1. This and the next three paragraphs draw on the four primary source accounts of Lay’s action at the Burlington meeting: a note by John Kinsey dated September 19, 1738, PYM Minutes, 1681–1746, MRPh469, FHL-SCL; interview with John Forman, 1785, in Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 274–76; Rush, “Account”; and Vaux, Memoirs. The yearly meeting was the highest in the hierarchy of Quaker meetings, which ascended from preparative to monthly, quarterly, and yearly, each one routing members and representatives to the one above. Most business was conducted in the monthly meetings, usually one for men and one for women: discipline was dispensed, certificates for travel awarded, and proposed marriages evaluated. The quarterly and yearly meetings, which met four times and once a year as their names implied, handled the larger issues of policy.
2. Rush, “Account.” Mario Caricchio refers to the “spectacular prophetic performances” of the Ranter Abiezer Coppe during the English Revolution. See his “News from the New Jerusalem: Giles Calvert and the Radical Experience,” in Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Radicalism in Context, ed. Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 71.
3. Lay, All Slave-Keepers. It is not clear why the publication date on the title page is listed as 1737 when several entries in the book are dated 1738. Lay also took out a notice in the American Weekly Mercury to announce the recent appearance of the book on August 24, 1738.
4. Semi-Weekly Eagle, July 16, 1849 (Brattleboro, VT). Jean R. Soderlund has shown that between 1731 and 1751, two-thirds of the members of the Board of Overseers owned slaves. See her Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 34.
5. Rush, “Account”; Vaux, Memoirs, 20–21. Rush’s estimate of Lay’s height (“not much above four feet”) is to be preferred to that of Vaux (“four feet seven inches in height”) because Rush gathered information twenty-five years earlier, when many more people who knew Benjamin were still alive. It should also be noted that Benjamin may have used his small stature to advance his ideas. Christopher Hill wrote that, during the English Revolution, many radicals “deliberately exaggerated their eccentricities in order to get a hearing.” This was especially true of many of the early Quakers. See Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (orig. publ. 1972; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1984), 16.
6. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 38. This study of Lay’s life seeks to contribute to the relatively new and rapidly growing field of history known as disability studies. For an overview and a synthesis, see Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). See also Nathaniel Smith Kogan, “Aberrations in the Body and in the Body Politic: The Eighteenth-Century Life of Benjamin Lay, Disabled Abolitionist,” Disability Studies Quarterly 36 (2016), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5135/4410.
7. Quotations: Vaux, Memoirs, 24; Semi-Weekly Eagle, July 16, 1849; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 324. See also Hunt, “Notices of Lay”; C. Brightwen Rountree, “Benjamin Lay (1681–1759),” Journal of the Friends Historical Society 33 (1936): 3–19; Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1950), 44–48. Among the best works on Quakers and slavery are Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery; Thomas P. Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); Maurice Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Geoffrey Plank, John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); and Brycchan Carey, From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Anti-Slavery, 1657–1761 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). I would also mention three important collections of essays: Richard Newman and James Mueller, eds., Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice on the City of Brotherly Love (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank, eds., Quakers and Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); and Maurice Jackson and Susan Kozel, eds., Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist Cause, 1754–1808 (London: Routledge, 2015).
8. J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, performed in 1788 (Dublin: W. Corbet, 1792), 267; Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (London, 1808), 84–85; [Benjamin Lundy], “Biographical Sketches: Benjamin Lay,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, A Monthly Periodical Work Containing Original Essays, Documents, and Facts Relative to the Subject of African Slavery 1 (1830): 38–40; Child, Memoir. On Garrison, see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). Three outstanding histories of the abolition movement in Britain and America are Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
9. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 151. Exemplary “biographies from below” have been written by Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); and Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon, 2007).
10. Vaux interviewed ten people who averaged eighty-two years of age. See Memoirs, viii. For Fox’s reforms, see chapter 1.
11. Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography, or, A Description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter Times (London, 1647); Hill, The World Turned Upside Down; Christopher Hill, “Antinomianism in 17th-Century England,” in his Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, vol. II, Religion and Politics in 17th-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 179. Frederick B. Tolles mistakenly claimed that by 1739 “no trace” of antinomianism remained in Quakerism. See his “Quietism Versus Enthusiasm: The Philadelphia Quakers and the Great Awakening,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 69 (1945): 27.
12. Pennsylvania Packet, February 7, 1774; Ann Emlen to John Pemberton, 15.1.1785, Pemberton Family Papers, vol. 42, 162, HSP. I thank Gary B. Nash for the Emlen reference.
13. Vaux, Memoirs, v, vi, 20, 22, 25.
14. Meeting of 24.iv.1737, PMM Minutes, 1715–1744, MRPh383, fo. 285–86, FHL-SCL. See chapters 2 and 3 for accounts of Benjamin’s disownments from various Quaker meetings.
15. Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 274.
16. Here is the original Latin version of the poem quoted by Vaux (18): Justum, et tenacem propositi virum, / Non civium ardor prava jubentium / Non vultus instantis tyranni / Mente quatit solida.
1. David Ross, “Copford, St Michael and All Angels Church,” Britain Express, http://www.britainexpress.com/counties/essex/churches/copford.htm, accessed April 25, 2016.
2. Janet Cooper, ed., A History of the County of Essex, vol. X, Lexden Hundred (Part) Including Dedham, Earls Colne and Wivenhoe (London: Victoria County History, 2001), 139–43; Harold C. Greenwood, “Quaker Digest of Essex Births, Index, 1613–1837,” 1997, SFC-UE; Catherine Ferguson, Christopher Thornton, and Andrew Wareham, eds., Essex Hearth Tax Returns: Michelmas 1670 (London: The British Record Society, 2012), based on Q/RTh 5, ERO.
3. Presentments by hundreds of Ongar, Harlow, and Waltham, 1667, Q/SR 412/40, ERO; CMM Minutes, 1672–1718, meetings of 5.ii.1672 (fo. 3) and 7.iv.1672 (fo. 3), SFC-UE. It seems unlikely that the William Lay mentioned in the Quaker records was Benjamin’s father, who would have been only eighteen years old in 1672. On the distances that members lived from the CMM meeting, see John Heveningham, “Williamson Loyd,” “Richard Freshfield,” “Benjamin Dikes,” John Layswell, James Catchpool, John Kendall, and “Thomas Kendall” to PMM, 27.vi.1732, ff. 84–85, SFC-UE.
4. CMM Minutes, 1672–1718, meetings of 3.xi.1679 (fo. 38), 6.iii.1687 (fo. 74), 3.iv.1687 (fo. 75), and 2.iii.1712 (fo. 258), SFC-UE.
5. Will of William Lay, Husbandman of Copford, Essex, 30 October 1684, PROB 11/377/453, NA; Will of William Lay of Fordham, yeoman, 17 October 1722, D/ABW 84/2/75, ERO; Will of John Lay of Copford, yeoman, 24 August 1735, D/ABW 89/1/113, ERO. While copyhold and freehold differed in the medieval period, by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both conveyed a right of ownership. For background, see A. W. B. Simpson, An Introduction to the History of Land Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1961), 135–62. Thanks to Janelle Greenberg on this point.
6. J. H. Round, ed., Register of the Scholars Admitted to Colchester School, 1637–1740 (Colchester, UK: Wiles and Son, 1897); Vaux, Memoirs, 13, 44.
7. Philip Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (London, 1768), xxv; Thomas Cromwell, History and Description of the Ancient Town and Borough of Colchester, in Essex (London: Robert Jennings, 1825), 83; “To be SOLD,” American Weekly Mercury, October 12–19, 1732. Two of the people mentioned in Benjamin’s will of 1731 were bay makers; four more were weavers. See “A Copy of Benjamin Lay’s Will, Dated ye 9: 1 month 1731,” folder 56, SFC-UE. On Benjamin’s spinning, see Rush, “Account.”
8. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Christopher Hill, “From Lollards to Levellers,” in Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton, ed. Maurice Cornforth (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 52–61.
9. Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 78–79. See also Hill, “From Lollards to Levellers,” for discussion of the “direct links in ideas from Lollards through Familists and Anabaptists to the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Quakers of the mid-seventeenth century,” 63.
10. Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000), ch. 10: “From Lollards to Quakers.”
