INTRODUCTION
ON SEPTEMBER 19, 1738, Benjamin Lay strode into a large gathering of Quakers in the Burlington, New Jersey, meetinghouse for the biggest event of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Benjamin had journeyed almost thirty miles on foot, as was his way, arriving four days earlier and subsisting on “Acorns & peaches only.” Presiding over the gathering were John Kinsey, clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and Israel Pemberton Sr., assistant clerk, leaders of the Society of Friends in the Philadelphia region and the Quaker-dominated legislature of Pennsylvania. Benjamin had a message for them and indeed for all of the assembled.1
Benjamin surveyed the room and took a conspicuous location. He wore a great coat, which hid a military uniform and a sword from his fellow Quakers, who, back in 1660, had embraced the “peace testimony,” refusing all weapons and warfare. Beneath his coat Benjamin carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice. Because Quakers had no formal minister nor church ceremony, people spoke as the spirit moved them. Benjamin, a man of spirit pure and unruly, waited his turn.
He finally rose to address this gathering of “weighty Quakers,” many of whom owned African slaves. Quakers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had grown rich on Atlantic commerce and many bought human property. To them Benjamin delivered a chilling prophecy. He announced in a booming voice that God Almighty respects all peoples equally, rich and poor, men and women, white people and black alike. He explained that slave keeping was the greatest sin in the world and asked, How can a people who profess the Golden Rule keep slaves? He then threw off his great coat, revealing the military garb, the blade, and the book to his astonished co-religionists. A collective murmur filled the hall. In a rising crescendo of emotion, the prophet thundered his judgment: “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He pulled out the sword, raised the book above his head, and plunged the sword through it. The people in the room gasped as the red liquid gushed down his arm; several women swooned at the sight. To the shock of all, he spattered “blood” on the heads and bodies of the slave keepers. Benjamin prophesied a dark, violent future: Quakers who failed to heed the prophet’s call must expect physical, moral, and spiritual death.
The room exploded into chaos, but Benjamin stood quiet and still, “like a statue,” remarked Kinsey. Several Quakers quickly surrounded the armed soldier of God, picked him up, and carried him from the building. Benjamin did not resist. But he had made his point. As long as Quakers owned slaves, there would be no “business as usual” if Benjamin could help it. His brothers and sisters had made peace with the devil, so he used his body to disrupt their hypocritical, pious routines.
This spectacular prophetic performance was one moment of guerrilla theater among many. Benjamin repeatedly dramatized what was wrong in both the Society of Friends and the world at large. For a quarter century he railed against slavery in one Quaker meeting after another, in and around Philadelphia, confronting slave owners and slave traders with a savage, most un-Quaker-like fury. Whenever he performed guerrilla theater, his fellow Quakers removed him by physical force as a “trouble-maker” or “disorderly person” as they had done in Burlington. He did not struggle against eviction, but back he came, again and again, undeterred, or rather more determined than ever. He began to stage his theater of apocalyptic outrage in public venues, including city streets and markets. He refused to be cowed by the rich and powerful as he freely spoke his mind. He practiced what the ancient Greeks called parrhesia—free, fearless speech, which required courage in the face of danger. He insisted on the utter depravity and sinfulness of “Man-stealers,” who were, in his view, the literal spawn of Satan. He considered it his Godly duty to expose and drive them out. His confrontational methods made people talk: about him, his ideas, the nature of Quakerism and Christianity, and, most of all, slavery. His first biographer, Benjamin Rush—physician, reformer, abolitionist, and signer of the Declaration of Independence—noted that “there was a time when the name of this celebrated Christian Philosopher . . . was familiar to every man, woman, and to nearly every child, in Pennsylvania.” For or against, everyone told stories about Benjamin Lay.2
The zealot carried his activism into print, publishing in 1738 one of the world’s first books to demand the abolition of slavery: All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. All enslaved people were innocent, Benjamin believed, so he called for all to be emancipated, immediately and unconditionally, with no compensation to slave owners. Slave keepers had transgressed the core beliefs of Quakerism in particular and Christianity in general: they should be cast out of the church. Benjamin wrote his book at a time when slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens. No one had ever taken such a militant, uncompromising, universal stand against slavery in print or in action. Benjamin demanded freedom now.
