CHAPTER ONE
THE FORMATIVE EARLY influences in Benjamin Lay’s life were family, region, religion, and work. He was born in 1682 to people of modest but growing means in Essex, a part of England known in the seventeenth century for textile production, protest, and religious radicalism. He was a third-generation Quaker and eventually one more fervently dedicated to the faith than either his parents or grandparents. He studied the history of Quakerism and drew inspiration from its origins in the English Revolution. And he had a broad set of work experiences—rural and urban, regional and international—as a shepherd, glove maker, and sailor. How and where Benjamin made his living would shape his evolving view of the world.
Benjamin’s family had lived in the small village of Copford, County Essex, about sixty miles northwest of London, for several generations. Copford was part of the manor of the Bishops of London during the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the rule of England’s later Saxon kings. The bishops held the manor until 1559, when the new Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, dispossessed Copford’s bishop, Edmund Bonner, for refusing to take an oath of allegiance. The lands of Copford were then offered for private purchase, but local commons remained. The village chapel was known for its twelfth-century Norman wall paintings and for a sheet of flayed human skin—probably that of a poacher—that hung on a door as a dreadful warning. Originally dedicated to St. Mary, the chapel would be renamed St. Michael and All Angels Church, based on the storied clash between good and evil in the Book of Revelation.1
Benjamin’s grandparents, William and Prudence Lay, possessed modest property in Copford, as revealed by the hearth tax levied in Essex in 1670. “Willelmus Lay” owned a cottage with one fireplace: it was home to himself, his wife, and three children: son William (Benjamin’s father), born 1654; daughter Susan, born 1659; and son John, born 1662. The village itself was small. Only twenty-two households had taxable hearths. One family, obviously the local gentry, had six; two had four; five had three; nine had two; and five, including the Lays, had one. An additional “nine poor persons” were omitted from the list, while another seventeen had exemptions, perhaps because they too were poor or were renters. Among the forty-eight households noted in the hearth tax record, the Lays were squarely in the middle, at the lowest end of the propertied. The village would consist of fifty to sixty households over the next century.2
William and Prudence were moved by the revolutionary ferment of the 1640s and 1650s, joining the Quakers sometime after 1655. A dozen years later William was still a dissenter: he was indicted at the Essex Quarterly Court for not attending Church of England services. In 1672 he was appointed by the Quaker Colchester Monthly Meeting (CMM) to look for a proper meeting place for the local congregation. This is the only reference to William or Prudence in early Quaker records, other than notations of the births of their children. They appear not to have been active in the CMM, perhaps because they, like other members of the congregation, lived “3 Miles & so to 5, 8 & 10 Miles Distance” from the meeting place.3
Benjamin’s father—let us call him William II—was more active in the congregation, though not without controversy. He apparently married as a young man outside the Quaker faith, producing two sons, William III and John, neither of whom became Quakers, as far as can be told, and a daughter, Susanna, who did. In 1679, presumably after the death of his first wife, William II went before the CMM and “declared his intention of marriage wth Mary Dennis” (or Dennish) of Layer Breton, about five miles south of Copford. Even though Mary was apparently William’s first cousin, no objections were raised, and the union was consummated. Years later, in 1687, the CMM asked whether “marrying one so near a kin” was appropriate and added that they were “unsatisfied whether they be married or not.” At the very next meeting William presented a marriage certificate, but this caused more strife because the ceremony had been performed by an Anglican priest, which was unacceptable to the Quaker congregation. After a discussion of the case, the CMM scribe noted that William “declares that he is sorry” and accepted the “testimony of condemnation against himself & ye evil works.” All seems to have been forgiven, for in 1712 William II and his friend Robert Tibbal “conveyed a piece of Land at Copford to the meeting for a [Quaker] burial ground.” But even this act of generosity was tainted as something was wrong with the deed. The CMM concluded that “William Lay forsakes Truth, so a new deed is made mentioned in this book at ye Monthly Meeting.”4
