Notes
N o t e s introduction 1. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Quaker Slaveholding, and How It Was Abolished,” National Era, April 8, 1847, 1:14, 2; see also April 15, 22, 1847, 1:15, 2, 1:16, 3. 2. John Woolman, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes Recommended to the Professors of Christianity of Every Denomination (Philadelphia, 1754). 3. An Epistle of Caution and Advice concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves (Philadelphia , 1754). 4. For an overview of the literature on Woolman, see the Epilogue. 5. Jean R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). While highlighting the variety of Quakers who participated in the debate over slavery in the eighteenth century, Soderlund and Nash also emphasize Quaker resistance to abolition, and their work provides an important corrective to earlier, more celebratory works such as Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950). 6. Whittier also promised Garrison that he would remind the Quakers of Anthony Benezet’s antislavery work, but in subsequent years he would cite Woolman’s labors much more emphatically. Whittier to William Lloyd Garrison, November 12, 1833, in John B. Pickard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 1:133. For the start of his campaign see Whittier (“A Friend”) “To the Members of the Society of Friends,” April 16, 1834, in Pickard, ed., Letters, 1:148. On Whittier’s becoming an abolitionist see Charles A. Jarvis, “Admission to Abolitionism: The Case of John Greenleaf Whittier,” Journal of the Early Republic 4 (1984): 161–76. Although most nineteenth-century American Quakers celebrated Woolman ’s holiness, they were not equally active in their opposition to slavery. See Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences (Central Falls, R.I.: Freeman, 1891); Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America, 133–66; Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820–1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) provides a good introduction to the divisions within the American Society of Friends in the nineteenth century. 238 Notes to Pages 3–5 7. John Greenleaf Whittier, ed., The Journal of John Woolman (Boston: Osgood, 1872), 2, 31. 8. Andrew Smellie’s introduction to John Woolman, The Journal of John Woolman (London, 1902, reprint of 1898 edition), xiv. Smellie prefaced his assessment with an elaborate qualifier. Individually or in groups, abolitionists had been compared to Napoleon before . See Louis Taylor Merrill, “The English Campaign for Abolition of the Slave Trade,” Journal of Negro History 30 (1945): 382–99, 397; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital : Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 7–8. 9. Rosemary Moore, The Light of Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) provides a good introduction to the founding principles of early modern Quakerism. See also Richard Bauman , Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence Among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For Quaker belief and practice in America, see Meredith Baldwin Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Carla Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); J. William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973). Rebecca Larsen, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Knopf, 1999); and Carla Gerona, Night Journeys: The Power of Dreams in Transatlantic Quaker Culture (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2004) are important works that span the ocean. 10. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008). I have several detailed disagreements with Slaughter’s work; for those I refer the reader to Chapter 2 nn19, 93, Chapter 4 n33, Chapter 5 nn42, 54, Chapter 8 nn20, 42, 77, Epilogue nn9, 50. See also my review in Christian Century, September 9, 2008, 42–44. 11. See Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748...
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