Benjamin & Sarah Lay - Mr. and Mrs. Quaker Comet

Written By Christina Moffett

In the future, if I am ever asked about "historical figures you'd love to meet," I will most definitely put Benjamin Lay on the list. He has been described as "a troublemaker at every moment of his life." He was one of the earliest Quakers to oppose slavery and did so with a militant zeal that few can emulate. He and his wife, Sarah, both were Quaker ministers with dwarfism. Originally this post was only about Benjamin, as it is very difficult to find information about Sarah, but I did my best to include her here as well. They were a fascinating couple who were key in advancing the cause of abolition in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Portrait of Benjamin, 1750s

Benjamin Lay was born on January 26, 1682 in Copford, England, a small village northeast of London. This area was known for textile production, protesting, and religious radicalism. His parents were the children of Quakers and themselves Quaker farmers; Benjamin would also choose to become a Quaker. Their son was born with dwarfism and kyphosis. His adult height was just over four feet tall, perhaps as tall as 4 feet 7 inches, and he had a protruding chest covered by a long beard, with arms as long as his legs. A fellow Quaker described him: "His head was large in proportion to his body; the features of his face were remarkable, and boldly delineated, and his countenance was grave and benignant... His legs were so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him, diminutive as his frame." He referred to himself as "Little Benjamin," but not disparagingly (he often likened himself to "little David" who killed Goliath).

Like other figures of note that I have written about before, it appears that Benjamin's physical differences and disabilities caused him to have such passion for freeing enslaved people. This argument has been made by Nathaniel Smith Kogan in his PhD dissertation in 2016. He and others have theorized that Benjamin empathized with the enslaved, as Black bodies were considered inferior to white bodies, similar to how his own body was thought to be inferior. Inferior bodies were subject to brutality and being viewed as nonhuman. Along with this, Benjamin was already marginalized, so he could essentially do what he wanted in his activism, as he did not fear being ostracized more than he already was.

He worked as a farmhand, receiving little formal education, before leaving to be a shepherd on his half-brother's farm. His father then apprenticed him to a master glover. Benjamin had loved being a shepherd, saying it was "the best work that a human being could do." He hated being a glove-maker, so he ran away to the London to become a sailor in 1703, when he was 21. Though he had been set to inherit his father's farm, he decided instead to rebel.

Sailing, and living alternately in London, became his life for the next dozen years. His small size was used to scamper about the top of the ship or getting into otherwise unreachable corners. These experiences gave him "a hard-earned, hard-edged cosmopolitanism." He first learned about slavery through hearing stories from other sailors, some of whom had been slaves themselves or had worked on slaving ships. Historian Dr. Marcus Rediker said, "There was also a radical seafaring tradition, a sailor's ethic of solidarity, which connects in Lay to the radical tradition."

Though he had had limited schooling (he was most likely taught to read by literate sailors he worked with), Benjamin began to study with a fervor. He studied the history of Quakerism, especially its origins during the English Civil War.  They had preached radical messages of equality and millenarianism, democracy and anti-slavery, which all further fueled his own radicalism. He also read ancient philosophy, especially that of Diogenes, founder of the philosophy of Cynicism. It was said Benjamin even presented King George I with a copy of John Milton's 1659 tract Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove hirelings. "Hirelings" referred to priests, whom he wanted removed to reduce corruption in the church.

In 1717, he sailed to Boston to obtain a certificate of approval from the local Quakers to marry Sarah Smith of Deptford, England. Uniquely, Sarah also had dwarfism and possibly kyphosis. She was a popular and respected preacher in her own Quaker community. She was born around 1677 to a London plaster craftsman, John Smith. Her family were not Quakers, but she joined the Society of Friends as a young adult. She had most likely met Benjamin at one of the Deptford Monthly Meetings.