William’s marriage to Mary Dennis apparently raised the family’s fortunes dramatically. He had grown up in a small one-hearth home in Copford, but in 1684, a mere nine years after he turned twenty-one, he listed in his will three substantial properties he now owned, almost certainly through Mary. He willed to his son William III “free and copy hold Lands with a Barne thereon built standing lying and being in ffordham [Fordham] and Westbergholt [West Bergholt] called or known by the names of Bishopps and Moorcrofts.” He willed to his other son, John, “all those ffree and copy hold houses and Lands whatsoever standing lying and being in Mount bures [Mount Bures] and Colne Wakes.” To wife Mary he left “free hold Houses and Lands standing lying and being in Layer Bretton,” with the provision that on her decease the property would go “to my youngest sonn Benjamin Lay,” who was then two years old. William may have worried about Benjamin’s longevity, perhaps because of his dwarfism, for he added, “If my said Sonn Benjamin shall dye before hee shall accomplish his full age of one and twenty years or day of majority,” the “Houses and Lands” would go to his older sons. Meantime William III and John moved onto their properties and turned them to immediate advantage. When they wrote up their wills years later, in 1722 and 1735, respectively, they listed themselves as “yeomen”—commoners who possessed and cultivated their own free or copyhold land. The family was moving up in social rank.5
Benjamin was born April 26, 1682, in the small, dark, smoky cottage in Copford and named for his maternal grandfather, Benjamin Dennis. He was followed in the family by a sister, Mary, twenty months later. Despite the upward mobility of the half-brothers, education was not yet a significant family achievement. John could not sign his own will and Benjamin himself was afforded only limited schooling. He does not appear in the “Register of the Scholars Admitted to Colchester School” between 1637 and 1740. He may have received some informal schooling within the Quaker community, even though the first official Friends school was founded too late for him, in 1698. In any case, according to Roberts Vaux and the older Quakers he interviewed, Benjamin was given nothing “more than the rudiments of learning, as taught in the lower order of English schools.” He would spend the rest of his life educating himself, becoming an autodidact known for wide reading in “theology, biography, poetry, and history.”6
Benjamin’s home region was dominated by the textile industry. In the late seventeenth century it was known for producing “bays and says,” coarse cloths made of combed, not carded, wool, the precursors of the contemporary cloths, baize and serge. The know-how had been brought to Essex by Dutch refugees in the 1560s and 70s. A century later, after sheep herding and spinning had proliferated across the countryside, woolens were the region’s most important export. Local chronicler Philip Morant wrote in 1768 that in Essex, “the poor are employed in spinning Wool, in most parts of the County.” When Benjamin migrated to Philadelphia in 1732 he took with him the textile culture of his home region. Among items he listed for sale were “a parcel of Wool or Worsted Combs and Wool Cards.” And Benjamin was himself a spinner, as visitors to his cave noted: skeins of yarn hung in wild profusion all about the interior. These he used to make his own clothes, suggesting a history of skill and familial involvement in textile production.7
Essex had a long tradition of popular protest that would be part of Benjamin’s patrimony. Major disturbances rocked the region in 1549, the year of Kett’s Rebellion against enclosure in Norfolk, and in 1566 conspiracy and resistance wracked the textile towns of northeast Essex. In 1642 thousands plundered the opulent estate of Sir John Lucas in the most dramatic attack on property committed during the English Revolution. Morant remembered the history more than a century later, remarking that the lower sort of the region were “always too much inclined to plunder.” Popular protest in Essex was many-headed: commoners protested the enclosure of common lands, unfair elections, the allocation of grain, weavers’ wages, and the authority of ministers and the church.8
Essex was relatedly a hotbed of religious radicalism, beginning in the early fifteenth century with the Lollards, whose heretical rejection of wealth would roil the region for more than a century. Inspired by the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, who attacked the clergy and translated the Bible into the vernacular, Essexmen joined the Lollard Revolt of 1414; executions followed, creating many a martyr over the next century. By 1440 the heretics were refusing oaths and claiming that all property should be held in common. Later they kept their hats on during prayer, practiced fierce anticlericalism, and criticized the “covetousness” of the Church of England. According to Christopher Hill, the textile region around Colchester was “a breeding ground for Lollardy.” The same was true for a new heretical movement, the Family of Love, or Familists, led by Henry Niclaes. Alongside the knowledge of bay- and say-making in the Dutch migrations of the late sixteenth century came radical religious ideas.9
Lollardy and Familism took root in the very region where the Lay family lived and where Quakerism would emerge in the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed Copford’s Robert Tibball, who was surely a descendent of the Essex Lollard leader John Tyball, was apparently a lifelong friend of Benjamin’s father. William married Mary Dennis at Tibball’s home in 1678, and the two men worked together, many years later, in 1712, to procure a Quaker burial ground for the CMM. As historian Adrian Davies has shown, religious radicalism had a long underground existence in Essex. The Lays were part of it.10
