The Lay Abolitionist

A personal reflection on and tribute to Benjamin Lay, more than three centuries on

I don’t remember exactly how I learned of Benjamin Lay. It was probably through some discussion of the antislavery movement by Effective Altruists or something similar. What I do remember is my immediate recognition that he was a character who transcended time and space, one whose stories still carry great inspiration even today. One of my favorite stories is that one Pennsylvania winter, he stood with his right leg and foot exposed and planted in the snow. When a passerby expressed concern that Lay was injuring himself and might fall ill, he declared, “ah, you pretend compassion for me but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad.” Icon behavior.

Despite this, few people know of Lay even today, and he is not featured in the canonical histories of antislavery. This may be in part because he is still too dangerous and too radically visionary for the people of the present age. Benjamin Lay was an agitator who steadfastly resisted all attempts to quell or moderate him, so many people even of our enlightened era may find his judgments—which implicitly challenge our own presumptions and behaviors—uncomfortable. But to have relegated Lay to the dustbin of history is, in my view, our loss rather than his.

I want to be clear that Benjamin Lay was not the only such agitator. I write about him specifically because he represents well the spirit of agitation which has animated a rare class of souls throughout history. I deeply believe that this kind of agitation, and the vision with which it is inextricably intertwined, plays a necessary yet unsung role in the moral progression of our society.

A Short Biography

Source: The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker. This honestly kind of doubles as a book review/summary; I give it 5 stars!

Antecedents

I had hoped to find in Benjamin Lay’s a story about a first mover: someone who became an activist without prior inspiration, training, or calling. In this, I was disappointed.

Benjamin Lay was the youngest child of a couple of Quakers. They were not rich, though their socioeconomic station had been increasing and they had managed to acquire some property. Still, young Benjamin had ample experience with a variety of duties and trades; first he worked as a shepherd for his half-brother and then he worked as an apprentice glover. He loved being a shepherd but abhorred glovemaking, and at the age of 21, he ran away to become a sailor.

Lay also grew up in a region steeped in a tradition of popular protest and during a time not long after a string of civil wars and popular revolutions. The Quakers were not the only popular movement to arise during that time: other popular movements in England such as the Levellers, Diggers, Ranters, and Seekers also emerged during the English Revolution of 1639–1653. By Lay’s time, the revolutions had faded and the first generation of Quakers had passed (or been killed). The Society of Friends had both grown and become more moderate and hierarchical. Still, Lay absorbed the foundational tenets of Quakerism from his parents and his community, and he would become something of a torchbearer of the ideals of the early radical Quakers.

One of the defining tenets of Quakerism (and the other popular movements) was that salvation was attained solely through the Grace of God and not through any other means. This implied what has come to be known as antinomianism: a fiercely anti-legalistic, anti-establishment ethos that placed the personal conscience above all temporal laws and authorities. It was this ethos which laid the foundation for Lay’s uniquely radical abolitionist activism.

Charting A Course

As I mentioned, Benjamin Lay ran away from glovemaking to become a sailor. Sailing left a lasting impact on him, to the point where Lay always identified himself as a common sailor. It may have been instrumental in honing his Quakerish ethos: he and the other sailors, a multiethnic motley crew, depended on one another to persevere through life-and-death situations. They all worked under a strict hierarchy headed by a captain endowed with incredible powers, which I’m surprised Lay tolerated for any extended period of time.

Lay would travel between Britain and its American colonies many times throughout his life, but he also had experiences in other parts of the world, even visiting the Ottoman-held Levant to pay homage to holy sites of early Christendom. It was through these travels that he first met enslaved and formerly enslaved persons and heard dark stories about the regular physical and sexual abuse the slave trade was tied up with.

But what really shocked Lay into the calling he would take up for the last 4 decades of his life was his time in the British colony of Barbados, though he and his wife only lived there for 18 months. Barbados was and is notorious for 1) having been a massive slave plantation colony and 2) the regular cruelty with which enslaved persons were treated to maintain the decadence of the Planter class.

Enslaved people begged and stole from Lay’s waterfront shop, angering him until he realized the desperate straits they were in, after which he felt remorse. He and his wife, Sarah, were then among the few who showed the enslaved people any compassion, talking with them, listening to their stories, holding meetings, serving meals, and publicly denouncing the institution of slavery. In turn, the enslaved people expressed great love and admiration for the couple. But it was not to last—the island’s White population, enraged and afraid of the Lays’ subversion, banished them from the island.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When I read through the descriptions of the horrors of the sugar industry, I couldn’t help but draw parallels. The atmosphere of fear, humiliation, and deprivation of the Barbados of them is not so different from the same atmosphere that pervades the ranks of powerless slaughterhouse workers. The suicides of enslaved persons are not so different from the suicides of today’s exploited factory workers. The limbs and lives lost in sugar-making vats and machines find a perfect parallel in the limbs and lives routinely lost in the incredibly dangerous meatpacking industry. And of course, the cruelty for sport with which enslaved persons were treated has found its reprise in wanton cruelty towards farm animals, the gratuitous kicking, shoving, and smashing that is enough to boil blood.

