aster 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."

We may easily conceive that a person so scrupulous and tender on this
subject (as indeed John Woolman was on all others) was in the way of
becoming in time more eminently serviceable to his oppressed
fellow-creatures. We have seen already the good seed sown in his heart, and
it seems to have wanted only providential seasons and occurrences to be
brought into productive fruit. Accordingly we find that a journey, which he
took as a minister of the gospel in 1746, through the provinces of
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, which were then more noted than
others for the number of slaves in them, contributed to prepare him as an
instrument for the advancement of this great cause. The following are his
own observations upon this journey. "Two things were remarkable to me in
this journey; First, in regard to my entertainment. When I ate, drank, and
lodged free-cost, with people who lived in ease on the hard labour of their
slaves, I felt uneasy; and, as my mind was inward to the Lord, I found,
from place to place, this uneasiness return upon me at times through the
whole visit. Where the masters bore a good share of the burthen, and lived
frugally, so that their servants were well provided for, and their labour
moderate, I felt more easy. But where they lived in a costly way, and laid
heavy burthens on their slaves, my exercise was often great, and I
frequently