Quakerism emerged in the English Revolution within a motley crew of uppity commoners who used the quarrel between Cavalier (Royalist) and Roundhead (Parliamentarian) elites to propose their own solutions to the problems of the day. During the 1640s, as armies warred and censorship broke down, and during the interregnum of the 1650s, Protestant radicals such as Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Quakers fought to deepen and radicalize the English Revolution, establish a godly republic, and advance the principles of democracy and equality. Many of these radicals were denounced as “antinomians”—people who believed that no one had the right or power to control the human conscience. Early Quakers epitomized the type. Benjamin never used the word—it was largely an epithet used by enemies—but he was deeply antinomian in every nuance. This was the wellspring of his radicalism and of the endless conflict and controversy that were his life.11
Led by the charismatic James Nayler of Yorkshire, a long-time soldier in the New Model Army, and George Fox, a shoemaker from Leicestershire known for his convulsive—quaking—manner of preaching, Quakers built a national movement in the 1650s. Nayler and Fox drew together men and women who had been Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, and Diggers to attack the Church of England: they shouted down ministers and refused to pay tithes. One Quaker recruit wrote, “I was struck with more terror before the preaching of James Naylor [sic] than I was before the Battle of Dunbar, when we had nothing else to expect but to fall a prey to the swords of our enemies.” Another man screamed at Fox: “Don’t pierce me so with thy eyes! Keep thy eyes off me!” Quakers believed that God was in each person in the form of a divine “inward light.” Deeply anticlerical, they rejected ministerial mediation between God and the believer, reserving special wrath for “hireling ministers” who “preached their bellies.” Quakers also insisted that wicked laws need not be obeyed. The early Quakers shared an affinity with the ultra-antinomian Ranters, who took their name from their rants against ungodly ministers and believed that to the pure of heart, all things were pure.12
Quakerism came to Benjamin’s native Colchester in the militant spirit of eighteen-year-old itinerant James Parnell in 1655. Influenced by Familism, Parnell thought the time was right “to turn the world upside down; and this is the cause why the world rages.” From Colchester jail he warned the wealthy to “weep and mourn” before the coming judgment: “the Lord is coming to burn you up as stubble before him.” Another Quaker incarcerated in Colchester was Martha Simmonds, who disrupted church services and “was moved to walke in sackcloth barefoote with her hayre spread & ashes upon her head, in the toun in the frosty weather, to the astonishment of many.” Parnell died in the jail in Colchester Castle in 1656 after a ten-month imprisonment and a ten-day fast; Simmonds went on to wilder antinomian controversy.13
Three principle characteristics of early Quakerism are crucial to understanding Benjamin’s life and activism two generations later: public rants against established ministers, the refusal of “hat honor,” and provocative street theater. Many Quakers, including Fox himself, routinely disrupted the services of the Church of England and other denominations. They would enter a Sunday service, sit in the congregation, wait for the minister to speak, then stand up and loudly denounce both speaker and sermon as unrighteous and unholy. Leo Damrosch has written that among the early Quakers the denunciation of ministers was “understood to be a prophetic duty, and if it gave offense, so much the better.” Best of all would be if serious persecution should follow, for this was a sure sign of God’s favor. Quaker disruptions became so frequent, Oliver Cromwell issued a national proclamation in 1655 to prevent the heckling of ministers. Hundreds of Quakers were prosecuted and imprisoned for the practice, in Colchester and across England. Benjamin would continue the tradition of speaking truth to power, after which he was physically removed from many a meeting and even jailed on occasion.14
Quakers gave new meaning to an old form of protest in England when they refused to doff their hats in the presence of a so-called social superior. Such acts of deference were crucial to maintaining harmony in a class-riven society, so the Quaker refusal was considered not only a breach of social etiquette but an act of leveling equality. Radical Quakers took the practice further: John Perrot claimed that he received “an express commandment” directly from God that men should not take off their hats during prayer. After all, God was present in all believers—all were divine and equal—so what was the point? George Fox, who thought Perrot was “Nayler risen from the dead,” was infuriated by this ultimate antinomian act, so he clamped down against the practice. But Perrot had preached in Colchester in 1657 and attracted numerous followers there, including members of the influential Furly family. The hat controversy would smolder on in the region and Benjamin would carry the practice into the eighteenth century.15
