The Making of Benjamin Lay
A brief History of Early Quakerism ending with a difficult Vegan who tried to end Slavery
It is September 19th, 1738. Burlington, New Jersey.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is underway — the most important gathering in American Quakerism. Friends are assembled outside the brick hexagonal meetinghouse when they see a figure coming down the road.
Spindly legs. Dove gray wizardly beard. Four and a half feet tall with a slight hunch — but walking with stolid determination. They all know he has walked twenty miles to get here.
It can be no other than Benjamin Lay.
Mixed feelings are evident immediately. Tightening of lips and hardening of jaws. The look of restrained amusement on others. Some hastily entering the building. Others linger outside — delighted to welcome him.
He comes in. Greets a few people. Takes a seat. Without removing his coat, or his dingy slouch hat. Even though sweat beads on his forehead from his twenty mile walk to get here. The rows of benches follow the hexagonal shape of the room so that Friends face each other. And there is one row set apart and slightly raised — where the elders sit. Esteemed men. Not just of the Quaker community but wealthy men of Philadelphia society.
Among them — John Kinsey. Clerk of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Future Attorney General of Pennsylvania. Future Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
A very important man. A well respected man. Also a slaveholder. He is not the only slaveholder sitting on that bench.
The meeting commences. Heads lower. A few voices speak out of the silence. Benjamin Lay waits for the spirit to move him.
And then he stands up.
He moves toward the facing bench. Toward Kinsey and his colleagues.
And in the language of his time, in a voice witnesses describe as thundering, he begins:
“Oh, all you negro masters, who are contentedly holding your fellow-creatures in a state of slavery during life, well knowing the cruel sufferings those innocent captives undergo… especially you, who profess to do unto all men as ye would they should do unto you…”
He throws off his coat. Revealing a military uniform. A sword at his belt. The room gasps.
He pulls out a Bible. But this is no ordinary Bible. He has hollowed it out. Hidden an animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice inside its pages. To the important men on the facing bench, it looks only like an innocent book.
He holds it out directly toward Kinsey.
“It would be as justifiable in the sight of the Almighty, who beholds and respects all nations and colours of men with an equal regard, if you should thrust a sword through their hearts as I do through this book.”
He drives the sword into the Bible.
Bright red juice erupts — the color of blood — and splatters across the fine coats of the slaveholders on the facing bench.
The room erupts. Men grab him and throw him out of the meetinghouse and into the street. Where he lies for the rest of the day. So that every single person leaving that meeting has to step over his body to get home.
And one has to wonder — how does a man like this exist? How do you get a Benjamin Lay?
To answer that, we have to go way back. It almost always begins with the technology.
Part One: The World That Made Quakerism
The Printing Press and the Democratization of Ideas
Around 1450, a German craftsman named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Like the internet, it expanded the possibilities of communication and information across cultures and time — increasing literacy and removing guardrails for better or for worse.
Before Gutenberg, knowledge was controlled by the people who controlled books. Which meant the Church. The wealthy. The powerful. Ordinary people didn’t read. Didn’t form their own opinions about God or scripture or justice. They were told what to think by people who had every reason to keep them thinking it.
And then Gutenberg built his press. Within fifty years — printing establishments in over two hundred cities. Millions of books. The cost of a book dropped by ninety percent, making it accessible to common people for the first time.
And it wasn’t just Bibles that got printed. It was everything. Plato. The Stoics. Diogenes the Cynic. Cicero. The ancient world’s most radical thinkers — ideas that had been locked away for centuries, preserved by Islamic scholars in Baghdad and Cairo while Europe was largely in the dark — suddenly flooding out into the world. There were also pamphlets and tracts and gossip columns. Anybody with a thought could attempt to get an audience.
This was the age of the printing press as a disruptive technology. Similar to the internet, but slower and more socially consumed — think of the pre-internet era of pamphlet culture, where ideas could be copied and distributed faster than any authority could control them. Traveling soldiers carried printed tracts across the country. Dissenting ideas crossed parish lines, county lines, national borders. The establishment couldn’t put the lid back on.
But unlike the internet, there were no algorithmic controls filtering what reached you — and no information tsunamis drowning your focus and attention. You might read a Quaker tract, then a Presbyterian rebuttal, then a Leveller manifesto, all in the same week. There were no echo chambers sorting you into a tribe and feeding you more of what you already believed while at the same time keeping you from collaborating with others. So when an idea did change you, it had to actually compete with and defeat other ideas in your mind first. The change was earned. It had room to go deep, and there was time without distraction for formation. It had the intellectual infrastructure to last.
We still know the Levellers. We still know the Fifth Monarchists. We still know the early Quakers — because the ideas they hammered out in that chaotic marketplace were strong enough to survive being challenged, and durable enough to become foundational to democracy, to religious liberty, to abolitionism. The echo chamber can change you too — intensely, even violently — but that kind of change tends to be self-consuming. It burns without building. It may not even earn a paragraph in the history books.
This created a new kind of person. Someone who could sit alone with a book and reach their own conclusions. Without permission. Without a priest. Without an institution telling them what it meant. That person had never existed before in large numbers, across social classes. And that person was dangerous.
Within a generation of Gutenberg you have Martin Luther. The Reformation. Vernacular Bibles in people’s own hands. And people start asking — do we actually need a priest for this? Does God actually require all of this institutional machinery between me and Him?
That question does not stay contained.
The Soldiers make ideas go viral
Soldiers have always been one of history’s most effective — and unintended — vectors for radical ideas.” In fact, it is one of history’s great recurring ironies. Armies are raised, at least in part, to protect the narrative of a nation — to enforce the ideological order that justifies the people in power. But to build an army you have to take ordinary men out of their parishes, away from their local hierarchies and the priests who tell them what to think, put them in close quarters with each other for years, hand them a cause, and tell them it is righteous. You expose them to ideas they never would have encountered at home. You teach them that authority can be questioned — because you are asking them to question the authority of a king. And then you cannot control what that produces. Not to pivot, but that’s how we ended up with the shift in ideas following WWI and WWII — The Lost Generation — Hemingway, Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, Wilfred Owen — were all men who went to war believing in the noble narrative of patriotism and glory, and came back unable to believe in anything the establishment told them. The war that was supposed to defend Western civilization produced the people who most devastatingly critiqued it and spread ideas in order to undermine it.
Cromwell raised the New Model Army to fight for Parliament against the Crown. He essentially created a mobile university of dissent. Many of the earliest Quaker converts were veterans of that army — men who had fought a revolutionary war, watched a king lose his head, and seen the entire old order proven mortal. They were hungry, searching, and they already knew how to move across the country in organized formations. The soldiers who came home from that war were not the same men who had left. They carried Leveller ideas, Digger ideas, Seeker ideas, early Quaker ideas back into every village and market town in England. When they carried those ideas with them, they weren’t just travelers. They were a distribution network. The institution meant to protect the established order had become its most effective critic.
The pamphlet culture and the military movement fed each other, pushing radical thought into corners of England it never would have reached through the church alone. It is a pattern that repeats throughout history — armies sent to enforce a narrative returning home no longer willing to believe it.
England in the 1640s: Everything on the Table
By the 1640s in England, the printing press had made things completely explosive. The English Civil War. King Charles I versus Oliver Cromwell. The king insisted that only he had a direct connection to God on behalf of the people. Cromwell believed that God worked collectively through people and wanted a Parliament.
And out of that war — the most extraordinary explosion of radical ideas in British history.
The Levellers. Demanding political equality. The rights of ordinary people. The Diggers. Farming common land. Rejecting private property. Basically communists. The Ranters. The Seekers. The Fifth Monarchists — people who believed Christ was coming back any minute and were living accordingly.
England in the 1640s was a country where everything was on the table. Every assumption. Every hierarchy. Every institution.
George Fox, Margaret Fell, and the Birth of Quakerism
Out of this ferment, around 1647 to 1652, came George Fox — a shoemaker’s apprentice from Leicestershire who claimed he had heard directly from God. But it is worth pausing on that origin story, because Fox may not have been quite the lone visionary founder that history has sometimes made him. Some historians believe he was one among several people who had been arriving independently at similar ideas — that figures like Francis Howgill may have influenced Fox as much as Fox influenced them. What Fox had was extraordinary staying power. He outlasted the other early leaders, and his journals and speeches became the defining texts of the movement. But the fire that became Quakerism was lit by many hands at once.
And then there is Margaret Fell.
Fell was a woman of the gentry — educated, socially connected, and married to a prominent judge — when Fox came to preach at her parish in Ulverston in 1652 and she heard something that changed her life. But her husband Thomas was in London at the time, and when Fox’s words moved her so deeply that she invited him back to Swarthmoor Hall, she was, in her own words, “stricken with such sadness that I knew not what to do” — terrified of what Thomas would say when he returned home to find his household transformed.
And transformed it was. Seven of their children converted. The household servants converted. By the time Judge Thomas Fell rode back through the gates of Swarthmoor Hall, he came home to a Quaker household.