Perhaps because he had little education, Benjamin ignored the rules of convention in writing his book. It made for odd reading, then and since, but it is a veritable treasure trove for a historian: a mixture of autobiography; prophetic Biblical polemic against slavery; a commonplace book into which he dropped writings by others as well as his own thoughts on a variety of subjects; haunting, surreal descriptions of slavery in Barbados; an annotated bibliography of what he read; and a vivid, scathing account of his own struggles against slave owners within the Quaker community. It is a founding text of Atlantic antislavery.3
Benjamin knew that Kinsey, Pemberton, and the other members of the Quaker Board of Overseers—who vetted all publications—would never approve the book. Most of them owned slaves. So he went directly to his friend, the printer Benjamin Franklin, and asked him to publish it. When Franklin saw a confused jumble of pages in a box he expressed puzzlement about how to proceed. Lay answered, “Print any part thou pleaseth first”—assemble the materials in any order you like. As one exasperated reader later noted of the different parts of the book, “the head might serve for the tail, and the tail for the body, and the body for the head, either end for the middle, and the middle for either end; nay, if you could turn them inside out, like a glove, they would be no worse for the operation.” (Lay was one of the world’s first postmodernists.) Franklin agreed to publish the ringing rant against slavery, knowing full well that the wealthy Quakers assailed in it would howl in protest. He quietly left the printer’s name off the title page.4
Part of Benjamin’s guerrilla theater was his distinctive appearance. He was a dwarf or “little person,” standing a little over four feet tall. He was also called a “hunchback,” meaning that he suffered from over-curvature of the thoracic vertebrae, a medical condition called kyphosis. According to a fellow Quaker,
His head was large in proportion to his body; the features of his face were remarkable, and boldly delineated, and his countenance was grave and benignant. He was hunch-backed, with a projecting chest, below which his body became much contracted. His legs were so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him, diminutive as his frame was, in comparison with the ordinary size of the human stature. A habit he had contracted, of standing in a twisted position, with one hand resting upon his left hip, added to the effect produced by a large white beard, that for many years had not been shaved, contributed to make his figure perfectly unique.5
Benjamin’s wife, Sarah, was also a “little person,” which caused the enslaved Africans of Barbados to remark in delighted wonder, “That little backarar [white] man go all over world see for [to look for] that backarar woman for himself.” Yet Sarah was more than a help-meet; she was a principled abolitionist in her own right. Benjamin was by some definition “disabled,” or handicapped, but I have found no evidence that he thought himself in any way diminished, nor that his body kept him from doing anything he wanted to do. He called himself “little Benjamin” but he also likened himself to “little David” who slew Goliath. He did not lack confidence in himself or his ideas.6
Benjamin Lay is little known among historians. He appears occasionally in histories of abolition, usually as a minor, colorful figure of suspect sanity. By the nineteenth century he was regarded as “diseased” in his intellect and later as “cracked in the head.” To a large extent this image has persisted in modern histories. Indeed David Brion Davis, a leading historian of abolitionism, condescendingly called Benjamin a mentally deranged, obsessive “little hunchback.” Benjamin gets better treatment by amateur Quaker historians, who include him in their pantheon of antislavery saints, and by the many excellent professional historians of Quakerism. He is almost totally unknown to the general public.7
Benjamin was better known among abolitionists than among their later historians. The French revolutionary Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville gathered stories about him almost three decades after Benjamin’s death, during a visit to the United States in 1788. Brissot wrote that Benjamin was “simple in his dress and animated in his speech; he was all on fire when he spoke on slavery.” In this respect Benjamin anticipated by a century the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, who was also “all on fire” about human bondage. When Thomas Clarkson penned the history of the movement that abolished the slave trade in Britain, in 1808, a moment of triumph for that country, he credited Lay, who had “awakened the attention of many to the cause.” Lay possessed “strong understanding and great integrity,” but was “singular” and “eccentric.” He had, in Clarkson’s view, been “unhinged” by cruelties he observed in Barbados between 1718 and 1720. When Clarkson drew his famous graphic genealogy of the movement, a riverine map of abolition, he named a significant tributary “Benjamin Lay.” On the other side of the Atlantic, in the 1830s and 1840s, more than seventy years after Lay’s death, the American abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and Lydia Maria Child rediscovered him, republished his biography, reprinted an engraving of him, and renewed his memory within the movement.8