Early Quakers acted out high religious drama in public in order to shock people out of their sinful complacency. They conducted religious services anywhere and everywhere, in a private home, a barn, an open field, or in the streets, because they believed that a church was not a physical structure but rather any congregation of godly people. They frequently performed deliberately wild and eccentric acts such as “going naked for a sign” or burning a Bible in public to emphasize the primacy of the “inward light.” One Quaker “came naked through [Westminster] hall, only very civilly tied about the privities to avoid scandal, and with a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone upon his head did pass through the Hall, crying, ‘Repent! Repent!’” Women often played leading roles in these apocalyptic dramas.16
The most famous piece of Quaker guerrilla theater featured James Nayler, who, surrounded by Martha Simmonds and other Quaker women singing hosannas and laying flowers in his path, reenacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on a donkey in October 1656. Nayler was at the time the leading writer and theologian among Quakers, a coleader with Fox of a rapidly growing, already national, deeply subversive movement. When questioned by Bristol magistrates, Simmonds gave an antinomian explanation of her actions: she acted “in obedience to the power on high.” Parliament seized the moment to try to break Nayler and the Quaker insurgency. After a debate lasting twelve sessions—about whether to execute him or torture him nearly to death—MPs condemned Nayler to three floggings, a bored tongue, a branding of the letter B (blasphemer) on his forehead, and incarceration, a savage set of punishments from which he never recovered. After the flogging it was said that Nayler had no skin left between his hips and his shoulders. He left prison a broken man in 1659 and died a year later.17
This hostile image of the early radical Quakers, depicted “going naked for a sign,” emphasized their antinomian disdain for law. They were “above ordinances.”
George Fox thought Nayler’s extravagant actions had harmed the Quaker movement and took action. Against the antinomian ways of Nayler, Simmonds, Perrot, and many others, he led something of an internal counterrevolution in the 1660s and 1670s, instituting a series of reforms that would discipline or drive out the free spirits in his midst. His efforts to tame the radical Quakers occurred in the larger context of the restoration of King Charles II and a reign of terror against those who had made the English Revolution, including and perhaps especially the Quakers, who were the most successful and longest-lasting of the radical religious groups that sprung up in the 1640s and 1650s. Fox declared the “peace testimony”—a vow of pacifism, an enduring and defining feature of Quakerism—in 1660, partly in reaction against the carnage of war and partly in a shrewd preemptive bid to lessen the violence he knew would be enacted against his own people. In the 1660s, furious at Perrot and his ilk, he implemented a new hierarchical meeting system that imposed self-censorship and collective discipline on the radical wing of the faith. He implemented a certificate system that required all Quakers to get approval from their local meeting before launching an itinerant ministry or changing congregations. He created separate meetings for women, who could be quite unruly. The original spontaneous, democratic style of Quakers was slowly but surely replaced by “a more rigid, authoritarian, catechetical technique” to preserve order. Quaker elders and leaders were not to be opposed. Not surprisingly, the reforms met opposition: in the 1670s the Story-Wilkinson group objected to subordination of the inward light to a new national hierarchy. But Fox carried on, waging and winning a twenty-year struggle against his own antinomian wing, creating in the end what Barry Reay has called a “Quaker ruling class.” Fox won the battle with Nayler decisively, and Quakerism was profoundly changed between 1660 and 1700. Fox and his fellow rulers had effectively transformed a boisterous part of a revolutionary movement into a disciplined sect. Benjamin spent much of his life battling the mechanisms that Fox put in place to discipline free spirits such as himself.18
Benjamin, born two generations later, was in many ways a throwback to Nayler, Simmonds, Perrot, and other early radical Quakers. As we shall see, he followed their lead by visiting houses of worship to rant against the ungodliness of minister and congregation, all in a fierce effort to level church hierarchy and restore the proper egalitarian order of things. He observed leveling principles by keeping his hat upon his head during sermons and prayers. He engaged in street theater to shock people into a renewed sense of proper, ethical behavior. He shared with the early Quakers a love of the apocalyptic Book of Revelation, which became a cornerstone of his political theory. Many of the behaviors his contemporaries regarded as “mad” about Benjamin were actually antinomian survivals from the early history of Quakerism.