He never converted himself. He kept attending his Anglican church every Sunday. But what he did next is one of the quiet, remarkable human stories of the early Quaker movement: he used his position as a judge to shield the entire operation. He offered Swarthmoor Hall as a meeting house. He intervened when Friends were arrested. He protected Fox, Margaret, and the traveling ministers for the remaining six years of his life — not because he believed what they believed, but because he believed in his wife. That arrangement — a skeptical judge protecting a radical religious movement out of his own home — is the kind of detail that reminds you that history is made by human beings with complicated inner lives, not just by ideological forces.
After Thomas died in 1658, Margaret stepped fully into public life. She petitioned King Charles II for Quaker religious freedom. She was eventually arrested, sentenced to life imprisonment and forfeiture of her property for allowing Quaker meetings in her home, and spent four years in Lancaster Gaol — where she continued writing. She managed correspondence, coordinated the traveling ministers, used her social position to intercede when Friends were beaten and imprisoned, established the Kendal Fund to support imprisoned preachers and their families, and provided the financial backbone that kept the whole enterprise alive.
Fox was the spark. Fell built the house around it.
There is a serious argument to be made that without her, the movement doesn’t survive its first decade. She also wrote Women’s Speaking Justified — a fierce, scripture-based argument for women’s right to preach — which wasn’t peripheral to Quakerism but absolutely central to what made it radical. She later married Fox in 1669, but her contribution to the movement long predated that union and should never be reduced to it.
Fox’s core message was radical in its simplicity: every person carries an Inner Light, a direct connection to the divine. You don’t need a priest. You don’t need a church hierarchy. You don’t need elaborate ritual. You need only to listen.
The people who gathered around Fox eventually became known as the Religious Society of Friends — Quakers, their critics called them, mocking the way they trembled when moved by the Spirit. But Friends called themselves something else first: Children of the Light. That name wasn’t incidental. It came straight out of the apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation — the same end-times fever that would drive the first generation to suffer everything rather than stay silent. From the very beginning, this was a movement that believed it was living in the last days.
Part Two: The Valiant Sixty
The first wave of Quakers were known as the Valiant Sixty — though the actual number was somewhat higher. These were the first publishers of Quaker truth, the original missionaries of the movement. And what made them remarkable wasn’t just their message. It was who they were.
At a time when preaching was the exclusive domain of educated, ordained, male clergymen, the Valiant Sixty were farmers. Tradespeople. Women. Ordinary people from the north of England — a region the southern establishment already looked down on as backward — who believed they had heard something true and couldn’t stay quiet about it.
But to understand why they were so willing to suffer for it — why ordinary people would accept imprisonment, corporal punishment, and social ruin rather than be quiet — you have to understand the atmosphere they were living in. These were people who believed, with complete sincerity, that they were living in the last days.
The Book of Revelation wasn’t distant scripture to them. It was a news report. The English Civil War, the execution of a king, the collapse of the established church — these weren’t just political events. They were signs. The world was ending, and God was separating the faithful from the corrupt. The Quakers read themselves directly into the apocalyptic narrative: they were the remnant, the true witnesses, the people called to speak truth in the final hour before Christ’s return.
They were not protesters. They were people running into a burning building to drag people out.
This is why early Quakers crashed church services. Refused to remove their hats before kings and judges. Went naked through the streets as prophetic signs — following the tradition of Isaiah, who walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign against Egypt and Ethiopia, and Micah, who declared “I will go stripped and naked, I will make a wailing like the jackals.” The naked body symbolized souls stripped of the corrupting garments of state churches, clergy, and ritual. The nakedness was meant to fall spiritually on the audience, not the prophet. Early Quakers read the Hebrew prophets not as embarrassing anomalies but as models of prophetic embodiment — the idea that God sometimes demands the body itself become the message when words fail.
This was the fever that drove them. And it explains everything about how they behaved.
They traveled throughout England, then to Europe, then to the New World. Mary Fisher sailed to Turkey and secured an audience with the Sultan himself. Margaret Fell, already established as co-founder and organizational backbone of the movement, was also among them — imprisoned for her witness, continuing to write from her cell.
And then there was James Nayler.
Nayler was perhaps the most radical of all. A veteran of the Parliamentary army, already one of the most prominent Quaker preachers in London — so prominent that some outsiders regarded him as the leader of the movement over Fox himself. In 1656 he became the center of a national scandal. He climbed onto a horse and rode into Bristol — followers streaming behind him, laying cloaks in the street, crying out hosannas. He wasn’t referencing Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. He was doing it.
Nayler wasn’t performing a reenactment the way an actor plays a role. He wasn’t claiming to represent Christ — he was claiming, through the logic of the Inner Light, that Christ was literally present in him. That the divine could inhabit an ordinary human body. And if that was true of Nayler — if it was true of any ordinary person — then no king, no bishop, no institution had any special claim to divine authority over anyone else.
That is what terrified Parliament. Not the donkey. Not the singing. The implication.
By a margin of only 14 votes out of 178 cast, Parliament decided not to execute him. That was the mercy. Instead, they bored a red-hot iron through his tongue and branded his forehead with the letter B for Blasphemer. He was whipped through the streets of London — over three hundred lashes. Then returned to Bristol and made to repeat his ride in reverse, facing the rear of his horse. Then imprisoned in solitary confinement.
After his sentencing, Nayler responded: “God has given me a body; he shall, I hope, give me a spirit to endure it.”
These were people who took their faith seriously enough to bleed for it — to earnestly take up the cross. They were, in the deepest sense, revolutionaries — early practitioners of civil disobedience, willing to break unjust laws and accept the consequences. When you believe the end is near, the cost of speaking truth feels very different.
Part Three: The Price of Respectability — Quietism and the Cooling of the Fire
Benjamin Lay was born in 1682 — a third-generation Quaker, arriving just as that first fire was cooling. The end times had not arrived. The world had continued. And the movement was beginning to make its peace with that world in ways that would have horrified its founders.
What happened is a phenomenon that recurs throughout religious history. Movements that begin in radical truth-telling have a tendency, over time, to get comfortable.
After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the hammer came down on the various radical religious groups that had flourished under Cromwell. The Quakers made a collective decision: survive rather than confront. Turn inward. Become respectable. The apocalyptic urgency faded. And in its place came order. Discipline. The meeting as institution.
This turn is known as Quietism — and it reshaped Quakerism from the inside out. Where the early Friends had been explosive, confrontational, and outward-facing, the Quietist Quakers turned inward. Silence became the dominant mode. Waiting on the Spirit replaced active prophecy. The emphasis shifted from speaking truth to power to maintaining the purity of the gathered community. Don’t make waves. Don’t embarrass the meeting. Submit to the oversight of the elders.
George Fox, as he aged, worked hard to institutionalize and systematize the movement — creating the monthly meetings, the yearly meetings, the Overseers of the Press who had to approve all Quaker publications before they could be printed. This was partly strategic survival. But structure has a cost. The wild, disruptive, prophetic energy of the Valiant Sixty got increasingly domesticated.
By the time Benjamin Lay’s parents were practicing Friends, the faith looked very different from what Fox and Fell had ignited. The fire had been replaced by something much more comfortable. And much more compromised — in the eyes of people like Benjamin Lay.
Part Four: The Making of Benjamin Lay
Born This Way
Benjamin Lay was born in 1682 in Copford, Essex. Sixty-Two years after the Mayflower Landing. The same year William Penn received his Pennsylvania charter. Newton was about to publish the Principia. The slave trade was at its absolute peak.
Benjamin was born into a modest Quaker family. Third generation Friends — which meant his grandparents were there in the legendary beginning. Maybe he heard stories. The apocalyptic urgency. The hat testimonies — the early Quaker practice of refusing to remove their hats before judges and kings, a radical insistence that no human being deserved that gesture of submission, only God. The naked prophets
And just to provide some perspective — there was the same distance between Benjamin Lay’s birth and the beginning of Quakerism as there is between a person born in 1971 (as I was) and America’s entry into World War II. Close enough to feel the romance of it. Far enough that the reality had softened into legend. I grew up lionizing the Greatest Generation — their courage, their sacrifice, and honestly their clothes and their big band jazz and the adventures of some of that eras key figures such as Earnest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn. One wonders if Lay felt something similar — a longing for a purity and courage he had only heard about secondhand. The Valiant Sixty walking barefoot into jails. The naked prophets. The hat testimonies. The people who ran into burning buildings to drag souls out. And then he looked around at the comfortable, compromised world his parents had made. Not making any waves.
And then he looked at the world his parents had made. Not making any waves — not even a ripple.
He was born with kyphosis — significant curvature of the spine. His diminutive body unavoidably visible to everyone he met. You cannot blend in when you look like Benjamin Lay. You cannot earn acceptance through conformity. You learn very early that the world is going to see you as different no matter what you do.
