FRUITS OF THE MARAZION QUAKER LIBRARY (14) - MARCUS REDIKER (2017) 'THE FEARLESS BENJAMIN LAY - THE QUAKER DWARF WHO BECAME THE FIRST REVOLUTIONARY ABOLITIONIST'

Marcus Rediker, the biographer of Benjamin Lay, is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the College d'etudes mondiales in Paris. He is from a working-class background and the first in his family to attend university but dropped out in 1971 unable to cope with the elitism he encountered. Already the protests against the Vietnam war were shaping his radical activism which was further honed by three years working in a cellophane factory. When he was laid off, he enrolled on a university course and graduated in 1976. After his doctorate, Marcus Rediker emerged as an outstanding advocate of a 'history from below approach' shaped by a Marxist awareness of the nature of capitalist society. His main focus has been on slavery and the slave-trading ships, showing the influence of the sea in the history of countries bordering on the Atlantic. He is the author of The Slave Ship as well as The Fearless Benjamin Lay. 

The response to his biography of Benjamin Lay has been very positive:

The Publishers Weekly review states that the book "successfully rescues Lay from obscurity" and that Benjamin Lay "deserve[s] to be remembered."^[12] The Guardian included the book on their list of the best biographies and autobiographies of 2017 saying that the book is "micro-history at its best".^[13] Christianity Today commented on the book saying that it "brings vividly to life a near-forgotten figure".^[14]   Benjamin Lay's life story unfolded in England, the Caribbean and the American colonies in a remarkable fashion in the course of which he emerged as a critically important figure in the turn against slave ownership. Lay was a radical, free spirit abolitionist. 

I am impressed with Marcus Rediker. He is a fine historian. As for Benjamin Lay, I find him truly inspirational, as does Marcus Rediker. Lay deserves a prominent place in the larger drama of American history and we Quakers need to know about his remarkable life and learn lessons from his fortitude and spirit. Benjamin Lay embodied a set of principles that fit well with American and Western ideals of democracy and equality too often breached in the real world. Benjamin Lay cared for the world and all its creatures. He wrote on the margin of one of the two hundred books he kept in his cave: "Dear souls, be tender hearted." 

Benjamin Lay - this portrait by William Williams in 1758 depicts Lay in front of his cave in Abington but makes no reference to his deep commitment to the cause of abolitionism. Benjamin Lay would not have given his approval for such a portrait; he would have seen it as an expression of vanity. 

Benjamin Lay's family had lived in the small village of Copford in Essex, around sixty miles from London, for several generations. His grandparents, William and Prudence, joined the Quaker movement sometime after 1655, towards the end of the period that encompassed the civil war from 1642 to 1649, the execution of the king, Charles I, in 1649, and the Cromwellian Protectorate that came to an end in

1660 with the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. These were the years that saw the world turned upside down. Radical new ideas about government, society and religion flourished, not least amongst those who came to be known as Quakers. Benjamin was born into a Quaker farming family in 1682, six years before our Marazion meeting house saw the light of day. 

Essex had been a hotbed of religious radicalism since the early fifteenth century, starting with the Lollard revolt of 1414. Lollards rejected wealth and lambasted the clergy. By 1440 such heretics, inspired by the teaching of the Oxford theologian, John Wycliffe, were refusing to swear oaths and claiming that all property should be held in common. Lollardy had taken root in the very area in which the Lay family lived and where Quakerism was to emerge in the middle of the seventeenth century. 

The early Quakers were denounced as "antinomians", meaning they were seen as being against authority. Many of these Quaker radicals did believe that no one had the right or authority to control the human conscience. Benjamin Lay never used the word but but he was antinomian to his core. Interestingly, so too was George Fox to begin with but he tempered his views, not least because of the death of another early Quaker, James Nayler, who died in 1659 from the effects of the whipping he suffered for his refusal to deny the spirit that surged within him. Fox led a counter-movement within Quakerism to discipline the freer spirits that threatened, in his view, to bring about a concerted campaign of terror against Quakers after the restoration of the monarchy. The declaration of the 'peace testimony' in 1660 - the vow of pacifism - was in part a shrewd move to protect the movement from government repression. George Fox knowingly set up a new hierarchical meeting system that imposed self-censorship and collective discipline on the more radical wing of the faith.  

