CHAPTER FIVE
AFTER THE DOUBLE EXPLOSION OF 1738, when Benjamin spattered the blood of God’s vengeance on Quaker slave owners and, less than a month later, published his fierce prophetic attack on them, he entered a new phase of life. Although he had been disowned and denounced, he would remain involved with the Quaker community, attending worship services and arguing, through word and deed, about the evils of slavery. At the same time he turned his attention to building a new revolutionary way of life, which would fold his antislavery principles and practices into a broader, more radical vision of human possibility. He would build the New Jerusalem, on a small scale, and he would live there. He would embody his own hopes for the future. At fifty-six years of age, Benjamin decided that he would become more dangerous as he grew older.
Benjamin loved books, as autodidacts often do. He collected books and he read voraciously. Reading and reflection were his favorite pastimes. He carried books—probably his single most important possession—with him to Philadelphia in 1732. He worked as a bookseller, off and on, for much of his life. He participated in the print culture of the city, subscribing to the Pennsylvania Gazette, raising subscriptions to publish books he admired, and joining newspaper debate. He proudly built a personal library of two hundred volumes, some of which he loaned to friends. He had the fullest collection of early Quaker writings to be found in Pennsylvania, and probably in the Americas. His love of books connected to his love of children: “He took great pleasure in visiting schools, where he often preached to the youth. He frequently carried a basket of religious books with him, and distributed them as prizes, among the scholars.” He wrote and published his own book, which few people of his class ever managed to do. Near the end of his life, when Deborah and Benjamin Franklin commissioned his portrait, the artists featured him holding his favorite book. Books were probably the only “worldly good” he cared about. Even though he called himself “illiterate,” Benjamin Lay was very much a man of the book.1
As it happens, we know a great deal about Benjamin’s books, and what he thought about them, from four sources. First, he published the list of books he thought it important to bring to Pennsylvania when he and Sarah migrated in 1732. Second, he included an extensive, thirty-page annotated bibliography of many of his books in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, published in 1738. Third, various books he had read show up in other documents, for example an inventory taken in 1759 at his death and in the memoir about his life published by Roberts Vaux in 1815. Finally, a couple of books from Benjamin’s personal library have survived. Taken together, these illuminate the reading and thinking of a self-made intellectual and prophet.
In imagining a new life Benjamin drew ideas and inspiration from many writers across a broad temporal and geographic expanse, from an English revolutionary of the 1640s and 1650s, to philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, to an unconventional thinker, much like himself, whose ideas originated in places as diverse as India and Barbados. Benjamin translated the ideas he took from books into action, into concrete, practical ways of living. This chapter explores the reading of a common man as he rethought the ethical foundations of human life.
Benjamin read and studied the work of William Dell, a militant chaplain of the New Model Army who was part of the occupying force in Colchester during the English Revolution. Dell was a man of “the light,” although not a Quaker. We know that Benjamin admired Dell because he says so in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates. He approvingly mentions Dell’s essay “The Right Reformation of Learning, Schools, and Universities, according to the State of the Gospel, and the True Light that Shines Therein,” which appeared in a 650-page collection of Dell’s works, Several Sermons and Discourses of William Dell, Minister of the Gospel, published in London by the Quaker printer J. Sowle in 1709. When Benjamin arrived in Philadelphia in 1732, he recommended and offered for sale “William Dell’s Works,” which might have referred to Several Sermons and Discourses or to a collection of individual books and pamphlets. In either case, he was thoroughly familiar with Dell’s writings, and indeed he was in significant ways influenced by them.2
Benjamin’s favorite work by Dell was The Tryal of Spirits, Both in Teachers and Hearers, Wherein is held forth the clear Discovery and Downfal of the Carnal and Anti-Christian Clergy of these Nations, testified from the Word of God to the University Congregations in Cambridge, originally published in London in 1653. Benjamin called it “an excellent book”—so excellent that he copied a sizable passage, about the “mark of the beast,” into his own tome. We also know that Benjamin read the edition of the book published by the Quaker printer Thomas Sowle in London in 1699, and we know quite specifically what he thought about it, almost passage by passage, for his own personal copy of the book, amply annotated in his own somewhat crooked handwriting, has survived and is part of the collection at the Historical Society of Germantown, Pennsylvania, where Quaker protests against slavery began in 1688. Dell’s book somehow made its way from the library in Benjamin’s cave through at least three subsequent owners, over two and a half centuries, to its present location. Benjamin’s dialogue with Dell spans two generations and the Atlantic Ocean.3
William Dell studied at Puritan-controlled Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he received a bachelor of arts degree in 1628 and a master of arts degree in 1631, and afterward became a fellow. Radicalized during the 1640s and called by some a “Seeker,” meaning someone who rejected formal religious organization and took a spiritual path toward the “pure” church, Dell became a chaplain in the revolutionary New Model Army at the very moment when the Levellers were ascendant. Neither he nor his fellow chaplain John Saltmarsh were formal members of the Leveller organization, but both held consistent radical ideas, several of which Dell expressed in a fast sermon delivered to the House of Commons on November 25, 1646. The chaplain spoke of the “turning and tumultuous times”; the world was “shaking.” He recalled the era of the “primitive Christians,” when Jesus bid his disciples to “Go teach all Nations,” sending forth “poor, illiterate, mechanick men” who “turned the world upside down,” just as the New Model Army was doing as he spoke. Dell had recently preached to the soldiers: “the power is in you, the people; keep it, part not with it.”4
This “key figure in the development of antinomian religion” in the 1640s and 1650s told members of Parliament that his sermon was “the Lord’s voyce to you.” Dell emphasized “spirit” over law and demanded the abolition of all “outward ordinances” that impinged upon individual conscience. He spoke mostly about the kingdom of God to the great men assembled, but he did make one demand—one might even call it a threat—about the kingdom of England:
that you would regard the oppression of the poor, and the sighing of the needy. Never was there more injustice and oppression in the Nation than now; I have seen many oppressed and crushed, and none to help them. I beseech you consider this with all your hearts, for many who derive power from you are great oppressors. And therefore I require you in the name of God, to discharge the trust that God hath put into your hands; & so to defend the poor and fatherlesse, to doe justice to the afflicted and needy, to deliver the poor and needy, and to rid them out of the hands of the wicked; This is your business, discharge your duty: if you will not, then hear what the Lord saith, Psal. I, 12, 5. For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now will I arise saith the Lord: and Gods arising in this case would prove your ruine. If you will not doe Gods work in the Kingdome which he hath called you to, he will doe it himself without you, as it is written. He shall deliver the needy when he cryeth, the poor also, and he that hath no helper, he shall save their soules from deceit and violence, the common evils of the times. And this is all that I have to say for this Kingdome.