Some people in that situation learn to disappear. Others decide — if I cannot be invisible, I will be completely, entirely, unapologetically myself.
The Books That Formed Him
In those days there was no public school. Children learned at home, through apprenticeship, through meeting. His family apprenticed him as a glove-maker. He hated it. He ran away to London and became a sailor at twenty-one.
But somewhere in those early years — in the relative solitude that his difference probably brought him — he discovered books. And in the books he found Diogenes.
Diogenes the Cynic. Ancient Greek philosopher. Lived in a barrel in the public square of Athens. Owned nothing. Rejected social convention completely. Used his body and his behavior as philosophical instruments. When Alexander the Great came to meet him and asked what he could do for him — Diogenes told him to get out of his sunlight.
Benjamin Lay read about Diogenes and likely recognized himself. This led him to the Stoics. Plato. The whole ancient world of radical thinkers. All available to him because Gutenberg had built his press two hundred years earlier.
And he read Revelation. Obsessively. The same text that had driven the Valiant Sixty into the streets was alive in him — and he read it with a specificity that was almost forensic. The beast system. The whore of Babylon. The remnant called to witness. He wasn’t reading it as history. He was reading it as instruction. And he knew exactly who was who. Slaveholders were subjects of the dragon. The slave trade itself was, in his own words, “the very worst part of the old whore’s merchandise.” John Kinsey — the most powerful man in American Quakerism, the one mentioned in the beginning of this article, sitting on that raised bench in his fine coat — was, in Lay’s theological framework, a manifestation of the nasty beast empowered by the dragon of Revelation. He wasn’t speaking in metaphor. He was reading the room through scripture, and every face he saw in that meetinghouse had a biblical counterpart.
The Sea
Benjamin went to sea at twenty-one. The historian Marcus Rediker — who wrote the definitive biography of Lay — makes a point about this that is essential to understanding his moral orientation.
Ships in the early eighteenth century required radical solidarity. You depended on the person next to you completely. It didn’t matter where you came from, what you looked like, or what God you prayed to. You needed each other. Full stop.
Benjamin Lay absorbed that ethic. And it would transfer directly to how he thought about enslaved people. Every human being deserving of the same solidarity he had learned to extend to every sailor on a ship in a storm.
Sarah
He returned to England. Met and married Sarah Smith. Also a Quaker. Also a person of small stature. A recognized and recorded minister within the Society of Friends — universally beloved and respected in ways that her husband, with his habit of quarreling and disrupting, was not. Mr. Lay was more of an acquired taste.
By this time in his late thirties he was already a disruptive force — disowned by the Devonshire House Monthly Meeting around 1720, and disciplined by the Colchester meetings in 1722 and again in 1724 — for quarreling with his fellow Friends and accusing ministers of preaching their own words rather than God’s truth. This audacity came from somewhere specific: an absolute, unquestioned faith in his own ability to hear God directly. The Inner Light, for Benjamin Lay, was not a metaphor. It was a live wire. He never doubted it.
Which raises a question worth sitting with. Quakerism was never meant to be solely about individual revelation. At its core was also the practice of corporate discernment — the idea that truth emerges collectively, that the Spirit speaks through the gathered community, that your own sense of leading needs to be tested against others’. There is a reason you worship with people. The meeting structure that Fox and Fell built wasn’t just organizational machinery. It was a theological check — a way of ensuring that individual certainty didn’t become unchecked certainty. The cautionary tale was James Nayler. Absolutely sure. Riding into Bristol. Fourteen votes from execution.
Benjamin Lay drew deeply on Quaker theology — the Inner Light, direct revelation, the body as prophetic instrument. But he consistently rejected the mechanism the tradition had built to govern it. He wanted the individual access without the collective accountability. Was his certainty a gift or a limitation? Probably both. He was right about slavery. Completely, unambiguously, generations-ahead-of-everyone right. But the same unquestioned inner authority that made him right about that also made him impossible to work with, and may have slowed the very cause he was fighting for — because a message delivered by someone who has just been thrown out of the building is easier to dismiss than one delivered by someone still in good standing.
John Woolman understood this. Which is why he worked differently. But that comes later.
Sarah was his anchor. His witness. The person who saw him clearly and said — you are not wrong. For someone who spent his entire life being told he was too much, that kind of witness was probably everything. She made it possible for him to keep going. When the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting later condemned Benjamin, they went out of their way to note that Sarah was a member in good standing — “she appearing to be of a good Conversation during her residence here.” Even his enemies had to admit she was something.
