Selecting from the Writings of John Woolman: ‘On Christian Moderation’

Abstract

In 1816 the Friends Tract Association published an excerpt from John Woolman’s first antislavery essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes with every reference to slavery edited out. The editors wanted to highlight Woolman’s ‘general’ message, that those who maintained their health, lived humbly and served God were rewarded with true happiness. In the excerpt, using biblical citations and an invocation of the early Quaker colonisation of the Delaware Valley, Woolman asserted that God rewards his servants. The excerpt successfully highlights this easily overlooked feature of Woolman’s lifelong ministry, but by omitting Woolman’s discussion of slavery it violated his original intention. The excerpt appeared in the last year of Quaker consensus on the issue of slavery. The editors believed they could set the issue aside because they thought the Quakers were in agreement on it, but shortly after their excerpt appeared the Quaker consensus on slavery fell apart. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .