THE WORKS OF JOHN WOOLMAN. IN TWO PARTS. [including] A JOURNAL OF THE LIFE, GOSPEL LABOURS, AND CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCES OF THAT FAITHFUL MINISTER OF JESUS CHRIST, JOHN WOOLMAN, LATE OF MOUNT-HOLLY, IN THE PROVINCE OF NEW-JERSEY [and] . . . PART THE SECOND. CONTAINING HIS LAST EPISTLE AND HIS OTHER WRITINGS by Woolman, John - 1774

Philadelphia: Printed by Joseph Crukshank, 1774. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. xiv,[2],436 pp. Each part with separate title page. Contemporary speckled calf, raised bands, manuscript paper title label. Contemporary ink ownership inscription, "Mary Olney's 1775," on title. Additional autograph of Mary Olney pasted on rear pastedown. Ex-library from the Friends School of Providence, bearing 19th-century paper spine label, institutional inkstamps on front free endpaper and p. [iii], and ink call number on p. [iii]. Calf worn, joints starting, mild foxing. A very good copy.

"An autobiographical masterpiece, rivalled in 18th century America only by that of Franklin" (Howes). The works of colonial Quaker preacher and abolitionist John Woolman (1720-1772), containing his famous journal and early anti-slavery essay, "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes." This copy bears the signature of Mary Olney Brown (1743-1798), second wife of Moses Brown. Moses Brown (1738-1836) was the youngest of the four Brown brothers who helped found Brown University in 1764. Members of a prosperous merchant family of Providence, the Browns financed the disastrous voyage of the slave ship Sally in the 1760s, and eldest brother John Brown remained one of America's most active and notorious slave traders into the 1790s. Moses, however, distanced himself from the slave trade after the Sally affair and further withdrew from the family business in 1773 during a spiritual crisis brought upon by the illness and death of his first wife, Anna. That same year, as he became increasingly involved with the antislavery Quakers of Rhode Island, he renounced slavery entirely and freed the last of his own slaves. Brown was formally accepted as a member of the Friends Meeting in 1774 and went on to follow in the tradition of John Woolman as one of early America's most committed and influential early abolitionists. Mary Olney, a fellow Rhode Island Quaker, married Brown in 1779. EVANS 13782. HOWES W-669, "aa." SABIN 105211.