Part Five: Barbados
In 1718 they moved to Barbados. Barbados back then was the most profitable colony in the British Empire — built entirely on the backs of enslaved human beings. The violence was casual and constant. The conditions were brutal beyond description.
Benjamin and Sarah opened a little shop on the waterfront in Bridgetown. And immediately encountered what slavery actually looked like up close. Enslaved people staggered into their shop and collapsed on the floor. Some died there — of overwork, of hunger, of the casual violence of the plantation economy. On her way to visit other Quakers, Sarah came upon an African man hanging by a chain above a pool of his own blood, suspended there as punishment for attempting to escape.
He saw an enslaved man commit suicide rather than be beaten again by his owner. He could not unsee it. He could not turn away.
His combative, prophetic style was already established — but his antislavery militancy came into full flower in Barbados. He was incapable of keeping quiet when he believed Friends were in error. And Quakers in Barbados were participating in the slave system. The same people who claimed the Inner Light — who claimed that of God in every person — were holding human beings as property.
He and Sarah responded the only way they knew how. They began feeding enslaved people. Invited them to their home on Sundays for meals and fellowship. Word spread, and soon the Lay home had become something like a meeting house for hundreds of enslaved people who came not only for food but to hear the couple denounce the system that was the source of their misery.
The slaveholding master class got wind of the meetings and applied pressure. The Lays were banished.
They went back to England briefly. And then in 1732 they sailed to Philadelphia.
Part Six: Philadelphia and The Quaker to Corrupt Feedback Loop
Philadelphia in 1732 was the largest city in the American colonies. And deeply Quaker. Benjamin Lay arrived full of hope. Penn’s holy experiment. The city of brotherly love. Surely here — among Friends — things would be different.
And then he discovered that one in eleven people in Philadelphia was enslaved. And many of those enslaved people were owned by wealthy Quakers.
He flew into a rage that would last the rest of his life.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting by the 1730s was run by a merchant elite. Wealthy. Respected. Powerful. Pillars of the community. Known for their honesty in business. Among them — John Kinsey. Already the most powerful administrative figure in American Quakerism. On his way to becoming Attorney General of Pennsylvania and Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
It is worth understanding how these men operated. Call it the Quaker to Corrupt Feedback Loop:
Quaker reputation for honesty generated trust. Trust generated wealth. Wealth generated power within the meeting. Power allowed them to define acceptable Quaker behavior. Which meant they could silence people like Benjamin Lay while protecting their own interests. Including their slaveholding.
The Quietist turn had made this possible. A movement that had once crashed church services and spoken truth to kings had become, in a single generation, an institution that protected the powerful and punished the disruptive. The very structure that Fox had built to keep the movement alive had become the mechanism by which it was being corrupted.
Benjamin Lay saw all of this with crystalline clarity. And he was constitutionally incapable of keeping quiet about it.
Part Seven: The Man Himself & The Remarkable Company He Kept
Before talking about what Benjamin Lay did, it is worth talking about who he was. Because this is where the story gets complicated in a beautiful way.
Benjamin Lay was disowned by four Quaker meetings over the course of his life. Thrown out of rooms his entire adult life. Denounced in newspapers. Mocked for his appearance. Dismissed as uneducated, unstable, excessive.
And yet.
Benjamin Franklin was his friend. Franklin visited him at his home in Abington. And Deborah Franklin — Benjamin’s wife — commissioned a portrait of Benjamin Lay as a gift to her husband, painted by the artist William Williams. In a letter Franklin wrote to Deborah from London in 1758, he mentioned the painting with evident delight: “I wonder how you came by Ben. Lay’s Picture.” That portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC — after the remarkable journey of disappearing from view after the 18th century, being sold at auction in 1977 for four dollars, restored by conservators at the Winterthur Museum, and eventually finding its permanent home. That portrait serves as the blog art for this article.
Anthony Benezet — one of the most respected Quakers in Philadelphia — was his close friend. A genuine, cordial friendship. Benezet would go on to be one of the great Quaker abolitionists of the next generation. The direct line between Lay’s radicalism and the reform movement that followed runs straight through that friendship.
Ralph Sandiford was another ally. A fellow abolitionist who had published his own attack on slavery — without Quaker approval, just like Lay — and been persecuted for it. Benjamin Lay visited him regularly in the final year of his life. Watched him broken by the persecution. Watched him die at forty. Lay concluded — oppression makes a wise man mad.
And then there were the friends who loved him enough to save him from himself. At one point Lay decided to fast for forty days — like Jesus in the desert. He made it about three weeks. By that point his faculties had so failed that he forgot he was fasting. His friends — watching him deteriorate with alarm — quietly slipped him food while he was incoherent.
