A biography of the famous eighteenth-century Quaker whose abolitionist fervor and spiritual practice made him a model for generations of Americans John Woolman (1720–72) was perhaps the most significant American of his age, though he was not a famous politician, general, or man of letters, and never held public office. A humble Quaker tailor in New Jersey, he became a prophetic voice for the entire Anglo-American world when he denounced the evils of slavery in Quaker meetings, then in essays and his Journal, first published in 1774. In this illuminating new biography, Thomas P. Slaughter goes behind those famous texts to locate the sources of Woolman's political and spiritual power. Slaughter's penetrating work shows how this plainspoken mystic transformed himself into a prophetic, unforgettable figure. Devoting himself to extremes of self-purification—dressing only in white, refusing to ride horses or in horse-drawn carriages—Woolman might briefly puzzle people; but his preaching against slavery, rum, tea, silver, forced labor, war taxes, and rampant consumerism was infused with a benign confidence that ordinary people could achieve spiritual perfection, and this goodness gave his message persuasive power and enduring influence. Placing Woolman in the full context of his times, Slaughter paints the portrait of a hero—and not just for the Quakers, social reformers, labor organizers, socialists, and peace advocates who have long admired him. He was an extraordinary original, an American for the ages.
“The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition.” The Christian Century 125, no. 18 (2008): 40. Plank, Geoffrey. John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire.
... 2012); B. Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657–1751 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); T. Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (New York, ...
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That year Loring Dewey, an agent of the ACS stationed in New York City, contacted the president of Haiti, Jean-Pierre Boyer, about the possibility of sending free persons of color to the independent black nation.
Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York: 1980), 1–5. ... Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (New York: 1956), 334–335. 2. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Massachusetts ...
A week before Cruikshank published “The Gradual Abolition of the Slave Trade,” he published a caricature of the Kimber case, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade.” For a discussion of Kimber and of the Cruikshank satire, see Brycchan Carey ...
4 Proprietary, Supply, and State Tax Lists of the City and County of Philadelphia for the Years 1769, 1774, and 1779, ed. William H. Egle (Philadelphia, PA, 1897), pp. 158, 502. Anthony in both lists was evaluated at ...
But as historian Geoffrey Plank recounts, this tailor, hog producer, shopkeeper, schoolteacher, and prominent Quaker minister was very much enmeshed in his local community in colonial New Jersey and was alert as well to events throughout ...
Repr. in The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, 238–272. in these our possessions” (255). This led Woolman to assert flatly: ... Slaughter, Thomas P. The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman: Apostle of Abolition (New York, 2009).