Radical Quakerism was the foundation of Benjamin’s worldview. He self-consciously stood within a tradition of Protestant radicalism and indeed he constructed his own genealogy of it in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates. It began with Jesus, the apostles, and the “primitive Christians,” who held “all things in common,” according to the book of Acts (4:32). It continued through the heretical Waldensians, who arose in twelfth-century France, and carried on through the Reformation, to the Lollards, the Family of Love, and the antinomians of the English Revolution. To Benjamin, the glorious historical arc of Protestant radicalism reached its apotheosis with the “primitive,” antinomian Quakers of the 1650s. These brothers and sisters lit the path to glory.19
During the late 1690s, a teenage Benjamin left his parents’ cottage in Copford and traveled about fifty miles northwest to work on the farm of his half-brother William in Fordham, a prosperous village located in eastern Cambridgeshire. Benjamin’s work during this time was the care of sheep, whose wool drove the regional economy. He also formed a lifelong attachment to William’s family, wife Sarah and their six children, none of whom, it appears, were Quakers. Benjamin seems to have had a special relationship with one of the younger sons, Philip, whom he would remember fondly in his will of 1731.20
Benjamin loved the work of the shepherd, as he recalled in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates: “I remember about 40 years ago I kept my elder Brother’s Sheep, and the pretty Lambs and their Dams would be quietly sweetly and prettily feeding together, a very beautiful and comely Sight to see.” All was not idyllic, however: at times, Benjamin, like many shepherds, got “a little careless and sleepy,” whereupon his brother’s sheep “would go wandring about over Hedge and Ditch, and get into my Neighbour’s Corn, and do Mischief.” It was no easy matter to recover them all: “Sometimes it would cost me many Tears before I could get them in to order again.” Even more worrisome was the trouble caused by roving dogs, which would scatter the sheep and occasionally kill them. This would be a “Grief” to his brother and a “Reproach” to himself. Yet all things considered, Benjamin loved tending the “pretty pretty dear Lambs.”21
Lambs and sheep would come to play an important part in Benjamin’s thinking about the world. He used the gentle creatures as metaphors throughout his writing. As a seeker of the true church he saw all genuinely Godly people as “dear lambs.” He regarded Jesus as the most dutiful shepherd, “who laid down his Life for his Sheep and Lambs.” He considered slave-owning ministers to be wolves in “Sheeps Cloathing.” Benjamin’s ideal for a Quaker meeting was one in which the assembled were “as silent as a Flock of Sheep and Lambs in a Field, sweetly feeding, without Noise of Words.” He was of course drawing on Biblical verse and a major theme in Christian theology, even if he rarely kept silent himself.22
Yet the lamb also had a more specific—and militant—meaning for Benjamin and indeed for many Quakers, who since the 1650s had seen themselves as engaged in the “The Lamb’s War”—the desperate fight against satanic forces as they sought to build the “New Jerusalem” on earth. The Lamb’s War was the title of an influential pamphlet written by James Nayler, originally printed in London in 1657 and republished in 1716. Nayler and George Fox, like Benjamin, drew on the apocalyptic Book of Revelation in explaining the war of good against evil, the archangel Michael against the Great Red Dragon, who, once defeated, was exiled to earth and brought Satan’s dominion with him. This parable, in which the lamb was a central actor, would guide Benjamin in his view of Christianity, divinity, Quakerism, and in the end slavery. The roots of this life-forming interpretation lay in an early experience of work.23
When the time came for Benjamin to leave his half-brother’s household and begin life on his own, his father apprenticed him to a master glover in Colchester. Glove making was a low and unpleasant craft, one of the “stinking trades”—the glover worked primarily with the skins of dead animals. Families of modest means often bound their children to glovers, tailors, or shoemakers as these crafts required only a modest payment to the master to train the child. Because glove making took “neither much Strength nor Ingenuity,” it was rapidly proletarianized in the eighteenth century, including ever-larger numbers of women. The tedious work was also known as “a sedentary Stooping Business.”24
According to an eighteenth-century survey of the crafts in London, the glover worked primarily with the skins of sheep, goats, and deer, dressed with allum and salt. The glover cut the leather into different sizes and shapes, then stitched them together, sometimes lining them with rabbit fur. Better-off glovers (unlike Benjamin) might put the cut leather pieces out to seamstresses for stitching, while those who had wealthier patrons might also make muffs and tippets, sometimes with ermine. Like the tailor, the glover depended on shears and needles, his main tools. Indeed, the inventory of Benjamin’s material possessions taken at his death in 1759 included “a pair of Glovers Shairs,” gloves of various kinds, and twelve thousand pins!
