On John Woolman

Somewhat in favor of guilt

I recently read The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition. John Woolman was a Quaker mystic and early abolitionist. He spent much of his life traveling from Quaker meeting to Quaker meeting, urging people to oppose slavery. In part because of Woolman’s advocacy, the Quakers became the first religious organization in the United States to demand complete abolition.

John Woolman would probably be mad at me for writing a post about his life. He never thought his life mattered. In fact, his memoir, the Journal of John Woolman, barely mentions his wife and entirely leaves out his daughter—in spite of considerable historical evidence that he was a loving husband and father.

The only thing that mattered to John Woolman was God.

As a child, Woolman experienced a moment of moral awakening:

During a ramble toward a neighbor’s house, Woolman spots a robin sitting on her nest, and he alters his path and startles the bird. She flies off but circles, crying in fear for her young. Woolman tosses stones at the mother even though she poses no threat to him. The last of these strikes her dead....

“At first I was pleased with the exploit,” he writes, “but after a few minutes was seized with horror, as having in a sportive way killed an innocent creature while she was careful for her young.” Hitting the target pleased the boy emotionally; success stroked his ego. Then his conscience hit him. Sport hunting was contrary to Woolman’s values. The Quaker peace testimony taught him that killing is wrong...

[John Woolman continued:] “I beheld her lying dead and thought those young ones for which she was so careful must now perish for want of their dam to nourish them; and after some painful considerations on the subject, I climbed up the tree, took all the young birds and killed them, supposing that better than to leave them to pine away and die miserably, and believed in this case that Scripture proverb was fulfilled, ‘The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.’”…

Immediately after executing the innocent nestlings, Woolman felt remorse: “I then went on my errand, but for some hours could think of little else but the cruelties I had committed, and was much troubled.” Violence had begat violence, an insight that was precisely the origin of the Quaker peace testimony, as Woolman knew.

This anecdote epitomizes the two driving forces of John Woolman’s personality: deep compassion and the refusal to ever cut himself a moment of slack. You might say “it was just a bird”; you might say “come on, Woolman, what were you? Ten?” Woolman never thought like that. It was wrong to kill; he had killed; that was all there was to say about it.

When Woolman was a teenager, the general feeling among Quakers was that they were soft, self-indulgent, not like the strong and courageous Quakers of previous generations, unlikely to run off to Massachusetts to preach the Word if the Puritans decided once again to torture Quakers for their beliefs, etc. Woolman interpreted this literally. He spent his teenage years being like “I am depraved, I am evil, I have not once provoked anyone into whipping me to death, I don’t even want to be whipped to death.”

As a teenager, Woolman fell in with a bad crowd and committed some sins. What kind of sins? I don’t know. Sins. He's not telling us:

“I hastened toward destruction,” he writes. “While I meditate on the gulf toward which I travelled … I weep; mine eye runneth down with water.”

In actuality, Woolman’s corrupting friends were all... Quakers who happened to be somewhat less strict than he was. We have his friends' diaries and none of them remarked on any particular sins committed in this period. Biographers have speculated that Woolman was part of a book group and perhaps the great sin he was reproaching himself for was reading nonreligious books. He may also have been reproaching himself for swimming, skating, riding in sleighs, or drinking tea.

Woolman is so batshit about his teenage wrongdoing that many readers have speculated about the existence of different, non-Quaker friends who were doing all the sins. However, we have no historical evidence of him having other friends, and we have a fuckton of historical evidence of Woolman being extremely hard on himself about minor failings (or “failings”).

Most people who are Like That as teenagers grow out of it. Woolman didn’t. He once said something dumb in Weekly Meeting¹ and then spent three weeks in a severe depression about it. He never listened to nonreligious music, read fiction or newspapers, or went to plays. He once stormed down to a tavern to tell the tavern owner that celebrating Christmas was sinful.²

Woolman refused to pay taxes to support the French and Indian War, and so the government forced him to house two soldiers. An army captain said he was “obliged” to Woolman for housing the soldiers. At this minor, rote courtesy, Woolman freaked out. What if the captain thought that Woolman was housing the soldiers out of a sense of patriotism? That would be lying! Woolman immediately rode out to where the captain was staying to clarify that he was doing this against his will.

As he aged, Woolman became, frankly, a crank. He tried to get rid of any of his possessions that would cause someone else to want to steal from him. When traveling, he tried to convince the people he was staying with to put him up in less nice conditions. Woolman started to walk for his ministries rather than riding, because he didn't want to make extra work for the enslaved people who would care for his horses and he wanted to provide an example of humility for slaveowners.³ He refused to use silver and hated even touching silver money, because he thought it would contaminate him with the horrors of the Spanish silver mines. He attempted to overpay his childhood friends—the same ones who lured him into the Dread Sin of Sledding—for a berth on a ship, because it was cross-subsidized by the Triangular Trade.

