John Woolmanthe AuroraINFP

Around 1742, John Woolman, a 22-year-old Quaker clerk in Mount Holly, West Jersey, was told by his employer to write out a bill of sale for a woman the employer had just sold. The buyer was standing there, waiting.

Woolman kept the shop and drew up papers for customers, so a bill of sale was ordinary work. In his Journal he never names his employer. He never names the woman either.

He felt uneasy at once. Then he counted his reasons for writing it anyway. He was hired by the year. His master had told him to. The buyer was an elderly man, a member of his own Society of Friends. “So, through Weakness, I gave way, and wrote.”

Those three reasons are still in daily use: the pay, the boss, and the respectable older person who surely knows best.

Then, as the paper was being signed, the quiet clerk spoke. He told both men that he believed keeping slaves was inconsistent with the Christian religion. It was a mild sentence, and a startling one from a young employee to an elder of his own faith. Philadelphia's Quakers would not bar slaveholding among their members for another 34 years.

Afterward he judged himself exactly. He would have been clearer, he wrote, if he had asked to be excused from it, “as a Thing against my Conscience; for such it was.” He had spoken, but only after the act.

Auroras know that failure from the inside. They feel the line long before they say it, and by the time the words come out, the paper is signed.

The next time, he got the order right. A young Friend asked him to write a conveyance for an enslaved woman. “I told him I was not easy to write it,” Woolman recorded. This time the refusal came before the pen moved.

Out of these moments he made a rule, narrow enough to keep: he ought not to be the scribe for wills that made some children masters over others for life. Writing wills paid well, and he disliked offending respectable people. He kept the rule anyway.

When an elderly man came to have his will drawn, leaving enslaved people to his heirs, Woolman did not call him wicked. He gave a reason that was only about himself.

The man went away. A few days later he came back, directed their freedom, and then Woolman wrote his will. At an injured neighbor's bedside he drew up a will without the clause that would have handed on an enslaved woman, and charged nothing for his work. The neighbor agreed to set her free.

He kept the rule for thirty years, riding far in the Quaker ministry and arguing against slavery in print. He died of smallpox at York, in England, on 7 October 1772, aged 51.

It all began in a shop in Mount Holly, with one paper he never stopped regretting. That paper showed him exactly where his line ran, and nobody moved it again.