He chose what he considered the best practices from multiple social worlds as he tried to create a new one. He applied evolving radical principles to all aspects of his life, changing himself as he changed the world. He dared to live in a new way based on an ethical relationship to all living things. He spoke truth to power, shaming and defying slave traders and keepers. He denounced ministers – Quakers and others – who did not live up to his standards.
He fed the hungry and preached an end to slavery, earning the wrath of the master class. He talked with and learned from enslaved people in Barbados. To a foundation of Quaker radicalism he added the egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism of seafaring culture, the life-and-death struggles of African America, and the environmentally friendly ways of vegetarianism. He entered an urban trade and then a global seafaring culture between roughly 17, became a convinced abolitionist after his encounter with slavery between 17, and devoted himself to a new kind of commoning from the 1730s through the late 1750s. Rush explained that Lay sowed “the seeds of a principle which bids fair to produce a revolution in morals, commerce, and government, in the new, and in the old world.” Lay the commoner would have liked the planting metaphor, and Lay the sailor would have liked the transatlantic reach.īorn to a Quaker farm family in Copford, a small village in Essex, England, Lay moved as a young man to London and went to sea, relocated to Barbados at age thirty-six, and moved to Philadelphia at age fifty. The first person to call him a revolutionary was Benjamin Rush, Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, in 1790, the beginning of a decade that would see the Atlantic in flames, from Paris to Belfast to Port-au-Prince.
He demanded an end to slavery and therefore radical change in all societies where it had a significant presence, and he anchored abolition in a new way of life, without human and animal exploitation, based on the “innocent Fruits of the Earth.” He lived in a cave, ate only fruits and vegetables, championed animal rights, and refused to consume any article produced by slave labor. The Quaker dwarf Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was the first revolutionary abolitionist. Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. Excerpted from " The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist" by Marcus Rediker (Beacon Press, 2017).
0 kommentar(er)
