Reviewed by Michael Meranze | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.3

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Reviewed by Michael Meranze | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition. By Thomas P. Slaughter. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. 459 pages. $30.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles
John Woolman dreamed many dreams. He dreamed of cats and foxes, he dreamed of slaves suffering at the hands of Christians, he dreamed of burdens, tasks, and the voice of the Spirit. He dreamed of a renewed Quakerism returned to its original purity and based in love. He dreamed of a world where the connections between individual selfishness and the suffering of others would disappear because the self would be conquered. His greatest dreamwork, perhaps, was his Journal and the life he recounted there.	1
Woolman was born in 1720 in Mount Holly, New Jersey, to a middling Quaker family (his father was a weaver and a farmer). Quakers had settled Mount Holly during the 1680s; it remained a small village throughout Woolman's life and beyond. Woolman was born, experienced youth, and lived there. He worked and ministered there, came and went on his travels, suffered and grew there. When he died, though, he was in York, England, far from Mount Holly, now an internationally known Friend and moral critic, driven to preach to English Friends by his dreams and what he believed was the calling of the Spirit.	2
In this unusual book, Thomas P. Slaughter treats Woolman's dreams, his life, and his death with subtlety and great sympathy. As with any study of Woolman, Slaughter must contend with the Journal, Woolman's great work of spiritual autobiography and social criticism and the prime source we have for the historical Woolman. But the Journal, as Slaughter notes, is as much problem as opportunity for a Woolman biographer: "In retrospect, I see that I initially believed Woolman's Journal was the key to understanding him. I now consider it the lock for which I needed keys" (429). Slaughter overcomes the "lock" of the Journal by placing Woolman's life and work, roughly chronologically, in a series of expanding contexts—local records, oral traditions, Quaker minutes and history, the upsurge of revival and reform in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, "Enlightened" notions of reason and reasonable behavior, Christian practices of representing mysticism and asceticism, and, shadowing them all, the complex interrelationships between commercial society and chattel slavery in the Americas. He immerses the reader in the works that Woolman and his contemporaries read and owned. Woolman took, as Slaughter shows, a series of models from Catholic and Protestant traditions alike; his models were not only men and women of great asceticism but also those of mystical bent, outcasts and martyrs alike. Slaughter traces out Woolman's various journeys, describing the places that he passed through (for Woolman always seemed to be passing through, never really staying) and overcoming the gaps in Woolman's self-presentation by allowing us to see him as others saw him. He also, intriguingly, allows us to see Woolman as others did not wish to see him, analyzing the process of editorial review and repression that occurred when Woolman submitted his writings (including his Journal) to the Quaker censors for publication (here Slaughter is helped by the pioneering work of Henry J. Cadbury, Amelia Mott Gummere, and Phillips P. Moulton).¹	. . .

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