It’s one thing to know of the routine torments and murders, as you and I do. We’ve all seen slaughterhouse footage so often that for many of us it’s no longer shocking. We’ve heard the testimonies of workers who were mistreated and traumatized. But I just know that that’s different from having true secondhand experience. I’ve never seen a factory farm or a slaughterhouse in-person. I’ve never looked into the eyes of a fellow creature in real time as they were being taken to slaughter. I’ve never had that conversation myself with someone who had to kill animals day in and day out. Benjamin and Sarah Smith Lay did for 18 months. Benjamin Lay listened as an enslaved man vowed to take his own life rather than face another regular Monday whipping, following through on his promise that Sunday. And Sarah Smith once visited a fellow Quaker who had brutally punished the enslaved person in his bondage, hanging him in the air with a pool of blood at his feet and flying into a rage when Sarah begged him for an explanation. The truth is that had the Barbadians not driven them out by force, Benjamin and Sarah would have left to avoid compromising their own souls.

I think I still understand how these 18 months set the course the Lays would take in the remainder of their lives. When I first learned about factory farming, it turned my whole world upside down. I knew we had war and slavery and a million other evils throughout human history. I knew we still have our own versions of those things today. But there was a sense in which one felt the world to still be fundamentally balanced and just. Seeing the world in a light so fundamentally devoid of justice and succour, and seeing how the people around me passively participated in perpetuating a machine of evil, destroyed that sense for me as it did for the Lays. It turned these evils from exceptions to be mended into a rule that had to be broken. And the Lays, particularly Benjamin, would spend the rest of their lives trying to break that rule.

The Holy Experiment

The Lays would spend much of the rest of their lives in the colony of Pennsylvania. It was here that Benjamin Lay came into his own as public nuisance no. 1.

Again, Lay was not some singular mad genius who invented performative public protest and disrupting gatherings; those traditions had been regularly utilized by the early Quakers and other antinomians. Lay might simply have been particularly good at attracting attention, and he was among the first to use these tactics to advocate for abolitionism.

Lay’s advocacy for abolitionism was meant to reach all Pennsylvanians and beyond, and indeed Lay was likely the most famous man in the colony at one point. But he focused particularly on the Quakers because he was one of them and because their values—particularly, their belief that God was present in everyone—were so at odds with their complacency and participation in the institution of slavery. He would spend the last four decades of his life demanding that the Society of Friends denounce and divorce itself from slavery.

It is ironic that Lay used these tactics against the Quakers themselves. By the time Lay was around, the Quaker movement had matured and been somewhat deradicalized. Many Quakers at that time had strayed from the movement’s ascetic, egalitarian roots and had acquired great wealth, often through the institution of slavery. Lay was rightfully incensed by such hypocrisy and thus devoted a great deal of his focus to demanding that the Society of Friends censure and expel those members who held people in slavery. Lay’s persistence and spirit were admirable. At meetings, when a slaveholder tried to speak, Lay would shout, “there’s another negro-master!” And at one meeting, Lay stood and delivered a thunderous religious condemnation of slaveholders, culminating in stabbing a hollowed-out bible filled with pokeberry juice, splattering nearby slaveholders with the fake blood. Lay made it effectively impossible for the Quakers to sweep the issue of slavery under the rug, forcing those who held enslaved people in bondage to actively defend the institution of slavery and compelling everyone else to make their stances publicly known.

The Quaker elites, many of whom held enslaved people in bondage, did everything in their power to silence Lay. Their tactics are familiar to anyone who has tried to use official meetings to speak to power: they shamed and censured him, insulted him and called him mad, disowned him as a member, and forcefully removed him from their premises. And when he wrote a book critical of the institution of slavery, they refused to publish it and attempted to prevent others from doing so as well. In all these efforts, they were surprisingly unsuccessful. Little Benjamin just kept coming back.

Lay lived to see the beginning of his victory. In 1758, the Society of Friends initiated a process to discipline and eventually disown slaveholders. Upon hearing the news, Lay declared, “I can now die in peace.” Benjamin Lay would live for about a year longer, passing away on February 3, 1759.

Paean to Lay

No One Mourns The Wicked?

I’ve always admired Benjamin Lay for his moral tenacity.

