John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire by Geoffrey Plank (review)

Readers who enjoyed Geoffrey Plank's earlier articles on John Woolman will welcome this important study. Plank's particular angle of interest is solidly rooting Woolman's ideas in the region of Mt. Holly, New Jersey, and amid the secular currents of the eighteenth century. His focus is on Woolman's "detailed and sweeping critique of the material culture and economy of the British Empire."

The book's greatest strength is its thorough anchoring of John Woolman's Journal and essays in historical context, making productive use of many kinds of resources: Samuel Smith's 1765 History of Nova Caesarea, Abner Woolman's unpublished journal, Uriah Woolman's bills of lading, census reports, meeting minutes, epistles and letters of John Woolman and his contemporaries, and much more. What emerges is a densely textured narrative that is an aesthetically delightful interweaving of these various sources.

Plank's portrait of the relationship between John Woolman and Henry Paxson may serve as an example. In matters of business, the two served as co-executors of the estate of wealthy slave-holding Quaker Thomas Shinn. Shinn's will stipulated that one of these enslaved persons was to be freed nine years later than the typical indentured servant, an injustice for which Woolman later sought to make reparations and, according to Plank, to shame Paxson into doing the same. In the non-commercial sphere, Paxson and Woolman served together on committees to enforce religious discipline. More personally, their close friendship is reflected in Paxson's sitting at Woolman's bedside during his near-terminal case of pleurisy of 1770. Only a study of multiple sources could reveal all the dimensions of this relationship. Juxtaposing other materials, Plank suggests links between the iron works in Mt. Holly, which used free and enslaved labor, and Woolman's evolving response to slavery, and between Woolman's withdrawal from his successful venture in the pork trade and the fact that so much of New Jersey pork was exported to the Caribbeans, where slaveholding was so prevalent.

One layer of the text is the presentation of John Woolman as an inhabitant of the British Empire. Frederick Tolles spoke of Quakers as an Atlantic community; to this legacy Plank adds a contemporary understanding of empire and explores how Woolman was a complex ethical thinker who both benefited from some features of that empire, even shared some of its assumptions, and yet offered a thoroughly alternative vision of the ethical life. Plank explores the development of Woolman's thinking on slavery, on economics, and on methods of protest and social change and then links these ethical concerns to political ideals and realities of the eighteenth century.

Particularly compelling is Plank's account of Lenape spiritual leader Papun-hank whom he notes as a much more renowned figure at the time than Wool-man. The Moravian-Quaker competition to claim him as one of their own is well reported, though direct use of David Zeisberger's Diarium might have led to even more insight.

Plank can also spin a good yarn, as when he recounts the tale of New Jersey Quaker Samuel Busby who enlisted as a privateer, retiring from the life of a pirate of the Caribbean only after being wounded in a failed attempt to loot and pillage the harbor of Saint Vincent. Woolman and Paxson were assigned to discipline the unrepentant Busby, seeking to persuade him to see the error of his ways. After some unfruitful labors, Woolman was willing to continue the process, but Burlington Monthly Meeting disowned Busby while Woolman was away visiting Rhode Island in his antislavery ministry.

One risk of making as many creative connections as Plank suggests is that not all of them are equally persuasive. Not all readers may agree that Woolman's adolescent trials can be reduced largely to boredom with husbandry, or that Woolman's admonition to...