The Massachusetts Quakers asked Benjamin's home congregation in London that he was a member in good standing, the reply was that he was "clear from Debts and from women in relation to marriage...We believe he is Convinced of the Truth but for want of keeping low and humble in his mind, hath by an Indiscreet Zeal been too forward to appear in our publick Meetings." He was eventually granted permission to marry, after a lengthy appeals process, and this did not temper his zealous preaching. 

After marrying, Benjamin became a merchant and moved to Bridgetown, Barbados for eighteen months with his new wife. It was here that he witnessed the horrific treatment of enslaved Africans. On this island, nine out of ten people were enslaved: there were 9,000 white Europeans and over 70,000 enslaved Africans. Quakers were prominent among the slave-holders: in 1680, 170 Quaker families held a total of 3,254 enslaved workers.

Enslaved people, dying of hunger and overwork, staggered into his shop and collapsed on the floor. They tried to buy, beg, or sometimes steal small bits of food. Initially, Benjamin was angry, and whipped those who stole. He later wrote: "So when we were in a hurry, one would run away with one thing, another with another, and so on. Very much we lost to be sure. Sometimes I could catch them, and then I would give them stripes sometimes. But I have been sorry for it many times, and it does grieve me to this day, considering the extreme cruelty and misery they always live under. Oh my heart has been pained within me many times, to see and hear. And now, now, now, it is so.” He realized that the real criminals were the slave-holders. Remorseful for his own actions, he tried to speak to more enslaved people and learn from them instead.

Torture ("Starving, Whipping, Racking, Hanging, Burning, Scalding, Roasting, and other Hellish Torments") was a common sight. Rebel slaves were executed. Workers lost limbs in the sugar factory machines. He once saw an enslaved cooper, who was whipped every Monday, commit suicide on a Sunday night to escape. Sarah, too, was not exempt from these horrors. On the road, she came across a trembling Black man hanging by a chain over a pool of blood. She was struck dumb at the sight, but went inside the slaveowners' home to demand an explanation. Sarah was told that the man had run away and was now used as a lesson for all of the other enslaved people.

"Planting the Sugar-Cane," 1823

This inflamed the Lays' abolitionist principles, fueled by their Quaker radicalism. They invited enslaved people to their home on Sundays for food and fellowship. Word of this spread and soon their home became an unofficial meetinghouse for hundreds. The enslaved workers ate the food, though it was often spoiled ("stinking Biscuits which sometimes we had in abundance, bitten by the Cockroaches; or a rotten Cheese, stinking Meat, decayed Fish, which we had plenty of in that hot Country") and listened to the Lays preach against slavery. Benjamin later wrote that their new friends seemed to "rejoice" at the sight of him and Sarah, "we being pretty much alike in stature and other ways." He described the slave-keepers as "scum of the infernal pit, a little worse than the same that comes off their sugar when it is boiling, which is composed of grease, dirt, dung, and other filthiness, as it may be limbs, bowels, and excrements of the poor slaves and beasts." As you can imagine, this made them immensely unpopular with their fellow white residents of Barbados, the ones who profited from slavery. The Lays were pressured to leave the island and worked to officially banish them. Benjamin and Sarah decided on their own to return to England instead of being forced out.

In England, Benjamin was formally expelled from two congregations for his aggressive denunciations of the Quaker's community's wealth and materialism. He had determined that, indeed, money was the root of all evil:

“These rich grown, ever poor, over wealthy, ever needy, ever grasping, never satisfied, brim-full yet always empty, ever laboring, yet always idle, ever diligent, yet always negligent, ever waking, yet eternally asleep, ever living, panting, and breathing, after more, more, more, a little more, I say ever living but eternally dead, and there let ’em lie and stink still, if they will not be awakened. But I had much rather they should.”

He remained at a distance from the local Meetings, as the Friends demanded he apologize for his behavior, while Sarah traveled throughout Great Britain with other Quaker female ministers.

