CHESTERFIELD: Uncovering the conflicting life of abolitionist Richard Waln

By Geoffrey Wertime, Staff Writer
   UPPER FREEHOLD —When Sue Kozel got involved in the creation of the Upper Freehold Historic Farmland Byway six years ago, she had no way of knowing she was about to be pulled into a historical mystery of national interest.
   But, according to the Cream Ridge resident, that’s exactly what happened when she first heard of Richard Waln, the namesake of Historic Walnford Park here, during a byway tour in 2003. After devouring the scant amount of information on the former township resident that was available, she found herself thirsty for more.
   ”I thought, ‘Wow, we had this amazing 18th-century abolitionist; let’s learn more!’” said Ms. Kozel.
   But her research came to show her the man’s history wasn’t quite so clear-cut.
   ”If you have a county park named after him, you have to really portray the whole person’s story,” she said.
   It turned out that while Waln, a member of the Religious Society of Friends at the Crosswicks Meeting House, also known as the Quakers, testified before the state Supreme Court in a bid to free slaves who had been promised their freedom and then denied it, he also was a businessman who in the 1760s made a great deal of money selling slave-made products from the Caribbean.
   Just over a week ago, Ms. Kozel discovered details of an even more shocking document showing that Waln had participated in the actual trading of slaves, selling at least one woman, whom his wife had inherited before he became an outspoken abolitionist.
   Yet in the same business ledger where that tidbit came out, Ms. Kozel also found Waln doing business with free blacks, listing the sale of lemons to them like he would any other customer.
   In her quest to riddle out the mystery of Waln’s apparent contradictions, Ms. Kozel received aid March 16 in the form of a $2,000 grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission. A day later, District 12 legislators Sen. Jennifer Beck, Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon and Assemblywoman Caroline Casagrande presented her with a joint proclamation from the New Jersey Senate and Assembly honoring her for that achievement.
   Ms. Kozel’s research has taken her to sources including the Monmouth County Office of Historic Services, Haverford College’s Quaker Collections in Haverford, Pa., and the Richard Waln Papers held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
   A former owner of a public relations business, Ms. Kozel holds a master’s degree in history from New York University and now works as an adjunct history professor for four colleges in the state: Mercer County, Ocean County, and Brookdale community colleges and Kean University.
   ”I think we have a complicated man who has a good heart, a young ambitious twenty-something who made lots of money” in the 1760s, she said of Waln.
   ”And then he comes out to New Jersey right before the Revolutionary War — he was in and out of New Jersey in that period — and then all of a sudden after the war he’s out there signing petitions. … What happened for Richard Waln to turn and become that active?”
   Ms. Kozel said she thinks Waln, a native Philadelphian whose family came from England several generations earlier with William Penn, must have been part of a discourse about the ethics of slavery among Philadelphia-area Quakers.
   Indeed, she said, records show he did business with Uriah Woolman, the brother of renowned Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, in the 1760s, shortly after John Woolman began publishing anti-slavery essays.
   ”I have to know that people like Waln and others in the Philadelphia area are tied up in this great discussion,” Ms. Kozel said.
   She posited Waln’s sale of lemons to the free African-Americans may well have been the turning point for him.
   ”I don’t want to say he’s a bad guy or good guy — I don’t know enough yet,” she said. “But clearly he goes from a guy who sold slaves to a guy appearing … before the state Supreme Court, helping Quakers fight to free slaves both held by Quakers and non-Quakers” starting in 1788.
   As Ms. Kozel has pursued more information on Waln, she also has found she is not alone in her curiosity.
   Her research has garnered her many invitations to speak, most recently March 24 at the Kean University Research Day, and before that in Philadelphia at the 2008 Landmarks Workshop entitled “Philadelphia: From Revolution to Republic,” which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
   Other presentations have included ones at the 2008 New Jersey History Forum in Trenton and the 2007 National Conference of the Association to Study African American Life and History in Charlotte, N.C.
   A Jonathan Holmes Road resident, Ms. Kozel has found connections closer to home as well. She said she unearthed one letter in which Waln upbraided a man who posted on Waln’s mill an advertisement for a slave from the Holmes family, referring to the “state of wretchedness of these human beings” for sale.
   Her research is far from finished, and she has until December to write up the grant research. She is also branching out into other areas of slavery research, such as trying to catalog all the families in the area that held slaves based on tax documents between 1780 and 1808.
   A related mystery she is pursing is the identity of a black man named Peter Waln, who may have been a relative of Waln, or perhaps a freed slave who took his name.
   Richard Waln was different from other abolitionists in that he was not an intellectual, but a Philadelphia merchant, Ms. Kozel said.
   ”I have to believe all these guys are reading each others’ documents,” she said. “They were leading the country in a much different way than it had been before, and we had one of those key people in New Jersey.
   ”Now we have to discover more about how he lived his life, which values he chose and which he chose to ignore.”