Many of the great men did not take kindly to Dell’s self-assured, daunting instructions. They did not offer the class-conscious Dell official thanks for the sermon, nor did they have it printed for distribution, both customary practices. Dell spoke bluntly about the “oppression of the poor.” In 1645 he had written, “He that fears God is free from all other fear; he fears not men of high degree.” Benjamin lived by this creed.5
In 1649, at the New Model Army’s peak of power, Dell was, in a straightforward political appointment, “intruded” as master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, thus creating a paradox: Dell was the era’s leading radical critic of Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He attacked the elite monopoly on “humane learning” and spelled out a plan to democratize England’s educational system. Benjamin too took a great interest in education; he called Dell’s approach “a Method very excellent.”6
Dell offered a radical plan for educating youth, to be undertaken not by the churches but by “civil power, or chief magistrates.” He wanted schools to be built throughout the nation, in all cities, towns, and villages; they would be run by “godly and learned men,” like himself. They would teach reading, so that all could know the Holy Scriptures, as well as grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, and geography. Dell considered all of these subjects to be “very useful to human society, and the affairs of this present life.” Cambridge and Oxford—where people loved private gain more than their brethren—would see their monopoly on humane learning broken as universities and colleges would be built in all the great towns and cities of England. In Dell’s vision, education was geared both to a secular idea, improvement “in the use of reason,” and to a republican idea, “the common good of the people.” Benjamin affirmed the popular, democratic, and egalitarian values embodied in Dell’s plan.7
Even more important for Benjamin was Dell’s The Tryal of Spirits, which strongly influenced the Quaker’s own antinomian thinking. It is impossible to know when Benjamin first read the book, but it may have been relatively early in his life. He acted on some of its central tenets in 1720 in criticizing Quaker ministers in London. He clearly drew heavily on Dell’s book in formulating the arguments about “false prophets” that appeared in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates. Benjamin also wrote in the back of the book, “Benjamin Lay his Book borrowed by Jos ffowes this 21st day of May 1742.” He thought the book important enough to recommend and loan to others.8
The Tryal of Spirits had two parts. The first was the printed version of a sermon Dell delivered to “the University Congregations at Cambridge,” probably in 1653. The second was Dell’s critical response to a sermon given around the same time by Sydrach Simpson, an Independent/Congregationalist minister, master of Pembroke Hall, and another Parliamentary appointment at Cambridge, entitled “A Plain and Necessary Confutation of divers Gross and Anti-christian Errors, delivered to the University Congregation.” Judging by the number and range of his marginal comments, Benjamin took greater interest in the former than the latter.9
Benjamin respected Dell’s learning, as well as his position as master of a Cambridge college. When Dell called himself a “bruised reed”—that is to say, a weak foundation for the heavy task of exposing anti-Christian ministers—Benjamin wrote in the margin that “if so great a Man as Wm Dell call himself a broused Reed which was Master of a Colledg in the University of Cambridg what may I call my self that was a poor common Sailer and no more.” Benjamin had even greater respect for the humble, forthright, unpretentious ways Dell wore his learning. The very first comment Benjamin wrote in response to Dell’s book was “If I desire to Live Let me desire to Live humble.”10
Benjamin shared with Dell antinomian beliefs. Both men insisted on the primacy of the spirit over the letter, the word, and the law. When Dell wrote against those who use “the Outward letter of the Word” to serve “their own Worldly Ends and Advantages, and nothing else,” Benjamin added, simply, “no spirit no life.” At the end of the paragraph he penned that “if this be true what a sad condition is the World in.” Dell was an outspoken advocate of “free grace,” a code phrase for the antinomian spirit that elevated the believer above the authority of church and state. Benjamin quoted Dell on the power of grace to overcome the “mark of the beast,” that is to say, slavery.11
Both authors were fiercely anticlerical, attacking the ministers of the Church of England and indeed all “false prophets”—the anti-Christian ministers who appear on the title pages of both The Tryal of Spirits and All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates. Both Dell and Lay regarded the discernment and casting out of such ministers as crucial to building the pure church, the New Jerusalem, the kingdom of God on earth. Both warned against “dark powers”: the snares, seductions, and delusions that would waylay the godly. Both emphasized the corrupting power of class. Dell told a story of dogs lying “at ease” on “a rich Garment, or soft carpet” until someone dared to speak against their privilege, whereupon these “angry Dogs . . . bark at them, and rend them, as much as they can or dare.” Benjamin declared his spiritual affinity with Dell by paying him the highest compliment, writing below the book’s final published paragraph, “Pure reading I think Finis.” Benjamin too was a Seeker after the pure church; he found a kindred spirit in William Dell.12