Because Quakers believed that every human had the same inner light inside of them, and because they preached anti-violence, Benjamin also could not comprehend that they hypocritically chose to participate in the cruel system of slavery. He became one of the earliest and most zealous opponents of slavery, though he was not the first. George Fox, a founder of the Quakers, preached against enslaving Africans and Indians in the 1650s. In 1688, four Pennsylvania Quakers from Germantown wrote the first organized protest against slavery in the Americas.

Though the London Yearly Meeting finally officially disproved of slavery in 1727 (but did not ban its members to own slaves until 1767), Benjamin and Sarah eventually left for Pennsylvania colony in mid-March 1732. They were approved to move by the Colchester Monthly Meeting, after Benjamin had granted the Quarterly Meeting of Coggeshall a legacy of £100 (around $36,000 in 2023). He was fifty years old at the time of this emigration and became a bookseller in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, 1700s

The colony of Pennsylvania had been founded by Quaker William Penn as a "Holy Experiment." Philadelphia was North America's largest city and contained the world's second-largest Quaker community. The area was prosperous, amassing much wealth and power. Though Quakers are known for their opposition to slavery, they were not yet organized in this. In fact, the majority of Philadelphia Quakers owned enslaved people. As Benjamin had not been exposed to much slavery in his years in England, he was shocked at his new home where one in eleven people were enslaved. He furiously noted that enslaved men would "Plow, sow, thresh, winnow, split Rails, cut Wood, clear Land, make Ditches and Fences, fodder Cattle, run and fetch up the Horses," while the women were busy with "all the Drudgery in Dairy and Kitchen, within doors and without." He observed that, while the enslaved had "growling, empty bellies," their owners had "lazy Ungodly bellies." The heirs to these enslaved people were even worse: "proud, Dainty, Lazy, Scornful, Tyrannical and often beggarly Children." He viewed "Man-stealers" as the literal spawn of Satan, considering it is God-given purpose to expose and drive them out.

Ralph Sandiford, a Quaker who had published an indictment of slavery three years earlier, was befriended by Benjamin. He had recently moved to cabin nine miles outside of Philadelphia to escape persecution from prominent Quakers. Sandiford was in very poor health, mentally and physically. Benjamin visited him for almost a year before the man died at the age of forty. He concluded "oppression...makes a wise man Mad." He was determined to carry on Sandiford's work.

Benjamin began staging public protests to shock the Philadelphia Friends into action against slavery. Since commodities like tobacco and sugar were only possible because of exploiting enslaved people, he went to a Quaker yearly meeting with "three large tobacco pipes stuck in his bosom." At meeting's end, he stood and "dashed one pipe among the men ministers, one among the women ministers, and the third among the congregation assembled." With each blow, he preached against slave labor, luxury, and poor health caused by smoking the "stinking sotweed."

Another demonstration took place in the winter. Benjamin stood in the snow outside the Quaker meetinghouse, "his right leg and foot entirely uncovered." The Friends leaving the building tried to convince him to get out of the cold, to which he replied, "Ah, you pretend compassion for me but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad."

Benjamin's neighbors even held slaves. He once persuaded their 6-year-old son to come to his home, where they played together all day. Once evening hit, the boy's parents were extremely concerned, running around desperately to find them. Benjamin inquired as to their purpose and, when the parents explained that their son was missing, Benjamin replied, "Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negroe girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice."

Benjamin was famous in the colony for his aggressive protests. His first biographer, the famous Benjamin Rush, said 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." He was even known to jump up and leave the table of the host if he learned there was slavery in the household, declaring, "I will not share with thee the fruits of thy unrighteousness."

A Quaker meeting

He continued to disrupt Quaker meetings, where he sometimes sat in the women's section to further rebel, giving "no peace" to slave owners. Isaac Hopper, a Quaker abolitionist, recalled, "As sure as any character attempted to speak to the business of the meeting, he would start to his feet and cry out, 'There's another negro-master!'" Benjamin was continually expelled from meetings; there was even a "constabulary" appointed to keep him out of meetings all around Philadelphia. Once, after he was thrown into the street one rainy day, he lay down in the mud in front of the main door to the meetinghouse, meaning every person leaving had to step over his body.

