Benjamin Lay

• Benjamin Lay
• Born: c. 1681
• Died: February 3, 1759

Abolitionist, was born in Colchester, Essex County, England, to Quaker parents. He was cruelly deformed; a hunchback with a protruding chest, very slender legs, uneven arms, and a large head, he only attained the height of four feet seven inches. Lacking the means to give young Benjamin much schooling, his parents apprenticed him to a glovemaker. Before turning eighteen, he quit glovemaking and labored on his brother’s farm near Colchester. He then served as a seaman for seven years, visiting various ports of the world. Returning to England in 1710, Lay married Sarah, who was also a hunchback, and settled in London where he probably earned a living as a glovemaker and possibly as a draper. Lay attended meetings of the Society of Friends in London where he acquired a reputation for contentiousness. After repeated warnings, the Devonshire House Monthly Meeting disowned him in 1720. Shortly afterward, Lay returned to Colchester, his native city. His behavior at the Colchester Two Weeks Meeting distressed his fellow Quakers who rebuked him.

In 1731 Benjamin and Sarah Lay set out for Barbados, where they witnessed the terrible mistreatment of slaves. They befriended the slaves and vowed to fight the wicked institution. Compelled to leave Barbados because of the hostility of the planters, the Lays settled in Philadelphia in 1731. Another reason for leaving was Sarah Lay’s fear that they would acquire the haughtiness and oppressive mannerisms of the planters. (The Lays had stayed in Barbados for about a year. Roberts Vaux, who wrote an early biography of Benjamin Lay, said that he left Britain for Barbados in 1718. However, according to C. Brightwen Rowntree, who examined the records of the Colchester Meeting House, Vaux knew “nothing of Benjamin Lay’s soujurn in Colchester between 1721 and 1731, and imagined that he was in the Barbados all that time. But he cannot have been there more than about a year”).

The Lays built a cottage about six miles north of Philadelphia and planted a garden. Benjamin Lay’s habits were austere and self-denying. He drank no liquor and refused to wear clothes or eat food obtained at the expense of animal life or slave labor. An eager reader, he collected a library of nearly 200 volumes, including works by important theologians, historians, biographers, and poets.

Lay devoted himself to his crusade against slavery. He visited several governors of neighboring provinces and spoke with influential persons, including Benjamin Franklin, with whom he entered into a lifelong friendship. In trying to win people over to abolitionism, Lay demonstrated both determination and belligerence. At times he was either barred or forcibly ejected from Quaker meetings. Once he “kidnapped” a neighbor’s six-year-old son. When the anguished parents told Lay that their child was missing, he replied: “Your child is safe in my house and you may now conceive of the sorrow you afflict upon the parents of the negroe girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.” On another occasion, Lay was invited to breakfast, but seeing a black servant in attendance he asked the host: “Is this man ȧ slave?” When answered affirmatively, Lay replied: “Then I will not share with thee the fruits of thy unrighteousness,” and immediately left the house. Lay’s prickliness earned him the disapprobation of many people, yet he enjoyed the friendship of some learned and distinguished persons in Pennsylvania.

In 1737 Lay published All slave keepers that keep the innocent in bondage, apostates ... it is a notorious sin which many of the true friends of Christ and his pure truth, called Quakers.. . are concerned to write and bear testimony against; as a practice so gross and hurtful to religion . .. and yet lived in by ministers and magistrates in America. In this work he enjoined Quakers, who themselves had suffered persecution, to sympathize with slaves who “have been stolen, banished, tortured, and tormented.” He was particularly severe with ministers who preached “the gospel of glad tydings to all Men, and liberty to the captives” while themselves keeping slaves in bondage. He urged masters to teach their slaves how to read and write and to instruct them in the principles of righteousness and truth and then to set them free.

In his sixty-third year, Lay, now ill, left his cottage and boarded on the farm of John Phipps. Shortly after, Sarah Lay died, a loss that filled her husband with great sorrow. Despite his infirmities and the death of his wife, he continued to speak and to write on the subject of slavery.

Lay’s efforts bore fruit when the Society of Friends, meeting at Philadelphia in 1758, enjoined Quakers who held slaves “to set them at liberty, making a Christian provision for them.” Occurring less than a year before his death, this act filled him with immense satisfaction.

Lay’s reform zeal and Christian humanitarianism found other outlets. He urged hard labor for criminals instead of the death penalty, spoke out against the dangers of alcohol, and was charitable to the needy.

Benjamin Lay died in 1759 and was buried in the Friends’ cemetery at Abington, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the best summation of his life was that written by the poet John Greenleaf Whit-tier. He called Lay an “irrepressible prophet who troubled the Israel of slaveholding Quakerism, clinging like a rough chestnut to the skirts of its respectability and settling like a pertinacious gadfly on the sore places of its conscience.”

An early account of Benjamin Lay’s life is R. Vaux, Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandford (1815). J. G. Whittier’s introduction to The Journal of John Woolman (1871) contains a brief assessment. The most valuable twentieth-century account is C. B. Rowntree, “Benjamin Lay (1681-1759),” The Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, no. 33 (1936). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1933).