He called himself Little Benjamin. Not as self-deprecation. Not with shame. As a reference to the Biblical Benjamin — the youngest son of Jacob. The one who was underestimated. The one nobody expected anything from. The one who showed them by making a difference. It tells you everything about how he understood his own place in the story.
He loved children. He would bring the neighborhood kids to his cave to play. He was, by all accounts, warm and joyful in private — the thundering prophet of the meetinghouse becoming something gentler at home.
He was self-educated. No institutional degree. But he read widely and without permission — theology, biography, history, poetry. Two hundred books lining the walls of his cave. George Fox. William Penn. Thomas Tryon. Diogenes. The whole ancient world of radical thinkers available to him because Gutenberg had built his press two hundred years earlier. He read the same way he did everything else — without asking anyone whether he should.
And his community could not stop talking about him.
His first biographer — Benjamin Rush, physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence — wrote that “there was a time when the name of this celebrated Christian philosopher was familiar to every man, woman, and to nearly every child in Pennsylvania.”
You don’t become that famous just by annoying people. He had friends. He had charm. He was received warmly by remarkable people who saw past the disruption to something genuine underneath. He was, in a very real sense, an influencer — someone whose ideas spread through personal relationships and personal presence. No platform. No institution. Just the force of his character and the absolute consistency of his witness. People talked about him because he was genuinely unforgettable.
Part Eight: The Guerrilla Theater
Now. What did he actually do.
It is worth holding one thing in mind as you read this. Benjamin Lay was not young when he did these things. He was in his fifties. After Sarah’s death — which broke him open further, made him more radical, grief and conviction becoming the same thing. After decades of witnessing. After a lifetime of being told he was the problem.
He stood outside a meetinghouse in winter. No coat. One foot bare in the snow. When a passerby expressed concern, he said — this is how enslaved people are made to work. In winter. In rags. Are you equally concerned about them?
He walked into a Philadelphia market during Yearly Meeting. Set out his late wife’s china tea cups on a table and began systematically smashing them. One by one. Because tea required sugar. And sugar was produced by enslaved people. And every cup of tea in every fine Quaker home was a product of that system.
On another occasion, he took a Quaker child briefly from a meetinghouse. Took him to his cave for a few hours to play. And when the parents were frantic — sick with fear, desperate — he returned the child and said quietly: “Your child is safe in my house and you may now conceive of the sorrow you afflict upon the parents of the Negro girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.”
He put the moral point not in people’s minds. He put it in their bodies.
After being thrown out of one gathering, he stretched out on the path just outside the doorway of the meetinghouse, forcing each departing attendee to step over his prone body as they headed home.
A constabulary was eventually appointed specifically to keep him out of meetings. Not one meeting. Meetings all around Philadelphia. They hired people whose entire job was to stop Benjamin Lay from entering Quaker worship. He kept getting in anyway.
And then there was Burlington. Which we have already seen. But there is one more thing to add.
Three weeks before Burlington — Benjamin Lay published a book.
All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates.
He knew the Board of Overseers would never approve it. His attacks against fellow Quakers by name would have guaranteed its rejection. So he went directly to his friend — the printer Benjamin Franklin — and asked him to publish it. Which Franklin did. While quietly leaving his own name off the title page. Because Benjamin Franklin at this point in his life owned enslaved people himself. He owned three — Joseph, Peter, and Jemima.
That tension is worth sitting with. Because it illuminates the moral fog that everyone else was living in, and makes Lay’s clarity more striking by contrast. Franklin believed in Lay enough to print his book. Lay pressed Franklin directly about his own enslaved people — looked him in the eye and asked simply: “With what right?” Franklin eventually promised in his will to free Peter and Jemima after his death. Whether Lay’s friendship moved him toward that, we cannot know for certain. But the question was asked.
The book itself is extraordinary. Part autobiography. Part Biblical polemic. Part personal accusation against specific Quakers by name. Written in a style so nonlinear it can be read front to back, back to front, or opened anywhere. It has no conventional argument because Lay didn’t believe slavery required a conventional argument. It just required you to look at it.
He was a self-educated man writing something like a postmodern text two hundred years before postmodernism existed.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting — John Kinsey specifically — responded by taking out newspaper advertisements denouncing him. Distancing the institution from his book. Declaring him not truly a Friend. Kinsey signed that advertisement personally. The most powerful man in American Quakerism. Personally. In the newspaper. Denouncing Benjamin Lay by name.
