American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
         Reform in Colonial America: John Woolman on Goodness and Greed

Overview: This article surveys the ideas and values of an early American reformer, John Woolman, and explores his wide-ranging critique of injustice in early America. We follow his career from his early experiences of “a feeling sense of the condition of others” as a young man to his adult role as a religious leader and missionary. An heir to the Quaker emphasis on the “inner light,” Woolman developed an acute sense of what he called “the connection of things.” In developments as disparate as the slave-made dye on his neighbor’s clothes and the wretched condition of Indians on the frontier he saw the results of unrestrained greed. Woolman criticized such aspects of colonial society, and he advocated a deeper sense of kinship across racial and economic divides.

1. Introducing John Woolman: Robin, “complicity in the sale,” “divine impulse in himself,” social reformer, charity.

2. Quaker Background: Protestant Reformation, George Fox, “inward light,” physical convulsions, Society of Friends, Northhampton, Quakerism, Pendle Hill, “a great people in white raiment,” meeting in open fields, “hat-honor,” spiritual enlightenment, men and women, divine truth, Quaker imprisonments, William Penn, No Cross No Crown, “a meek and quiet spirit,” West Jersey, Pennsylvania, Frame of Government, Benjamin Franklin (1723), retirement and contentment, worldly persons, “appetite” for “gain” and “cumber,” “scramble” for worldly possessions, Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House, slaveholding, Delaware Valley.

3. Early Life of John Woolman: Deepening religiosity, “inner plantation,” universal love, brute creatures, Mount Holly, “pure opening,” “standing like a trumpet,” shop owner, tailor, Quaker minister, no hierarchy, Quaker gatherings, “calling” to go on  trips to other meeting, Southern Quaker slavery, Woolman's visit to slaveholding Quakers, giving money to slaves, Sarah Ellis, Quaker wedding, Fruits of an Active Life, Fruits of Solitude (1682), Union of Soles, Union of Sense, exercise that gift.

4. Indian Mission to Wehaloosing:  Delaware Indians, Wehaloosing, “inward drawings,” “awe-full-ness,” Prophet David, frontier warfare, rum, Indian trade, Israel Pemberton, Benjamin Parvin, Indian painting on trees, Indian with a tomahawk, Indian inter-tribal hostilities, two societies, expanding English settlement, “I love to feel where the words come from,” Moravian Missionary, “woman of modest countenance,” Susquehanna River, homeward journey—Indian fellow travelers.

5. Later Years and Woolman’s Legacy: Essay on Some Consideration on the Keeping of Negroes, Plea for the Poor, “seeds of great calamity,” pacifism, revisiting “white raiment,” singular simplicity, accusations of vanity, walking not riding, smallpox, Quaker prohibition of slavery, “abolition environmentalism and social justice,” “Crown thy good with brotherhood.”



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