George Fox and his inspirational message

Benjamin Lay, however, grew up as an unreconstructed free spirit. A dwarf, little more than four feet in height with a curvature of the spine, Benjamin became a shepherd which he loved and was then apprenticed to a glover in Colchester which he did not find so agreeable and so aged 19 in 1703 he ran away to the London docklands to become a sailor. When on dry land, he followed the lead of the early radicals by visiting houses of worship to rant against the ungodliness of their ministers and congregations; he kept his hat on during sermons and prayers; he engaged in street theatre to shock people into a renewed sense of how life should be lived. Many of his contemporaries thought him mad, a deranged hunchback dwarf. As a young man living in London, he soon found himself in conflict with the elders of Quaker meeting houses he attended - and that pattern of revolt followed by anger in the Quaker community leading to expulsion continued for much of his later life, here in England and in the New World across the Atlantic. 

Sailing around the world gave Benjamin Lay, to use Marcus Rediker's words, 'a hard-earned, hard-edged cosmopolitanism'. His dozen or so years at sea also provided Benjamin with an education that made him a reader and collector of books. He learnt from other sailors but he was also an autodidact who taught himself much. In 1718, aged 36, he married Sarah, who was also a dwarf, after securing a Quaker marriage certificate in Salem, Massachusets. He had found himself in trouble with 'weighty Quakers' in London for having opposed ministers in public meetings and so decided to sail from London to north America to request a marriage certificate over there from those who did not know about his reputation for being difficult. As Rediker says: 'Almost every move Benjamin made after he retired from the sea was an escape from a system of religious authority designed to control radicals like himself'.

Benjamin and Sarah decided to settle in Barbados in the Caribbean after they married. They spent two years there in which Benjamin's discovery of the horrors of a slave society transformed him into a radical abolitionist. He witnessed public events staged to create terror and ensure planter control over their enslaved workers; he knew that 'sugar was made with blood'. He also knew that other Quakers were slave owners themselves or turning a blind eye to the horrors of the racist exploitation of other human beings. 

The Lays came back to London in 1720 and two years later returned to Colchester to avoid conflicts with London Quakers alienated by Benjamin's free spirit. However, a similar pattern was repeated over the next decade in Essex and once again the Lays left England, this time for Philadelphia in Pennsylvania in 1732, to put distance between himself and the Quakers in Essex he had crossed. Arriving in the midst of Quaker meeting houses controlled by rich, slave-owning Quaker ministers, Benjamin was immediately back in the conflict zone. Sarah died unexpectedly in 1735 and six months later the grief-stricken Benjamin began writing the book - All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates - which brought attention to the evils of slavery. Benjamin Franklin published Lay's work in 1737 and its message was soon picked up in the incipient anti-slavery movement that was beginning to emerge in north America. It was an odd, eclectic book from a self-educated man but it was filled with a fury that so-called good men were behaving in evil ways through their association with the slave-trade and slave-ownership. 

The title page from Benjamin Lay's soul-felt work that helped shape the early abolitionist movement

Someone who knew Benjamin well described him as a "Cynic" philosopher, meaning that he followed the teaching of the Cynics, founded by Diogenes in Athens in the fourth century BC. Like Socrates, Diogenes believed that philosophical ideas had to be embodied in public action and he challenged people high and low with one subversive act after another - just as Benjamin Lay did. Benjamin adapted Cynic ideals to the needs of radical Christianity; he admired both the Cynics and the 'primitive Christians' as described in the Book of Acts in the New Testament; Benjamin collected, read and sold books about the Cynics. He patterned key parts of his new revolutionary life in his later years on Cynic practices - he wore a long beard and simple clothes, ate only fruit and vegetables, drank only water, and travelled long distances on foot using his walking stick. 

 A memorial sign in the Abington Meeting house grounds  

In 1759, aged 77, he died after two years of ill health and was buried in an unmarked grave near Sarah in the Quaker burial ground in Abington, eight miles north of Philadelphia. Marcus Rediker, Benjamin Lay's biographer, reflecting on Benjamin's impact and legacy makes the point that it is a difficult evaluation for two reasons. First, his contemporary enemies did their best to suppress his activism and limit the circulation of  his subversive ideas. Another difficulty is that historians have neglected or marginalised radical voices such as Lay's. However, at last there has been a shift towards understanding the significance of the antislavery activists of the 1730s and 1740s who made possible the achievements of later Quakers such as John Woolman in the 1750s. Rediker argues that Lay was able to transmit his truth in the face of extreme opposition from the most powerful men in the colony of Pennsylvania in four ways - through his book, All Slave-Keepers ... Apostates; through the image of Benjamin Lay that was commissioned without his authority; through the stories that were told about him and his subversive acts; and through the symbolism of his life, how he chose to live. 

I do recommend reading Marcus Rediker's biography. Benjamin Lay has joined my select group of inspirational hero-figures.