American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Shortly after Penn’s arrival, the elected assembly of Pennsylvania met at once and passed what was called the “Great Law of Pennsylvania,” which established that Pennsylvania was to be a Christian state built on Quaker ideals.

  William Penn brought Christian values into every aspect of his governance of the colony. One of his first acts was to befriend and make treaties with the Indians of his territory. A great conference was arranged with the Indians of the Delaware valley, at which Penn accorded their leaders every respect. Out of the conference came what is called the Great Treaty, one of the notable high points in European and Indian relations, a treaty which was honored for half a century and for which Penn became esteemed and loved by all the Indian tribes of the region. Over the next few years, Penn paid them generously for their lands, feeling that, though the king of England had granted him Pennsylvania, the land really belonged to the Indians. He could not take what they did not consent to sell. A tall and athletic man, he traveled among them, learned their languages, joined in their sports, always paid them fairly, and in all ways won their undying loyalty.

  By 1700, Quakers mostly controlled Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and were politically powerful in most of the other English colonies as well. Shiploads of new settlers were arriving, not now just a ship or two a year, but dozens of ships leaving England together and traveling in convoy to North America. Ahead of his contemporaries in so many ways, and seeing where such rapid growth must lead in the end, William Penn wrote and urged for a union of all the English colonies in America.

  The ideal of religious freedom, however, was not practiced throughout the colonies with the same reality as it was by the Quakers. Even prior to the Concessions and Agreements, a handful of Quakers had immigrated to Boston, where persecution had followed them from England. Four peace-loving Quakers were hanged by fellow believing Puritans, the rest deported, and Quakers banned completely from the Massachusetts colony.

  Yet no matter what the ideals upon which any enterprise is founded, growth invariably produces stress and change and inevitable conflict. As the country continued to grow, immigrants continued to flood in. Not all were Quakers. Not all were spiritually minded. The new land also drew the greedy and opportunistic.

  And as farms and plantations and commerce widened, a trade in slaves slowly began to develop and expand which would become the evil bane of a land founded on the basis of religious “freedom” and equality.

  Slavery of blacks and the cruel mistreatment of Indian tribes were cancers growing beneath the surface of the new nation that would ultimately test the strength of its spiritual roots.

  A Nation’s Conscience in Simple Garb

  1720-1772

  The mutual great-grandson of old William Woolman and of John and Anne Borton, who had come to Burlington together on the Shield, was born in 1720 at the Woolman homestead on Rancocas Creek to Samuel Woolman and his wife Elizabeth Burr. In the years since that landing, Burlington on the river had grown from a fledgling settlement to a thriving town. The child was named John after his Woolman grandfather and Borton great-grandfather.

  Philadelphia, just downriver, was no longer a mere dream in William Penn’s brain but already one of the largest cities in the colonies. All around Burlington County, New Jersey, other towns had sprung up among the Quaker settlements, towns such as Mount Holly a little further upstream from the Woolman Homestead, and Moorestown, which lay east about halfway between Mount Holly and Cooper’s Ferry. Roads connected them all, and linked Philadelphia to New York, and, further north, to Boston. The colonies were fairly bursting with life and activity and business and growth. More immigrants arrived from England every year.

  The Quaker immigrants to the New World had indeed found in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Delaware what they had come seeking—as near an idyllic life as could be imagined. And they thrived in every way—families and communities grew without care of want or crime or greed. They prospered, financially and spiritually. The land was good to them and they treated it, and one another, with kindness and respect. Life and family and values were simple, but full of the rewards of simplicity and hard work. More than one Quaker writing of the period could not keep from comparing this world to Eden.3

  The boy John Woolman grew up in this environment where family, church “Meeting” and school with other children of the community provided the framework for the values of Quaker life to be passed on from generation to generation.

  Though Quaker Meetings were established on the principle of silence, and each man or woman’s inner dialogue with God, the Quakers were nonetheless a remarkably social people. It was, in every sense, a society and community of friends. And its organization of mandatory Meetings—weekly local meetings, monthly county meetings, half-year and yearly regional meetings—insured constant social exchange throughout the entire Quaker community of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and beyond. Add to this that it had became a prosperous community, with many well-to-do families with large homes, and that the average family had eight or ten children, sometimes more, and with Philadelphia growing as a vibrant, thriving, bustling city… a vision emerges of an exciting time to be young with all of life and its multitude of opportunities spread out like a feast.

  Quaker society at this time was not puritanical and stuffy. The simplicity of Quaker values had not translated into Spartanism. Though dancing was forbidden, alcohol and laughter and frivolity were not. It was a gay atmosphere of travel, cultured etiquette, refinement, and social grace in the best houses of Philadelphia society. In this environment, young John Woolman came to be known as an engaging, witty, personable young man.

  Gradually, however, between his sixteenth and eighteenth year, an awareness of the emptiness of what he called the “vanities” of such a life began to waken in the soul of John Woolman.

