In the mean time the New England Yearly Meeting was agitated by the same
question. Slaves were imported into Boston and Newport, and Friends
became purchasers, and in some instances were deeply implicated in the
foreign traffic. In 1716, the monthly meetings of Dartmouth and
Nantucket suggested that it was "not agreeable to truth to purchase
slaves and keep them during their term of life." Nothing was done in the
Yearly Meeting, however, until 1727, when the practice of importing
negroes was censured. That the practice was continued notwithstanding,
for many years afterwards, is certain. In 1758, a rule was adopted
prohibiting Friends within the limits of New England Yearly Meeting from
engaging in or countenancing the foreign slave-trade.

In the year 1742 an event, simple and inconsiderable in itself, was made
the instrumentality of exerting a mighty influence upon slavery in the
Society of Friends. A small storekeeper at Mount Holly, in New Jersey, a
member of the Society, sold a negro woman, and requested the young man in
his employ to make a bill of sale of her.

[Mount Holly is a village lying in the western part of the long,
narrow township of Northampton, on Rancocas Creek, a tributary of
the Delaware. In John Woolman's day it was almost entirely a
settlement of Friends. A very few of the old houses with their
quaint stoops or porches are left. That occupied by John Woolman
was a small, plain, two-story structure, with two windows in each
story in front, a four-barred fence inclosing the grounds, with the
trees he planted and loved to cultivate. The house was not painted,
but whitewashed. The name of the place is derived from the highest
hill in the county, rising two hundred feet above the sea, and
commanding a view of a rich and level country, of cleared farms and