that time, and from now on he was dedicated to the cause of abolition. A momentary backward glance at what had been earlier attempted will not here be amiss.

Slavery, for commercial reasons, was disappearing from Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century, but it flourished greatly in other parts of England's dominions, and under the protection of the British flag. England had been a slave-owning power since Sir John Hawkins had interested Queen Elizabeth in the great profits of the trade; many followed her example, and the Treaty of Utrecht gave a fresh impulse. The Quakers from the beginning had been implicated as owners, and by many, perhaps most of them, the institution had not been regarded in its true light. The ancient Hebrew slave did not serve in hereditary bondage, but went free every fifty years, being treated in the interval much like his master's sons and daughters. A Roman slave who showed unusual talent was well educated and generally set free, and some of the most illustrious poets, statesmen and warriors of Rome were freedmen.

The African, on the contrary, was doomed to perpetual bondage. The negro in America was the product of foreign importation, combined with a most vicious system of domestic breeding, and was totally deprived by law in many portions of the colonies, of any literary, moral, or religious instruction. Soon after the settlement of Pennsylvania, slavery was introduced into the West Indies, and the Quakers were the more ready to condone it under the conditions of a scarcity of labor in the new province. The Indian was too wild to settle down to domestic service, as was at first fondly hoped, and the black, more tractable and adaptable physically, was substituted.

The protests of "our dear friend and Governor, William Penn," against the institution, caused Philadelphia Monthly Meeting in 1700 to appoint a special meeting to be held at intervals for the negro slaves. Penn urged "that Friends be very careful in discharging a good conscience towards them in all respects, but more especially for the good of their souls." Two bills were introduced by him in the Assembly: one, "for regulating negroes in their morals and marriages"; the other, "for regulating negroes in their trials and punishment." The former was defeated. A later bill, "To prevent the Importation of Negroes

and Indians into the Province," was passed by the Legislature, but immediately repealed in England by an Order in Council. Until the year 1770 almost every effort to ameliorate by law the condition of the negroes was frustrated in Parliament. The Quakers were not often importers, but in many instances they were slave-owners on a large scale, although by the period at which Woolman wrote his tract, the practice was decreasing among them. Puritan Massachusetts had early raised her voice against the iniquity, but most of the other Colonies saw too much profit in the trade to abolish it by any legal measure.

1

Like voices crying in the wilderness, single protests at long intervals had been raised in the American colonies. The appeal of the Germantown Friends to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1688, the first corporate effort of Quakerism in this direction, is well known. George Keith followed in 1693, with his "Exhortation and Caution to Friends concerning Buying and Keeping of Negroes, &c." In 1712 Nantucket meeting made a minute that "it is not agreeable to Truth for Friends to purchase slaves and keep them term of life." Five years later New England Friends recommended "that Merchants do write their Correspondents in y Islands and elsewhere, to discourage their sending any more (negroes), in order to be sold by any friends here."2 Philadelphia Friends thought differently, for at the same time, in 1717, one of their meetings made a record condemning "the paper by John Farmar directed to this Meeting against Slaveholding, the Casting of Lotts, &c." He was dealt with "for disorderly practices in sending and Publishing papers tending to Division."

1 In 1645 Massachusetts prohibited buying or selling slaves except when prisoners of war, or when sentenced by a Court. Even here the "Law of Moses" was enjoined. In 1713 a heavy duty was imposed. In studying the attitude of the Quakers toward the slave question, it is interesting to note that there was a time when the Quakers themselves had been slaves on the coast of Africa. In common with all prisoners taken in the seventeenth century by the Algerine pirates, certain Quakers were for years held in slavery in the Barbary States. In 1679 the London Meeting took action for relief. (Sam'l Tuke, 1848, "Account of the Slavery of Friends in the Barbary States, towards the Close of the 17th Century.")

MS. Records of N. E. Y. M. 4mo. 14, 1717. Vol. I, pp. 97, 98, 188. This action was referred to in 1744, when New England, at the instance of Philadelphia, asked all the subordinate meetings to discourage "buying slaves, even when imported."

Quarterly Meeting of Phila. for 3mo. 12, 1717. The original paper, signed by Sam'l Preston, Clerk, is in the Monthly Meeting papers of Burlington, N. J., at Friends' Library, Phila.

William Burling's "Address to the Elders of the Church" came out in 1719, and was probably in response to the agitation caused by the unwise methods used in a good cause by John Farmar and William Sotheby. In 1729 Ralph Sandiford's "Mystery of Iniquity, in a Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times," preceded "The Testimony against the Anti-Christian Practice of Making Slaves of Men," published by Elihu Coleman in Nantucket in 1733.1 Benjamin Lay's "Treatise on Slave-Keeping" appeared in 1737, containing also a republication of part of Burling's tract. A very great influence was exerted by George Whitefield in 1739, who addressed a letter from Georgia to "the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina" on the cruelties practiced by many slave-owners.2

In the colony of Virginia it was long against the law to manumit a slave. Friends found it difficult to free them, and vainly endeavored to get the law repealed. Far from the supply of. slaves being exhausted or limited in South Carolina, when that colony in 1756, proposed to curtail the number imported, the British government forced her to remit the duty on imported negroes, "lest the legitimate business of English merchants and shippers be interfered with!" 3

The importance of the Essay which had been written by John Woolman upon this vital subject was duly appreciated by his father. When Samuel Woolman 11 lay upon his death-bed, in the summer of 1750, he urged his son to submit the manuscript to the publication committee of the Friends that it might be printed. His advice was eventually taken, but four more years elapsed before the essay appeared in 1754. In that year also the Yearly Meeting of Philadelphia, held at Burlington, published “An Epistle of Caution and Advice concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves." A rare copy of this little known epistle still

1 Coleman's original manuscript is now in possession of the Nantucket Hist. Soc. It is dated "29th of ye 11mo. 1729-30." The first printed copy bears the above date of 1733.