11. Pagitt, Heresiography. For a comprehensive, first-rate study of the “antinomian underground,” from the Grindletonians in the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the English Revolution, see David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
12. Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1660 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 69; Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 14. On Fox and Nayler, see H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); Leo Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); and David Neelon, James Nayler: Revolutionary to Prophet (Becket, MA: Leadings Press, 2009). Christopher Hill noted in The World Turned Upside Down, 232: “The whole early Quaker movement was far closer to Ranters in spirit than its leaders later liked to recall, after they had spent many weary hours differentiating themselves from Ranters and ex-Ranters.” See also Robert Barclay, The Anarchy of the Ranters, and Other Libertines (London, 1676).
13. Davies, Quakers in English Society, 26; Parnell quoted in Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, 36. Phyllis Mack offers a vivid portrait of Martha Simmonds in her Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 197–208.
14. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, 26, 44, 53; Davies, Quakers in English Society, 13, 27, 182; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 25; Damrosch, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 43. Melvin B. Endy Jr. emphasizes the “spiritualist” origins and genealogy of Quakers among the Seekers and Ranters, who were “anti-clerical Antinomians.” See his essay “Puritanism, Spiritualism, and Quakerism: An Historiographical Essay,” in The World of William Penn, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 281–301. Endy also sums up the antinomianism that lay at the heart of Quakerism: “saints were free from all human authorities, which were all corrupt, and could submit only to the witness of God within them.” Everyone, including rulers, were, according to the apostle Paul (Roman 13:1), “subject to the Higher Power” of God, which was beyond all man-made law. See his William Penn and Early Quakerism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 86–87.
15. Fitch, Colchester Quakers, 37–38; Kenneth L. Carroll, John Perrot: Early Quaker Schismatic (London: Friends Historical Society, 1971), vii; Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, 193–203; Davies, Quakers in English Society, 67, 131.
16. Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 29, 244; Davies, Quakers in English Society, 17.
17. Simmonds quoted in Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 170, 178; Kenneth L. Carroll, “Sackcloth and Ashes and Other Signs and Wonders,” Journal of Friends Historical Society 63 (1975): 314–25; Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and ‘Going Naked as a Sign,’” Quaker History 67 (1978): 69–87; Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus, 5, 7; Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, ch. 3.
18. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, 111, 113–14; Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, 214–28; Davies, Quakers in English Society, 189; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 254–56; Clare J. L. Martin, “Tradition Versus Innovation: The Hat, Wilkinson-Story and Keithian Controversies,” Quaker Studies 8 (2003), available at http://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/quakerstudies/vol8/iss1/1.
19. Lay announced his commitment to Protestant radicalism soon after he arrived in Philadelphia in 1732 with an advertisement in the American Weekly Mercury listing books for sale, the very first of which was John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), the classic account of Protestant sufferings at the hands of the Catholic Church. See “To be SOLD, by Benjamin Lay,” American Weekly Mercury, October 12–19, 1732. Lay also studied the writings of the founding generation of Quakers—George Fox, Edward Burrough, Richard Hubberthorne, William Dewsbury, Francis Howgill, and George Whitehead, all members of the Quaker “Valiant Sixty”—as well as the leading figures of the second generation, William Penn and Robert Barclay. He knew William Sewel’s The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers (1722). He had also read extensively about the persecution of the “Quaker lambs” by Puritans in seventeenth-century Boston; indeed he had visited the very spot where their executions had taken place.
20. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 131–33; “A Copy of Benjamin Lay’s Will, Dated ye 9: 1 month 1731,” SFC-UE, folder 56.
21. Sheep were valuable to farmers like Benjamin’s brother for their wool, for mutton when sold to butchers, and for manure that fertilized fallow fields, as Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm wrote during his tour through eastern England, including Essex, in 1748. See Kalm’s Account of his Visit to England in his Way to America in 1748 (London: Macmillan and Company, 1892), 301–2.
22. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 28, 265.
23. James Nayler, The Lamb’s War (London, 1657), reprinted in James Nayler, A Collection of Sundry Books, Epistles, and Papers written by James Nayler, some of which were never before Printed: with an Impartial Relation of the most Remarkable Transactions relating to his Life (London, 1716). For an excellent analysis of Fox’s radical early use of the Book of Revelation, see David Loewenstein, “The War of the Lamb: George Fox and the Apocalyptic Discourse of Revolutionary Quakerism,” in The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Thomas N. Corns and David Loewenstein (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 25–41. For a succinct summary of “The Lamb’s War,” see Meredith Baldwin Weddle, Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70–71.
24. This and the following two paragraphs draw from R. Campbell, The London Tradesman, being a Compendious View of All the Trades, Professions, Arts, both Liberal and Mechanic, now Practiced in the Cities of London and Westminster (London: T. Gardner, 1747), 223; Inventory of the Estate late of Benjamin Lay decd, Exhbitd 12 March 1759, File A-55–1759, CPRW; Amelia Mott Gummere, The Quaker: A Study in Costume (Philadelphia: Ferris & Leech, 1901), 43–46.
25. Vaux, Memoirs, 14 (emphasis added). This section draws on research presented in Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014).
26. Daniel Defoe, The Storm: or, a Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the late dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land (London, 1704).
27. Basil Lubbock, ed., Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen, & Other Merchant Men from 1659 to 1703 (London, 1934), 553.
28. Benjamin likely disdained parts of seafaring culture, especially the profanity and drinking of rum. It is hard to imagine how, at his height, he would have been able to turn the capstan, a mechanical gearing device operated by the physical strength of the crew. Perhaps he did other work.
29. “Curious Cave Dweller Once Made Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1, 1901. The hammock appears in the “Inventory of the goods & Chattals of Benjamin Lay of the Town of Abington in the County of Philadelphia Deceasd as appraised by us the Subscribers this twenty first and twenty third Days of the Second mo 1759,” file A-55–1759, CPRW.
30. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 145–46.
31. Ibid., 230–31. “Picaresque proletarian” comes from Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), ch. 4.
32. Barnaby Slush, The Navy Royal; or, a Sea-Cook Turn’d Projector (London, 1709); DHMM Minutes, vol. III, 1707–1727; London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting Book, vol. III (1713–1724); London Two Week Meeting, Book of Certificates, A1716–67; London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting, Digest Register of Marriages, vol. I (1657–1719); all in the LSF. On October 16, 1717, Cotton Mather complained of a “furious, venomous, rancorous Man” who, “for no Reason in the world, insulted me.” This may have been Lay, who was in Boston at the time. See The Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1724 (New York: Ungar, 1957), vol. II, 480. I am grateful to Steven Pitt for this reference.
33. Meeting of 3.i.1732, CMM Minutes, 1718–1756, shelf 6, no. 2, SFC-UE.
34. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 17.
35. Ibid., 161.
36. Ibid., 55–56.
37. Ibid., 6; Philippe Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 61 (2004): 609–42; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, ch. 4. Here is the passage from the King James Version of the Bible, which Lay apparently quoted from memory: “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.”
38. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (London, 1845), 168, 184. Benjamin’s friend and fellow Quaker activist Anthony Benezet was not a sailor, but he too used maritime knowledge, especially sea-going travel accounts, to attack slavery. See the outstanding biography by Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 80–88.
39. See the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database at www.slavevoyages.org and Marcus Rediker, “History from Below (the Water Line): Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Atlantic Studies 5 (2008): 285–97.
1. Benjamin Lay’s Certificate, LTWM Minutes, Book of Certificates A (1716–1767), FHL-SCL. Benjamin might have attended Quaker meetings prior to 1714, but his presence would likely have been fitful because of long voyages at sea. Given his personality and antinomian beliefs, it is hard to believe that he would not have left some kind of documentary trace had he been attending services regularly.
2. Ibid.
3. “Sarah Lay,” entry in John Smith, “Lives of Ministers Among Friends,” unpublished manuscript, 975A, three volumes, QC-HCL; DMM Minutes, vol. I (1694–1726); London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting, Digest Register of Marriages, vol. I (1657–1719), book 835, pg. 554, both in LSF. See also the excellent article by Andreas Mielke, “‘What’s Here to Do?’ An Inquiry Concerning Sarah and Benjamin Lay, Abolitionists,” Quaker History 86 (1997): 22–44.
4. Miles Walker (DHMM) to CTWM, 7.ix.1722, fo. 24, SFC-UE.
5. Meeting of 4.x.1717, fo. 247, DHMM Minutes, vol. III, 1707–1727, LSF; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 255–56.