In March 1734, likely due to persecution, Benjamin and Sarah moved eight miles north of Philadelphia to Abington. This required a certificate from the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting to state they were members in good standing. While Sarah was noted as in good standing - "she appearing to be of a good Conversation during her residence here" - Benjamin was not. His beloved wife died in late 1735, after all of this conflict, for which Benjamin would accuse the Quaker elite of being partially responsible for "the Death of my Dear Wife." There are not many records of her, but it appears that they had had a happy marriage and that she had supported his work. Upon her death, the Abington Monthly Meeting wrote that she "had a gift in the ministry bestowed upon her, in which she was serviceable...Her service therein was acceptable."

At the end of 1737, Benjamin decided he should fast for forty days as Jesus did in the desert. Eight days in, he visited his friend, Benjamin Franklin. Apparently his "breath had become so acrid as very much to affect [Franklin's] eyes." By the tenth day, his strength was failing. He lay in bed, staring at a loaf of bread but determined not to eat of it. His friends begged him to eat and he still refused. After three weeks of fasting, "his faculties so failed that the memory of his determined fast left him, and his watchful friends perceiving this, gave him suitable food. He gradually regained his strength, and...never again attempted an extended fast."

Benjamin began to write. For two years, since his wife's death, he worked on his book All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, which can be read online here. Its actual full title was: All slave-keepers that keep the innocent in bondage: apostates pretending to lay claim to the pure & holy Christian religion, of what congregation soever, but especially in their ministers, by whose example the filthy leprosy and apostasy is spread far and near: it is a notorious sin which many of the true Friends of Christ and his pure truth, called Quakers, has been for many years and still are concern’d to write and bear testimony against as a practice so gross & hurtful to religion and destructive to government beyond what words can set forth, or can be declared of by men or angels, and yet lived in by ministers and magistrates in America. It became "a founding text of Atlantic antislavery... no one had ever taken such a militant, uncompromising, universal stand against slavery."

Benjamin's famous treatise

The 278-page book was a mix of autobiography, prophesies against slavery, descriptions of slavery in Barbados, a defense of women preachers, others' writings, and his persecution by Quaker slave owners. He even named specific individuals. Benjamin called slavery "filthy," "gross," "heinous," "Hellish," "a soul Sin," and "the greatest Sin in the World." "No Man or Woman, Lad or Lass ought to be suffered, to pretend to preach Truth in our Meetings, while they live in that Practice; which is all a lie," he wrote of slaver owners. He went to his friend, Benjamin Franklin, to print and publish it, though Franklin kept his and his print shop's name off of the book. It was published in August 1738 and sold for two shillings ($18 in 2023) each, or twenty shillings ($181 in 2023) a dozen. Benjamin made sure to get the book into the hands of younger Friends, some of whom were the children of slaveholders, who later grew up to be abolitionists. The Quakers were furious, as he had published the book as a Quaker document without Quaker approval. Benjamin was officially condemned and expelled from both the Philadelphia and Abington Quaker meetings. The Abington Meeting minutes read: "It is ordered that Benjamin Lay be kept out of our meetings for business, he being no member but is a frequent disturber thereof." He continued to attend worship there, determined to convince them of his views.

The Meetinghouse where Benjamin performed his most famous stunt

His most famous stunt took place three weeks after his book was published, on September 19, at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers in New Jersey. Benjamin wore a large coat over a hidden military uniform, sword, and Bible. When his turn to speak, he stood and preached a diatribe against slavery. Many Quakers profited financially from the Atlantic slave trade, some even owning people themselves. He quoted the Bible saying that all men are created equal under God and that keeping a slave was the greatest sin in the world. He threw off his coat, declaring, "Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures.” He raised the Bible over his head and plunged the sword through it. Women swooned as "blood" spattered those who kept slaves. Benjamin had hidden a bladder of blood-red pokeberry juice in the hollowed-out book for this dramatic effect. He prophesied physical, moral, and spiritual death for those who failed to heed him. He stood still "like a statue" in the chaos of the room. Several Quakers surrounded him and carried him from the building. He did not resist.

