American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  John’s father died in 1750. On his deathbed Samuel Woolman asked his son again whether he intended to publish the small book on slavery. “I have all along,” his father told him, “been deeply affected with the oppression of poor Negroes, and now at last my concern for them is as great as ever.”

  At the death of his father, John Woolman at thirty stood as the head of his family as the eldest son, and was by now widely recognized by the men of Burlington Meeting as one of their leading spokesmen. Slavery continued to gnaw at him as a scourge on humanity’s conscience. But his slavery manuscript remained unpublished for another three years. Others would launch crusades, Whitefield and Wesley and Wilberforce, as had George Fox before them. But John Woolman waited.

  Several years later, at last he decided to speak publicly. He had been refining and polishing and honing his manuscript for six years. Finally he submitted it to the Ministers and Elders of his meeting. With their approval, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was published in 1754 and sent to every Quaker Yearly Meeting throughout the colonies. Though circulated at first through the network of the Quaker community, Woolman nowhere mentions the Society of Friends specifically. He addresses his work “To the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination,” meaning all those who professed the Christian faith.

  The reaction was instantaneous. No other document opposing slavery had ever been so widely distributed. Its message, as was said, sounded through the Society of Friends “like a trumpet blast” and roused Quakers everywhere to the controversy. Suddenly the simple tailor of Mount Holly was a figure of renown.

  Even with a “reputation” now following him, as a man devoted to simplicity in his life, John Woolman sought to live his convictions practically. If too much business began coming to him, he sent customers to other shops. If a woman was debating between choices of cloth, he would encourage her toward the simplest and least expensive. Mostly his was a simplicity of outlook, an inward simplicity rather than what might have been visible externally. Balance regulated all—balance between outward concerns and inner convictions, between keeping silent and speaking out, balance between business profit and a life of frugality. In Woolman’s view, his first duty was to live a consistent life within himself.

  Very early in his Journal, Woolman wrote what would be a guiding principle throughout his every business venture large and small: “Being clearly convinced in my judgment that to place my whole trust in God was best for me, I felt… that in all things I might act on an inward principle of virtue, and pursue worldly business no further than as truth opened my way.”

  He amplified on this principle, saying, “My mind, through the power of truth, was in good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness, and I was learning to be content with real conveniences, that were not costly, so that a way of life free from much entanglement appeared best for me, though the income might be small. I had several offers of business that appeared profitable, but I did not see my way clear to accept of them, believing they would be attended with more outward care and cumber than was required of me to engage in. I saw that an humble man, with the blessing of the Lord, might live on a little, and that where the heart was set on greatness, success in business did not satisfy the craving; but that commonly with an increase of wealth the desire of wealth increased. There was a care on my mind so to pass my time that nothing might hinder me from the most steady attention to the voice of the true Shepherd.”*

  And now, many years later, that same principle continued to guide him.

  Yet his determination to live by his scruples, never to tell a lie, never to overcharge or sell goods or services that were unneeded, did not dim his sense of humor, his wit, his keen intellect and business sense. He remained the man his friends and relatives were most likely to go to for perspective, for advice, for insight concerning any dilemma. All his life he was engaging, charming, full of grace and selflessness. He was simply a man doing his best to live a humble, consistent, and balanced life.

  Woolman’s intent was for his shop to serve as an adjunct to his tailoring trade. Making clothes for his neighbors and friends seems to have been his first love. He had merely intended to sell linens, buttons, and the other necessary trimmings. For in addition to the tailoring of garments, Woolman now desired to devote more time to writing.

  But the demand for much else gradually led to a shop with a great variety of merchandise, from tea and thread to rum and coffee and butter and molasses, dishes and utensils, chocolate and candy, gloves, even a small stock of lumber. The shop prospered in spite of his efforts to keep it on a small scale.

  As slaves were used on indigo plantations so fundamental to the making of dyes, sometime later he began to wear undyed clothing. Though he loathed calling attention to externals, he felt he must modify his dress to be consistent with his convictions. His appearance mostly in white or natural-colored clothing was unique and recognizable around Mount Holly. He was always asking God to illuminate some additional area of his life that needed to come under Divine scrutiny. He was never satisfied with himself. In his fiftieth year he gave up the use of rum. He had never regarded alcohol as such as evil. He spoke, rather, against excess and misuse. And when he finally gave up rum, he gave up sugar and molasses at the same time—he had recently learned about the cruel conditions of the slaves in the West Indies where all three were mostly produced.

  In three chief areas he felt the simple life was undermined in the life of many Christians: love of money, haste and urgency, and spiritual compromise. “In the love of money and in the wisdom of this world,” he wrote, “business is proposed, then in the urgency of affairs pushed forward, and the mind cannot in this state discern the good and perfect will of God.”

  Woolman’s empathy toward the plight of the American Negro was mirrored in his love and concern for the native Indian tribes of America, leading him to undertake a difficult and dangerous journey among them in 1762, even though the French and Indian War was still in progress.

  At a meeting in Philadelphia he found himself in conversation with a Quaker minister by the name of Ezekiel Harlan from Chester about whom he had heard news that intrigued him.

