The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker (review)

Benjamin Lay (1682–1759) may have been a little person but, as Marcus Rediker makes clear in this insightful biography, The Fearless Benjamin Lay, he was no small man. A zealous, vegetarian, environmentalist, Quaker abolitionist ascetic who lived in a cave for the last twenty-five years of his life and shocked many with his use of guerrilla theater, Lay is precisely the type of marginalized and radical member of the Atlantic world that Rediker has worked on for the past thirty years.¹ As he relates, Rediker first encountered Lay while he and Peter Linebaugh were writing The Many-Headed Hydra. “Intrigued by his early opposition to slavery and by his fearless guerrilla theater,” Rediker considered Lay worthy of “a study all his own” (151). Rediker has fulfilled this by constructing a biography presented as an “intellectual history ‘from below’” (5), pulling apart the strands of Lay’s radicalism—“he was a Quaker, philosopher, sailor, abolitionist, and commoner” (6)—and the influences that made him the first revolutionary abolitionist. Contending that Lay was “a throwback to . . . early radical Quakers” (19), Rediker posits “a new genealogy of antislavery” with origins among the poor, well before late eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers and “middle- and upper-class abolitionist ‘saints’” (148) made the cause fashionable.

Though small in stature, Lay cast a significant shadow on the comfortable, consumer-oriented lives of Quaker elites throughout the Atlantic world. Quakers’ success in eighteenth-century commerce and banking has been discussed at length by historians since Frederick B. Tolles’s 1948 Meeting House and Counting House.² Many factors—including involvement in the slave trade and shipping and selling the products of slave labor—contributed to the considerable wealth Quakers accumulated in the eighteenth-century transatlantic economy. Accordingly the Quaker testimony on slavery in this period was particularly complex and dynamic in ways that have not always been appreciated. In long-standing popular imagination, Quakers have been envisioned as abolitionists from their beginnings.³ Some scholarly histories have adopted this view, and, as Elizabeth Cazden notes, “even Quaker historians stressed Quaker anti-slavery rhetoric, ignoring inconvenient contrary facts or treating them as isolated slips between theory and practice.”⁴ This perspective, however, ignores the arduous and divisive eighteenth-century debates through which Quakers across the Atlantic world defined their testimony against slavery by the mid-1750s. Rediker positions Lay and to a lesser extent Ralph Sandiford (1693–1733), whose antislavery work Lay continued, at the center of these disputes. That approach fits well with recent interpretations presented by Brycchan Carey, J. William Frost, Jon R. Kershner, and Geoffrey Plank, who situate the work of famed abolitionists such as John Woolman (1720–72) and Anthony Benezet (1713–84) within a much longer tradition, in some cases extending back to the earliest Quakers.⁵ Similarly, Julie L. Holcomb has located the origins of the free-produce movement in seventeenth-century Quaker meetinghouses and contends that though the movement itself failed, its supporters did not, for they shifted the ideological context of the slavery debate to make neutrality impossible. Certainly Lay’s guerrilla theater and his 1738 book, All Slave-Keepers That keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, forced Quakers, especially slave-owning Quakers, to consider the morality of slavery.⁶

There is much to applaud in Rediker’s book beyond its persuasive retelling of Lay’s heroic story. Rediker is adept at navigating the space between mainstream history and Quaker history, a promising direction for both fields of study.⁷ And clearly Rediker has worked to understand Quakers as more than flat, caricatured actors dressed in gray. Rather, he casts them as complex people, bound by similar interests—including a unique faith perspective—that shaped the behavior of others who moved in the same historical time and place. Rediker makes excellent use of the extensive Quaker archival collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, he...