Benjamin decided he would no longer participate in "a degraded, hypocritical, tyrannical, and demonic society." After all of this turmoil, he moved to a cave in the countryside that had an outside entryway attached. It was described as "spartan but charming," with the ceiling covered by sprigs of pine. He was committed to almost complete self-sustenance, believing this was the true way to live "plain" as a Quaker. He farmed fruit trees and kept goats, spinning the flax he grew into clothing (in order to boycott the slave-labor industry).  Benjamin was a vegetarian (inspiried by Thomas Tryon's 1683 work, A Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, available here to read), eating only fruits, vegetables, and honey, and drinking only milk and water. He also did not believe that humans were superior to animals: he did not wear or eat anything made from the loss of animal life or provided by slave labor to any degree. His goal was to be a living example of equality with all living things, living only on "the innocent fruits of the earth." Benjamin also kept his library in the cave: 200 books of theology, biography, history, and poetry. He continued to write, publishing over 200 pamphlets, most of which were treatises against slavery, capital punishment, animal cruelty, the prison system, the moneyed Pennsylvania Quaker elite, and more.

The cave where it's assumed Benjamin lived

Another demonstration took place in 1742 during the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Benjamin rented a stall in the market and laid out his late wife's set of teacups, then began smashing it all with a hammer. The crowd told him to stop destroying good china, but he did not. Finally, a young man lifted Benjamin and physically removed him from the area, allowing the crowd to take what was left of the cups. With each blow, he denounced the "tyrants" in India and the Caribbean who mistreated their workers who harvested the tea and enslaved the people who produced the sugar. His message was not totally understood: a newspaper thought it was a "publick Testimony against the Vanity of Tea-drinking,"

Ben Franklin continued to visit his friend, even after Benjamin had moved to a cave and become a hermit. He called Benjamin a "Pythagorean-Christian-Cynic philosopher." By 1750, Franklin owned two slaves, Peter and Jemima. Benjamin published With what Right? and, in April 1757, Franklin drafted a new will stating that his slaves would be freed upon his death.

In 1750, Franklin's wife, Deborah Read, commissioned William Williams to paint a portrait of Benjamin. It was created sometime between 1750 and 1758. This painting disappeared after the 18th century but reappeared at a 1977 auction, where it sold for $4 (about $20 in 2023). It was restored at the Winterthur Museum then sold to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

By 1757, Benjamin was 75 years old. His physical health deteriorated, though his mind remained sharp. He gave up the long hikes he loved and stayed in his home. The next year, he was informed that a group of Quaker reformers were conducting an internal "purification" campaign, fighting against the elite slave-holders. The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was finally starting a process to discipline and eventually disown any Quakers who traded slaves. When Benjamin was told all this, he said, "Thanksgiving and praise by rendered unto the Lord God. I can now die in peace." Slaveholding would still be allowed until 1776, but this was the first big step toward abolition.  In 1790, the Friends sent the first petition to Congress condemning slavery and calling for emancipation, though slavery would not be nationally banned for 75 more years.

Benjamin died at the home of a friend in Abington on February 3, 1759, at the age of 77. He was buried in an unmarked grave near his beloved wife in the Abington Friends Meeting's burial ground. The grave's exact location is unknown, but it was next to the meeting house and Abington Friends School in Jenkintown. His death was noted in Quaker records as: "Benjamin Lay of Abington died 2 Mo. 7th Inter'd 9th, Aged 80 years." Other names received notations in the margins for "elder," "minister," and whether they were a member of the congregation. Benjamin had none of these notations.