Part Nine: The Vindication
In 1750 — twelve years after Burlington — John Kinsey died.
And it came out that he had been embezzling from his clients for years. Substantial. Serious fraud. The man who had simultaneously been Speaker of the colonial Assembly, Clerk of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and Clerk of the colony’s General Loan Office had been stealing from that office for years.
The man who had personally signed the newspaper advertisement denouncing Benjamin Lay. A thief. Hiding behind respectability.
And here is why I think this important.
Benjamin Lay had spent decades — in meetings, in the street, in his book, in his guerrilla theater — associating slaveholding with corrupt character. These men are not who they claim to be. Their spiritual authority is fraudulent. Their wealth is built on human suffering. Their respectability is a lie.
Nobody wanted to hear it. Because these were respected men. Honorable men. Men whose word you could trust in a business deal.
But then the embezzlement came out. And suddenly the congregation had to ask — if Kinsey lied about the money, what else did he lie about? If his character was corrupt here, was it corrupt there too?
The kind of corruption that was revealed — financial fraud, stealing from clients, betraying the trust of people who had relied on him — was the kind of corruption that Quaker merchants could imagine happening to themselves. It landed in their world. In their ledgers. In their own vulnerability. It cracked the armor.
And all this time, Lay had been pointing at these men saying — their souls are compromised. Nobody wanted to hear it in those terms. But when their ledgers proved it — in language everyone understood and everyone feared — his entire moral argument became retroactively credible.
Perhaps, he was right about everything. Including who the enemy was.
Part Ten: The Cave, and the End
By 1758 Benjamin Lay was seventy-six years old. Living in his cave in Abington. Weakening.
That year the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took its first formal steps against slaveholding. Quaker reformers — led by Anthony Benezet, Lay’s dear friend, and the gentle, careful John Woolman — pushed through a decision to discipline and eventually disown any Friend who bought or sold enslaved people.
A visitor brought him the news.
He went silent for a moment.
And then he rose from his chair. And said:
“Thanksgiving and praise be rendered unto the Lord God.”
And a few moments later:
“I can now die in peace.”
He died the following winter. February 3rd, 1759. He was buried in the Quaker graveyard at Abington — the same meeting that had disowned him — in a grave whose exact location remained unmarked and unknown for over two hundred and fifty years.
In 2018, all four meetings that had disowned him officially reversed those decisions. They issued a joint statement declaring him a Friend of the Truth.
They were — as Lay always believed they should be — finally right.
Part Eleven: Was his Activism in Vain?
There is a pattern that repeats in the history of social movements. George Fox — the wild visionary prophet. Margaret Fell — the builder, the organizer, the one who made it survivable. Fox got the credit. Fell did much of the work.
The same pattern repeats with Benjamin Lay and John Woolman.
Woolman is remembered as the great Quaker abolitionist. Gentle. Poetic. Persuasive. He worked with people’s consciences, went through proper channels, was careful never to publicly criticize fellow Friends. His journal is still read. Still beautiful. He is almost revered among Quakers today.
But John Woolman built on ground that Benjamin Lay had broken. Rudely. Expensively. Over decades. While being thrown out of rooms. Woolman was thirty-eight years younger than Lay and almost certainly knew of him. He never mentioned him in his writing. Perhaps the careful organizer needed to keep his distance from the disruptor. Perhaps he understood, as movements often do, that you cannot acknowledge the person who made your work possible without inheriting their reputation.
Someone had to be Benjamin Lay before John Woolman could be John Woolman.
The Quakers did eventually abolish slavery from their meetings — sixteen years after Lay’s death, they became the first religious body in the modern world to do so. They got there through Woolman’s gentle persuasion and Benezet’s patient organizing. Through proper channels and careful process.
But they also got there because for thirty years a four-and-a-half-foot man with a curved spine walked thirty miles at a time to stand in their meetings and tell them the truth. And would not stop. No matter what they did to him.
George Fox and Margaret Fell. Benjamin Lay and John Woolman. Two different eras. The same dynamic. The prophet and the builder. The disruptor and the organizer. The one who breaks the ground and the one who plants in it.
You cannot have one without the other. The movement needs both.
There had to be a Benjamin Lay before there could be a John Woolman. And history suggests there is a little Benjamin Lay guiding every John Woolman — usually unnamed, usually disowned, and often right on the money.
Primary source for this document: Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Verso Books, 2017). Additional sources: the Smithsonian Magazine, Aeon Essays, the National Portrait Gallery, Bryn Mawr’s Quakers and Slavery project, and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting archives.