John Woolman was born at Northampton, in the county of Burlington and province of Western New Jersey, in the year 1720.  In his very early youth he attended, in an extraordinary manner, to the religious impressions which he perceived upon his mind, and began to have an earnest solicitude about treading in the right path.  “From what I had read and heard,” says he, in his Journal[A], “I believed there had been in past ages, people who walked in uprightness before God in a degree exceeding any, that I knew or heard of, now living.  And the apprehension of there being less steadiness and firmness among people of this age, than in past ages, often troubled me while I was a child.”  An anxious desire to do away, as far as himself was concerned, this merited reproach, operated as one among other causes to induce him to be particularly watchful over his thoughts and actions, and to endeavour to attain that purity of heart, without which he conceived there could be no perfection of the Christian character.  Accordingly, in the twenty-second year of his age, he had given such proof of the integrity of his life, and of his religious qualifications, that he became an acknowledged minister of the Gospel in his own society.

[Footnote A:  This short sketch of the life and labours of John Woolman, is made up from his Journal.]

At a time prior to his entering upon the ministry, being in low circumstances, he agreed for wages to “attend shop for a person at Mount Holly, and to keep his books.”  In this situation we discover, by an occurrence that happened, that he had thought seriously on the subject, and that he had conceived proper views of the Christian unlawfulness of slavery.  “My employer,” says he, “having a Negro woman, sold her, and desired me to write a bill of sale, the man being waiting who bought her.  The thing was sudden, and though the thought of writing an instrument of slavery for one of my fellow-creatures made me feel uneasy, yet I remembered I was hired by the year, that it was my master who directed me to do it, and that it was an elderly man, a member of our society, who bought her.  So through weakness I gave way and wrote, but, at executing it, I was so afflicted in my mind, that I said before my master and the friend, that I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion.  This in some degree abated my uneasiness; yet, as often as I reflected seriously upon it, I thought I should have been clearer, if I had desired to have been excused from it, as a thing against my conscience; for such it was.  And some time after this, a young man of our society spoke to me to write a conveyance of a slave to him, he having lately taken a Negro into his house.  I told him I was not easy to write it; for though many of our meeting, and in other places, kept slaves, I still believed the practice was not right, and desired to be excused from the writing.  I spoke to him in good-will; and he told me that keeping slaves was not altogether agreeable to his mind, but that the slave being a gift to his wife he had accepted of her.”