John Woolman (1720-1772) was a minister of the Society of Friends or Quakers ( so named because George Fox told a judge "I quake before the Lord' and not the crown). In Orthodox meetings there are no paid ministers but some Friends are noted to have the gift of ministry and are listened to when they feel called upon to speak. John Woolman felt called upon to travel extensively and his Journal had great effect on the Abolitionist movement among the Friends in America and England. He met a "colonel of the militia" in Port Royal Virginia, May 11, 1757, and contrasted the spiritual lives of those living off their own labors and those living off the labor of slaves. Woolman remarked that " liberty was the natural right of all men equally, which he did not deny, but said that the lives of the Negroes were so wretched in their own country that many of them lived better here than there." another man joined to remark on the incessant wars of Africa.
Woolman's remark after the scroll- all quotes from the Journal.
John Woolman's reply, to a certain colonel of the Virginia militia: " If Compassion on the Africans in regard to their domestic troubles were the real motives of our purchasing them, that spirit of tenderness being attended to would incite us to use them kindly, that as strangers brought out of affliction their lives might be happy among us; and as human creatures, whose souls are as precious as ours and who may receive the same help and comfort from the Holy Scriptures as we do, we could not omit suitable endeavours to instruct them therein. But while we manifest by our conduct that our views in purchasing them are to advance ourselves, and while our buying captives taken in war animates those parties to push on that war and increase desolations amongst them, to say they live unhappy in Africa is far from being an argument in our favor."
"And I further said," The present circumstances of these provinces to me appears difficult, that the slaves look like burdensome stone to such who burden themselves with them, and that if the white people retain a resolution to prefer their outward prospects of gain to all other considerations and do not act conscientiously toward them as our fellow creatures, I believe that burden will grow heavier and heavier till times change in a way disagreeable to us'- at which the person appeared very serious and owned that considering their condition and the manner of their treatment in these provinces, he had sometimes thought it might be just in the Almighty to so order it.