'‘Lay’s activism against those involved in the slave trade was just one part of a principled life.’ Photo: Benjamin Lay painted by William Williams in 1790
Benjamin Lay: Another look at an old Friend by Simon Webb
‘It is tempting to think of Benjamin Lay as an anachronism.’
Some time around the year 1731, a Quaker called Sarah Lay went to visit her neighbour on Barbados. Sarah was shown into her neighbour’s kitchen, and couldn’t help noticing something hanging from a beam in the ceiling. It was not a side of ham or a brace of conies, but a man: an enslaved person, strung up and standing in a pool of his own blood – he had been whipped. Naturally, Sarah asked what the man was doing there. She was told that he had been caught trying to escape.
Sarah would have had to crane her neck to see the man’s face. She was a dwarf and a hunchback, as was her husband Benjamin. We know about this horrifying event because Benjamin wrote it down in the one book he ever published: All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. This was published in Philadelphia in 1737, by Lay’s friend Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Lay was born in 1682 near Colchester in Essex. He was a birthright Quaker, raised by Quaker parents. It must have become evident to those parents fairly early on that their son would not grow up to look like the average man. This is how his biographer Roberts Vaux described him in later life: ‘He was only four feet seven inches in height; his head was large in proportion to his body; the features of his face were remarkable, and boldly delineated, and his countenance was grave and benignant. He was hunch-backed, with a projecting chest, below which his body became much contracted. His legs were so slender as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him…
‘A habit he had contracted, of standing in a twisted position, with one hand resting upon his left hip, added to the effect produced by a large white beard, that for many years had not been shaved, contributed to render his figure perfectly unique.’
Despite his size and shape, as a young man Lay worked as a shepherd and then a sailor. On Barbados, Sarah and Benjamin ran a kind of general store.
The horrors of slavery that the pair witnessed on Barbados can all be laid at the door of the British: we controlled the island from 1627 right up to independence in 1966. In All Slave-Keepers, Lay told the stories of enslaved people who were starved, exhausted and crippled because of their treatment, and related the tragic tale of somone who hanged himself one Sunday night rather than face another whipping from his master (a man called Parrot who whipped all his slaves every Monday morning ‘to keep them in awe’).
Eventually, the Lays resolved to leave Barbados, partly because Sarah was becoming worried that she would soon be seduced into the easy way of life of the white slave-owners. As Benjamin wrote: ‘Here friends you may see and understand the powerful influence long custom, conveniency, intimacy and profit has to insinuate itself into our affections; for I have often heard my dear wife say in her life-time, and express the danger she was in when living in Barbados, of being leavened into the very nature of the inhabitants, pride and oppression: so that dear creature, she seeing the evil and the danger, she was willing and desirous to leave the island, and indeed so was I.’
Benjamin described slave-owners in uncompromising terms: ‘proud, lazy, dainty, tyrannical, gluttonous, drunken, debauched… the scum of the infernal pit, a little worse than the same that comes off their sugar when it is boiling, which is composed of grease, dirt, dung, and other filthiness, as, it may be limbs, bowels and excrements of the poor slaves, and beasts, and other matter…’
When the Lays arrived in Pennsylvania, Benjamin quickly set about trying everything he could think of to set the white Pennsylvanians, or at least the Pennsylvanian Quakers, against the African slave trade. Once, he stood at the entrance to a Quaker meeting house as Friends were filing in for a meeting, with one bare foot, although the snow was thick on the ground. The Quakers protested that he would catch his death if he carried on doing that, but he replied, ‘Ah thou pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half-clad.’
At Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1738, he dressed up in a military uniform, strapped on a sword, and carried in a large book. He then delivered a loud harangue against slavery, and concluded by stabbing the book, which appeared to bleed copiously. In fact he had hollowed out the middle of the book, and concealed in the cavity a bladder filled with pokeberry juice.
The eccentricity of Lay’s protests began to shade into something more serious when he kidnapped the six-year-old son of a local white couple. The frantic parents hunted all over the place for the boy, eventually getting round to asking Benjamin if he had seen him. ‘Your child is safe in my house,’ he said, ‘and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the Negro girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.’
Lay himself never enslaved people, either in Barbados or Pennsylvania. He also avoided buying or using anything made by them, and would not sit down to dinner with a family that used one.
Lay’s activism against those involved in the slave trade was just one part of a principled life. He was a pioneering vegetarian, and if he hadn’t been in the habit of drinking cow’s milk he would have been close to veganism. Although he was a wealthy merchant, he took to making his own clothes from linen made from flax he had grown himself, because shop-bought linen or cotton clothes might have been made by enslaved people; and wool, leather, suede and sheepskin were products derived from the exploitation of animals.
In retrospect, Lay’s achievement seems admirable, but his impact was far from decisive: slavery was not abolished in the United States until 1865, over a century after Lay’s death in 1759. On his death bed, though, Benjamin was informed that the Philadelphia Quakers at least had started to turn their backs on slavery.
It is tempting to think of Benjamin Lay as an anachronism: a modern man with twenty-first century ideas, condemned to live most of his life in the eighteenth century. From the point of view of Quaker history, he sometimes seems more like the Quakers of the seventeenth century – radical and challenging – than the more sedate, bourgeois Friends of his own time. He was formally expelled from two congregations in England. In Philadelphia, a constabulary was created to keep him out of meetings. As the Smithsonian noted, he was ‘buried as a stranger to the faith he loved’.
More recently, as reported in the Friend in 2018, the four meetings that originally disowned him now expressed unity with him. A new headstone was laid at Abington Monthly Meeting in Pennsylvania, to mark his and Sarah’s graves. We may regret history. But, much more importantly, we should all be working out what that ‘unity’ might mean today.
This is an amended version of a talk Simon Webb gave to the Durham University Students with Disabilities Association.