  For two or three years, he lived what might be called a double life, drifting in and out of what he calls a life of “folly,” periodically convicted by God to give it up, yet unable and not altogether willing to stop.

  It is impossible to say whether in these years he was influenced by the preaching and teaching of Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield and the Great Awakening then beginning in the colonies among the Puritans. As time went on, he must certainly have been aware of the huge crowds gathering in Philadelphia to hear Whitefield’s preaching of the eternal burning fires of hell, and of the scorching fiery brimstone ready to overtake those who did not repent. It was a message that had swept England up in its wake and was now raging through the colonies, a new rousing into dramatic and emotional flame of English Puritanism, which would in time become known as Evangelicalism.

  Yet the force and explosiveness of this movement seemed largely to pass by the Quakers. It was not fear of hell that tormented young John Woolman’s soul. The spiritual yearnings within him were entirely positive. The desire of his heart was to know God, love God, be close to God, and to live a life pleasing to God.

  Gradually young Woolman became convinced that he must leave the frivolous activities and pastimes of his Quaker friends. Slowly he began to withdraw from their company and keep more to himself.

  As the change deepened, he began to discover the communion with God and the peace of soul he desired. While continuing to attend meetings, most of his leisure time he now spent at home, reading on Sunday afternoons and at night by the fire. The devotional writings of Francois de Fénelon and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, as well as Diderot’s Encyclopedia, were all favorites in the Woolman home.

  Having no particular ambitions, and feeling that he was to be single for a time, John remained at home working for his father on the family farm, and at the family craft of weaving, which had been the occupation of both his father and grandfather. At twenty-one, however, after a particularly hard winter, he came to the conclusion that he was perhaps not fit to endure the work for a lifetime as his stronger father had. Woolman thus began to consider other options that might be available for
making a living.

  About this time a man in the village of Mount Holly offered the twenty-one-year-old a job tending his baking and merchandise shop, and keeping his books. Woolman told his father of the offer. The two discussed it for several days, and at last mutually agreed that John should accept it.

  The move to Mount Holly for his new career in the world of business was only a move of five miles, but it was a major change. For the first time in his life young John Woolman would be living alone, and would be entirely self-supporting. Having for several years kept to himself during his leisure time, he suddenly found himself among people again, possibly facing temptations toward his former life.

  Though silence lay as a spiritual cornerstone for the Society of Friends, its counterpart solitude was not so widely practiced or sought as a doorway into wisdom. Everything about Quakerism was built around the social fabric of a “church” structure none the less that the word Meeting was employed in its stead. As individual as had been its roots, the structure was no less that of an organized church than that which George Fox had so unceremoniously rejected.

  In his move from the family home and farm to the small lodging above his employer’s shop in town, John Woolman discovered the balance, so rarely sought, and even more rarely found and practiced, between interaction with his fellow man and that solitude away from man so necessary to spiritual life and so exemplified in the life of Jesus. His daily dose of solitude balanced with work in the shop to feed and nurture the growing spiritual plant within him. The roots had been sent down during his years at home. Now the tree began to flourish and grow strong.

  Thus, the years of his early twenties, as he tended his employer’s shop, and as he grew and read and studied in the quietness of the lonely evenings, the good soil of John Woolman’s Quaker upbringing bore fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

  It did not take long before both Woolman and his employer discovered that the young man possessed an affinity for business, and enjoyed it. He liked his customers and they liked him. He was honest, had a head for books and numbers, was pleasing in manner, affable, enjoyed the flow of village life as relatives, family, friends, and strangers came and went, exchanging news, buying, asking advice, and passing the time of day. At the same time, the life of a shopkeeper was not without challenges.

  “At home I had lived retired,” Woolman wrote in his Journal, “and now having a prospect of being much in the way of company, I felt frequent and fervent cries in my heart to God… that he would preserve me from all taint and corruption; that, in this more public employment, I might serve him… in that humility and self-denial which I had in a small degree exercised in a more private life.

  “By day I was much amongst people, and had many trials to go through; but in the evenings I was mostly alone, and I may with thankfulness acknowledge, that in those times… I felt my strength renewed.”*

  In addition to the business of the shop, Woolman found that he had an aptitude for much else besides. He had been studying at home, as he says in his Journal, to “improve himself” beyond what he had received in “schooling pretty well for a planter.” His father had taught him much beyond farming—weaving, the rudiments of law and accounting. From his friend Josiah White he learned much in the way of amateur medicine—natural remedies, and herbs and potions gleaned from local Indians. His wide range of expertise began to manifest itself in requests for help in writing various accounting and legal documents, and occasionally even being sought for medical advice and treatment. His visits home now produced talks with Samuel Woolman that were the mature discussions between man and man. The love and mutual respect between father and son blossomed, as young John continued to look to his father, as he had in the matter of the job, as his chief adviser and counselor.

