Saints' Lives

Autobiographies are mixed blessings for biographers because autobiographers and biographers usually have very different motives for writing. Having designs on their readers, autobiographers accidentally or intentionally remember, forget, distort, and invent details of their lives to try to control how and why they will be remembered. The challenge for the biographer is much greater if his or her subject's autobiography is a spiritual one.

John Woolman (1720-72) is a particularly challenging subject because his posthumously published Journal (Philadelphia, 1774) is far more concerned with the state of his soul and the evolution of his relationship to God than with external events and his dealings in the world beyond those he saw as having moral significance. Woolman was considered saintly even during his lifetime, and he saw himself as a prophet. Further complicating the obstacles faced by Woolman's biographer is the fact that the Quaker press vetted his writings, including the Journal, before publishing them. Much like a critic dealing with an as-told-to slave narrative, Woolman's biographer must try to find his voice in the texts we have. Thomas P. Slaughter notes in his thoughtful study The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition that "in retrospect, I see that I initially believed Woolman's Journal was the key to understanding him. I now consider it the lock for which I needed keys" (429). Not surprisingly in light of all the challenges the life of Woolman presents, Slaughter's book is the "first full-scale biography in more than half a century" (12).

The "keys" that Slaughter successfully tries on the "lock" of Woolman's Journal are as much literary as they are historical. Slaughter lucidly presents a great deal of relevant historical and intellectual context to support what is essentially a very perceptive, extended exegetical study of the Journal, through which he seeks to recover Woolman's motives. Biographers and their readers are normally uncomfortable and often frustrated by speculations and suppositions. Slaughter, however, is far too scrupulous to assert as fact what the available evidence does not allow him to deem to be so. The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman is consequently replete with "perhaps," "possibly," "probably," "likely," and other such qualifications. What keeps this book from ever dissatisfying the reader is his or her conviction that Slaughter has earned his speculations because he is aware of the line between hard and soft evidence.

Slaughter's Woolman seems like an introspective eighteenth-century version of an Old Testament prophet seeking to lead his listeners and readers by exhortation and example. Slaughter acknowledges that Woolman can be a bit obsessive about the state of his soul and his fear of becoming self-satisfied. His concern with his inner life and that of others can give the impression of excessive coolness in his domestic relationships. But one never doubts that he was a man devoted to trying to do what was right, and Slaughter demonstrates that Woolman increasingly saw the abolition of slavery as the primary mission of his life. He was morally well ahead of his time in seeing the role slavery played in the commercial revolution of the time and the spiritually corrupting effects of materialism. When only a few of his contemporaries were reaching the point of opposing the transatlantic slave trade, Woolman recognized that the institution of slavery itself was the fundamental moral problem of his day. Fittingly, on the large fold-out map that illustrates volume 1 of Thomas Clarkson's History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (London, 1808) the widest single stream flowing into the river of abolition is labeled "John Woolman."

Clarkson represents Anthony Benezet (1713-84) by a much narrower and shorter stream than Woolman on his map. In Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, Maurice Jackson makes...