Benjamin loved being a shepherd, but he did not like being a glover, which is probably the main reason he ran away to London to become a sailor when he reached the age of twenty-one in 1703. Even though he returned to the craft of glove making after he left the sea, practicing it for a number of years in London and Colchester, he would eventually escape it. During the 1730s, not long after he moved to Philadelphia, Benjamin decisively rejected a line of work that depended on violence against animals. Like Thomas Tryon, who made beaver hats and would later, as a writer and a founding father of vegetarianism, have a great influence on Benjamin’s view of the world, the experience of life and work in a “stinking trade” would contribute to a radical rethinking of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the animal world.
A young and independent Benjamin took off for London, the swarming metropolis of six hundred thousand souls who stood at the center of England’s global empire. He was happy to escape his work as a glover, but he also had positive reasons for moving to the London waterfront. According to Roberts Vaux, Quakers who had heard Benjamin’s stories of his life at sea said that he sought “to gratify the leading inclination of his mind, which withdrew him from the interesting and innocent employments of agriculture, to encounter the hardships and perils of the life of a sailor.” Benjamin was curious and he was brave; he wanted to see the world more than he feared the dangers of life at sea. This is especially significant given his father’s promise that on the death of Benjamin’s mother, Mary, he would inherit a family farm in Layer Breton. Benjamin could have bided his time and eventually become a settled, propertied yeoman like his half-brothers. But he looked to the horizon and wanted to see what lay beyond it. He was nothing if not headstrong about anything he decided to do.25
Benjamin picked an extraordinary year, 1703, to head toward the docks along the River Thames. On November 26 a cyclone tore through southern England: eighty-mile-per-hour winds toppled hundreds of windmills and chimneys. Wreckage was extreme in Essex and in London, where dozens of sloops, schooners, brigs, snows, and ships were either sunk or pitched together in a confused tangle of splintered masts and torn rigging. As many as ten thousand seafaring lives were lost during “the great storm.” This was perhaps the greatest catastrophe ever visited upon the Thames waterfront.26
Edward Barlow, who had been sailing the high seas on English ships for almost half a century, offered a class-conscious interpretation of the origins and meaning of the storm: it was a “warning of God’s anger . . . for no man values his word or promise, or matters what he doth or saith, so that he can but gain and defraud his neighbour. All commanders and masters of ships are grown up with pride and oppression and tyranny.” “I want words,” he concluded in frustration, “to lay out the business and unworthy dealings of many men I have met with, not acting like Christians.” If Benjamin was already in the city, he escaped the wrath of nature unharmed. If not, he later entered a city in great need of maritime labor. He had chosen a line of work menaced by both natural and man-made dangers.27
For the next dozen years Benjamin would live alternately in London and, for months at a time, in a new social world all its own—the deep-sea sailing ship, the most advanced and consequential machine of its day. This engine of wood, canvas, and hemp, and the men who sailed it, had made possible the vast blue-water empires of Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England. Benjamin lived in cramped quarters with multiethnic fellow workers, cooperating within a strict hierarchy beneath a captain with extreme powers of discipline, to move ships and their cargoes around the world. Gangs of sailors messed together, spun yarns, set sails, and maintained the ship. Their lives were profoundly collective.
