He was strongly attached to the forms of Quakerism, as well as to the principles.  It troubled him, when some of his children changed their mode of dress, and ceased to say thee and thou.  He groaned when one of his daughters appeared before him with a black velvet bonnet, though it was exceedingly simple in construction, and unornamented by feather or ribbon.  She was prepared for this reception, and tried to reconcile him to the innovation by representing that a white or drab-colored silk bonnet showed every stain, and was therefore very uneconomical for a person of active habits.  “Thy good mother was a very energetic woman,” he replied; “but she found no difficulty in keeping her white bonnet as nice as a new pin.”  His daughter urged that it required a great deal of trouble to keep it so; and that she did not think dress was worth so much trouble.  But his groan was only softened into a sigh.  The fashion of the bonnet his Sarah had worn, in that beloved old meeting-house at Woodbury, was consecrated in his memory; and to his mind, the outward type also stood for an inward principle.  I used to tell him that I found something truly grand in the original motive for saying thee and thou; but it seemed to me that it had degenerated into a mere hereditary habit, since the custom of applying you exclusively to superiors had vanished from the English language.  He admitted the force of this argument; but he deprecated a departure from their old forms, because he considered it useful, especially to the young, to carry the cross of being marked and set apart from the world.  But though he was thus strict in what he required of those who had been educated as Quakers, he placed no barrier between himself and people of other sects.  He loved a righteous man, and sympathized with an unfortunate one, without reference to his denomination.  In fact, many of his warmest and dearest friends were not members of his own religious society.

Early in life he formed an unfavorable opinion of the effect of capital punishment.  His uncle Tatum considered it a useful moral lesson to take all his apprentices to hear the tragedy of George Barnwell, and to witness public executions.  On one of these occasions, he saw five men hung at once.  His habits of shrewd observation soon led him to conclude that such spectacles generally had a very hardening and bad influence on those who witnessed them, or heard them much talked about.  In riper years, his mind was deeply interested in the subject, and he read and reflected upon it a great deal.  The result of his investigations was a settled conviction that executions did not tend to diminish crime, but rather to increase it, by their demoralizing effect on the community.  He regarded them with abhorrence, as a barbarous custom, entirely out of place in a civilized country and a Christian age.