On two occasions, someone who knew Benjamin well described him as a “Cynic” philosopher. The commentators did not mean that he had a skeptical view of human nature but rather something both deeper and more specific. The first comment appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette March 25, 1742, in an article about a protest Benjamin had conducted in the Philadelphia marketplace regarding the “vanity of Tea-drinking.” The author of the article was in all likelihood the printer of the newspaper, Benjamin Franklin, who had published Lay’s book three and a half years earlier and knew him well. He called Benjamin a “Pythagorean-cynical-christian Philosopher.” The second comment was recorded four years later by a Pennsylvania/New Jersey Quaker politician named John Smith, who wrote in his diary, “Had part of the Evening in the Comp[an]y of B. Lay, the Comi-Cynic Philosopher.” It is not clear what the prefix “Comi-” was meant to imply—perhaps that Benjamin used humor in his conversation or, condescendingly, that he himself was somehow “comical,” an attitude many adopted toward little people. In either case Smith suggested that the ideas of Cynic philosophy had been part of the evening’s conversation. These remarks reveal a significant influence on the formation and character of Benjamin’s thought and activism.13
Benjamin was a serious reader of ancient philosophy. He had read the single greatest survey of ancient Greek and Roman thought published in English during his time, Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, which appeared in three volumes between 1655 and 1661. (Benjamin had probably read the combined, single-volume edition published in 1701.) Here Benjamin learned about many thinkers, most notably “the Cynick Philosophers,” including the founder of the group, Diogenes of Sinope. Benjamin had also read the work of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who admired Diogenes and considered Cynicism to be “the highest, and hardest, human calling.” Among the books Benjamin brought from London was Epictetus his Morals, Done from the Original Greek, by a Doctor of Physick, published in 1702. He also brought the work of the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger. Lay used the ideas of these thinkers and others as he fashioned his critique of slavery and the social order in Pennsylvania.14
Scholars agree that the Cynics, founded by Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE) in Athens in the fourth century BCE, carried on a more or less coherent line of philosophical thought over nine hundred years, stretching to Rome in the fifth century CE. Diogenes, the original Cynic, was described as “Socrates gone mad.” Like Socrates he believed that philosophical ideas had to be embodied in public action—and he carried the point to extremes. Seeking to shock and provoke, Diogenes walked the streets of Athens dressed in simple clothes, carrying a walking stick, engaging anyone and everyone he met in philosophical conversation. He attacked all received wisdom, all prevailing custom, all long-standing taboos; one of his many mottoes was “Deface the currency.” He was said to have masturbated and defecated in public. Diogenes challenged people high and low with one subversive act after another. He lived outdoors, slept in a large ceramic jar, walked everywhere, ate only vegetables, drank only water, and in all respects affirmed the simple life as a matter of principle. He rejected Greek nationality and insisted on a new kind of citizenship: he declared himself a “cosmopolitan”—a citizen of the cosmos—inventing a new word that has lasted down to the present.15
Lay studied the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers and had a special interest in Diogenes and his fellow Cynics. Lay followed the example of Diogenes by acting out his radical ideas in public confrontations.
Much can be learned of Diogenes through an anecdote Benjamin read in Stanley’s History of Philosophy: The philosopher had become so famous that King Alexander the Great sought out his company and came upon him one day as he lay in repose, sunning himself. Alexander offered to grant Diogenes any wish, any wish at all: “Ask of me what thou wilt.” Diogenes looked up at the great man and answered that there was one thing he could do: “Do not stand between me and the Sun.” Such was the legendary scorn that Diogenes, a former slave, poured upon the rich and the high-born. Combining wit, color, imagination, and serious moral message, he practiced philosophy from below.16
Other philosophers—from Crates to Lucian—carried on and expanded the corpus of Cynic ideas, evolving a set of fundamental virtues, values, and principles. At the center of it all was the notion of parrhesia: free, frank, blunt, candid speech, uttered with indifference to worldly authority, just as Diogenes had spoken to Alexander. Cynics were known above all else for fearless speech. A second value was autarkeia, the ideal of self-sufficiency, the freedom to enjoy nature’s gifts without the interference of material goods and the false needs they created. Next came the related virtues of askêsis—rigorous training in asceticism, endurance, and physical toughness—and karteria: the practice of patient self-control that leads to moral toughness. A fifth and final value was tuphos: commitment to an unrelenting attack on wealth, prestige, appearance, luxury, and social standing. Cynics sought to live “life in agreement with nature.” They chose a simple, natural existence over and against the artificialities of “civilization,” affirming a pantheistic vision of interconnected life, which included an affinity with animals. The ideal Cynic society was antinomian: it would have no law, no courts, no money, no war, and no slavery. All would be based on love, which would be freely given to friends, citizens, foreigners, even barbarians.17