Engraving of Benjamin, 1760

However, his legacy lived on as almost folklore. An engraving of him was sent to Pierre Eugène Du Simitière in 1782 by printer John Dunlap as a gift for America's first natural history museum. The French revolutionary Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville gathered stories about him almost three decades after his death, during a visit to the United States in 1788. Brissot wrote that Lay was “simple in his dress and animated in his speech; he was all on fire when he spoke on slavery.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush was the first to write a biography of him in 1790: An Account of Benjamin Lay. Later, in 1815, abolitionist Roberts Vaux wrote Memoirs of the Lives of Benjamin Lay and Ralph Sandiford. He had been able to interview elderly Quakers who known Benjamin when they were young. Vaux described him as a "comet, which threatens, in its irregular course, the destruction of the worlds near which it passes."

Thomas Clarkson, when writing in 1808 of the history of abolishing slave trade in Britain, credited Benjamin for this, saying he had "awakened the attention of many to the cause." He possessed “strong understanding and great integrity,” but was “singular” and “eccentric," having been “unhinged” by cruelties he witnessed in Barbados. Clarkson drew a famous graphic genealogy of the abolition movement, "a riverine map of abolition," and named one of the tributaries “Benjamin Lay.”

Graphic genealogy by Thomas Clarkson; the "Benjamin Lay" tributary is in the top center

In America, Benjamin Lundy and Lydia Marie Child rediscovered Benjamin in the 1830s and 40s. They republished his biography, reprinted an engraving of him, and reminded the abolitionist movement of this important figure. During the early and mid-1800s, it was common for abolitionist Quakers to keep pictures of him in their homes. John Greenleaf Whittier, a 19th-century poet, described him as “the irrepressible prophet who troubled the Israel of slaveholding Quakerism, clinging like a rough chestnut-burr to the skirts of its respectability and settling like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.”

Because of Benjamin's extreme views, he was often not mentioned in abolition histories, mostly due to his radicalism and aggressive tactics, as well as he and his wife's physical differences. If he is talked about, he's just a "minor, colorful figure of suspect sanity." By the 19th century, he mostly was viewed as having "diseased" intellect and "cracked in the head." David Brion Davis, in 1966, dismissed him as a "mentally deranged, obsessive little hunchback." Though Quaker histories have remembered him more generously, he still is almost entirely unknown outside of these circles. 

Benjamin Lay exhibit at the Friends Historical Library, 2017-18

In 2012, during a brief Occupy Jekintown encampment, protestors symbolically rechristened the Jenkintown Town Square as "Benjamin Lay Plaza." In 2018, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission erected an historical marker in Abington commemorating Benjamin. On April 21, 2018, Abington Friends Meeting unveiled a grave marker for Benjamin and Sarah Lay in its graveyard. Friends House in London also has the Benjamin Lay room named after him. The world premiere of the new play "The Return of Benjamin Lay" is June 13-July 8, 2023 in London.

Benjamin & Sarah's grave markers, unveiled 2018

Four Quaker meetings had disowned Benjamin for his demonstrations. In 2018, the last of the four, Southern East Anglia Area Meeting, "undisowned" him. The other three were Abington Monthly Meeting, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and North London Area Meeting. Their joint statement recognized "the integrity and courage of a man who called slave-holders, including Quakers, to account, who protested the abomination of slavery, upheld the equality of the sexes, and lived his life with integrity according to his Quaker beliefs...We hold that Benjamin Lay was a Friend of the Truth; we are in unity with spirit of Benjamin Lay." Dr. Marcus Rediker, a biographer of Benjamin, said it "brought tears to my eyes, not only because it represents retrospective justice, but because it would have meant so much to Benjamin himself...He dearly loved his fellow Quakers - as long as they did not own slaves."

