Inwardness and Outward Concerns: A Study of John Woolman's Thought

INWARDNESS AND OUTWARD CONCERNS: A STUDY OF JOHN WOOLMAN'S THOUGHT By William A. Christian, Sr.* Many readers of the journal and essays of John Woolman have been impressed by the quality of his piety without doing justice to the acuteness of his thought. But Woolman's piety was by no means an unthinking devotion. To look for "the Relation of one Thing to another, and the necessary Tendency of each" (G352/M211)1 was intrinsic to his religion. The aim of this study is to point out certain themes in his thought which, if we take them together, illuminate the pattern of his life. Also the interrelations of these themes are interesting in themselves. Woolman was born in 1720 in west central New Jersey. His father was a moderately prosperous Quaker farmer and John was one of thirteen children. He went to school, worked on his father's farm, and enjoyed some social life with the young people of Mount Holly and with friends in nearby Philadelphia. When he was twenty he went into business as a tailor and dry goods merchant. When he was twenty-nine he married Sarah Ellis. They had two children, a son who died in infancy and a daughter who survived him. Meanwhile his business was a profitable one, so profitable in fact that when he was thirty-six he sold his shop, saying in his Journal, "though my natural inclination was towards merchandize, yet I believed Truth required me to live more free from outward cumbers." (G183/M53) He continued to work as a tailor, living on his farm and tending his orchard. He was in demand as a surveyor and as a writer of legal documents such as wills and deeds. He put in some time at schoolteaching and wrote a primer. And he continued making the journeys to visit scattered Friends and Friends' Meetings which fill up so much of the Journal. *Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Yale University. 1. 'G' is for Amelia M. Gummere, ed.: The Journal and Essays of John Woolman (New York, Macmillian, 1922), still the most complete edition of Woolman's writings, though it is out of print. 'M' is for Phillips P. Moulton , ed.: The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (New York, Oxford University Press 1971), which is based on a careful revaluation of the manuscripts. In quotations I follow Gummere except when there are substantial changes, other than punctuation, spelling and capitalization, in Moulton. See also Henry J. Cadbury: John Woolman in England. (London, Friends Historical Society, 1971). 88 INWARDNESS AND OUTWARD CONCERNS89 These journeys took him, usually with some Quaker companion, into the south and into New England as well as through New Jersey, and once into the forests of central Pennsylvania to visit the Indians. In the latter part of his life he made many of the journeys on foot. He crossed the ocean in 1772 to visit Friends' Meetings in England. At York he died of smallpox in the same year. When one reads his journal and essays and discovers the experiences which animate and clothe this skeleton of events, one comes upon something like a paradox. Here is a man who says, "I . . . was early convinced in my mind that true Religion consisted in an inward life," (G156/M28) a conviction which became a permanent component of his character. Yet throughout his life he was engaged in outward concerns, most of all with slavery but also with the causes of poverty and war. Here is the distinctive pattern of Woolman's life, a contrast of inwardness and action, a contrast which does not become a contradiction. His inward life of self-examination and prayer and his engagement in outward concerns were essentially and dynamically related, in much the same way as the poles in an electromagnetic field of force. That Woolman was convinced early in life of the inwardness of religion is not in itself very remarkable. He grew up in one of the more quietistic periods of Quaker piety. Among the books he owned and lent were the Imitation of Christ and devotional works by Jacob Boehme, John Everard, William Law and others, along with Quaker journals...