As part of his commitment to askêsis and karteria, the strict training that led to physical and moral toughness, and in honor and imitation of Jesus, Benjamin took an example from Matthew 4:1 and, in February 1738, began a forty-day fast. He resolved to drink only spring water several times a day. For the first few days, he kept up his normal routine, rising at daybreak, gardening, and making “his usual excursions in the neighbourhood.” On the ninth day of the fast he observed, I “am as well in health, as ever, since I came to Pennsylvania, which is six Years this Spring.” One morning he walked eight miles to Philadelphia, where he met with Benjamin Franklin, who later remarked that Benjamin’s “breath was so acrid as to produce a suffusion of water in his eyes, which was extremely painful.” By the third week of the fast his strength began to fail. He was soon confined to his cave and eventually to his bed. Yet he would not give up. He asked a friend to place a large loaf of bread on a nearby table. Although weak of voice he continued to test his will by saying repeatedly, “Benjamin thou seest it, but thou shalt not eat it.” His friends at this point grew alarmed, explaining that if he did not eat “he would certainly perish.” After three weeks his “mental faculties began to fail,” whereupon his friends began to feed him, slowly bringing him back to life. He discovered his own physical limits but he retained a strong commitment to “resolute self-denial” and an austere, virtuous way of life.18
Benjamin adapted Cynic ideals to the dictates of radical Christianity, but part of that adaptation had already taken place hundreds of years before he was born. Many scholars think the Cynics had a significant impact on the early Christians, shaping their practices of asceticism, voluntary poverty, the sharing of material goods, and the gospel of universal love. A few even see Jesus himself as a Cynic philosopher, especially when he said, “I have come into the world to be a witness to truth” (John 18:37). It is also noteworthy that the famous Biblical phrase (1 Timothy 6:10) “The love of money is the root of all evil” was not only a Cynic idea but a specific historical phrase the philosophers used. Benjamin wrote in the margins of a book, “Mammon—cursed love of mammon—mammon surfeits and corrupts the mind, and darkens the understanding—Oh the blessed doctrine and practice of the first christians, which kept out luxury, pride, and cursed covetousness.” Benjamin admired both the Cynics and the “primitive Christians” as described in the Book of Acts.19
Benjamin patterned significant parts of his new revolutionary life on the ideas and practices of the Cynics. Like Diogenes he wore a long beard and simple clothes, ate only fruits and vegetables, drank only water, and traveled long distances on foot using his walking stick—the very characteristics of Benjamin emphasized by artists in their portraits during the late 1750s and early 1760s. Benjamin practiced philosophy in public and generated endless discussion of his actions. In group discussions, wrote Roberts Vaux, “he would often make observations and remarks, calculated to provoke argument, with a view to fathom the minds of those with whom he conversed; and the estimate of their characters was formed with astonishing facility and correctness.” He may have copied Diogenes, who refused to eat with tyrants, when he walked out on an acquaintance whose slave served breakfast. Both Benjamin and Diogenes were better known by their actions, and by the huge folklore that grew up around them, than by their writings. In his post-1738 life Benjamin practiced parrhesia (fearless speech), autarkeia (self-sufficiency), askêsis (physical toughness), karteria (moral toughness), and tuphos (attacks on wealth and standing). He wrote in the margins of another book, “Money—the love of money,—the destruction of nations—the fountain of evil.” He railed against the “custom” that made the sin of slavery “familiar, easy and sweet.” He even adapted part of the Cynic critique of slavery, that the institution was deforming and horrible for both the enslaved and the master, who grows “lazy, arrogant, and peevish.” Benjamin reiterated this argument in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, in which he called all masters “proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, [and] Tyrannical.” Finally, Benjamin, like the Cynics, was mocked for his ideas and way of life. Like Crates, who was also a hunchback, he was ridiculed for his appearance.20
Like Diogenes, Benjamin excelled in wit and public exchanges, as John MacPherson, captain of a Philadelphia privateer, learned the hard way. He spotted Benjamin and sought to provide “diversion” for his traveling party of friends by engaging the little man in repartee. MacPherson approached Benjamin using deferential gentlemanly language, declaring himself to be “his most humble servant.” As a crowd gathered ’round, Benjamin asked in response, “Art thou my servant?” MacPherson answered, “Yes, I am.” Benjamin then raised up his foot toward the captain and demanded, “Then clean my shoe.” The crowd roared in laughter as insincere speech got what it deserved: mockery. Seeking to redeem himself, Captain MacPherson asked if Benjamin could please instruct him as to the direct route to heaven. Benjamin asked, “Dost thou indeed wish to be taught?” MacPherson insisted that he did. Benjamin then replied in a more serious way, quoting the prophet Micah: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” Embarrassed, MacPherson and his friends mounted their horses and quickly rode away, having become the object of “merriment” rather than its authors.21
The public action that prompted Franklin to call Benjamin a “Cynic” philosopher took place in the open-air market of Philadelphia in March 1742. Benjamin set up a table and arranged on it a set of fine China teacups and saucers. (These had apparently belonged to Sarah, who had died seven years earlier.) As a crowd gathered, Benjamin took out a hammer and smashed one teacup after another to protest the mistreatment of those who harvested the tea in Asia and those who produced the sugar in the Americas that sweetened it. The crowd was shocked, some screaming that Benjamin must not destroy the beautiful teacups—Give them to me! was the cry. Others offered to buy them, but Benjamin refused to listen. Smash! His iconoclastic attitude toward fine private property caused pandemonium to erupt. A growing mob finally rushed Benjamin and threw him to the ground. When he got up, “a stout youth” stepped up behind him, “adroitly slipped his head between his legs, and suddenly rising, lifted him up, and carried him off.” The lad’s mates then “saved the balance of the tea-set from destruction” and “carry’d off as much of it as they could get.” But Benjamin had made his point.22