Rediker also remarked about Benjamin: "He did not care whether people liked it or not. He wanted to draw people in; he was saying: 'Are you for me or against me? Are you for slavery or against it?' He lost the battle with the elders of the church but won it with the next generation." Benjamin referred to himself as a "poor common Sailor and an illiterate Man" who did what he did as "a General Service, by him that truly and sincerely desires the present and eternal Welfare and Happiness of all Mankind, all the World over, of all Colours, and Nations, as his own Soul."

Most sincerely,

Christina
 

Further Media of Interest

 

Works Consulted

Anecdotes of Benjamin Lay. (1925). The Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 22(1–4), 72–75.

Burling, W. (1856). Early Anti-Slavery Advocates, Benjamin Lay: Vol. XXIX. Robb, Pile & McElroy. https://books.google.com/books?id=rHvTAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA220#v=onepage&q&f=false

Burnett, L. (2023). Benjamin Lay. Cross Cultural Solidarity. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://crossculturalsolidarity.com/benjamin-lay/

Contributors to Wikimedia projects. (2020). Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lay, Benjamin. In Wikisource, the free online library. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1885-1900/Lay,_Benjamin

Duncan, L., & Peagler, R. (2023). Divesting from White Supremacy: Reparations as the Next Phase of Benjamin Lay’s Prophetic Vision. In Benjamin Lay. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://benjaminlay.org/

Fearless and Fiery. (2018). Swarthmore College Bulletin, CXV(II). https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/winter-2018-issue-ii-volume-cxv/fearless-and-fiery.html

Fleming, M. (Ed.). (2001). Rebel With a Cause. In A Place at the Table: Struggles for Equality in America (p. 33). Oxford University Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=CrNOhrFuDXgC&pg=PA33#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hogan, S. (2018, May 14). ‘In the belly of hell’: The Quaker abolitionist disowned by his faith for condemning slave owners. Washington Post. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/05/14/in-the-belly-of-hell-the-quaker-abolitionist-disowned-by-his-faith-for-condemning-slave-owners/

Holmes, K. E. (2018, April 19). Cast out by the Quakers, Abington’s abolitionist dwarf finally has his day. https://www.inquirer.com. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/quakers-benjamin-lay-dwarf-abolitionist-slavery-abington-friends-meeting-20180419.html

Rediker, M. (2017a, September). The “Quaker Comet” Was the Greatest Abolitionist You’ve Never Heard Of. Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/quaker-comet-greatest-abolitionist-never-heard-180964401/

Rediker, M. (2017b, September 11). A radical for our time: Benjamin Lay, the Quaker dwarf abolitionist you didn’t learn about in class. Salon. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.salon.com/2017/09/11/a-radical-for-our-time-benjamin-lay-the-quaker-dwarf-abolitionist-you-didnt-learn-about-in-class/

Rediker, M. (2018, May 3). The forgotten prophet (S. Dresser, Ed.). Aeon. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://aeon.co/essays/the-abolitionist-benjamin-lay-was-a-hero-ahead-of-his-time

Rigby, B. N. (2018, December 2). Anti-slavery campaigner Benjamin Lay re-embraced by Quakers. BBC News. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-46334955

Rigby, N. (2018, February 10). Benjamin Lay: The Quaker dwarf who fought slavery. BBC News. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-essex-42640782

Smith Kogan, N. (2016). Aberrations in the Body and in the Body Politic: The Eighteenth-Century Life of Benjamin Lay, Disabled Abolitionist | Disability Studies Quarterly. Disability Studies Quarterly, 36(3). https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5135/4410

Taylor, A. (n.d.). A Paradise for All: The relentless radicalism of Benjamin Lay. Lapham’s Quarterly. Retrieved May 17, 2023, from https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/freedom/paradise-all

Wills, M. (2017). Benjamin Lay: The Radical “Quaker Comet.” JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/benjamin-lay-the-radical-quaker-comet/

 

Last Updated: 9 Oct. 2023

Christina Moffett
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