Lay, Benjamin (1682-1759)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Benjamin Lay was born into an English Quaker family on 26 January 1682 in Copford, county Essex. Lay actively promoted social justice issues like Abolition, veg*nism, animal rights, opposition to capital punishment, and Temperance. He opposed the use of tobacco and the introduction of tea into Pennsylvania. Influenced by the veg*n advocate Thomas Tryon, Lay counted Benjamin Franklin among his lifelong friends. In one of the series of biographical articles on "Early Anti-Slavery Advocates," the Quaker periodical The Friend (Vol. XXIX, 1856) reports about Lay: “Of the personal habits of this indefatigable labourer for the slave, we are informed that he practised temperance and frugality. His drink was milk or water, and his other food was altogether vegetable ... . He would not eat flesh, because he did not think it right that animal life should be sacrificed, to satisfy the appetite of man” (204). Lay made his own clothes, as part of the boycott of products of enslaved labor, and boycotted much of the system by living like a hermit in a cave-like cottage: “Lay was committed to a lifestyle of almost complete self-sustenance after his beloved wife died. Dwelling in the Pennsylvania countryside in a cave with outside entryway attached, Lay kept goats, farmed notably with fruit trees, and spun the flax he grew into clothing for himself” (The Friend 204).

Four Quaker meetings, on both sides of the Atlantic, disowned Lay for his campaigning, especially against the owning of human slaves which implicated his fellow Quakers. He encouraged slaveholding Quakers to grant freedom to the people they enslaved and publicly condemned those who would not. "To show his indignation against slave-holders he carried a bladder filled with blood into a meeting, and in the presence of the congregation thrust a sword, which he had concealed under his coat, into the bladder, and sprinkling the blood on several Friends exclaimed, 'Thus shall God shed the blood of those who enslave their fellow-creatures'" (Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. III, 1888. 643). Benjamin Lay died in Abington, Pennsylvania on 8 February 1759.

 

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Last updated on July 8th, 2024

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