For forty years, he was unswayed from his singular purpose of getting the Quakers to denounce and divorce from slavery. He disrupted Quaker meeting after Quaker meeting, staged demonstration after demonstration, wrote tract after tract, and debated fellow after fellow. For almost the entirety of that time, he was met with immense resistance, scorn, and apathy from all as well as threats and censures from the scumbags in power. And for most of that time, he was alone in his radicalism. The one soul who understood and consistently supported him in his activism—his dear wife Sarah Smith—passed away in 1735, leaving Benjamin alone for the last 24 years of life.

I cannot imagine the kind of moral fortitude this required. As fulfilling as activism can be, it is also exhausting, both physically and mentally. How did he endure knowing that so many of his fellow Philadelphians simply did not care about the plight of the enslaved? How did he bear the outrage that he—who spoke for compassion and truth—was ridiculed and ostracized, while the corrupt and slaveholding Quakers were not?

And how did he survive the many campaigns by that leadership and their ilk to destroy him? Even many other radical antislavery advocates of his time, faced by the hostility of the multitude and persecution by the powerful, broke and retreated. Benjamin Lay remained as stoic and radical as ever. He never backed down from his position that enslaving others was a grievous sin and crime and that slave-keepers and traders were murderers.

Yet I don’t think that even someone as strong and courageous as Benjamin Lay could have weathered the storm completely alone for so long. As mentioned, he had his wife Sarah for a good deal of that time, and I don’t doubt that she provided him with much needed support and comfort. And throughout his life in Pennsylvania, Lay found a handful of others who supported him in their own quiet, timid way. For example, Benjamin Franklin was a lifelong friend and supporter of Lay’s, even publishing Lay’s book All Slave-Keepers That Keep The Innocent In Bondage, Apostates—though Franklin did not take credit as the publisher until much later.

I know from experience that even this meager and hushed kind of support can go a long way in kindling one’s spirit, and I take some vicarious solace in the knowledge that Lay did not have to bear the moral burden of the world completely alone.

A Sailor Vision, A Shepherd’s Love

One might worry that the kind of unruly antinomianism Lay possessed would lead him to become megalomaniacal, aloof, selfish, and wantonly violent. In fact, Lay was the exact opposite. Though righteous and judgmental towards the tyrannical and hypocritical, Lay was a humble man who was drawn to the oppressed and unfortunate, generous and kind, and fundamentally nonviolent.

Over the course of his life and through his will, Lay donated in the ballpark of $100,000 in 2016 dollars, the great majority being made out to the poor, working class folks, and widows. In addition to direct aid, Lay also donated substantial amounts to hospitals and schools for the poor, and he set aside funds to help poor Quakers emigrate to America without selling themselves into indentured servitude. In these ways, he embodies what we today might see as effective philanthropy, mutual aid, and/or class solidarity.

Lay was also far ahead of his time in his views on race and gender. Not only did Lay object to enslavement and the African Slave Trade, but he was distinctly antiracist. He did not fall to standard contemporary tropes, never calling Africans inferior or barbaric. He argued that any perceived inferiority of Africans was the fault of the slavers, not of the victims, declaring that were they provided with “the same Education, Learning, Conversation, Books, [and] sweet Communion in our Religious Assemblies,” they would “exceed many of their Tyrant Masters in Piety, Virtue and Godliness.” Lay also believed that “Male and Female are all one in Christ the Truth,” and he thus did not respect the Quakers’ division of their monthly meetings by gender.

Finally, and most dear to my heart, Lay extended his love to non-human animals. In this regard, both trades of his youth left a lasting impression: his time as a shepherd imparted to him a love of the pretty and innocent lambs, while his time as a glovemaker instilled a distaste for the “dirty trades” which were built on animal exploitation. Later in life, Lay became a vegetarian. After killing a groundhog who had repeatedly raided his garden, Lay felt an immense deal of remorse for his cruelty, and resolved to eschew any activities that necessitated animal cruelty, exploitation, or murder. Though he kept honeybees and consumed honey, Lay refrained from the common practice of killing the bees to extract the honey, again on grounds of compassion. Thus, though Lay continued to consume milk and honey, I would say that Lay was an early vegan in the sense that he rejected all animal exploitation and murder.

It’s astounding to me that Lay was so holistically right. Many people are champions of one cause while remaining oppressors in another. Many people effect positive societal change but are not personally virtuous, or vice versa. But Lay did it all, and all the way back in the 18th century to boot, with no mentor to tie all these threads together for him. To put it pithily, “Benjamin Lay was, in sum, a class-conscious, gender-conscious, race-conscious, environmentally conscious vegetarian ultraradical.” And we love him for that.

