Tender Mercies: Transformed by Tenderness – by Ruth A. Tucker

Bless the Lord who crowns you with tender mercies (Psalm 103, NKJV).

In the 1740s John Woolman, living in the colony of New Jersey, was getting his start in life as a tailor and clerk, writing wills as a sideline. He was in his early twenties; his outlook was hopeful. The Civil War was still a hundred and twenty years in the future. The fractious battles over slavery were yet to be fought. But in that tiny tailor’s shop, as buttons were being sewn on suits so were seeds being sown that would tear apart the fabric of the Union—seeds that would also prepare the fabric for eventual mending. Woolman’s Journal relates one such story:

A neighbor received a bad bruise in his body and sent for me to bleed him, which having done, he desired me to write his will. I took notes, and amongst other things he told me to which of his children he gave his young negro. I considered the pain and distress he was in, and knew not how it would end, so I wrote his will, save only that part concerning his slave, and carrying it to his bedside, read it to him. I then told him in a friendly way that I could not write any instruments by which my fellow-creatures were made slaves, without bringing trouble on my own mind. I let him know that I charged nothing for what I had done, and desired to be excused from doing the other part in the way he proposed. We then had a serious conference on the subject; at length, he agreeing to set her free, I finished his will.

That incident was the first of many that set John Woolman on a life’s course of transforming the Society of Friends (Quakers).

I have taught courses in church history for more than a quarter of a century but had not realized that many Quakers in early America were wealthy slaveholders. Others owned only a few slaves. Land was abundant; laborers were scarce. Thus, the justification for slavery. A turning point in Woolman’s life had come a few years earlier when he received a “heavenly opening” from God, straight out of the book of Ezekiel. God, he was convinced, was calling him to be a “watchman” to warn people of the evils of slavery.

For the next thirty years he traveled by horseback or by foot taking his message into homes and meeting houses. He asked questions, offered suggestions, and gently persuaded slaveholders to free their slaves—one tender mercy at a time. Through his persistence, the Society of Friends eventually ruled that members were not permitted to own slaves—the first such ruling by a religious body in America.

Anything but a firebrand, Woolman spoke privately to individuals as well as to small groups. Tenderness was his principle:

My exercise was heavy, and I was deeply bowed in spirit before the Lord . . . which wrought a tenderness amongst us; and the subject was mutually handled in a calm and peaceable spirit . . . and by the tenderness they manifested in regard to the practice, and the concern several of them expressed in relation to the manner of disposing of their negroes after their decease, I believed that a good exercise was spreading amongst them.

Sometimes we imagine that the most effective change-making comes through strong argumentation and pointed confrontations, but Woolman proved otherwise. His humble persistence opened the way for a religious movement to shed its slaveholding past and become a leading light in the anti-slavery cause, particularly through the Underground Railroad. Stories spread far and wide of how runaway slaves found safe havens—and tender mercies—in Quaker homes.

Excerpted from Ruth Tucker’s new book, Tender Mercies: 52 Weekly Meditations, available at our book page, www.ptm.org/books.