inward to the Lord, I found this uneasiness return upon me, at times, through the whole visit. Where the masters bore a good share of the burden, and lived frugally, so that their servants were well provided for, and their labor moderate, I felt more easy; but where they lived in a costly way, and laid heavy burdens on their slaves, my exercise was often great, and I frequently had conversation with them in private concerning it. Secondly, this trade of importing slaves from their native country being much encouraged amongst them, and the white people and their children so generally living without much labor, was frequently the subject of my serious thoughts. I saw in these southern provinces so many vices and corruptions, increased by this trade and this way of life, that it appeared to me as a dark gloominess hanging over the land, and though now many willingly run into it, yet in future the consequence will be grievous to posterity. I express it as it hath appeared to me, not once, nor twice, but as a matter fixed on my mind.”*

  In this first impact upon him of the Southern slave system, seeing it up close for the first time, Woolman’s initial impression was not one of abject cruelty. How different Woolman’s impressions were from George Whitefield’s about the same time. After a similar sojourn, Whitefield wrote a letter to the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina, in which he enumerated the “miseries of the poor negroes.” A plantation owner, conscience-stricken by Whitefield’s fervor, might easily rectify such conditions by feeding his slaves more and beating them less. Whitefield spoke to surface conditions. He did not probe uncomfortably deep. When it came to the principle of slavery itself he did not condemn it outright.

  It was Woolman, more than a hundred years before the name Abraham Lincoln was known, who went straight to the root.

  Rather than immediately decry the plight of the Negro slave, Woolman had the insight equally to observe the harm done to white owners of slaves. In his first glimpse of the tobacco fields Woolman had not been struck by the miseries of the slaves so much as by the lethargy of the overseer.

  He looked deeper than the labor itself, to the will behind the labor. The overseer had to supply all the driving power, all the motive, for his workers… all the will. The laborers had no ambition, no initiative, no interest in the work. Their only desire was to do as little as possible. The overseer’s task was to coax, praise, scold, persuade: to set his will behind their inertia and somehow get the necessary minimum of work accomplished. It was not surprising that, like the schoolmaster, he often took the whip in hand. And once the incentive of physical pain was resorted to, with unlimited power and no one to interfere, it could lead to the most horrifying of excesses.

  Such excesses, however, were not universal. On this journey Woolman mentions none. The easygoing planters of Virginia and Maryland did not expect or require a maximum efficiency from their slaves. Many of them inspired their slaves by working themselves, at least in the way of personal oversight. This was better, said Woolman. But it was simply a poor system, harmful to everyone—to the plantation owner, to the slaves, to the economy of the South, and to the whole white population. Slavery was bad for everybody.

  Woolman’s conclusion went straight to the heart of the matter and laid axe to the trunk: And as for a Christian, he said, is there any Christian way to treat a slave except to set him free?

  “When we remember,” Woolman later wrote, “that all nations are of one blood, that in this world we are but sojourners… and that the All wise Being is Judge and Lord over us all, it seems to raise an idea of a general Brotherhood…

  “To consider mankind otherwise than brethren, to think favors are peculiar to one nation and exclude others, plainly supposes a darkness in the understanding. For, as God’s love is universal, so where the mind is sufficiently influenced by it, it begets a Likeness of itself, and the heart is enlarged toward all men.

  “When self-love presides in our minds, our opinions are biased in our own favor…

  “To humbly apply to God for wisdom that we may thereby be enabled to see things as they are and ought to be, is very needful. Hereby high thoughts will be laid aside, and all men treated as beco
meth the sons of one Father, agreeable to the doctrine of Christ Jesus.”

  When John Woolman returned to Burlington County after three months in the South, he rode up to his father’s house, greeted by younger brothers and sisters and mother and father all anxious to hear of his journey. When supper was over, they gathered on the grass outside in the warm August evening to hear everything he had to tell them. It was so serene and peaceful there.

  But John Woolman’s mind and heart were full of slavery, and his firsthand witness of conditions in the colonies south of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.”*

  When the idea first came to John Woolman that he might influence his fellow Quakers by the power of the pen is unknown. But at some point after these first journeys south, in his late twenties, he began to write down some of his thoughts concerning slavery, sharing his work at every stage with his father. Apparently he did not intend at first to publish what he was writing. Still strong within him was the sense of spiritual conviction as a private matter. Yet as he and his father discussed the matter, his work on the writing was sufficiently serious that he sought his father’s advice concerning it. And after reading his thoughts, the father pressed the son to publish his work.

  The younger Woolman, however, was reluctant. His efforts till now had remained personal and conversational—one on one. At the time he was thinking of other things as well, namely his future. He purchased the premises of his former employer and opened his own shop, and a year later married Sarah Ellis. The two moved into Woolman’s newly purchased house on eleven acres just outside Mount Holly, and a year later a daughter was born to them.

  His relationship with his father remained one of the strengthening foundation stones in John Woolman’s life. He and Sarah often rode over to the home farm, and Samuel Woolman, still strong at sixty, would ride into Mount Holly to spend the evening with his son and new daughter-in-law and to discuss slavery, business, farming, war—which had now come to the colonies—and to read John’s manuscripts. Sarah was a sympathetic listener. But it was Samuel Woolman who provided the steadying rudder for his son’s thoughts, and was the most valued and candid critic on his writings.