6. Meeting of 18.xi.1717, fo. 250, DHMM Minutes.
7. Meetings of 5.i.1718 and 9.ii.1718, ff. 253, 260, DHMM Minutes.
8. Meetings of 12.iii.1718 and 4.iv.1718, ff. 263, 265–266, DHMM Minutes; London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting, Digest Register of Marriages, vol. I (1657–1719), book 835, pg. 554. See also meetings of 15.iv.1718 and 7.vii.1718, DMM Minutes, vol. I (1694–1726), LSF.
9. See Larry Gragg, “The Making of an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lay on Barbados, 1718–1720,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 47 (2001): 166–84, and the same author’s The Quaker Community on Barbados: Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009). On the broader history of Barbados, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), and Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).
10. This and the following two paragraphs are based on Thomas Walduck, Letters on Barbados, to James Petiver: 1710–1712, Sloane MS 2302, BL.
11. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 40, 45. By the time Benjamin and Sarah arrived Morgan Godwyn and Thomas Tryon had written critiques of the slave system of Barbados: Godwyn, The Negroes’ and Indians’ Advocate, suing for their Admission into the Church, or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing in the Negroes and Indians on our Plantations, with a brief Account of Religion in Virginia (London, 1680), and Tryon, Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (London, 1684).
12. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 45.
13. Ibid., 44. See also Mielke, “‘What’s Here to Do,?’” 22–44.
14. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 34.
15. Ibid., 36, 38, 39;Vaux, Memoirs, 19.
16. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 44, 80.
17. Meeting of 2.ix.1720, ff. 306–307, DHMM Minutes.
18. Meeting of 4.xi.1720, ff. 311, DHMM Minutes.
19. Meetings of 1.i.1721 and 5.ii.1721, ff. 315, 316, DHMM Minutes; Meeting of 20.vi.1722, fo. 338, “Mens Meeting Book for ye frnds of Colchester Comencing ye 6th, 6 mo., 1705–1725,” box 6, no. 6, SFC-UE.
20. Fitch, Colchester Quakers, 11, 59–60. Daniel Defoe noted the lasting impact of the siege during his visit to Colchester in 1722. See his A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (orig. publ. in three volumes, 1724–1727; rpt. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971), 57–58.
21. Meetings of 20.vi.1722 and 3.vii.1722, CTWM Minutes, 338, 339; Peter Jarvis Jr. to the Meeting for Sufferings in London, 20.vi.1722, “Copys of Letters & Certificates & Papers of Condemnation,” CMM, 1720, Item #1102, fo. 19. For the charges against Lay to setting up shop while not a “Freeman of the City,” see Essex Quarter Session Roll, Mich. 1723, D/B5 ST136, ERO. Uninspired preaching was a lifelong concern to Benjamin, who condemned not only the speakers who had nothing to say but the “Elders and Ministers” who countenanced “such filthy Stuff.” See Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 131.
22. Meetings of 10.x.1722, 24.x.1722, 7.xi.1722, and 12.xi.1722, CTWM Minutes, 348, 350, 351, 354.
23. Fitch, Colchester Quakers, 19; Meeting of 6.xi.1692, CMM Minutes, 1672–1718, ff. 93–94, SFC-UE. On the formation of the separate women’s meeting among the Quakers, see Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 265–304.
24. Meeting 6.ix.1724, CMM Minutes, 1718–1756, shelf 6, no. 2, fo. 78: Fitch, Colchester Quakers, 17–18.
25. Meetings of 1.iii.1723, 5.iii.1723, 15.iii.1723, 27.iii.1723, 14.iv.1723, and 17.iv.1723, CTWM Minutes, 363–68.
26. Meeting of 22.v.1723, CTWM Minutes, 373–74.
27. Meeting of 5.vi.1723, CTWM Minutes, 375. John Locke credited New Model Army chaplain John Saltmarsh as the original source of keeping the hat on as protest during the English Revolution. Indeed, when Saltmarsh arose from his death bed in December 1647 to travel to London to upbraid Oliver Cromwell after the imprisonment of Levellers at Corkbush Field, he refused to take off his hat. See Roger Pooley, “Saltmarsh, John (d. 1647),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press online, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/24578, accessed January 30, 2016.
28. Meeting of 29.ii.1724, CTWM Minutes, fo. 400.
29. Meeting of 13.iii.1724, CTWM Minutes, fo. 403.
30. Meeting of 24.iv.1724, CTWM Minutes, 409–10; Stanley Fitch noted the “intransigent spirit” of the CTWM in the 1720s. See Colchester Quakers, 14.
31. Meetings of 26.viii.1724, 9.ix.1724, 23.ix.1724, and 26.x.1724, CTWM Minutes, 423, 427–28, 431, 436–37; Benjamin Lay to the CTWM, 7 December 1724, Letters of Condemnation, fo. 35. As critic Francis Bugg wrote in Quakerism Drooping (1704), Quakers used to “go naked for a sign” and call no man master, but by the early eighteenth century they “walked Cloathed” and gave up “Levelling.” See Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 220–21.
32. Meeting of 1.xii.1724, CTWM Minutes, ff. 439–40. Division among the committee spilled over into the final report when several members said they could not remember Benjamin making the “acknowledgments” that appeared in the sympathetic postscript. See Meeting of 17.xii.1724, fo. 442.
33. Benjamin Lay to DHMM, Letters of Condemnation, 3.i.1725/1726, ff. 38–39.
34. Ibid.
35. John Knight and Phillip Gwillim to CTWM, Letters of Condemnation, 9.xi.1725/1726, fo. 38; Benjamin Lay to DHMM, Letters of Condemnation, 21.ix.1725, fo. 39.
36. Peter Jarvis Jr. to DHMM, Letters of Condemnation, 11.ii.1726, ff. 40–41; paper on Benjamin Lay written by the CTWM, 16.iv.1723, fo. 28.
37. Essex Court of Quarter Sessions, Easter 1715–Michaelmas 1723, 12 August 1723, D/B 5 Sb5/1, ERO. Benjamin apparently did not stay in jail long for his name did not appear on the “Gaole Calendar” in subsequent Quarter Session records. Nor did the case itself reappear in later records.
38. Benjamin Lay to CTWM, Letters of Condemnation, 25.ii.1726, fo. 42; Benjamin Lay to CTWM, Letters of Condemnation, 9.iii.1726, ff. 42–43.
39. Ibid.
40. Meetings of 23.iii.1726 and 26.iii.1726, 44, CTWM Minutes, fo. 43.
41. Meeting of 5.ix.1729, DHMM Minutes, vol. V, 1727–1747, fo. 34.
42. Meetings of 7.xi.1729, 4.xii.1729, 4.i.1729/30, and 6.iii.1730, DHMM Minutes, ff. 36, 37, 40, 45.
43. Meeting of 3.ix.1731, DHMM Minutes, fo. 73.
44. Meetings of 9.i.1730 and 23.i.1730, ff. CTWM Minutes, 154, 155–56.
45. John Baker and Phillip Gwillim to CTWM, 30.x.1729, Letters of Condemnation, fo. 63; William Groom and James Catchpool to DHMM, 6.ii.1730, Letters of Condemnation, fo. 64.
46. “A Copy of Benjamin Lay’s Will, Dated ye 9: 1 month 1731,” folder 56; “Abstract of Benj, Lay’s Will,” folder 59; both SFC-UE.
47. Meetings of 5.ix.1731 and 13.x.1731, 216, CMM Minutes, 214, 216; Meeting of 5.ix.1731, CTWM Minutes, fo. 214.
48. Meetings of 7.xi.1731 and 3.i.1731/2, CMM Minutes, fo. 133, 134; Kite, “Account,” 220.
1. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 140; Hunt “Notices of Lay.” Philadelphia’s commercial newspaper, the American Weekly Mercury, noted on June 8, 1732, that “Capt. Reeves is just arrived in eleven Weeks from London, he touch’d at Bermuda.” For a classic account of the early history of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, see Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
2. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 77.
3. The portrait of the port of Philadelphia is drawn from James Birket, Some Cursory Remarks Made by James Birket in His Voyage to North America, 1750–1751 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1916), 67 (quotation); William Black, “The Journal of William Black, 1744,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1 (877): 405; Samuel Curwen, “Journal of a Journey from Salem to Philadelphia in 1755,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 52 (1916): 79; and Edward Porter Alexander, ed., The Journal of John Fontaine: An Irish Huguenot Son in Spain and Virginia, 1710–1719 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 118–19. For the indentured maid, the “Negro Man,” and the drowned sailor, see the American Weekly Mercury, June 8, 1732.