You might think, from this description, that Woolman was preachy, judgmental, stuck-up, and generally unpleasant to be around. He wasn’t. We have a lot of letters that people wrote to each other about John Woolman—often very critical letters—but they’re consistent that he was kind, sympathetic, and earnest. He never seemed to judge anyone he knew, except by implication when he was being very down on himself Possibly For Being Part Of A Book Group. Letters criticized him for being weird (“singular”, one of the worst insults among 17th century Quakers).⁴

But if Woolman were just an 18th century neurotic, no one would remember him. We care about him because of his attitude about slavery.

When Woolman was 21, his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. Woolman knew it was wrong. But his employer told him to and he was scared of being fired. Both Woolman’s employer and the purchaser were Quakers themselves, so surely if they were okay with it it was okay. Woolman told both his master and the purchaser that he thought that Christians shouldn't own enslaved people, but he wrote the bill.

After he wrote the bill of sale Woolman lost his inner peace and never really recovered it. He spent the rest of his life struggling with guilt and self-hatred. He saw himself as selfish and morally deficient.

Woolman’s guilt was compounded later in his life. At the time, Pennsylvania law required that anyone who manumitted enslaved people financially support the freedpeople if they were in poverty. As a result, many people freed their young slaves and then made them indentured servants until they were 30, when presumably the freedpeople would be able to support themselves. White orphans, conversely, were only indentured until 21. As one of two executors of a fellow Quaker’s estate, Woolman followed the custom about the deceased Quaker's young male slave.

The man Woolman enslaved attended Meeting with Woolman every week. Woolman wrote about the guilt that wracked him whenever he glanced over at the man, knowing his actions caused the man to be enslaved. Woolman eventually decided that he would pay for four and a half years of the man's labor, since he was half responsible. But even that didn’t make Woolman forgive himself.

In the Journal he implies that sale of the indenture occurred “in the time of my youth” before he was a responsible adult with fully formed views of racial justice. Leaving the story out of its chronological place and misstating when it actually happened reveal more than a forthright inclusion would. We can only glimpse the guilt that continued to haunt his dreams.

Woolman worked enough to support himself, but the primary project of his life was ending slavery. He wrote pamphlet after pamphlet making the case that slavery was morally wrong and unbiblical. He traveled across America making speeches to Quaker Meetings urging them to oppose slavery. He talked individually with slaveowners, both Quaker and not, which many people criticized him for; it was “singular”, and singular was not okay.

Sometimes Woolman’s actions worked? For example, Woolman had a conversation with someone about their will and convinced them to free all the people they’d enslaved. Twice.

The first time occurred when a Quaker asked Woolman to write his will. Woolman refused, saying:

I believe, under some certain circumstances keep him in his family as a servant on no other motives than the Negro’s good; but man, as man, knows not what shall be after him, nor hath he any assurance that his children will attain to that perfection in wisdom and goodness necessary in every absolute governor. Hence it is clear to me that I ought not to be the scribe where wills are drawn in which some children are made absolute masters over others during life.

The man was flattered and found another scribe. A few years later, he asked for Woolman to write his will again, explaining that his son didn't drink anymore, so he had dealt with Woolman's objection. Woolman explained that actually he objected to leaving enslaved people to your heirs in full generality. A few days later, the man returned to ask Woolman to rewrite the will with a clause that freed all the slaves.

The second time, Woolman's dying neighbor asked him to write his will. Woolman wrote all of it except the clause about the person the neighbor enslaved. He explained that the man, so the man could pay for someone else to write the clause about the slave. The man talked with Woolman and decided to free his slave instead.

It is difficult to overstate how much John Woolman hated doing anti-slavery activism. For the last decade of his life, in which he did most of his anti-slavery activities, he was clearly severely depressed. The biographer writes:

Woolman’s correspondence during that trip has an air of finality: “Farewell my dear friend,” he concludes one letter, and all the others dwell on the imminence of death. To feel the hand of mortality upon him was understandable, given the diseased environment he traveled in, but the gloom came from within him and was not just a reflection of external circumstances: “My life from one minute to another is sustained by Him.” He felt himself clinging to the world by a thread, as a loose button hangs from a coat. Imagining his family to be “lonesome” in his absence, he expressed his own pain of isolation more than he usually did.

He struggled to accept that God “assigned” him an “unpleasant” task that needed to be done. It was the fate of the prophet to suffer such isolation, and Woolman identified with Habakkuk’s pain: “I hear, and I tremble within; my lips quiver at the sound.” Woolman had “many cogitations” similar to Habakkuk’s and “was sorely distressed.