  “Tell me, Friend Harlan,” Woolman asked, “is what I hear of thy brother true, that he has taken an Indian maiden for a wife?”

  “It is true, John,” replied Harlan. “He was traveling in the Carolinas with some of our brethren and chanced to meet her in the western woodlands. She is said to be the daughter of one of the famous women of the Cherokee. She had been twice widowed when Ellis met her, though had no children.”

  “What is the girl’s name?”

  “Cata’quin Kingfisher.”

  “An Indian name indeed!” smiled Woolman. “And your son remains there?”

  “He is happy living with the Cherokee. He says they are the most civilized people he has ever met, outside Quakers, that is. They now have four children, but we expect more.”

  “I would dearly like to meet thy brother… and his wife,” said Woolman. “I am considering a journey among the Indians myself very soon.”

  Of his decision to make more personal acquaintance with Indians, Woolman wrote, “Having for many years felt love in my heart towards the natives of this land who dwell far back in the wilderness, whose ancestors were formerly the owners and possessors of the land where we dwell, and who for a small consideration assigned their inheritance to us, and being in Philadelphia… on a visit to some Friends who had slaves, I fell in company with some of those natives who lived on the east branch of the river Susquehanna at an Indian town called Wehaloosing, two hundred miles from Philadelphia. In conversation with them by an interpreter, as also by observations on their countenances and conduct, I believed some of them were measurably acquainted with that Divine power which subjects the rough forward will… Love was the first motion and thence a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive
some instruction from them, or they might be in any degree helped forward by my following the leadings of truth among them.”*

  The following June, with Indian guides arranged for, he set out into the Pennsylvania wilderness on a journey that proved as dangerous as it was eventful.

  Returning home, he continued to work on his Journal and write on an increasing variety of topics of concern to his Quaker brethren in increasingly turbulent times. A second installment of On Keeping Negroes was published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia.

  John Woolman continued to speak out against slavery and traveled more and more. As the country moved toward conflict and eventual war with England over independence, John Woolman planned a trip back to the homeland of his ancestors. He sailed at the end of April 1772, steerage class, arrived in London in June, and visited Quaker Meetings throughout England, walking almost the length of the country up into Northumbria, and partway back.

  He contracted smallpox and died at York in late September. He was fifty-two.

  John Woolman’s Journal was first published two years later, only two years before the outbreak of the American Revolution. It was published in dozens of editions in the years since, and became a spiritual classic, equal in influence to the Journal of George Fox and William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown among Quaker writings. It is certain that most, if not all, of the founders of the fledgling nation surely knew of and were to some degree influenced by the writings of John Woolman.

  During his lifetime, Woolman did not succeed in eliminating slavery within the Society of Friends. But his efforts changed many Quaker viewpoints, and within twenty years of his death, the Society of Friends eventually banned slavery among their people, and in 1790 petitioned the newly formed Congress of the United States for the abolition of slavery.

  The tailor of Mount Holly lived on through his writings, and devout men and women were still reading them a century later.

  Freedom and Bondage

  1852

  A tall, strong, muscular Negro man, sweat pouring from his face, bare chest, and shoulders, glanced up to see his employer, a white man wearing blue trousers, plain linen shirt, and a wide-brimmed black hat, walking toward him. The black man relaxed his right hand from its clutch on a heavy iron hammer, and with the tong in his left thrust the horseshoe he had been shaping under merciless blows steaming into a rusty water tub in front of the forge.

  “How is the new gate coming, Aaron?” said the white man as he approached.

  “Be finished today or tomorrow, Mr. Borton,” replied the black-smith. “I’m just getting this shoe on Mr. Pemberton’s horse from that one he threw yesterday, then I’ll be back to the gate.”

  “Fine, then. No hurry, though I would like thee to have it completed before I leave for Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia.”

  “When will that be, Mr. Borton?”

  “Next week.”

  “We’ll have it up by then, so long as thee and Mr. Pemberton can give me a hand with setting it in place.”

  “Of course. Let me know when thee is ready for our help.”

  John Borton and Aaron Steddings had known one another since boyhood. They had played with other Quaker boys, white and black, on the banks of Rancocas Creek, and rafted and fished on the mighty Delaware that Borton’s ancestors had sailed up for the first time 170 years before. Now they were men who worked alongside one another in mutual consideration and respect without regard for their difference of race.

  New Jersey was a Northern state where, since 1804, slavery, though not technically abolished, had been in steady decline. The roots of Burlington County were so strongly Quaker that slavery had never been widespread here, and the Quakers from this region had altogether given up slavery two and three generations earlier.

  The fact that this particular black man worked for this particular white man had nothing to do with the color of their skin. The arrangement was purely economic. John Borton was one of the leading men of Mount Holly, a farmer and businessman with sizeable holdings, not unlike many descendents of those first Quaker settlers. They had thrived in the new land to which they had come, and their descendents has prospered after them. Aaron Steddings was a laborer, without the inherited means of his employer. His grandfather had come as an indentured servant to this region and had worked faithfully for his freedom. Aaron worked with his hands at the smithy’s trade and was grateful to have a good job wherewith to feed wife and children, and, perhaps in time, as was the American way with free and hardworking men and women, to better his lot. He had his eye on a five-acre parcel one of the men of their Meeting planned to sell, and dreamed of someday building a house with his own hands that he could pass on to his son.