4. Alexander Hamilton, Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 66–67. In November 1736, when Captain Reeves returned to Philadelphia from Bristol, England, one of the centers of the slave trade, Benjamin met with him to discuss the commerce in human beings. See American Weekly Mercury, November 18–25, 1736. Benjamin notes the meeting in an entry dated December 30, 1738, in All Slave-Keepers, 88. Samuel Harford signed the letter of probate administration after Benjamin’s death in February 1759. See Will of Benjamin Lay, 1759, File A-55–1759, CPRW.
5. James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). For the Lenape view of the “Holy Experiment,” see Jean R. Soderlund, Lenape Country: Delaware Society Before William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), ch. 7. The best recent work on Atlantic ties among Quakers is Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
6. American Weekly Mercury, October 12–19, 1732.
7. Edwin B. Bronner, “Quaker Landmarks in Early Philadelphia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 43 (1953): 210–16.
8. Craig W. Horle et al., eds., “Anthony Morris,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, Vol. II (1710–1756) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 727–36.
9. “Robert Jordan,” entry in Smith, “Lives of Ministers Among Friends”; “Robert Jordan, Jr.,” entry in Frank S. Loescher, “Dictionary of Quaker Biography,” unpublished compilation, FHL-SCL; “Lately Imported and to be sold by Robert Jordan in Morris’s Alley,” Pennsylvania Gazette, November 27, 1735; A Collection of Memorials concerning divers Deceased Ministers and Others of the People called Quakers: in Pennsylvania, New-Jersey, and Parts Adjacent, from nearly the First Settlement thereof to the Year 1787; with Some of the Last Expressions and Exhortations of Many of Them (Philadelphia, 1787); Will of Robert Jordan, 1742, file 291, CPRW. On Perrot in Virginia, see Jay Worrall Jr., The Friendly Virginians: America’s First Quakers (Athens, GA: Iberian Publishing Company, 1994), 45–46. See also A. Glenn Crothers, Quakers Living in the Lion’s Mouth: The Society of Friends in Northern Virginia, 1730–1865 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012).
10. Horle et al., eds., “Israel Pemberton,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, vol. II, 824–36; Theodore Thayer, Israel Pemberton: King of the Quakers (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1943), 14; Darold D. Wax, “Quaker Merchants and the Slave Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 86 (1962): 147–48.
11. Horle et al., eds., “John Kinsey,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, vol. II, 591.
12. John Kinsey to Richard Partridge, 2 November 1742, Port 27.94, LSF; American Weekly Mercury, June 28, 1722; Will of Robert Jordan, 1742, file 291, CPRW; Thayer, Israel Pemberton, 26, 32, 33; William Bucke Campbell, “Old Towns and Districts of Philadelphia,” Philadelphia History 5 (1942): 102.
13. Kinsey’s father was a “wealthy slave-owner,” according to Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery, 38. His own slave-ownership might have been proven in probate documents, but as it happens the materials from Kinsey’s file, #41/1750 in the CPRW, are missing.
14. This and the following two paragraphs summarize an argument from Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 193–98. See also Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
15. American Weekly Mercury, February 26, 1734, November 25, 1736, and February 15, 1737; Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 275. See Vincent Brown, Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative, http://revolt.axismaps.com.
16. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 28, 31, 35, 82, 92; Gary B. Nash and Jean Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15. Soderlund shows that between 1731 and 1740, 53.8 percent of the participants in the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting owned slaves. See her Quakers and Slavery, 163.
17. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 6; Ralph Sandiford, A Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times (Philadelphia, 1729), and The Mystery of Iniquity; in a Brief Examination of the Practice of the Times, by the foregoing and the present Dispensation (Philadelphia, 1730); Vaux, Memoirs, 64. Sandiford noted that he was “repulsed by the Overseers” when he submitted his first manuscript and that he was “threatened by our chief judge,” John Kinsey. See Mystery of Iniquity, 90, 4. The London Yearly Meeting had advised the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1727 that slave trading by Quakers is “not a Commendable nor allowed practice.” LYM quoted in Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 2.
18. Sandiford, Brief Examination, 14, 30, 74, 94, 106; Sandiford, Mystery of Iniquity, 94–111; Vaux, Memoirs, 60. Like Lay’s, Sandiford’s view of animals changed over time. In 1727 his business was deeply involved in animal slaughter, as he advertised “good Hides Curried, and Calf Skins, Sole Leather, and Tann’d Sheep Skins” for sale: American Weekly Mercury, November 9, 1727. For George Fox’s views on slavery, written after his visit to Barbados in 1671, see his Gospel Family-Order, being a Short Discourse concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks, and Indians (n.p., 1676).
19. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 20–21.
20. Ibid., 18–20.
21. Ibid., 21–22.
22. Ibid., 21–23.
23. J. William Frost has noted how strategically important it was that Sandiford and Lay went after slave-owning Quaker ministers. See his “Quaker Anti-slavery from Dissidence to Sense of the Meeting,” Quaker History 101 (2012): 26.
24. Benjamin’s critique of wealth and its destructive power was carried further by John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, who saw the “love of Gain” as the source of slave trading and owning. See Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, 137, 213–17; Plank, John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom, 76, 84; and Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 63–66.
25. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 194–95.
26. Ibid., 59. Benjamin was not the only voice against covetousness. Frederick B. Tolles notes that attacks on avarice increased in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting during the late 1730s. See his Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763 (orig. publ. 1948; New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 81.
27. The story of the pipes was originally told by Quaker John Forman in 1785 and published later in Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 274–78. The story was recounted in Kite, “Account,” and Child, Memoir, 23.
28. Vaux, Memoirs, 34–35. This anecdote was repeated in the Village Record (Westchester, PA), February 25, 1818.
29. This anecdote was first told by “an OLD MAN,” perhaps a friend of Benjamin and at the very least someone who knew him, fifteen years after his death: Pennsylvania Packet, February 14, 1774. The next iteration was conveyed by Rush, “Account.” A third telling of the story appeared in Vaux, Memoirs, and a fourth in Child, Memoir, 25.
30. Child, Memoir, 22.
31. Federal Gazette, May 18, 1790; Vaux, Memoirs, viii.
32. Daily Advertiser, May 20, 1790; Political Observatory, December 10, 1803.
33. Meetings of 10.xi.1731, 7.xii.1731, 21.xii.1731, 20.i.1732, 3.iii.1732, 24.v.1732, CTWM Minutes, ff. 221, 223–24, 225, 228, 232, 238; Meeting of 12.iv.1732, “The Book of the Quarterly Meeting Minutes, Commencing 1711,” EQM Minutes, 1711–1754, shelf 2, no. 1, ff. 148–49.
34. Meetings of 27.vi.1732 and 2.viii.1732, CTWM Minutes, ff. 241, 244.
35. “Robert Jordan,” entry in Smith, “Lives of Ministers Among Friends.” Upon his death, in 1742, the inventory of Jordan’s worldly goods included a nameless “Negro boy,” valued at £25, one of his most valuable possessions. See Will of Robert Jordan, 1742, File 291, CPRW. Lay also correctly identified “A——M——s” (Anthony Morris), “I——P——n” (Israel Pemberton), J——B——s (John Bringhurst), and S——P——l (Samuel Powell) as slave keepers. See Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 273. I thank Jean R. Soderlund for helping me to figure out the identity of Bringhurst and Powell.
36. Meeting of 29.i.1734, PMM Minutes, fo. 242; “The Journal of Susanna Morris,” in Wilt Thou Go On My Errand? Three 18th Century Journals of Quaker Women Ministers, ed. Margaret Hope Bacon (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1994), 55, 72. On the labors of Quaker women ministers, see Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
37. Horle et al., eds., “Joshua Morris,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 742–50.
38. Mielke, “‘What’s Here to Do,?’” 22–44.
39. “Sarah Lay,” entry in Smith, “Lives of Ministers Among Friends”; Vaux, Memoirs, 32.
40. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 33, 38.