Again, like Diogenes, Benjamin had a knack for commanding the attention of powerful people. He wrote in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates that he had two meetings with English royalty: on the first occasion with King George I, probably during the time he lived in London, working as a sailor, and on the second with both King George II and Queen Caroline, in the late 1720s or early 1730s, before he left England for Philadelphia. How he arranged these meetings is unknown. If, however, the kings and queen thought they were meeting a “royal dwarf,” full of aristocratic flattery and deference, they were soon disabused of the stereotype. On both occasions Benjamin brought a gift, indeed the same gift each time: John Milton’s pamphlet Considerations touching the likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church, Wherein is also Discours’d of Tythes, Church-fees, Church-revenues; and whether any Maintenance of Ministers can be settl’d by Law, first published in 1659. Benjamin gave a classic anticlerical text to the kings and queen, hoping, as he put it, that “they might see what a Company of destructive Vermin they had about them.” Like Milton, Benjamin thought that “worldly Interest” among Anglican ministers was profoundly corrupting and that the monarchs needed to understand this. Benjamin, in short, used his audience to attack the very institution over which the kings were the titular head as “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” The Quaker Diogenes spoke truth to power.23
Benjamin took an interest not only in books but in other parts of print culture, especially newspapers. He seems to have spent a good bit of time in the print shops of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Bradford, selling his own books there and occasionally raising subscriptions to republish books he liked. Here he engaged with the world beyond the debates among Quakers about slavery, as Roberts Vaux pointed out in his biography of Benjamin published in 1815: “Benjamin Lay’s mind was not exclusively directed to the subject of the trade in human flesh, and the shocking train of evils by which it was attended; it observed, and investigated, other objects connected with the interests of civil society and the welfare of man.”24
Of special interest in this regard was an exchange in the Pennsylvania Gazette in April 1738. Franklin republished an article that had appeared three months earlier in the Craftsman in London, a ringing defense of John Peter Zenger, a printer and journalist with the New York Weekly Journal who had criticized New York governor William Cosby, who in turn sued for libel and locked Zenger in jail for eight months in 1733–1734. Defended by the distinguished Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton, Zenger won his case, establishing a crucial legal milestone and precedent for an independent press.25
The author of the first article framed the Zenger case as a struggle for the “Rights and Privileges of Englishmen,” highlighting the courtroom drama. Attorney Hamilton begged presiding royalist judge James DeLancey: “I hope to be pardon’d, Sir, for my Zeal upon this Occasion.” Governor Cosby had abused his authority by harassing the printer “in an extra-judicial and arbitrary Manner”; he, like all “Leaders of the People,” must be called to account. In his closing argument to the jury Hamilton explained, “Many injure and oppress the People under their Administration, provoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very Complaint the Foundation for new Oppressions and Prosecutions.” The people must therefore oppose “arbitrary Power . . . by speaking and writing TRUTH.” He concluded that the case “may in its Consequence, affect every Freeman that lives under a British Government on the Main of America. It is the best Cause. It is the Cause of Liberty.” Hamilton’s speech moved the jury to return a not-guilty verdict after a brief deliberation. Upon the announcement, “Three great Huzzas” rang out through the hall of justice.
An anonymous gentleman in Philadelphia responded to the reprinted article with ridicule, suggesting that Hamilton was a hypocrite—merely playing popular politics, seeking “veneration among the vulgar” and lacking any principled commitment to “Liberty of the Press.” The hypocrite, he went on, “of all Creatures is generally agreed to be the most detestable and destructive to Society.” He made his point through a double appeal to prejudice. The author of the Zenger defense merits “Shame and Contempt” when he tries “to persuade us, that an Æthiopian is as Fair as a Helen or that Ben Lay is the tallest and straightest Man in America.”
Benjamin responded immediately, not only to the personal insult but to the larger argument, which interested him in several ways. He had his own concerns about censorship and freedom of expression as the Quaker Board of Overseers in Pennsylvania was busy denying publication to all critics of slavery. They had refused to publish the work of John Farmer and Ralph Sandiford, and they would have denied the book Benjamin was at that very moment working on. Benjamin too opposed the “Leaders of the People” and their “arbitrary Power . . . by speaking and writing TRUTH.” This was parrhesia, the creed of the Cynic philosophers, which Benjamin embraced and practiced. He responded to the anonymous writer in the very next issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette.
To the Man that mentioned me in his idle Paper, THESE.
THEE has taken the Freedom to publish to the World, that I am neither tall nor strait in Body.—Friend,—we neither made our own Bodies, nor can we mend them. But our bad Lives and Manners we may mend; and our foolish and ignorant Conduct and Behaviour we may mend; wherefore take it not amiss that I admonish thee a little.
