Two hundred and sixty-four years after his death, Benjamin Lay has suddenly come into vogue. He is the subject of a new play opening on Tuesday at the Finborough theatre in London, which joins both a fine work of history and a graphic novel based on his life. Or perhaps we should say lives, because Lay was a shepherd, a glover, a sailor, an author, a bookseller. Most importantly, he was a revolutionary, who waged a lifelong battle for a cause that then looked hopeless but today is seen as unquestionably just. Half a century before William Wilberforce began cajoling fellow parliamentarians, Essex commoner Lay fought to stop slavery. For his pains, he was scorned and humiliated and spurned by his community. Yet in his life is a story for our times.
Born in 1682 with dwarfism, and standing 4ft tall, Lay was raised as a Quaker and taught its principles of democracy and equality. Though he came from a village outside Colchester, he could never settle, switching jobs, moving to London and then taking to the sea. Over 18 months in the slave society of Barbados, he and his wife, Sarah, witnessed how Africans were whipped, starved and burned by their wealthy white enslavers. He befriended enslaved people and one, “a lusty fellow”, swore he would kill himself rather than be whipped again. After he did so, Lay left the island knowing “sugar was made with blood”.
The couple arrived in Philadelphia in 1732, where the most powerful Quakers were enslavers. In protest, Lay would stride into a Quaker meeting and spatter them with pretend blood – nearly three centuries before such tactics were employed by Extinction Rebellion. Or he’d stand outside a meeting house barefoot in the snow, as a reminder of how enslaved people were forced to labour in freezing fields half naked. For all this, he was denounced and expelled by the Quaker community, and eventually withdrew to a cave. After his death, few remembered him until, a few years ago, the historian Marcus Rediker published The Fearless Benjamin Lay and rescued its subject from the injustice of obscurity.
In the UK, the abolition of slavery is often framed as an Enlightenment project, pursued by silky liberal gentlemen. Yet it was enslaved people in Haiti who led the way: thanks to their rebellion, it became the first country to ban slavery permanently from 1804. For all its boasts, Britain did not ban slavery in most of the British empire until 1833. Even that was not simply the work of a beneficent elite but of figures including Olaudah Equiano, who bought his freedom and then vigorously campaigned for that of others, and Mary Prince, whose powerful account of life in slavery galvanised the cause.
Lay, in the US, was an earlier and more quixotic figure. He was not alone in challenging a system many regarded as ineluctable, but his tactics were radical and shocking. Today’s activists campaigning on everything from climate change to humane migration policies have much to learn from his life, while the “Quaker Comet” would recognise their disruptive righteousness and what Rediker terms “guerrilla theatre”. From the suffragettes to Mahatma Gandhi, those who take up a great cause are later remembered as saints or treasures, divested not only of their blood and suffering, but of controversy. Lay’s example is a sharp reminder that yesterday’s impossible causes can become today’s inevitable principles – but that the journey is often made through shocking confrontation and personal sacrifice.