In my view, all of this arose from a core radical Quaker value: his belief that God is present in all beings. From that belief arose his fierce commitments to universal compassion, equality, and justice, summed up in the maxims: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” It was this deep and abiding tenderness, steeled by his unyielding antinomianism, which lay at the heart of Lay’s myriad moral revolutions.

Lay’s Legacy

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

— Frederick Douglass

Sadly, Lay was not much appreciated during his lifetime, and he remains vastly underappreciated today. Even in the contemporary era, the abolitionist historian David Brion Davis characterized Benjamin Lay as a “mentally deranged, obsessive ‘little hunchback.’” It saddens and enrages me that Lay remains so misunderstood and mistreated even to this day. David Brion Davis, I don’t know who you are, but fuck you for that.

Lay’s colorful public performances mask a sharp and calculating mind. He saw the Quakers as broken into four groups: the outspoken antislavery advocates, the silent opposers of slavery, the silent supporters of slavery, and the outspoken slavery apologetics. His strategy “was to unify the first group, get the second group to speak out, convert the third group, and either win over or drive out the final group.” This is almost exactly my theory of change regarding the animal rights movement and anti-oppression movements in general. After managing to get his book published, Lay made it a point to distribute the tract to young visionaries among the Quakers, knowing that those seeds would bear fruit once the old guard had passed. His works and actions greatly influenced many later antislavery advocates and abolitionists including Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Clarkson. And finally, Lay had “a knack for commanding the attention of powerful people,” managing to obtain audiences with both King George I and King George II where he advocated against slavery and exploitation. All in all, Lay was an intelligent and thoughtful man as well as a passionate one.

All this is good, but was Lay of consequence? And again, the answer is yes, much more than we thought. For a long time, the narrative of the antislavery movement was that real change began from more elite leaders like Anthony Benezet and John Woolman in the 1750s. And while those figures have been critical in moving antislavery forward, newer evidence suggests that they were not the real inflection point. Quaker attitudes towards slavery shifted profoundly from 1735–1743, when Lay was most active and before Benezet and Woolman were. At the very meeting in 1738 when Lay splattered slaveholding Quakers in pokeberry juice, the meeting notes record that slavery in the Quaker community had been declining for several years, and even Lay’s slave-holding nemesis John Kinsey admitted on record that he wished “this particular may be continued.” Lay was thus arguably the “sacred flame” who not only kept abolitionism alive, but was critical in winning the war against slavery within the Quaker movement and, eventually, in society more generally.

The Lay Spirit

All beings without number, I vow to liberate

Endless blind passions, I vow to uproot

Dharma gates beyond measure, I vow to penetrate

The great way of Buddha, I vow to attain

— The Four Vows

There will never be another Benjamin Lay.

I will certainly not become a Benjamin Lay. As much as I aspire to and practice the virtues of courage and moral tenacity, I know I am what might be called a “bruised reed.” I am a quite neurotic person, prone to anxiety and discouragement, and very sensitive to criticism and ill-will. I will do what I can to fight for the movement, but I can totally see myself as one of the visionaries who persecution drove to illness and early death, such as the unfortunate Ralph Sandiford.

All this is to say that the point of this is not to become Benjamin Lay, but to be guided and inspired by his spirit and his actions. He shows us that so much is possible, but only if we have the courage and fortitude to cast off the bindings of tradition, the delusions of separation, and the complacency of the status-quo.

As the Buddha declares in the Fire Sermon:

Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

It is up to us to be mindful and discerning enough to recognize this reality, and virtuous and courageous enough to change it.

Perhaps there are reasons to censor oneself, to refrain from action. If one, upon reflection, genuinely believes that the cost is greater than the benefit, then one should refrain. But ask yourself genuinely: is the reason that I refrain from action personal fear, shame, or spiritual weakness? It is okay if the answer is yes. But be honest with yourself.

The spirit of Benjamin Lay inspires us to make great sacrifices. After reading about his life, I am more inspired than ever to place myself on the front lines, to shout chants at pressure campaigns and to participate in open rescues. Even as a PhD student, even if or when I become a professor or take up some other prestigious post, I am inspired to put myself on the line for a worthy cause. Everyone has jobs, families, relationships, etc. that they fear harming or losing if they participate in activism, and there should be a sober calculation of whether it’s worth it to put those on the line for the cause. But again, people like me need to be honest about whether they are really being asked too much of. Because sometimes someone has to make a big sacrifice, and if everyone thinks that that someone should be someone else, then it will never happen. And I know that the sacrifice will never have to be total for me, because I will always have friends who will be there to support me in what ways they can. The same goes for them if they ever put themselves on the line.