Benjamin then praised Attorney Hamilton for “the Pains he hath taken in defending that Liberty,” which his anonymous critic “makes such large tho’ ill Use of.” He added that the gentleman was wrong to circulate “silly Books, said to come from Barbadoes, written against the Liberty of the Press, and against its Defender, for the Speeches he made at the Tryal of the said New York Printer.” He also objected to the attacks on Hamilton’s character, which anyone acquainted with the man knew to be false, and to the “vain Desire of being thought learned,” which caused the writer to pilfer lines from Aesop’s fables and dabble in Latin. Benjamin concluded by saying,
And now let me advise thee to regulate thy Diet, and live henceforth on the innocent Fruits of the Earth.—Friend,—clean Foods make a clean Body, which has a sympathetic Effect upon the Mind: And I perceive by the many Impurities that flow from thee, that thee feeds foully. Indeed, by thy spitting Venom round thee, by thy being swollen black with Envy, and by the low groveling dirty Malice that appears in all thy Papers, I do strongly suspect thee has eaten Toads lately. Fare thee well.
Benjamin demonstrated, in his brief response, his attitude toward a variety of topics: his own dwarf body; elite learning; and colonial politics. He also showed considerable rhetorical skill; command of the ideas of the Cynic philosophers and of his favorite writer, Thomas Tryon; and a sharp sense of humor.
Speaking in the familiar Quaker idiom of “thee” and “thou,” Benjamin addressed before all else the condescending comment about his height and shape, offering, in his own voice, the only direct comment on the subject to be found in surviving historical evidence. He had, of course, encountered ridicule many times throughout his life, so his response was surely well chosen and tested through experience. He embraced the statement that “I am neither tall nor strait in Body” and quickly added that he had no control over the matter: “we neither made our own Bodies, nor can we mend them.” He then pivoted to what can be controlled—and what he considered more important: “Lives and Manners” and “Conduct and Behaviour.” Here his “Friend” failed, as Benjamin would show in careful detail.
Clearly Benjamin knew the person who wrote the objectionable article. He referred to “thee and thy Friends,” to “thy last Paper,” indeed to “all thy Papers,” which presumably were also published in the Pennsylvania Gazette. He links the writer to Barbados and therefore likely to slavery: his friend’s friends were likely slave owners. It is also clear that Benjamin knew and respected Andrew Hamilton, the attorney who won the Zenger case. This exchange was part of a continuing debate about liberty in Philadelphia, Barbados, and London, which is to say, around the Atlantic.
Part of Benjamin’s purpose was to expose the writer’s vanity, expressed in a florid, patrician style of writing. Benjamin demonstrates his own knowledge of Aesop’s fables, specifically the “crow with borrowed feathers,” who strutted about pretending to be something other than what he was. Benjamin even slipped in a classical low-church Protestant dagger, accusing the writer of reading “Latin Prayers from a Book, to be admired of the Ignorant.” Benjamin bestowed one of his greatest insults in saying that the man had written an “idle Paper,” by which he meant worthless.
Benjamin concluded by offering advice, premised on his own principles of “life in agreement with nature.” He urged the writer to live “on the innocent Fruits of the Earth”—food that required no human or animal exploitation—and thereby to cleanse his body and mind. Benjamin’s body was suddenly not the only one under discussion! His opponent’s body was neither short nor crooked but “foul,” full of impurities; his ways were “foolish and ignorant.” Indeed, wrote Benjamin, “I do strongly suspect thee has eaten Toads lately.” After this clever, humorous flourish, Benjamin signed off with literal advice: “Fare thee well.”
Benjamin considered William Dell “pure reading” and thought so highly of the Cynic philosophers as to live some of their ideas. But there was another author he loved even more: a then popular but now little-known late-seventeenth-century English Atlantic writer named Thomas Tryon. As it happened, the two men lived parallel lives: Tryon was, like Benjamin, a former shepherd who came out of the radical Protestant movement in England, became a craftsman (a hatter), and lived in Barbados for a time. He too was appalled by slavery and came to oppose it. When artists created images of Benjamin between 1758 and 1760, they pictured the Quaker holding a book, on which was visibly written Trion on Happiness. The reference is to Tryon’s 1683 The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, or, A Discourse of Temperance and the Particular Nature of all Things Requisit for the Life of Man. Benjamin loved this book so much, noted biographer Benjamin Rush, “he frequently carried [it] with him, in his excursions from home.”26
Benjamin may have been drawn to Tryon’s angry denunciation of slavery in another book, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies, published in 1684. Here Tryon imagined a conversation between an “Ethiopian or Negro Slave” and his Christian master, the former offering a withering critique of the cruelty and terror of the ruling class of Barbados. But Benjamin found more in Tryon to like than his opposition to slavery. Tryon opposed violence and embraced other Quaker ideals such as simplicity and temperance. (Tryon was never a Quaker himself, but many of his books were published by Quaker printers.) Like the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, Tryon believed that war had its origins in the cruelty human beings practiced against animals. In All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, Benjamin repeated a key phrase from Tryon: “the merciful Man is merciful to his Beast.” Benjamin’s comments about food, body, and mind in the Zenger debate restated Tryon’s most fundamental idea.27
Tryon combined German mysticism (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Jacob Böhme), neo-Platonism (Pythagoras), and Indian Hinduism into an argument that vegetarianism promoted human “health, long life, and happiness.” He followed the Ranter shoemaker Jacob Bauthumley, who wrote, “I see that God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing.” Tryon saw enclosed lands as “the effects of Violence” and relatedly observed that cattle and other animals were being industrially produced and turned into “a grand Commodity, and (as it were) a Manufacture.” Tryon called animals “Fellow Citizens of the World”; they possessed natural rights. Profoundly influenced by the Brahmin philosophers of India, he wrote a different kind of history from below—“The Horses Complaint against their Masters”—as well as a different kind of history from above: “The Complaints of Birds and Fowls of Heaven to their Creator, for the Oppressions and Violences Most Nations on Earth do offer unto them, particularly the People called Christians, lately settled in several Provinces in America.” Tryon narrated these complaints in the animal voice: “We [horses] with great Toil and Labour draw their [master’s] Luggage in Carts and Wains, and their fat lazy Paunches in Charriots and Coaches.”28
Tryon and Lay were both fond of the phrase “fellow creature,” which was to English revolutionaries of the 1640s and 1650s what “citizen” was later to the French—a means of expressing equality, solidarity, and unity within the movement. Long after the restoration of monarchy in 1660, “fellow creature” survived as a mark of radicalism, a red thread that would thicken over time and stand out in the weave of abolitionism in the nineteenth century. Benjamin used the phrase repeatedly to refuse division and to express kinship with fellow Quakers, indentured servants, slaves—and animals. All creatures were fellow creatures. “Are not we the work of the great Creators hands,” asked Tryon. Were we, he wondered, not all endowed with the same spark of divinity?29
Roger Crab, a Leveller soldier in the English Revolution who in the 1650s became a vegetarian and ate only “herbs and roots,” may have been a model for Lay.