Benjamin is not the usual elite subject of biography. He came from a humble background and was poor most of his life, by occupation and by choice. He lived, he explained, by “the Labour of my Hands.” He was also considered a philosopher in his own day, much like the ancient Greek Diogenes, the former slave known for speaking truth to power. (He refused Greek nationality and insisted that he was, rather, “a citizen of the world.”) Benjamin lived a mobile, far-flung life, in England, Barbados, Pennsylvania, and on the high seas in-between, all of which shaped his cosmopolitan thinking. Unlike most poor people, he left an unmediated record of his ideas.9
We are unusually fortunate to have three distinct bodies of evidence with which to write Benjamin’s intellectual history “from below.” The first is his own book, All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates, a rich and remarkable body of evidence by any measure. The second set of sources is Quaker records, generated in Colchester, London, Philadelphia, and Abington, the places where Benjamin lived and worshipped. In the aftermath of George Fox’s reforms in the 1660s and 1670s, Quaker congregations became careful record keepers, partly in order to discipline recalcitrant spirits such as Benjamin. The third collection of records grew from Benjamin’s guerrilla theater, which generated endless stories. Some of these were published in newspapers after Benjamin’s death. In the early nineteenth century Benjamin’s second biographer, Quaker philanthropist Roberts Vaux, interviewed elderly Quakers who knew Benjamin. Born in the early 1730s, they had encountered Benjamin as children, teenagers, and young adults. With this unusual combination of sources we can explore in detail the thoughts and actions of someone who, with clear and canny prescience, saw that slavery must be abolished.10
Benjamin’s radicalism was a rope of five strands: he was a Quaker, philosopher, sailor, abolitionist, and commoner. As a free thinker he drew on a wide variety of books and intellectual traditions, combining them creatively to serve his own values and purposes. He was first and foremost an antinomian radical—someone who believed that salvation could be achieved by grace alone and that a direct connection to God placed the believer above man-made law. Taken from the Greek, meaning “against all authority,” antinomianism emerged in the heat of revolution and civil war in England. As heresiographer Ephraim Pagitt wrote of religious radicals such as the Diggers, Levellers, and Seekers, in 1647, “The Antinomians are so called . . . because they would have the Law abolished.” They offered a deep critique of power in all its forms in a “world turned upside down,” as Christopher Hill called the revolutionary era. Against institutions, the state, and all “outward forms,” conscience reigned supreme. Benjamin was, in short, a free spirit. Antinomianism was the foundation of his thought.11
Benjamin combined Quakerism with abolitionism and other radical ideas and practices that were uncommon for his time and rarely thought to be related: vegetarianism, animal rights, opposition to the death penalty, environmentalism, and the politics of consumption. He lived in a cave for the last third of his life, cultivated his own food, and made his own clothes. For Benjamin these beliefs and practices were all part of a consistent, integrated, ethical worldview—one that could save a planet desperately in need of salvation. He showed that multiple forms and traditions of radicalism could all be part of the same consciousness. He believed that abolition must inform a revolutionary revaluation of all life, premised on a rejection of the capitalist values of the marketplace. Benjamin Lay was, in several ways, a curiously modern man whose story has never been fully or properly told. He is a radical for our time.
In the aftermath of numerous successful abolition movements, now that almost everyone agrees that slavery was, and remains to this day, morally wrong, it is not easy to recover the profound hostility Benjamin encountered for espousing antislavery beliefs in the early eighteenth century. Benjamin himself noted how people flew into rages when they heard him speak against bondage. They ridiculed him; they heckled him; they laughed at him. Many dismissed him as mentally deficient and somehow deranged as he opposed the deep “common sense” of the era. The scorn was based in economic interest and racial prejudice but also in bias against him as a little person. Each reinforced the other in cruelty and rancor.