Benjamin climbed aloft to work the sails, remembering at all times the saying, “one hand for the ship, one for yourself.” He heard the captain bawl his commands against the wind as it whistled through the rigging. In stormy seas the timbers groaned as the vessel rocked and rolled; sailors defied the elements with their curses. In better weather Benjamin felt the sun and spray in his face as the ship clipped along with a brisk wind in its sails. He watched majestic sunrises and sunsets. He scanned the horizon and surveyed the ever-changing seas, always looking for clues about what omnipotent nature might do next to a lonely, brittle ship. He would test his physical strength and mental resolve to the limit, risking his life in a dangerous calling. This was the price of seeing the world and learning the ways of its peoples. His inquiring mind had taken him to sea: he filled it with the cosmopolitan knowledge that only a well-traveled sailor could acquire.28
Benjamin’s years at sea created a lifelong identity. In All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, published in 1738, Lay called himself a “common sailor,” even though he had not worked at sea for almost a quarter century. He was a “plain dealer”—he spoke simply, directly, and without deference, as seamen were known to do. He ate from a simple wooden bowl and slept in a hammock, sailor-style. And at the end of his life he made a request that shocked his friends and acquaintances: he asked a man to “burn his body, and throw the ashes into the sea.” Benjamin repeatedly used his seafaring experience to explain who he was. He had imbibed the traditions of seafaring during a formative phase of life.29
Several people who knew Benjamin recalled one of his stories about “ocean wandering.” On a Mediterranean voyage he visited Samaria in the southern part of the Ottoman Empire, in search of a place important to Biblical history. He probably jumped ship in a Turkish port, got aboard a small craft, sailed south to the port of Haifa, then hiked inland, over mountainous terrain, to visit the spot where Jesus met with the “woman of Samaria.” When he arrived Benjamin did what Jesus had done after a long journey: he “refreshed himself by a draft of water from Jacob’s Well.” What he later found significant about both the Biblical story and its setting was that it was a woman who carried the divine word about the messiah to the Samaritans. As Benjamin explained in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, “Male and Female are all one in Christ the Truth.” He used his seafaring travels to explore the history of Christianity and later to make a statement about gender equality.30
Sailing around the world gave Benjamin a hard-earned, hard-edged cosmopolitanism. He appealed to his proletarian experience as the basis of his authority in writing his book against slavery: “I know what I write by large experience, for many Years, in several Nations, where my lot hath been cast.” Like many sailors, Lay saw his “lot” as having been “cast” rather than “chosen.” Such was the case for most picaresque proletarians. Still, he had traveled the globe and could claim to know “Mankind, in all Nations, Colours, and Countries in the World.” He spoke proudly of his cosmopolitan experience, and indeed he announced it on the very cover page of his book. The author, he declared, “truly and sincerely desires the present and eternal Welfare and Happiness of all Mankind, all the World over, of all Colours, and Nations, as his own Soul.” This was enlightenment from below.31
Like other sailors, Lay adapted strategies of resistance to a reality of incessant movement. The seafaring sage “Barnaby Slush” (pen name) noted that early-eighteenth-century sailors responded to the excesses of authority with “an unchangeable Resolution of deserting at the first opportunity.” Lay used this approach in late 1717. He faced a dilemma when he decided to ask Sarah Smith to marry him. He needed a certificate from his own Devonshire House Monthly Meeting in London affirming that he was clear of debt and marital obligations; no problem there. But he was in trouble with local “weighty Quakers” for having opposed ministers in public meetings. Benjamin therefore decided to sail from London to Salem, Massachusetts, and to request a marriage certificate from the local Quaker meeting over there. He likely worked the voyage over, stayed a couple of months, made the request, ranted against the pompous Puritan prelate Cotton Mather, and sailed back home. The stratagem eventually worked: Benjamin and Sarah married July 10, 1718.32
Benjamin used the same strategy of mobility repeatedly in subsequent years as he fought one Quaker meeting after another about issues of hierarchy and power, whether in London, Colchester, or Philadelphia. Almost every move Benjamin made after he retired from the sea was an escape from a system of religious authority designed to control radicals like himself. He remained, throughout his life, always restlessly in motion, traveling widely and visiting, for example, Quaker meetings in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, many miles at a time. He always traveled on foot as he opposed the exploitation of horses.33