Benjamin encountered Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BCE) through Tryon, but he had also read him on his own; he cites him in All Slave-Keeper’s . . . Apostates. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Pythagoras was known not only for his famous theorem in geometry (a2 + b2 = c2) but also for his vegetarianism and his opposition to the killing of animals. Pythagoras had said, “As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love.” Here were the ancient origins of ideas Benjamin held dear.30
Vegetarianism thus had classical roots, but it sprouted anew in the churned-up soil of the English Revolution. Tristram Stuart writes that many radicals “used vegetarianism to articulate their dissent from the luxurious mainstream, and called for a bloodless revolution to institute a slaughter-free society of equality.”31 Benjamin may have been inspired by the cave-dwelling vegetarian Thomas Bushell or the Ranter-like vegetarian prophet John Robins. Most intriguing—and brimming with parallels—was the life of Roger Crab, a former soldier denounced as a Leveller “Agitator” and, he claimed, sentenced to death by Cromwell, perhaps after the great Leveller mutiny at Burford in 1649. Somehow reprieved (several were executed), Crab retired to the countryside to live a “strange reserved and unparallel’d kind of life,” much like Lay did two generations later. He thought himself the “Wonder of this Age,” as he announced in a pamphlet entitled The English Hermite. Crab considered it “a sin against his body and soule to eate any sort of flesh, fish, or living creature, or to drinke any wine, ale, or beere.” Instead, like Benjamin, he ate “roots and hearbs, as cabbage, turneps, carrets, dock-leaves, and grasse”; his clothing was “sack-cloath.” He practiced pacifism, proclaimed “universal love,” and, like any good antinomian, considered himself “above ordinances.”32
Benjamin used Tryon’s ideas just as he used the similar ideas of the Cynic philosophers: he acted on them. Tryon in many ways offered a Christianized version of Cynic ideals, living not just “life according to nature” but according to “God’s Law in Nature,” that is to say, a higher law. The goal was to live without violence, in “innocency,” in a state, wrote Tryon, where people neither “oppresseth nor hurteth nothing.” To kill animals was to break the Golden Rule. Water was the best drink, wrote Tryon, because it is simple and endowed “with such Equality.” Benjamin dressed in simple, undyed clothes as Tryon suggested. He embraced self-denial and temperance; like Benjamin Franklin, he thought “a little is sufficient.” He even retired to the countryside, described by Tryon as the place where “all is sedate and serene, still as the Voice of good Spirits, and quiet as the Birth of Flowers; no noise to be heard but the ravishing Harmony of the Wood-Musitians, and the innocent Lowings of Cows, and Neighings of Horses, and Bleating of the pretty Lambs.” Doing all of these things, wrote Benjamin, would enable “Mankind” to live the “sweet comfortable and happy Life.”33
As Benjamin built a new way of life after 1738, he combined the ideas of William Dell, the Cynic philosophers, Pythagoras, and Thomas Tryon, none of whom, it must be emphasized, were Quakers. Many were not even Christians. The free-thinking Benjamin decided that he must do something new. Armed with fresh ideas and a wealth of worldly experience, he withdrew from the culture and economy of slavery, violence, and capitalism. He returned to the commons with Sarah in 1734 and expanded his commitment to a new way of life in the years after her death in 1735.
