John Woolman and Quaker Abolition Campaigns

New Jersey Quaker John Woolman began traveling to slaveholding Quaker meetings across the colonies in the 1740s, personally appealing to enslavers to free their captives. His campaign, alongside Anthony Benezet's writings, gradually moved the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward an abolition position it would formally adopt in 1776. Woolman's moral witness was the earliest sustained individual anti-slavery campaign in American history.