2 Given entire in Clarkson's "History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade," Vol. I P. 149. Dr. Birkbeck Hill draws attention to Dr. Johnson's hatred of slavery, and says "Whilst the Quakers were almost the pioneers in the anti-slavery cause, he lifted up his voice against it. So early as 1740, when Washington was but a child of eight, he had maintained "the natural right of the negro to liberty and independence." (Boswell's Johnson, II. 478.) Works of Dr. Johnson, Ed. by Birkbeck Hill. VI. P. 313.)

Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel: "Charleston: the Place and the People," p. 145.

1

exists. The author is either John Woolman, or Anthony Benezet. It is quoted entire in Clarkson's "History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade." 2

In these days, when, happily, slavery is a dead issue, it is hard to appreciate the grave importance which attached to the appearance of Woolman's pamphlet. People of any standing who did not own slaves were an exception, and at the largest import markets, as Philadelphia, New York and Newport, Quakers were prominent merchants. New Jersey was a large slave-holding colony in Woolman's day, and the slave-market was standing in Perth Amboy half a century after his death. At Kaighn's Point, or Cooper's Ferry, where is now Camden, New Jersey, sales were regularly advertised in the newspapers. Thus, for instance, the "Pennsylvania Journal" for May 27, 1762, is typical of the entire period: "Just imported from the River Gambia in the Schooner Sally, Bernard Badger, Master, and to be sold at the Upper Ferry (called Benjamin Cooper's Ferry), opposite to this City, a parcel of likely Men and Women Slaves, with some Boys and Girls of different Ages. Attendance will be given from the hours of nine to twelve o'clock in the Morning, and from three to six in the Afternoon, by W. Coxe, S. Oldman, & Company. N.B. It is generally allowed that the Gambia Slaves are much more robust and tractable than any other slaves from the Coast of Guinea, and more Capable of undergoing the Severity of the Winter Seasons in the North-American Colonies, which occasions their being Vastly more esteemed and coveted in this Province and those to the Northward, than any other Slaves whatsoever." "A parcel of Choice, likely Young Slaves" was sold off at the same place three months later.

Anthony Benezet wrote, in 1762,3 "Those Negroes that were brought last year up the River and sold on the Jersey Shore opposite this City (Philadelphia) were probably of the Fully (Fuli) Nation, as the vessel came from the River Senegal."

In the Athenæum Library, Nantucket, Mass. 2 Vol. I, p. 113. The New Jersey Assembly in 1769 enacted a law imposing a duty of £15 on every imported slave in the Province. (Allinson's Laws, p. 315.)

A. Benezet. "Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes." P. 75 note. Ed. 1762. A conservative estimate places the number of slaves brought from Africa between 1676 and 1776 at three million, and a quarter of a million more died on the way across the Atlantic. (J. P. Wickersham, “Education in Pennsylvania," p. 248.)

At this very time, however, even George Whitefield dared not maintain that in the South slavery was not a necessity. For the youthful Quaker, therefore, boldly to attempt to persuade the prominent legislators and merchants of his day that slavery was not only wrong in principle, but was an economic mistake as well, demanded great courage. Yet when Woolman made his first southern tour in 1746, the injustice and cruelty inflicted on the negroes were, as a rule, less than in later years, when the planters of the South perceived the growth of the Abolition sentiment. A patriarchal system of protection was the rule on many plantations, although combined with negligent methods and much economic waste. An important fact in this connection has been pointed out by an eminent writer1 in a recent volume containing a fine appreciation of Woolman. The Anti-slavery movement was begun and fairly under way before the great industrial revolution was fully developed. Had modern inventions and slave trusts been combined in one great system of industry and manufacture, what power could ever have reformed the evil? What would have happened to the world had Woolman withheld his voice, and choked the utterance of his first feelings of repulsion at finding his fellowmen in bondage?

Between the writing and the publication of this essay, Woolman made five tours through the region about New York and Long Island, and to New England as far as Nantucket, with the plea for the negro as his chief message. Moreover, the year in which he wrote his essay, 1746, saw the importation of slaves into New York reach its climax, with a total of eight thousand nine hundred and forty-one souls. Woolman was now in the prime of early manhood and devoting himself to the work to which he felt called. In this interval also came his settlement in business, and his marriage.

In preparation for this Woolman in 1747 made two purchases of property. On April 4th, he bought of John Ogborn a brick house and lot of land on Mill street, Mount Holly. This house is still standing, numbered 47. Its appearance was greatly altered

1 George Macaulay Trevelyan. "Clio, and Other Essays": on "John Woolman." In contrast, as this was written, a Pan-African Congress was called to meet in Paris "with the declared purpose of securing the protection of the natives of Africa and the people of African descent in other countries," including Central America, Liberia, and Abyssinia, with the representation of a negro population of 157,000,000.