A costumed superhero known as the Quaker Comet began writing his most famous work on this date. He was 54 years old, four feet tall, hunchbacked, lived in a cave and ate mostly turnips, and his new book, All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, was about to get him into lots of trouble.
Which was fine, because Benjamin Lay dedicated his life to getting into trouble.
Like most of the early activists against slavery, Lay was of working stock. Born to Quaker parents near Colchester in 1682, he went on to earn his living at various times as a shepherd, a glover, a shopkeeper, and a sailor.
Wherever he settled, he soon gained a reputation for loudly and angrily interrupting the preaching of ministers in all sorts of churches, including Quaker meetings. As a fundamentalist follower of the original Quakerism, rather than the respectable religion it had become in his time, Lay considered it his duty to disrupt any service in which he believed the preachers were speaking their own thoughts rather than those of the Holy Spirit. He managed to get disciplined by, and even expelled from, most of the Quaker meetings he joined.
In 1718, Benjamin and his wife Sarah (an approved minister of the Quakers) moved to Barbados, perhaps hoping for a fresh start. But this was their first encounter with the violence, cruelty and cynicism of the slave industry - and to their horror many of the slave-owners were Quakers. The couple began holding gatherings at their home for slaves, where eventually hundreds would turn up. Unsurprisingly, the rebel Lays were soon run out of Barbados.
They emigrated to Philadelphia in 1732, presumably with high hopes that they would at last be part of a genuine Quaker community, true to its principles. But having begun as a revolutionary sect in the English civil wars, Quakerism in Philadelphia had now become a complacent and corrupt ruling class. And most of them owned slaves.
The Quaker Comet decided he had no option but "to make War" on these apostates, and it was in America that he developed the theatrical style of protest which made him, for a while, the most famous man in the colony. Though not, it's probably fair to say, the most popular.
If someone he knew to be a slave-owner tried to speak at a Quaker meeting, Lay would cry out "There's another negro-master!" He viewed slavers and those who tolerated them as servants of King Lucifer. They should not be allowed to be members of Quakerism, never mind its leaders. Slave-owning was incompatible with any Christianity, let alone the egalitarian variant, Quakerism. Slavers by definition were "murtherers," or accomplices to murther, and their victims uncountable thousands.
Slavery was "the greatest Sin in the World" and "the mark of the beast," and compromise with it would be as wicked as collaboration. Lay demanded immediate and unconditional emancipation of all slaves, without compensation to the slave-owners.
During a winter freeze, Benjamin stood outside the Quaker meetinghouse, his naked leg hip-deep in the snow. When his fellow-religionists told him he'd catch his death of cold, he pointed to their hypocrisy: they worried about his welfare, but didn't care about the slaves in the fields who entirely lacked warm clothing.
More and more, the avowedly pacifist Quakers somehow found it in their hearts to physically eject Lay from their premises. On one such occasion, he lay across the muddy doorway of the meetinghouse so that everyone leaving had to step over him.
He smashed a China tea service in a marketplace, one fine piece after another, with a hammer, creating a riot. His point was that these hypocrites cared about cups and saucers, but not about their fellow humans exploited by tea planters and sugar growers.
Having argued with slave-owning Quaker neighbours about the cruelty of separating children from their parents, Benjamin left their house and encountered their six-year-old son. He invited the lad to come and see his cave, and when the frantic parents arrived there many hours later, seeking Benjamin's help in the search for their missing boy, he delivered the child into their arms, reminding them that Quakers were supposed to live their lives according to the Golden Rule: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Why was it all right for the parents of their child-slave to suffer, but tragic when the suffering was their own?
His most famous performance took place at a worship meeting in 1738, where he arrived dressed as a soldier, complete with sword. After haranguing the respectable assembly about slavery, he drove his sword into his Bible. The people around him were splattered with what appeared to be blood (actually berry juice, hidden in a bladder inside the book). They all had blood on their hands, he explained, because they refused to fight the slave trade.
He was chucked out again, of course.
He opposed the separation of men and women at worship because "Male and Female are all one in Christ the Truth." Any true believer should agree with Lay that all distinctions based on class, sex, rank or race must be rejected. He preached the "Welfare and Happiness of all Mankind, all the World over, of all Colours, and Nations." Indeed, separate races didn't exist - it said so quite explicitly in the Book of Revelations.
Nor did he believe it acceptable to oppress non-human animals. He walked everywhere, because why should a horse labour for the benefit of "Little Benjamin," as he called himself? He's often described now as a vegetarian, but I think that's a modern misinterpretation of something even more radical: Lay urged people to live only "on the innocent Fruits of the Earth," which did not involve exploitation or cruelty to anyone, whether human or otherwise. So, he wouldn't wear wool, for the sake of the sheep, and he wouldn't use sugar, for the sake of the slave. His appearance, which included a big hat, a huge beard, home-made clothes and bare feet, was deliberately provocative.
Sarah died suddenly in 1735, and a few months later broken-hearted Benjamin began writing his magnum opus in a cottage he built into a cave, where he lived his last years along with a large library and a garden full of vegetables (especially turnips).
In 1758 the Philadelphia Quakers finally began a long, gradual process of expelling slave-owners. Benjamin had won, and he told a friend he would now "die in peace." Which he duly did, a few months later. Quakers in Britain and America went on to become amongst the most reliable allies of Africans fighting to liberate themselves from slavery.
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Sources:
The fearless Benjamin Lay the Quaker dwarf who became the first revolutionary abolitionist by Marcus Rediker (Verso 2017)
web.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/quakersandslavery/commentary/people/lay.php
www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/61/Benjamin-Lay
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-42640782