Partially, he hated the process of traveling: the harshness of life on the road; being away from his family; the risk of bringing home smallpox, which terrified him.⁵

But mostly it was the task being asked of Woolman that filled him with grief. Woolman was naturally "gentle, self-deprecating, and humble in his address", but he felt called to harshly condemn slaveowning Quakers. All he wanted was to be able to have friendly conversations with people who were nice to him. But instead, he felt, God had called him to be an Old Testament prophet, thundering about God’s judgment and the need for repentance.

Woolman felt it was unethical to benefit from the service of enslaved people, so he paid enslaved people for their work. To avoid causing embarrassment, he spoke to the slaveowner in private, gave them silver coins of small denominations, and encouraged them to distribute the coins among the enslaved people as they thought was just. When he felt the slaveowner would just keep the money, he paid the enslaved people individually himself. It was embarrassing to do this, and it provoked conflicts with the people he stayed with, but he felt like he had to.

Woolman craved approval from other Quakers. But even Quakers personally opposed to slavery often thought that Woolman was making too big a deal about it. There were other important issues. Woolman should chill. His singleminded focus on ending slavery was singular, and being singular was prideful. Isn’t the real sin how different Woolman’s abolitionism⁶ made him from everyone else?

Sometimes he persuaded individual people to free their slaves, but successes were few and far between. Mostly, he gave speeches and wrote pamphlets as eloquently as he could, and then his audience went “huh, food for thought” and went home and beat the people they’d enslaved. Nothing he did had any discernible effect. Sometimes he grew frustrated and angry and lashed out at individual slaveowners; then he felt more guilt for neglecting Christian compassion and love for enemies.

He continually struggled with the temptation to believe that he was personally responsible for the end of slavery, and that every moment that anyone spent enslaved was his fault. At one point, this resulted in one of the most beautiful moments in Woolman’s Journal:

[Woolman wrote:] “I was silent during the meeting for worship, and when business came on, my mind was exercised concerning the poor slaves, but did not feel my way clear to speak. And in this condition I was bowed in spirit before the Lord and with tears and inward supplications besought him to so open my understanding that I might know his will concerning me, and at length my mind was settled in silence.”

What happened next was extraordinary. A Friend rose in one Meeting for Worship that Woolman attended to indict himself and others for not educating their slaves. Another stood to express concern about the slaves’ religious instruction. In short, the spirit rose from the Meeting without a word from Woolman. The hand of God worked with or without him. It was a humbling experience for which he was grateful.

But even after this experience, Woolman spent much of his time feeling like a failure. If he were better, if he followed God’s will more closely, if he were kinder and more persuasive and more self-sacrificing, then maybe someone would have lived free who now would die a slave, because Woolman wasn’t good enough.

Woolman won. In 1776, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Woolman’s home meeting, banned Quakers from owning slaves. In 1780, Pennsylvania would become the very first polity in the history of the world to completely ban slavery. Many of the greatest abolitionist leaders of the 19th century were convinced by someone who was convinced by John Woolman.

But he would never know about his victory. He died in 1772, with no comfort other than his hope that God would make all things work out for the best.

When I’ve talked to my friends about John Woolman, a common reaction is “wow, this man had scrupulosity issues like whoa.”

He did. But I feel the story is more complex than that.

Much of Woolman’s behavior that makes a modern reader go “that sounds like scrupulosity”—refusing to read novels or watch plays or listen to secular music, calling out tavernkeepers for celebrating Christmas—was common and normative in his cultural context. All Quakers thought it was a sin to celebrate holidays, read fiction, wear fashionable clothes, drink alcohol, and so on. I think 18th century Quaker norms about those subjects are bad,⁷ but I don’t think it’s an example of distorted thoughts to try to do what everyone around you says is moral to do. Nor do we have any evidence of Woolman experiencing any harm related to following the moral strictures of his culture.

No, the thing that hurt Woolman—clearly, unambiguously, uncontrovertibly—was his opposition to slavery.

From one perspective, Woolman was too hard on himself about his relatively tangential connection to slavery. From another perspective, he is one of a tiny number of people in the eighteenth century who has a remotely reasonable response to causing a person to be in bondage when they could have been free. Everyone else flinched away from the scale of the suffering they caused; Woolman looked at it straight. Everyone else thought of slaves as property; Woolman alone understood they were people.

Some people’s high moral standards might result in unproductive self-flagellation and the refusal to take actions because they might do something wrong. But Woolman derived strength and determination from his high moral standards. When he failed, he regretted his actions and did his best to change them. At night he might beg God to fucking call someone else, but the next morning he picked up his walking stick and kept going.

And the thing he was doing mattered. Quaker abolitionism wasn’t inevitable; it was the result of hard work by specific people, of whom Woolman was one of the most prominent. If Woolman were less hard on himself, many hundreds if not thousands of free people would instead have been own things that could beaten or raped or murdered with as little consequence as I experience from breaking a laptop.