41. James T. Mitchell and Henry Flanders, comps., “An Act for the Better Regulating of Negroes in this Province,” in The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801 (Harrisburg, PA: William Stanley Ray, 1899), vol. IV (1724–1744), chap. ccxcii. See also Gary B. Nash and Jean Soderlund on this “full fledged black code”: Freedom by Degrees, 13. The practice of manumission had become common among Quakers in the 1750s and early 1760s, but Morris remained a diehard: he refused to have his slaves freed when he died in 1763. See Horle et al., eds., “Anthony Morris,” Lawmaking and Legislators, 735–36. For Michael the runaway, see the Pennsylvania Gazette, November 10–17, 1748. I am grateful to Jean R. Soderlund for information about John Bringhurst, who was a cooper and later a merchant.
42. Meeting of 27.ii.1734, PMM Minutes, 1715–1744, fo. 243, MRPh383, FHL-SCL.
43. Robert Jordan to Thomas Story, Philadelphia, 7.iv.1736, Gibson TS 730, LSF.
44. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 223–24.
45. Meeting of 24.iv.1737, PMM Minutes, ff. 285–86.
46. Meetings of 24.iv.1737 and 26.vi.1737, PMM Minutes, ff. 285–88.
47. Meeting of 26.vi.1727, PMM Minutes, ff. 287–88; “Nicholas Austin,” in Loescher, “Dictionary of Quaker Biography.” Benjamin described his encounter in a letter to John Cadwallader Jr., printed in All Slave-Keepers, 262. See also “Abington Monthly Meeting Book, Containing a Chronologie of the most Material Occurrences and Transactions that have been acted and done, in the said Meeting Since the first settlement thereof, transcribed from Sundry Manuscripts by George Boone, 1718,” AMM Minutes, 1682–1765, RG2/Ph/A2, FHL-SCL; Will of Nicholas Austin, 1770, File 338, CPRW; “To be SOLD,” Pennsylvania Gazette, October 16, 1755.
48. Meeting of 30.xi.1727, AMM Minutes, 1682–1765, RG2/Ph/A2, Volume I: 1682–1746, fo. 212, FHL-SCL; Mielke, “‘What’s Here to Do?,’” 32. For the rule by which the disowned were barred from meetings for business and discipline (but not worship meetings), see “Meetings for Discipline” in “A Collection of the Christian & Brotherly Advices given forth from time to time by the Yearly Meeting of Friends for Pennsylvania & New Jersey,” Miscellaneous Files, AMM, RG2/Ph/A2, Volume 7.9, 216, FHL-SCL.
1. Lay, All Slave-Keepers.
2. Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 143, 164.
3. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 247–48; Gary B. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150 (2006): 625.
4. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 3–4.
5. Rush, “Account”; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 271; Frost, “Quaker Antislavery from Dissidence to Sense of the Meeting,” 22.
6. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 18–19, 4.
7. Ibid., 4, 5, 195.
8. Ibid., 32.
9. Ibid., 45, 136; Vaux, Memoirs, 43–44.
10. Anonymous, A New Commonplace Book; being an Improvement on that recommended by Mr. Locke; properly ruled throughout with a Complete Skeleton Index, and ample Directions for its Use; Equally adapted to the Man of Letters and the Man of Observation, the Traveller & the Student, and forming an useful & agreeable Companion, on the Road; and in the Closet (London: J. Walker, 1799); Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 169.
11. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 11, 92.
12. Ibid., 33, 142, 105.
13. Ibid., 137, 230.
14. Ibid., 45, 31. Ralph Sandiford also emphasized the Biblical Jubilee: see The Mystery of Iniquity, 6, 28, 54, 66, 97, 101–2. For the broad history of Jubilee in the struggle against slavery, see Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, with Some Success,” Radical History Review 50 (1991):143–80.
15. Ibid., 131, 266.
16. Ibid., 23.
17. Ibid., 6–9, 130.
18. Ibid., 8–9.
19. Ibid., 80–94. On Quaker slave keeping in Philadelphia, see Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery, 163.
20. Ibid., 85, 59. Soderlund notes that “antislavery ideals were gaining substantial support in the Yearly Meeting between 1731 and 1751.” She also shows that the percentage of PYM leaders who owned slaves dropped from 58.6 (1706–1730) to 34.2 (1731–1751). These changes took place before the abolitionist “breakthrough” of 1753–1754. See her Quakers and Slavery, 46, 43. See also Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 172–81.
21. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 127–28, 133, 231. See George Fox, Gospel Family-Order, being a Short Discourse concerning the Ordering of Families, Both of Whites, Blacks, and Indians (n.p., 1676).
22. Ibid., 80.
23. Ibid., 84.
24. Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, 65. Brycchan Carey also notes that antislavery ideals had spread before they appeared in sanctioned publications. See From Peace to Freedom, 181. See entry for “Books” in “A Collection of the Christian & Brotherly Advices given forth from time to time by the Yearly Meeting of Friends for Pennsylvania & New Jersey,” Miscellaneous Files, AMM, RG2/Ph/A2, vol. 7.9, FHL-SCL. Since the 1650s Quakers had used the printing press in sophisticated and carefully controlled ways. See Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 252–55.
25. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 94; Robert Jordan to Thomas Story, Philadelphia, 7.iv.1736, Gibson TS 730, LSF.
26. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 26–37. See also Frost, “Quaker Antislavery from Dissidence to Sense of the Meeting,” 19, 22.
27. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 89, 83–84, 93. See also Katharine Gerbner, “Antislavery in Print: The Germantown Protest, the ‘Exhortation,’ and the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Debate on Slavery,” Early American Studies 9 (2011): 552–75.
28. Nicholas P. Wood and Jean R. Soderlund, “‘To Friends and All Whom it may Concerne’: William Southeby’s Rediscovered 1696 Antislavery Protest,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (forthcoming); Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America, 30–32. Some kind of personal connection between Farmer and Lay seems likely. Both attended the Colchester Two Weeks Meeting, although at different times. Farmer’s wife was a friend of Elizabeth Kendall, a friend of Sarah and perhaps a relative of Benjamin himself, as he named her a trustee in his will of 1731. Years later, in 1754, when one of his poor relatives in Essex fell ill and needed assistance, Benjamin sent home money through Elizabeth. See John Pemberton to Elizabeth Kendall, Philadelphia, 29.iv.1754, Pemberton Family Papers, vol. 10, page 4b, HSP. See also “The Testimony of Mary Bundock concerning Elizabeth Kendall,” 1765, ff. 48–52, Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Kendall, Coggeshall Monthly Meeting, Item #1376, SFC-UE. Benjamin’s niece, Sarah, daughter of his half-brother John, married Moses Kendall in 1725: Marriage licence bond and allegation of Moses Kendall and Sarah Lay, 1725, D/ABL 1725/113, ERO. See also Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 10–11.
29. Ibid., 76.
30. Ibid., 63–64, 58, 136, 18, 75, 84, 85, 87, 27.
31. Ibid., 136; American Weekly Mercury, August 24, 1738.
32. Samuel Sewell, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700). See also John Saffin, A Brief and Candid Answer to a late Printed Sheet, Entitled, The Selling of Joseph (Boston, 1701), and, for the broader context of the debate, Lawrence Towner, “The Sewell-Saffin Dialogue on Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 21 (1964): 40–52.
33. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 19, 63, 68.
34. Ibid., 63–64.
35. Ibid., 137, 34; Note by John Kinsey, 19 September 1738, PYM, Miscellaneous Papers, 1731–1738 1250/D1.5 #22, PYM-SCL. In the face of such anger Benjamin comforted himself, “you shall reign over all the rage of your Enemies in the favour of God, wherein as you stand in Faith, ye are the Salt of the Earth, for many seeing your good Works may glorify God in the Day of their Visitation.”
36. Ibid., 101–17. Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger-turned-Quaker who was the greatest radical thinker of the English Revolution, also used the Book of Revelation to explain oppression. See Ariel Hessayon, “Gerrard Winstanley, Radical Reformer,” in Hessayon and Finnegan, Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Radicalism in Context (London: Ashgate, 2011), 110–11. The Book of Revelation was widely invoked in late seventeenth-century England, but Benjamin stood out for using it to interpret the origins of slavery. See Warren Johnston, Revelation Restored: The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell Press, 2011). Revelation was not an especially popular text in early America, though it did get significant use by ministers in the run-up to the American Revolution. See Mark A. Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2016), 287.
37. Herbert Marks, ed., The English Bible, King James Version: The Old Testament, vol. I, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 569–72.
