From “Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit” by Parker J. Palmer
John Woolman (1720-1772) was a Quaker who lived in colonial New Jersey among other merchants and farmers in the Society of Friends whose affluence depended on enslaving human beings who, like them, had names and families, histories and hopes. Woolman, a tailor who did not own slaves, was torn by the blatant contradiction between the Quaker belief in human equality and the fact that many Quaker gentry were slaveholders. He refused to make that tension disappear by ignoring it, using theological sleight of hand, or riding its energy toward violence. Instead, he insisted that his community hold that tension with honesty and resolve it with integrity by freeing their slaves.
Quakers made decisions by consensus instead of majority rule, and Woolman’s local meeting (or congregation) was unable to reach unity of his proposal. Nonetheless, persuaded of Woolman’s absolute integrity in the matter, they agreed to support him as he pursued his concern. For the next twenty years, Woolman made frequent trips up and down the East Coast, visiting Friends in their homes and their shops, at their farms, and in their meetings. He spoke with his fellow Quakers about the heartbreaking contradictions between their faith and their practice. And he was always true to his beliefs. He wore undyed white clothing because dye was a product of slave labor; at meals, he would fast rather than eat food prepared or served by slaves, even if he stayed to talk; and if he learned he had inadvertently benefited from a slave’s work, he would pay that person his or her due without calling attention to the exchange.
Woolman and his family paid a great price for his consistent witness to truth’s imperatives and his deeply felt heartbreak. Nonetheless, he held the tension, held it for twenty long years, until Quakers became the first religious community in America to free their slaves, some eighty years before the Civil War. In 1783, Quakers petitioned the Congress to correct the “complicated evils” and “unrighteous commerce” created by the enslavement of human beings. And from 1827 onward, Quakers played a key role in developing the Underground Railroad, “an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by nineteenth-century black slaves…to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists who were sympathetic to their cause.
These historic outcomes were possible because not just Woolman but the entire Quaker community held their internal contradiction consciously and constantly until they saw the light. The community, like Woolman himself, refused to resolve the matter falsely or prematurely. The Quakers did not take a quick vote to let the slave-owning majority have its way, nor did they banish the vexatious Woolman from their midst. They tested their convictions in dialogue and labored to achieve unity, trusting tension to do its work, until they finally arrived at a decision of historic proportions.