  Being in the shop provided fertile breeding ground for ideas and growth and new spiritual dilemmas. Woolman soon began thinking more about higher concerns of society and the plight of his fellow man. Gradually the condition of the Negro began to concern him, though it was not the first “social ill” about which he took courage to speak.

  The silence of the Quaker meeting service, distinctive in Christianity, was based on the principle of hearing rightly what the Spirit of God was saying, then, if so led, speaking it forth for the collective good. Anyone was free to speak—man, woman, boy, or girl—but such speech must only be led by the Spirit and prompted by “Divine opening.” A lesson which never left him came from an experience about this time when young John Woolman rose to speak in a Meeting. But then, as he described it, “not keeping close to the Divine opening, I said more than was required of me.”

  The blunder, as he considered it, tormented him for weeks, until gradually, through much prayer, peace of spirit gradually returned. About six weeks after the first incident, again he felt “the spring of Divine love opened, and a concern to speak,” and once more he said a few words in a meeting. This time, however, he felt peace afterward, sensing that he had said just what God wanted him to and no more.

  The two incidents proved pivotal in John Woolmans life. As a young man now of about twenty-three, increasingly he felt a call to speak to some need that he felt ought to be addressed. Along with this came a corresponding check to speak carefully, after much prayer, making sure his own house was in order before attempting to set straight anyone else’s. After the two meetings, in his Journal Woolman wrote: “Being thus humbled and disciplined… my understanding became more strengthened to distinguish the pure spirit which inwardly moves upon the heart, and which taught me to wait in silence sometimes many weeks together, until I felt that rise which prepares the creature to stand like a trumpet, through which the Lord speaks to his flock.” The principle would be one to guide him for the rest of his life.

  Soft-spoken as he tried to remain, there were those in Burlington and Mount Holly who began to notice the gifts of young John Woolman’s speech and countenance. Talk began to circulate concerning his selection to what was called “ministry.”

  There being no paid professional clergy within the Society of Friends, all were equally free to speak and contribute at meetings. Out of the laity were chosen those called “ministers”—men and women, from age fifteen onward who were recognized to possess insight and the ability to share their wisdom. The Ministers and Elders were the recognized leaders of each Meeting, and often traveled about together, visiting other Meetings and congregations. Such travels also provided opportunity for the elders among this invisible Quaker priesthood to train the younger ministers who would gradually assume leadership after them. Traveling about between Quaker meetings provided a spiritual apprenticeship and training ground.

  In the Burlington Monthly Meeting of 1743, twenty-three-year-old John Woolman, among others, was recommended as a minister. It was a new role that he took seriously.

  Of this gradual change in his outlook toward a more public and outspoken ministry, he wrote, “From an inward purifying, and steadfast abiding under it springs a lively operative desire for the good of others. All the faithful are not called to the public ministry; but whoever are, are called to minister of that which they have tasted and handled spiritually. The outward modes of worship are various; but whenever any are true ministers of Jesus Christ, it is from the operation of his Spirit upon their hearts, first purifying them, and thus giving them a just sense of the conditions of others. This truth was early fixed in my mind, and I was taught to watch the pure opening, and to take heed lest, while I was standing to speak, my own will should get uppermost, and cause me to utter words from worldly wisdom, and depart from the channel of the true gospel ministry.”*

  One of his first opportunities to “speak out” came close to home and was not in a Meeting at all. His employer’s shop sat next to a tavern, and since his coming to Mount Holly John had been struck with the rowdiness of its inns and public houses, especially at Christmas. He therefore went to the owner of the tavern and spoke to him, simply and gently, with none of the fervor of judgment and de
nunciation so common among religious zealots, suggesting that he might temper the quantities served to some of his potentially wild and rowdy guests.

  And because he did not flash the fiery eye and point the angry finger of judgment the gentle manner of John Woolman won friends even among those whose consciences he sought to awaken. The owner of the tavern treated him with all the more respect after his visit.

  It was not against drink or riotous living or “folly,” however, that John Woolman’s soft-spoken yet persistent voice would come to be recognized as prophetic in his new land, but against the mushrooming practice of slavery so linked to seafaring colonial expansion. Slavery did not exist in England. The very idea of it would have been repugnant. Yet somehow those same English, transplanted to the American colonies, gradually accustomed themselves to the notion of slavery without the accompanying outrage it would have occasioned in their own homeland.

  Though from the beginning, slavery was not widespread among Quakers, it was yet present in the Society and was a source of concern. George Fox had written a pamphlet, “To Friends Beyond the Sea that Have Blacks and Indian Slaves,” reminding them of the mercifulness of Christ and the necessity of displaying kindness “to every captivated creature under the whole heaven.” And in the very first years of Quakers settling near Philadelphia, at a monthly Meeting a discussion took place over the question, Was it possible for slavery to fulfill the Golden Rule?