38. Ibid., 101–2. The Book of Revelation—an antinomian text—played a surprisingly significant role in the thinking of Quaker antislavery activists George Keith, John Hepburn, John Woolman, and Warner Mifflin.
39. Ibid., 102, 104, 107, 110.
40. Ibid., 111, 112, 60, 114.
41. Ibid., 114, 116, 117.
42. Ibid., 51.
43. Ibid., 52.
44. Ibid., 51.
45. Ibid., 111; Alan Tully, William Penn’s Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1726–1755 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 97.
46. PYM Minutes, 16–20.vii.1738; Pennsylvania Gazette, October 26, 1738; November 2, 1738; November 16, 1738.
1. Rush, “Account”; Frost, “Quaker Antislavery from Dissidence to Sense of the Meeting,” 23. For the portrait commissioned by Franklin, see chapter 6. On the subscription to Franklin’s newspaper, see David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 82.
2. American Weekly Mercury, October 12–19, 1732.
3. The first owner of the book was Samuel Ernow, below whose name is written “now, Benj Lays Book.” Subsequent owners were George Duncan, John Conroy, and, finally, a Mr. Foulke, who in 1916 donated the book to the Site and Relic Society of Germantown, which later became the Germantown Historical Society. Another book that seems to have belonged to Benjamin, though it has no marginalia, is The Archbishop of Cambray’s Dissertation on Pure Love, by the French Catholic archbishop François Fénelon, published by Christopher Sauer in Germantown in 1750.
4. Dell quoted in Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 42.
5. Roger Pooley, “Dell, William (d. 1669),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/7461, accessed July 1, 2016; Christopher Hill, “The Radical Critics of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1650s,” in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 127–48; Eric C. Walker, William Dell: Master Puritan (Cambridge, UK: Heffer, 1970), ch. 4.
6. William Dell, “The Right Reformation of Learning, Schools, and Universities, according to the State of the Gospel, and the True Light that Shines Therein,” in his Several Sermons and Discourses of William Dell, Minister of the Gospel (London: J. Sowle, 1709), 642–48.
7. Benjamin sold not only religious books in Philadelphia but also “Books of Aritmatick, Mathamaticks, Astronomy, Trogonomytry, Whistons Uclids, and others.” See “To be SOLD,” American Weekly Mercury, October 12–19, 1732.
8. Benjamin noted that he began to oppose false ministers “almost 20 [years] before I ever saw Pennsylvania,” which would have been around 1714, a little before the first complaints were made against him for opposing “approved ministers” in the Devonshire House Monthly Meeting in London. He may have read Dell around this time. See Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 123–24.
9. Tai Liu, “Simpson, Sidrach (c.1600–1655),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/25592, accessed February 28, 2016.
10. The “bruised reed” appears in Isaiah 42:3 and Matthew 12:20.
11. William Dell, The Tryal of Spirits (London, 1653; rpt. 1699), iv, 24.
12. Ibid., viii, 38, 192; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 53.
13. Pennsylvania Gazette, March 25, 1742; John Smith, Hannah Logan’s Courtship, A True Narrative; The Wooing Of The Daughter Of James Logan, Colonial Governor Of Pennsylvania, And Divers Other Matters, As Related In The Diary Of Her Lover, The Honorable John Smith, Assemblyman Of Pennsylvania And King’s Councillor of New Jersey, 1736–1752 (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1904), entry for 8.xi.1746, 81.
14. We know that Lay read Stanley because he quoted from the book, precisely but without attribution, in All Slave-Keepers in his discussion of Pythagoras. It is likely that Lay also read [Diogenes Laërtius], The Lives of the Ancient Philosophers, containing an Account of their Several Sects, Doctrines, Actions, and Remarkable Sayings (London: John Nicholson, 1702). Benjamin also had an interest in the ancient Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, who was translated into English by the English Seeker/antinomian John Everard (1584? –1641), in The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (London: Robert White, 1650). See Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 166–69.
15. William Desmond, Cynics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 28, 82, 201–2.
16. Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect (London, 1701), 285.
17. See Desmond, Cynics, for how the Cynics waged war against nomos (authority): 3, 7, 84, 85, 186, 187, 189, 206, 208. In his final lectures, and in his last book before his death in 1984, Michel Foucault held up Diogenes and parrhesia as models for contemporary radical thinkers. See his Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001).
18. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 147, 151; Vaux, Memoirs, 47–49. Fasting was common among the radical Quakers of the founding generation. See Moore, The Light in Their Consciences, 127.
19. Vaux, Memoirs, 46; Desmond, Cynics, 98, 213; “Benjamin Lay,” Biographical Catalogue, Being an Account of the Lives of Friends (London: Friends’ Institute, 1888), 418–22. What Robert Dobbin says of Diogenes is also true of Lay: “the biographical tradition presents us with a mass of anecdotes (chreiai) that are often very entertaining and attest to a consistent set of habits and beliefs that, taken as a whole, inspire confidence that they are at least true to the spirit of the man and his philosophy.” See his The Cynic Philosophers: From Diogenes to Julian (New York: Penguin, 2013), xxiv.
20. Vaux, Memoirs, 35; Desmond, Cynics, 24–5, 78–79, 85, 97, 187. Lay too made “more of an impression in person than in print,” Dobbin, The Cynic Philosophers, xxvii.
21. Rush, “Account”; Vaux, Memoirs, 35–36.
22. Pennsylvania Gazette, March 25, 1742; Kite, “Account,” 220. Benjamin’s protest against tea drinking made the rounds in the London press as the article from the Pennsylvania Gazette was republished in the London Evening Post, July 6–8, 1742; the Champion and Evening Advertiser, July 8, 1742; and the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, July 10, 1742.
23. See John Milton, 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 (London: S. Baker, 1717). On the tradition of aristocratic and royals dwarfs in Europe, see Betty M. Adelson, The Lives of Dwarfs: Their Journey from Public Curiosity Toward Social Liberation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), and Deborah Needleman Armintor, The Little Everyman: Stature and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). David Brion Davis called Benjamin the “Quaker Diogenes” in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 323.
24. Vaux, Memoirs, 26.
25. The original article appeared in the Pennsylvania Gazette, March 30, 1738. The response appeared in the same newspaper a week later. Lay’s unsigned rejoinder was published April 13, 1738.
26. Rush, “Account”; Philotheos Physiologus [Thomas Tryon], 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 (London: Andrew Sowle, 1683).
27. For an excellent summary of Tryon’s views on slavery, see Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon,” 609–42. The impact of Tryon on Lay, other Quaker abolitionists, and Benjamin Franklin is noted by David Waldstreicher, “The Origins of Antislavery in Pennsylvania: Early Abolitionists and Benjamin Franklin’s Road Not Taken,” in Antislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice on the City of Brotherly Love, ed. Richard Newman and James Mueller (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 45–65. Lay alluded to Proverbs 12:10: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.”
28. Jacob Bauthumley, The light and dark sides of God or a plain and brief discourse, of the light side God, heaven and earth, the dark side Devill, sin, and hell (London, 1650), 4. Tryon quoted in Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 61, 73, 72; Tryon, Way to Health, 509–10. See also Thomas Tryon, The Country Man’s Companion, or, a New Method of Ordering Horses & Sheep (London, 1684), ch. 5.
29. Tryon, Way to Health, 514.
30. Lay refers to Pythagoras in All Slave-Keepers, 252.
31. Stuart, Bloodless Revolution, xx, chs. 2–5.
32. Ibid., chs. 2, 3, 4; Roger Crab, The English Hermite, or, Wonder of this Age: Being a Relation of the Life of Roger Crab, living neer Uxbridg, taken from his own Mouth (London, 1655).
33. Tryon, Way to Health, v, 53, 136, 143, 343; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 144–45. Benjamin’s interest in water extended to raising money in 1744 to republish a new edition of a book by John Smith, The Curiosities of Common Water: or the Advantages thereof in Preventing and Curing many Distempers (London, 1723). This book was a compendium of observations by physicians about the healthful qualities of water, which was considered a “Universal Remedy.” Benjamin’s ad for subscriptions appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal, April 26, 1744.
34. Helen L. Shaffer, A Tour of Old Abington (n.p., 1960; rpt. 1976), available on the Abington Township website at http://www.abington.org/about-us/abington-s-history, and Edward W. Hocker, A History of the Township of Abington (Abington, 1956); Andrew Newman, “Treaty of Shackamaxon,” Encyclopedia of Great Philadelphia, http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/treaty-of-shackamaxon-2/, accessed July 9, 2016.
