Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay

The early radical abolitionist Benjamin Lay, whom historians have generally neglected, spent his lifetime being a troublemaker. This contentious agitator, the subject of Marcus Rediker’s compelling The Fearless Benjamin Lay: the Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, elicited intense rage and even contempt from Quaker leaders and slaveholders in colonial Pennsylvania. He was best known during his lifetime – and in memory – for one famous act of what Rediker calls ‘guerrilla theater’. At the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the largest gathering of American Quakers at the time, Lay stood up, denounced the sin of ‘slave-keeping’, hoisted above his head a hollowed-out book filled with a secret bladder of berry juice, and thrust a sword through it, splattering what looked like blood all over the Quakers who surrounded him. With fury, Quaker leaders forcibly removed him from the meeting house, but the abolitionist lay in the mud outside, forcing his fellow Quakers to step over him to exit the meeting. Generations of Philadelphia-area Friends never stopped telling the story.

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