Efforts began after Benjamin’s death to remember the enmity he suffered. A New Jersey abolitionist who wrote under the pen name “Armintor” noted in 1774 how few were the number of advocates who, early on, dared to speak out on behalf of Africans, “this poor oppressed part of creation.” He singled out “the despised Benjamin Lay” as the “foremost” among them. Quaker Ann Emlen, wife of abolitionist Warner Mifflin, noted in 1785 that Benjamin’s confrontational ways in meetings met strong resistance from Friends, even though he spoke “the truth” about slavery.12
Roberts Vaux made the hostile response to Benjamin a major theme of his biography, published in 1815. Indeed he wrote his memorial against the repression that had obscured and sullied the activist’s memory. As a philanthropist and abolitionist himself, Vaux sought to set the record straight among his fellow Quakers and the public at large. He used strong words to describe precisely what Benjamin encountered as he witnessed against the beast of bondage: opposition, antipathy, prejudice, ridicule, hostility, intolerance, persecution, oppression, and violence. Vaux noted that Benjamin faced “vigorous opposition from every quarter” and found himself “an almost solitary combatant in a field where prejudice and avarice . . . had marshalled their combined forces against him.” The response from his fellow Quakers in particular was “so general and so intense,” it was enough “to make a wise man mad.” Benjamin was, in 1738, the last Quaker disowned for protests against slavery. It would take another twenty years for Quakers to agree even to the possibility of disowning a member for slave-trading and an additional eighteen years to begin to excommunicate slave owners. It was not easy to be so far ahead of one’s time.13
Quaker abolitionist and philanthropist Roberts Vaux was Lay’s second biographer, publishing The Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford, Two of the Earliest Public Advocates for the Emancipation of the Enslaved Africans in 1815.
Prejudice ballooned into repression. Fellow Quakers not only denounced Benjamin’s book about slavery but also denied his right to speak on the subject in their gatherings. As John Kinsey made clear in 1737, the leaders of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting objected to how Benjamin was “presumeing to preach” in “publick Meetings.” Once known for their open-to-all “mechanick preaching,” Friends now decided that they “could not approve of his Ministry.” They simply could not bear to hear what he was saying.14
Campaigners against slavery who came before Benjamin could not always take the pressure. According to Quaker John Forman, Benjamin’s fellow Essexman John Farmer made “a very powerful testimony against the oppression of the black people” in 1717–1718. After Farmer addressed a Quaker congregation in Philadelphia, “a great man, who kept negroes . . . got up and desired Friends to look on that man as an open enemy to the country.” Other Friends sided with the great man and together they forced Farmer to “make something like an acknowledgment” that he had been wrong. This event had a crippling effect: Farmer “sunk under it” and “declined in his gift” of ministry. He never returned to England. On his deathbed he declared himself “easy” about everything in his life except “flinching from his testimony at that time, and in that manner.”15
Benjamin got greater pressure, over a longer period of time, and additional derision for being a little person, but he never sank, declined, flinched, or retreated. At the same time his determination and conviction made him an awkward and difficult person, to say the least. He was loving to his friends, but he could be a holy terror to those who did not agree with him. He was aggressive and disruptive. He was stubborn, never inclined to admit a mistake. His direct antinomian connection to God made him self-righteous and at times intolerant. The more resistance he encountered, or, as he understood it, the more God tested his faith, the more certain he was that he was right. He had reasons both sacred and self-serving for being the way he was. He was sure that these traits were essential to defeat the profound evil of slavery.
The ill will expressed toward Benjamin in Barbados and Pennsylvania came from both above and below—from political and religious leaders like Kinsey and from ordinary people, all of whom supported the institution of slavery in one way or another. To make this point, Vaux quoted Rome’s great lyric poet, Horace, of whom Benjamin would certainly have approved, as he loved the writers of antiquity:
The just man who is resolute
will not be turned from his purpose
either by the rage of the crowd or
by an imperious tyrant.
It took fortitude and courage to face the kind of opposition that confronted Benjamin over the last forty years of his life. Fortunately for him, and for posterity, those virtues were never in short supply. He demonstrated the power of saying no to slavery. His life is a story of fearlessness in that cause.16