35. “Ann Phipps,” entry in Smith, “Lives of Ministers Among Friends.” Like other commoners, Benjamin organized his subsistence outside the capitalist market, but unlike others he did not cultivate land collectively but rather with Sarah and, after her death in 1735, by himself.
36. Vaux, Memoirs, 23, 43–44; Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 274–78; unsigned article, “Lay, Benjamin, 1677–1759,” File PG7, FHL-SCL. See also “Trips Awheel: Where to go and How to get there,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 1897; “When Philadelphians Were Cave Dwellers Along the Delaware,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 1898; “Curious Cave Dweller Once Made Home Here,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1, 1901; “Lay Denounced Slavery from Cave near Abington,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 12, 1903. For commoning practices in eighteenth-century England, see J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Peter Linebaugh, Stop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014).
37. Julie L. Holcomb, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 4. There is evidence that Lay drank milk and ate honey, the only practices that would run counter to contemporary vegan practice.
38. Vaux, Memoirs, 32; Rush, “Account”; Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 275–76.
39. Child, Memoir, 14.
40. “When Philadelphians Were Cave Dwellers Along the Delaware,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 20, 1898. On Kelpius and others, see Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 172–77.
41. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 218–19, 235, 169.
1. Vaux, Memoirs, 49.
2. Ibid., 50.
3. Ibid., 50–51; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 53–54.
4. Will of Benjamin Lay, 1759, File A-55–1759, CPRW.
5. Burials at Abington from 1758, Births and Deaths, 1670–1812, AMM, RG2/Ph/A2, vol. 3.8, FHL-SCL.
6. “A Copy of Benjamin Lay’s Will, Dated ye 9: 1 month 1731,” folder 5, SFC-UE. The sums specified in the will were paid after Lay’s death in 1759 as executed by Samuel Cook, a weaver from North Halstead, Essex, on behalf of the late Sarah Lay. See Will of Benjamin Lay, Glover of Colchester, Essex, 2 July 1760, PROB 11/857/252, NA. See also Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 148.
7. A “preferential option for the poor” has been a key concept in liberation theology, a radical movement within global Catholicism that has been especially strong in Latin America. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (orig. publ.1971; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015).
8. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (orig. publ.1905; New York: Penguin, 2002).
9. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania, Beginning the Fourteenth Day of October, 1758 (Philadelphia: Henry Miller, 1775), vol. V, 35; Vaux, Memoirs, 43.
10. Benjamin’s books were listed along with the auction sale prices of his estate sale in 1759, according to Amelia Mott Gummere in her The Quaker: A Study in Costume (Philadelphia: Ferris & Leech, 1901). She provides no footnote for the inventory, which has since been lost.
11. Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, June 10, 1758, London, original in the American Philosophical Society, accessed online at The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, digital edition by the Packard Humanities Institute, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//, accessed May 31, 2016. See also David H. Dickason, “Benjamin West on William Williams: A Previously Unpublished Letter,” Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 133; Susan Rather, “Benjamin West’s Professional Endgame and the Historical Conundrum of William Williams,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 59 (October 2002): 821–64; Susan Rather, The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 2.
12. Benjamin Franklin to Lord Kames, January 3, 1760, London, original in the Scottish Record Office, accessed online at The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin//, accessed May 31, 2016.
13. “A Collection of the Christian & Brotherly Advices given forth from time to time by the Yearly Meeting of Friends for Pennsylvania & New Jersey,” Miscellaneous Files, fo. 292, AMM, RG2/Ph/A2, vol. 7.9, FHL-SCL. See also Dianne C. Johnson, “Living in the Light: Quakerism and Colonial Portraiture,” in Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck, eds., Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, 1720–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 122–46; Anna Cox Brinton, Quaker Profiles: Pictorial and Biographical, 1750–1850 (Lebanon, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1964), 1.
14. William Dillwyn to Roberts Vaux, June 12, 1816, Vaux Family Papers, Collection 684, Roberts Vaux Correspondence, 1795–1818, box 1, HSP.
15. William Dillwyn to Roberts Vaux, April 12, 1816, Vaux Papers.
16. Lita Solis-Cohen, “He Paid $4 for a Treasure of Americana,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 4, 1977.
17. David Howard Dickason, William Williams: Novelist and Painter of Colonial America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), ch. 1.
18. Vaux, Memoirs, 20–21.
19. Rush, “Account”; Hunt, “Notices of Lay,” 275. The prophet Isaiah (20:3) had gone “naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia.”
20. Waldstreicher, Runaway America, 79–82. Franklin wrote to John Wright (November 4, 1789): “about the year 1728 or 29 I myself printed a book for Ralph Sandyford, another of your friends of this city, against keeping negroes in slavery, two editions of which he distributed gratis. And about the year 1736 I printed another book on the same subject for Benjamin Lay, who also professed being one of your Friends, and he distributed the books chiefly among them. By these instances it appears that the seed was indeed sown in the good ground of your profession, though much earlier than the time you mention.” The letter is available online at The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, http://franklinpapers.org, accessed May 31, 2016.
21. Wilford F. Cole, “Henry Dawkins and the Quaker Comet,” Winterthur Portfolio 4 (1968), 33–46. Cole suggests the first image was printed “probably about 1760,” which seems accurate. Part of the evidence for dating the engraving is the kind of paper the engraver and printer used. Most of the surviving copies are on “laid paper,” a ribbed paper created one sheet at a time before the mechanization of papermaking in late 1750s England. Thereafter engravings might appear on “wove paper,” which was grained and strong, without laid lines. “Wove paper” began to be used in North America around 1795 and with increasing frequency by 1810, suggesting that the Lay engravings on laid paper date from earlier in the eighteenth century. On Benezet’s likely involvement, see Gary B. Nash, “Franklin and Slavery,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 150 (2006): 628.
22. Cole, “Henry Dawkins and the Quaker Comet,” 33–46.
23. See letters from Thomas Pole to Roberts Vaux dated January 8, 1818; January 19, 1819; April 25, 1819; and November 9, 1819, in the Vaux Family Papers, Collection 684, Roberts Vaux Correspondence, 1795–1818, box 1: 1795–1818, box 2: 1819–1826. How Pole acquired the painting is unclear. The most likely possibility is that Williams either reacquired the painting from Franklin or produced his own copy. Either might serve a common purpose, that is, to prove that he had worked with the now-famous Benjamin West, whom he contacted as soon as he reached London in 1781. West gave his former teacher some assistance, allowing him, for example, to sit as a subject for a painting. Whatever West was able to do, it was not enough. In 1784 an impoverished Williams returned to Bristol and probably took the painting with him. Williams entered a home for indigent seamen, where he eventually met a Bristol gentleman named Thomas Eagles. Upon his death in 1791, he bequeathed all of his manuscripts and paintings to Eagles, likely including the portrait of Lay. A few years later, after the death of Eagles, the painting probably came into the hands of Thomas Pole. As it happens, Pole’s portrait of Lay has its own fascinating history. Sometime between 1819 and 1853, the painting found a new owner who had no idea that Benjamin Lay was its subject. That owner apparently did what owners often do, he (or she) simply made up the identity of the man in the portrait. Curiously—with no apparent discernible connection— the owner glued a piece of paper to the back of the painting in 1853 stating that the subject was a “Mr. Fitch . . . one of the followers of Johanna Southcott,” a controversial and well-known religious mystic of the 1790s. It was added that Mr. Fitch “has been dead about 25 or 30 years.” See the Pole portrait and the file “British or American School, Portrait of Benjamin Lay, K2978,” Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, England.
24. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 58–59.
25. Horle et al., “Anthony Morris” and “Israel Pemberton,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 727–36, 824–36; Pennsylvania Gazette, January 4, 1738; Gary B. Nash, “The Early Merchants of Philadelphia: The Formation and Disintegration of a Founding Elite,” in Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn, eds., The World of William Penn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 337–62.