  Both men attended the same Quaker Meeting. Spiritually they were brothers in Christ.

  They were distinct from other residents of Mount Holly, New Jersey, however, in this. Both descended from well-known families of history in the region.

  John Borton still bore the respected name of his legendary great-great-great-grandfather who had come ashore across the ice that first day in 1678 after the arrival of the second shipload of Quakers to the New World from England. The Bortons had been here ever since, and the name had spread throughout the colonies. Even as the original homestead of 110 acres had gradually shrunk between sons and grandsons and great-grandsons, new land had been purchased and sons and grandsons and daughters and granddaughters of large families had married and taken their Quaker roots up and down the Atlantic seaboard and west to Ohio and Indiana. John and Anne’s inquisitive son, who had crossed the wide Atlantic at nine, lost two wives and with his third moved to join Quakers in William Penn’s Pennsylvania. His son Obadiah, a widely respected Quaker minister, married Susanna Butcher, of English name as longstanding as her husband’s and whose family had also immigrated to Burlington County. Their son John married Hannah Haines. Their son John became a Quaker minister, whose son John married Ketturah Haines, and upon her death Martha Woolman, possessor of an equally prestigious pedigree as great-great-great-granddaughter of old William Woolman who followed John Borton ashore from the Shield. The present John Borton was therefore the fifth John Borton in six generations to carry on the proud family name from Aynho, Northhamptonshire, England.

  Though he could not trace his ancestry back to his native land of Africa as could the Borton, Woolman, Harlan, and Davidson names to their native England, Aaron Steddings’ spiritual pedigree was no less significant in the annals of Quaker influence in the history of this nation called the United States of America. It was a spiritual pedigree linked to the Woolman name of Borton’s wife Martha.

  In the early 1750s, almost a century before when Mount Holly had been much smaller than today, one of its prominent farmers was thrown from his horse and, though no bones were broken, a serious bruise on his thigh resulted. The bruise worsened, swelled, the whole leg became inflamed, and the man began to fear for his life. With his wife’s help, for by now he could hardly walk, he paid a visit to his neighbor, a literate man of unusual talents who had a tailor’s shop in the village, who knew medicine, and to whom many in the neighborhood also went for legal assistance.

  Assisted by his wife, the farmer limped into John Woolman’s establishment, obviously in great pain, and requested Woolman to bleed the wound. The tailor of Mount Holly led them into the back where he had his office, equipment, and supplies, but after the treatment, his pain and distress seemed as great as ever.

  “I also wonder, if you do not mind, John,” said the farmer, grimacing in pain, “if I could prevail upon you to write my will.”

  “Of course,” replied Woolman. He immediately rose, got pen and ink and paper, then sat down again and began to take notes as the man specified the disposition of his property, which was not extensive.

  “I also have a young Negro slave girl,” he said. “Her name is Betsy Ferris. She is to become the property of my son William.”

  Woolman completed his notes, and, with a few instructions about his leg, the m
an returned home and took to his bed.

  Woolman called at the farm several days later. He was shown to the man’s bedside.

  “I am sorry thy troubles have not abated,” he said. “But I have prepared thy will and hope that will help set thy mind at ease.”

  “Ah, good… sit down,” said the farmer. “Read it to me, Woolman.”

  The tailor took a chair and proceeded to read the will he had drawn up. At length he came to the point where his conscience had required him to cease.

  “I am deeply sorry,” he said, “but further than this I have not written. In the matter of thy slave girl, I am unable as a matter of principle to write any legal instrument by which my fellow creatures are made slaves of any other. I know such was thy wish, but it is something I cannot do. I will charge thee nothing for what I have prepared.”

  “I have heard of your scruples over such matters, Woolman,” smiled the man. “I cannot say I am surprised. I know the story of old Alexander Hawkins’ will and your refusal to dictate in writing the disposition of his slaves to his son. The whole town knows of it.”

  A lengthy talk on the subject of slaves followed.

  “Well, Woolman,” said the man at last, “I cannot tell whether you are stubborn or a simpleton, but no one will accuse you of not being a man of conscience. And if old Alexander Hawkins can free his slaves and still count you his friend, I suppose I can too. So finalize the will as it stands, and I shall sign it. Along with it prepare a writ of release for Betsy. She shall be a free Negro and your conscience shall be at liberty, and I shall die having at least done one good turn from my sickbed.”*

  Betsy Ferris continued to work in the employ, now for pay, of her former master, who recovered from his injury. In the next twenty years, as Woolman’s influence grew throughout the Quaker community from Virginia to Boston, most Quakers eventually set their slaves free, such that in Burlington County hundreds of free Negroes lived and worked alongside their white neighbors.