Materializing Conscience: Embodiment, Speech, and the Experience of Sympathetic Identification

In 1769, John Woolman, fearing his own mortality, discovered that he was "exercised for the good of my fellow-creatures in the West Indies" (Woolman, "Journal" 155). Woolman had long been a notable and outspoken critic of slavery and the slave trade. His Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes had been published in two parts (1754 and 1762), he had been a prime mover behind the Society of Friends' growing efforts to purge themselves of the stain of slavery, and he had personally challenged slaveholders throughout the British North American colonies.¹ But now his concern for slaves raised the prospect of traveling to the heart of the British slave regime and in a ship that participated in the commerce of slavery.

This last fact gave Woolman especial pause. Earlier in his life, Woolman confessed, he had "retailed rum, sugar, and molasses, the fruits of the labour of slaves" without much worry "save only that the rum might be used in moderation." But later, "being further informed respecting the oppressions too generally exercised in these islands and thinking often on the degrees that there are in connections of interest and fellowship with the works of darkness," Woolman came to feel that he should not only withdraw from commerce with slavery but turn what profits he might have made to "promoting righteousness in the earth" (Woolman, "Journal" 156). Woolman worried that traveling on any West Indian vessel might prove unrighteous. As a potential compromise—and in a move that might give any commercial person real pause—Woolman proposed paying "more than [was] common for others to pay" for his transport (Woolman, "Journal" 158). He reasoned that the price of travel to the West Indies was artificially low—because of the oppression upon which it was based—and that consequently the only morally acceptable way to travel was not to benefit from this debasement. In the end, after much soul-searching as to God's will, he became convinced that he should not go at all.²

Woolman's dilemma thrust him into one of the oldest of Christian trials—how could one engage with this world without denying the world of spirit? Protestantism, of course, had done nothing to alleviate this trial. At least since Weber, scholars have recognized that the Protestant acknowledgment of the inextricable links between the secular and the sacred raised the question of the sinfulness of everyday life to new levels. But in Woolman's dilemma we see a new, even more painful torsion of the problem. For Woolman's impasse resulted from his desire to extend the new humanitarianism. His was not simply the enigma of how to be in the world but not of it, nor the quandary of the relationship between the inner and outer kingdoms. Instead, he confronted the riddle of whether he could do God's will and speak out against the powers of this world without that very effort making him a tool of sin.

Woolman's awareness of the complicated dangers of commercial entrapment was not new. From his early manhood Woolman had attempted to construct limits and boundaries around the seemingly boundless powers of capital. Finding that his abilities in merchandizing threatened to pull himfully within the exchange economy, Woolman withdrew into the seemingly safer realm of tailoring, while preaching throughout his life against the threats that dependence on commodities and the desire for wealth posed to the life of the spirit (Woolman, "Journal" 53–55, 129; "A Plea for the Poor," 250–52). Nor was his encounter with West Indian shipping his first recognition of the inadvertent collusion that reformers might have with the evils they opposed. During some of his trips to discourse with slaveholders in the south, Woolman had traveled on foot to indicate his solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, while insistently paying his hosts for the expenses that his visit might have entailed (Woolman, "Journal" 59–60, 145–48). The latter gesture he hoped would prevent them from passing on their added burdens to their slaves.

Indeed, for all of his obvious skill at business, Woolman...