Lay, Benjamin

LAY, BENJAMIN (1682–1759). Benjamin Lay was one of the first people to call for the immediate worldwide abolition of slavery. Born in rural Essex, England, this third-generation Quaker worked as a shepherd, a glove-maker, and a seaman, sailing around the world in the early eighteenth century and soaking up the work culture of solidarity at sea. In 1718 Benjamin and his wife Sarah, both of whom were “little people” (dwarfs) and committed Quakers, moved to Bridgetown, Barbados, where they opened a small shop on the waterfront. Shocked by the violence and terror of the world’s leading slave society, Benjamin and Sarah befriended enslaved Africans, feeding the hungry as they denounced the institution of slavery in large meetings at their home. Such solidarity was intolerable to the big sugar planters, who denounced the Lays for inspiring insurrection and sought to drive them off the island. Benjamin and Sarah returned to London in 1720, then to Benjamin’s native Essex for several years, until they decided to move to Pennsylvania in 1732.

For the next twenty-seven years Lay devoted himself to tearing down the Babylon of American slavery, for slave-trading and owning were very common among his fellow Quakers at the time. He performed guerrilla theater, spattering rich Quaker slave-masters with fake blood to humiliate them in public. He smashed teacups to show that tea sweetened with sugar depended on the exploitation of tea workers in India and enslaved workers in the Caribbean. He was the first to boycott any and all items produced by slave labor. He warned all to beware “rich men who poison the earth for gain.” Lay insisted that human bondage violated the fundamental beliefs of Quakerism in particular and Christianity in general. He wrote a scorching book entitled All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, which was published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1738.

Lay’s radical, uncompromising attacks on slavery, in action and in print, caused his fellow Quakers to disown him. He retired to a cave in Abington, Pennsylvania, where he lived as a vegetarian, advocated for animal rights, favored equality between men and women, and opposed the death penalty. He made his own clothes and produced his own food to avoid exploiting the labor of anyone else. He considered all animals to be his “fellow creatures.” He even refused to ride horses, walking everywhere he went. He had an integrated radical world view that condemned all forms of oppression – in the early eighteenth century! He was far ahead of his times. Benjamin Lay’s life illuminates the history of abolitionism “from below,” showing how working people helped to build the world’s first great social movement.

Lester, David with Paul Buhle and Marcus Rediker. Prophet against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

Rediker, Marcus. The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.