Woolman’s biographer describes Woolman’s moral views:

By small steps, by a gentle slope, good people decline from reading the Bible to reading Paradise Lost, to swimming, to buying ice skates manufactured under harsh working conditions, to becoming attached to horses and sleighs, to owning fine clothes in great quantities, dining at expensive restaurants, living in houses larger than they need, and wasting resources that others might better use, all of which we can rationalize in terms of the acceptable moral standards of other good people around us who live in much the same way.

Going sleigh-riding is not wrong, and even other Quakers—ascetic as they were—disagreed with the idea that sleigh-riding is sinful. But Woolman’s mistake here is natural. Of course Woolman didn’t understand the creation of wealth through trade, and instead thought there was a fixed pile of Stuff and if one person has more Stuff then everyone else has less. He died four years before Wealth of Nations came out.

It’s bad to have moral standards that hurt people (and Woolman’s opposition to vaccination is a stain on his legacy). But it’s, well, it’s an unreasonably high moral standard—perhaps even scrupulous—to expect that, for someone to rightly exercise independent moral judgment, every moral belief they come to has to be correct. Woolman reasoned for himself and followed his conscience and concluded that sleigh-riding was wrong, which is bad, because he could have had fun in sleighs. If Woolman had followed the morality his culture considered proportionate and healthy and well-adjusted, he would have believed it was okay to own people. That’s worse!

And about that: I made gentle fun of Woolman for his guilt about reading books and going sledding with his childhood friends. But all of his childhood friends grew up to own or trade slaves.

Of course he’s skeptical of nice food and nice clothes, sleighs and ice skates. His friends, good people, people he loved, liked these seemingly innocent pleasures—and so to pay for them, they bought people who were violently kidnapped away from their families and carried to a foreign land, forced them to work from dawn to dusk, underfed them and dressed them in rags, sold their children away from them, tortured them, and supported laws that ensured that all this would continue forever.

From Woolman’s point of view, to oppose slavery, you have to hate torturing innocent people more than you like ice skating. It turns out this is very hard and people mostly don’t.

A thing I think about a lot is cognitive strategies. You might think “you should just make good decisions and not bad ones.” But no one can actually do that. You have an approach to decision-making. Sometimes it works out well for you; sometimes it works out badly; hopefully the former more often than the latter. But the successes and the failures are of a piece. You wouldn’t succeed in the ways you succeed if you didn’t fail in the ways you failed.

By Katy Doughty.

I don’t think you get John Woolman without the scrupulosity. If someone is the kind of person who sacrifices money, time with his family, approval from his community, his health—in order to do a thankless, painful task that goes against all of his instincts for how to interact with other people, with no sign of success—

—a task that, if it advanced abolition only in Pennsylvania by even a single year, prevented nearly 7,000 years of enslavement, and by any reasonable estimate prevented thousands or tens of thousands more—

Well, someone like that is going to be extra about the non-celebration of Christmas.

It is bad to replace your independent moral judgment with the judgment of those around you. It is bad to feel guilt in a way that makes you weaker and more self-centered and less able to help those in need. It is bad to judge other people for not living up to the standards you set for yourself. And it’s bad to direct your effort into a useless or counterproductive direction; the most important cognitive strategy of all is actually being right.

But it is not bad to have high standards for your own behavior. It is not bad to feel guilty when you don’t live up to your standards. It is not bad to make normal human mistakes about what’s wrong and what isn’t. It is not bad to do things that you think are right and that inconvenience people or make them think you’re really weird or making a big deal about nothing. It is not bad to do things that make you less happy, or even miserable, if you’ve judged that the tradeoff is worth it.

It’s easy agree with these statements when you’re talking about abolitionists, because almost no one in the Anglosphere owns slaves, so high moral standards about slavery don’t cost very much. But when it comes to the moral issues of our own day, it’s much less popular to exercise independent moral judgment, to be singular, to hate torture more than you like ice skating.

I’m not saying that you should try to be John Woolman; I’m certainly not. But I am trying, as best I can, to take a few more steps towards exercising the cognitive strategies Woolman executed: deep compassion and the refusal to cut myself slack.

1. At the time, Quaker Sunday services (called “Weekly Meetings”) were conducted in silence. Occasionally a person would rise to speak at the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

2. The tavern owner seems to have been amused.

3. Wikipedia says his motivation was opposition to animal cruelty but Woolman’s biographer says that that’s a common misconception.

4. In their defense, because of an unusual interpretation of Revelations, he spent much of his life refusing to wear clothes that weren’t bleached pure white.

5. Woolman was opposed to vaccination because he believed people should humbly submit to God’s will that they die of smallpox, which goes to show that everyone is wrong about something.

6. And, to be fair, his refusal to wear clothes that weren’t dyed white.

7. Well, okay, maybe they’re right about alcohol.