Benjamin’s knowledge of slavery began at sea, with a sailor’s yarn. He sailed to the Mediterranean: “I was near 18 Months, on board a large Vessel of 400 Tons in a Voyage to Scanderoon [Iskenderun] in Turkey.” This was a big ship on a long voyage with a crew as large as fifty men—quite a concentration of worldly experience and knowledge. Benjamin met “four Men that had been 17 Years Slaves in Turky.” He carefully took in their yarns, then later compared what he learned to the stories he heard from other sailors who had worked in the African slave trade. Benjamin heard accounts of rape in the infamous Middle Passage—that “the Captain [kept] 6 or 10 of ’em in the Cabbin, and the Sailors as many as they pleased,” all to satisfy “their lusts.” He identified not with the crew but their female victims. He also understood that in Africa the trade tended to the “Destruction and the Ruin of the whole Country.” He concluded that the four men enslaved in Turkey were not as “badly used” by Muslims “as the poor Negroes are by some called Christians.”34
Benjamin’s cosmopolitan experience as a sailor resonated with a Biblical passage (Acts 17:26) that would eventually become a centerpiece of the abolitionist movement: God “hath made of one Blood all Nations of Men for to dwell on all the Face of the Earth.” Benjamin took to heart this assertion of the spiritual equality of all humankind, saying confidently to his fellow Quakers that God “did not make others to be Slaves to us.” His Quaker belief and maritime experience sailing the “Face of the Earth” joined to produce a radical assertion of unity at a time when race and slavery were rapidly dividing up global humanity. Benjamin never once used the word “race” in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, preferring always the more neutral, more objective, less divisive “color.” His insistence that people were “of one blood” deracialized and denationalized his arguments against slavery.35
Benjamin demonstrated his commitment to equality in the very language he used to describe people of African descent. He said not a word about any of them being “savage,” “barbaric,” “inferior,” or “uncivilized,” the standard racist tropes of his day. He reserved the word “barbarity” strictly for the European mistreatment of Africans. He evinced no condescension, no paternalism. He wrote that if the hundreds of thousands in slavery were given “the same Education, Learning, Conversation, Books, [and] sweet Communion in our Religious Assemblies,” they would “exceed many of their Tyrant Masters in Piety, Virtue and Godliness.” This he knew because he had talked with a great many Africans; he knew firsthand what he called “their bright Genius.” Enslaved people deserved liberty, which is “life” itself.36
Because of their collective labor in a dangerous environment sailors were known for their solidarity, to one another and to other workers. Their cry “one and all” was heard in mutinies, strikes, and waterfront riots around the Atlantic. Lay’s class experience created in him a lifelong sensitivity to issues of labor and an empathy for those who worked under difficult, sometimes deadly conditions. Dependency on the money wage and the reality of being bilked by captains taught him and other sailors something about the labor theory of value. Benjamin recognized that slave owners, including Quakers, paid no regard, as Edward Barlow noted, to “Equity or Right, not heeding whether they give them [the enslaved] any thing near so much as their Labour deserveth.” He linked seafaring and slavery back to the Bible, to Jeremiah 22:15: “Wo unto him that buildeth his House by Iniquity, and useth his Neighbour’s Service without Wages, and giveth him not for his Work.”37
Benjamin used his seafaring knowledge to indict slave traders as a class of murderers. He was perhaps the first ever to do so. Here he anticipated an argument made a century later by Friedrich Engels, who claimed, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), that factory owners in England who caused workers to live in deadly conditions were in fact guilty of “social murder.” Benjamin saw that the operation of the slave trade routinely and systematically produced death, and he held the organizers of that trade personally responsible. In All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates he noted that slavers were so puffed up with pride that they thought themselves beyond the Bible, beyond law, beyond “Abraham, Prophets, [and] Patriarchs.” They were beyond all moral sense. They had come to “Cain the Murtherer,” and Benjamin insisted they were beyond him too, for Cain had “Murthered but one.” He said to the traders directly, you, you, have killed “many Thousands, or caused ’em to be so.”38
Conscious of the long, lethal history of the slave trade, Benjamin went further in his indictment: “for ought I know,” slavers may have murdered “many Hundreds of Thousands.” At the very moment he wrote these words, two and a half million Africans had already been transported through a nightmarish Middle Passage to the plantations of the Americas. His estimate was right: “Hundreds of Thousands” had already been murdered. The actual number was almost half a million—lifeless bodies thrown over the rail of ships to the sharks that followed the slavers across the Atlantic. Benjamin not only denounced the murderers of enslaved Africans; he also glimpsed the magnitude of their crime. The sailor-turned-abolitionist was also one of the first to condemn the maritime holocaust perpetrated by Atlantic slave traders.39
. . .
By the time Benjamin reached his early thirties he was a working man of the world: he had known pastoral labor, sheep herding; he had experienced the urban crafts as a glover; and he had survived rigorous proletarian work at sea as a “common sailor.” He had lived in a small village, a manufacturing town, an imperial metropolis, and on big ships, on the oceans and in port cities around the world. All of these experiences shaped his consciousness, expanding a core of radical Quaker concerns, values, and practices. As a throwback to the “primitive Quakers” and the English Revolution, Benjamin would challenge his fellow Quakers in London and Colchester on a wide variety of issues.