Benjamin and Sarah’s new home, Abington, was eight miles north of Philadelphia. The colony had gained the eastern half of the township by treaty with the Lenni Lenape Indians in 1683, the western half in 1687. Always interested in history, Benjamin took pride in the nonviolent way William Penn acquired the land from the indigenous leader Tamanend, and taught children about the famous Elm tree at Shackamaxon, where the first treaty was thought to have been agreed to. Voltaire would later remark that this was only treaty Christians ever made with Indians that was not broken. Benjamin West would memorialize the event in a famous painting of 1771–1772.34
Benjamin and Sarah joined Quakers who had begun to settle in Abington in the 1690s. The quality of the land was excellent and in 1693 the colony began to construct “York Road,” a vital artery of commerce, northeast toward New York. A list of landowners in Abington drawn up in 1734—the very year Benjamin and Sarah moved there—contains the names of forty-two people, thirty-eight of whom owned between fifty and five hundred acres each. The median was a hundred acres, suggesting that this was a settlement of smallholders who slowly cleared the land for agriculture. Benjamin and Sarah did not buy land themselves, choosing instead to live on a small piece of property owned by fellow Quakers John and Ann Phipps, on Old York Road, about a quarter mile from the Friends Meeting House in Abington.35
Here Benjamin decided to reorganize his life outside the increasingly global market economy. He built his own abode, selecting a spot for habitation “near a fine spring of water” and erecting a small cottage into a “natural excavation in the earth . . . to afford himself a commodious apartment.” He lined the entrance with stone and created a roof with sprigs of evergreen. The interior of the cave was apparently quite spacious, with room for a spinning jenny. He made his own clothes in order to avoid the exploitation of the labor of others, animals included: “he would not even use the wool of sheep in his clothing and never wore any but flax-made garments.” His sitting room in the cave was festooned with “skains of thread, spun entirely by himself.” The cave also contained a large library. This was where he lived a life of the mind: “he reflected, read, and wrote.” Nearby he planted apple, peach, and walnut trees and tended a massive bee colony—an apiary a hundred feet long. He made honey a staple of his diet, never killing the bees. He also cultivated potatoes, squash, radishes, and melons. He essentially built a commons for himself.36
Benjamin conducted his life in full keeping with his evolving democratic, egalitarian, and antinomian principles. He lived simply and unostentatiously, in “plain” style as was the Quaker way, but he went further: he ate only fruits and vegetables, drank only milk and water; he was a strict vegetarian and very nearly a vegan two centuries before the word was invented. Because of the divine pantheistic presence of God he perceived in all living things, he refused to eat “flesh.” Animals too were “God’s creatures.” He opposed the death penalty in all instances, even for animals. Most tellingly, Benjamin consciously boycotted all commodities produced by slave labor. He understood the dark secrets of the marketplace: he saw the violent conditions under which the commodity sugar was produced and the suffering of the producers, all of which he first grasped in Barbados, where “sugar was made with blood.” Benjamin expanded the boycott into a positive idea: people had to learn to live on the “innocent fruits of the earth,” such as those he grew in his garden. He lived “life in agreement with nature,” embodying a new ecological consciousness.37
Benjamin’s unusual way of life attracted the curious, who wanted to see how he translated his ideas into practice. Visits generated an expansive folklore as people will talk—and write. When Governor Richard Penn, Benjamin Franklin, and “some other gentlemen” showed up at his cave, he received them “with his usual politeness” and engaged them in his always witty, starkly honest conversation. He then spread a table for dinner and covered it plentifully with the fruits and vegetables he had grown. He announced to his visitors, “This is not the kind of fare you have at home, but it is good enough for you or me—and such as it is, you are welcome to eat of it.” His own favorite meal was “Turnips boiled, and afterwards roasted.” His favorite drink was “pure water.” He produced his own nutritious food and did not depend on the money economy for subsistence.38
Part of Benjamin’s refusal to eat meat was philosophical, but part of it was personal and temperamental: he had a sensitive soul and could not abide cruelty, even when it was his own. He once encountered a groundhog that repeatedly ravaged his garden. He caught and killed the troublesome creature, dissected it, and nailed its parts to the four corners of the garden, perhaps unconsciously replicating the practices of the English ruling class, which drew and quartered criminals, and displayed their body parts to terrorize others. Lay was immediately stricken with remorse over the cruel act, and soon thereafter, under the tutelage of Tryon, he renounced killing and eating animals and declared himself a vegetarian. Tryon had recommended the virtues of a quiet, simple, rural life, based on “Harmony and Unity” with the world. In the last phase of his life, Lay followed Tryon in rethinking humanity’s most fundamental relationship to nature.39
The final and indeed the core element of Benjamin’s “life in accordance with nature” was Christian asceticism. He was part of a long line of devout people who sought spiritual strength through self-denial and a humble, secluded life. The prophet Jeremiah had lived in a cave, as had monks of many kinds over the centuries. Francis Daniel Pastorius, who drafted the Germantown petition against slavery in 1688, had lived in a cave at Front and Spruce Streets in the early years of Philadelphia’s settlement. German pietists such as Johannes Kelpius and his followers lived in caves not far from Benjamin’s own. The common effort was to recapture the lost innocence of man before the Fall—before Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Benjamin shared this hope and consciously expanded it to include an ethical relationship to all of nature, to other human beings, to animals, and to the “innocent Fruits of the Earth.” Benjamin’s greatest challenge to humanity was not merely to abolish slavery but to eradicate all forms of exploitation and oppression. This he attempted to exemplify in his own way of life. He built the inward and outward New Jerusalem, in his own soul and on a small patch of land. This was an embodied prophecy about the future.40
In the end Benjamin’s ideal society was one in which all people could visit the “sweetly refreshing Streams of the River of Life for Drink, and the Tree of Life for Food,” where “they may have a proper right to partake of the Fruit daily, without Money or Price, all free as was the Hebrews Manna.” Subsistence would not be mediated by money and restricted to those who had it. He continued in rapture, “Oh! Holy Pleasure indeed, to eat of such Food, and drink of such Drink.” His fondest hope, and ultimate political goal, was that “the Earth might become a Paradise again, to all People, as it is to some.”41