Spreading the Story of Benjamin Lay

Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was one of the most unusual people in Britain’s early eighteenth-century American colonies.

Lay was only a little over four feet tall and hunchbacked, though fit enough to work as a sailor. He became a vegetarian and lived in caves. He owned hundreds of books, and he published scores of pamphlets, mostly jeremiads about social ills.

Born into an English Quaker family, Lay first encountered slavery on a large scale on Barbados. After that, he became a vocal abolitionist. At the time, the Society of Friends hadn’t yet adopted that position, much less Lay’s unwillingness to compromise on or shut up about it. 

After moving to Pennsylvania in 1731, Lay joined the Abington Friends Meeting, but that didn’t last. In 1737 he had Benjamin Franklin print his pamphlet All Slave Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. As the modern meeting says on its website:

Benjamin Lay was written out of membership at Abington Monthly Meeting on the thirtieth day, eleventh month, 1737 (which by the Quaker calendar, while the Julian calendar was in use, would have been January 30, 1738), because his zealous actions were considered disruptive.

It is now known that at least two of the Friends who led the discernment about writing Benjamin Lay out of membership in the Society of Friends were slave-owners and were likely targeted by Benjamin Lay’s anti-slavery activism. Benjamin Lay was disowned decades before Quakers were disowned for being slave-owners.

Abolitionists such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, Roberts Vaux, and Lydia Maria Child wrote biographies of Lay in the early 1800s. Many featured portraits ultimately derived from a painting, shown above, that Deborah Franklin commissioned from William Williams (1727-1791) as a gift for her husband. But when slavery was no longer a burning political issue, Benjamin Lay became obscure again.

During the Bicentennial, that portrait was spotted at an auction and recognized. It was restored for the National Portrait Gallery. Nonetheless, Lay remained a footnote, occasionally profiled in an article or short entry in a larger book.

In 2010 Alexander Lagos, Joseph Lagos, and Steve Walker made Benjamin Lay a character in their two-volume Sons of Liberty graphic novel, a superhero story set in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. Frankly, I didn’t think it was a good comic, but an uncompromising abolitionist dwarf mentor fit right into the genre.

Seven years later, Marcus Rediker published the first modern scholarly biography of the man, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. He spoke at the Abington Friends Meeting, part of an effort coordinated with the organization to repudiate the disowning of 1737 and honor Lay for his egalitarianism. The meeting’s website details the results.

Rediker has now collaborated with David Lester and Paul Buhle to produce a graphic biography, Prophet Against Slavery, ensuring the memory of Benjamin Lay will continue to spread.