26. Horle et al., “John Kinsey,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 591–607. Kinsey’s daughter died in 1742, followed by his wife in 1744, a son in 1745, and another son who accidentally shot himself to death in 1748. See also Joseph S. Walton, John Kinsey: Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly and Justice of the Supreme Court of the Province (Philadelphia: Friends’ Book Association, 1900); Isaac Sharpless, “John Kinsey: 1693–1750,” Bulletin of the Friends Historical Society of Philadelphia 8 (1917): 2–10, 46–53; and, most importantly, Edwin B. Bronner, “The Disgrace of John Kinsey, Quaker Politician, 1739–1750,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1951): 400–415.
27. Glowing memorials of Kinsey may be found in the Pennsylvania Journal, May 17, 1750, and in the New-York Gazette, May 21, 1750.
28. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 111. On Kinsey and the codification of law, see Susan A. Hoffman, “Kinsey, John (1693–1750),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/article/68175, accessed September 5, 2015; Horle et al., “John Kinsey,” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania, 595.
29. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 59; Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 49–50.
30. Ann Emlen to John Pemberton, 15.1.1785, Pemberton Family Papers, vol. 42, 162, HSP.
31. Thomas E. Drake discusses Lay and other early abolitionists in a chapter entitled “Voices Crying in the Wilderness,” in his Quakers and Slavery in America, 34–47. In his edited collection of documents entitled The Quaker Origins of Antislavery (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1980), J. William Frost includes writings by Benezet and Woolman, as well as many figures less important to the beginnings of an abolition movement, but nothing by Lay. See also Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 330, 483–93; Sydney V. James, A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 125–26, 131–34; Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 108–9, 112–16; and David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 151–53.
32. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery, 46, 163.
33. Carey, From Peace to Freedom, 175–76, 181, 190.
34. PYM Minutes, 1681–1746, MRPh469, fo. 412, FHL-SCL. The satisfaction of the PYM in 1738 at the lessening involvement of Quakers in the slave trade was recorded for posterity in “A Collection of the Christian & Brotherly Advices given forth from time to time by the Yearly Meeting of Friends for Pennsylvania & New Jersey,” Miscellaneous Files, Abington Monthly Meeting, RG2/Ph/ A2, vol. 7.9, FHL-SCL. Another possible sign of Benjamin’s impact is that in 1776, when the PYM announced that slave holding was a disownable offense, the Abington Monthly Meeting was one of the first to move. Four of five enslaved Africans owned by meeting members had been freed by 1778. See Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery, 96, 106.
35. Vaux, Memoirs, 31.
36. Child, Memoir. Thanks to Gary B. Nash for pointing out the significance of Benjamin Rush’s timing in publishing the biography amid the Congressional debates. For the crucial role of Warner Mifflin in the debate, see his Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
37. Rush, “Account”; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 246.
38. Louise Shea argues that truth is expressed in the body of the Cynic philosopher, not as an abstract category. See her The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 180.
39. John G. Whittier, ed., The Journal of John Woolman (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), 15. It should be noted that Woolman was not as deeply antinomian as Lay, but he did have the subversive approach within him, as when he explained that “laws and customs are no further a standard for our proceedings than as their foundation is on universal righteousness.” When it came to slavery, upright people might have to break man-made law in service of a “higher law.” See Plank, John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom, 131. Thomas P. Slaughter emphasizes Woolman’s “radical spirit.” See his The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, 389.
40. Carole Dale Spencer, “The Man Who ‘Set Himself as a Sign’: James Nayler’s Incarnational Theology,” in Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought, 1647–1723, ed. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 64–82. Lay had a much greater influence on Benezet and Woolman than did Ralph Sandiford, who had similar attitudes about slave-produced commodities, animals, clothing, and greed. Benezet arrived in Philadelphia in 1731, a mere two years before Sandiford died, while Woolman was a youth of only thirteen at the time. Both men lived, with Benjamin, in the small world of mid-Atlantic Quakerism for almost three decades.
41. Benezet quoted in Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 19, 50. “Universal love,” with its leveling embrace of toleration, went back to Ranter Abiezer Coppe, Digger Gerrard Winstanley, and James Nayler and his supporters, especially Robert Rich. See Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 138, 210, 332, 338. Benjamin also appears to have influenced New Jersey Quaker minister Joshua Evans (1731–1798), an abolitionist who embraced vegetarianism, wore undyed clothes, and opposed the values and practices of the capitalist economy. See M. Ellen Ross, “‘Liberation Is Coming Soon’: The Radical Reformation of Joshua Evans,” in Carey and Plank, Quakers and Abolition, 15–28.
42. Rush, “Account.”
43. Benjamin’s agitation may have had an impact on the “Great Awakening,” the firestorm of religious enthusiasm that swept the American colonies after the arrival of the itinerant minister George Whitefield in October 1739. Beginning in 1732, Benjamin anticipated many Awakeners’ messages of religious reform as he opposed conservative ministers of all denominations in the Philadelphia region. Blind, heartless, and covetous, these ministers preached people into hell; they alienated young people; they obstructed regeneration through “new birth”; they ruined the church. The New Jersey-based itinerant, Gilbert Tennent, who frequently preached in Philadelphia, used an almost identical language of critique. See Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 85–86, 106, 134–35, 233–35, and Milton J. Coalter, Gilbert Tennent, Son of Thunder: A Case Study of Continental Pietism’s Impact on the First Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
44. Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation” (1857), available in Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition, ed. Robert S. Levine, John Stauffer, and John R. Kaufman-McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 133–34.
1. Rush, “Account”; Pennsylvania Gazette, April 13–20, 1738. A later account, published in 1805, mentioned Lay as a revolutionary alongside John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and Warner Mifflin: “their efforts will probably, in their consequences, produce a revolution unheard of in the annals of nations—even the breaking of the yoke of oppression and willingly permitting the slave to go free.” See Independent Chronicle, August 26, 1805.
2. Two of the great works in liberation theology are Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, and James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (orig. publ. 1986; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015).
3. David R. Como suggests that antinomians could speak with “formidable self-confidence” because “the spirit was speaking in and through them.” He suggests that “the antinomian tendency to exalt, magnify, and stress the power of the spirit” may have had “a leveling effect, which did indeed encourage and foster an unusual assertiveness among humble women and men alike.” See his Blown by the Spirit, 52.
4. Anthony Benezet and John Woolman would carry forward the emphasis on “universal love,” implying toleration and broad solidarity that defied boundaries of race, class, nation, and gender. See Jackson, Let This Voice Be Heard, 53.
5. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 81.
6. Burrough quoted in Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 386.
7. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Brycchan Carey likewise emphasizes the American “periphery” as the driving force in Atlantic antislavery. See his From Peace to Freedom, 5.
8. Vaux, Memoirs, 25; Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 87.
9. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 130; W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown (orig. publ. 1909; New York: International Publishers, 2014).
10. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 267. It should be noted that Brissot got numerous details of Lay’s life wrong, saying, for example, that he had been a planter in Barbados.
11. I would like to thank Graham Hodges for emphasizing this important issue.
12. Rush, “Account”; Vaux, Memoirs, 28–29; Child, Memoir, 17–18; Kite, “Account,” 229–30. The unpublished Quaker critics of slavery were, as Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund note, “well-situated men.” See their Freedom by Degrees, 47.
13. Vaux, Memoirs, 54.
14. The Oxford-educated Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn was the odd man out in this early cohort of antislavery writers. See his The Negroes’ and Indians’ Advocate, suing for their Admission into the Church, or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing the Negroes and Indians on our Plantations, with a brief Account of Religion in Virginia (London, 1680).
15. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 320–26. Davis also writes, wrongly, that neither Sandiford nor Lay “betrayed the slightest awareness of living in the Age of Enlightenment” (320).
16. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, title page.
17. Meeting of 13.iii.1717, LTWM Minutes, Book of Certificates A (1716–1767), FHL-SCL; Ian Davidson, Voltaire: A Life (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), 69.
18. John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review 115 (2010): 942–74; John Donoghue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Around the time of Benjamin’s death in 1759, philosophers in France and Germany—D’Alembert, Rousseau, Sade, Wieland, and Frederick the Great—began to revive Diogenes and Cynic philosophy within what would become the traditional enlightenment. See Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment.
19. Thompson suggests that Blake’s antinomianism, like Lay’s, was radical, subversive, and antihegemonic, helping him to break out of the “common sense” of his era. See his Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 20.
20. Lay, All Slave-Keepers, 51, 169; Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982): 87–121.
21. For a useful history of the boycott movement that began with Lay, see Holcomb, Moral Commerce.
22. Rush, “Account.”