Benjamin Lay

Benjamin Lay was so far ahead of his time that he did not experience the same gratification as Charles Burleigh, who lived to see the (somewhat) end of American slavery. Born in Essex in 1681, he first worked as a glove maker before switching to farming and finally becoming a sailor in 1701. He arrived in America in 1717, joined the New England Quaker group, and soon started upsetting it by disrupting meetings, promoting vegetarianism, never donning shoes, and refusing to drink tea.

When he visited Barbados in 1731 and saw the horrifying treatment of slaves there, he became even more outspoken while also becoming exponentially more righteous. He then returned to Quaker settlements and denounced the Peculiar Institution. After being widely printed in 1738 by none other than Benjamin Franklin himself, his most important work, All Slave-Keepers That Hold the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, became a founding document for the Atlantic abolitionist movement.

He was also completely unrestrained when it came to more aggressive criticisms of slavery. He once donned a cloak to attend a service before ripping it off to expose a military uniform and a hollowed-out bible. The bible was hollow because, in one of the few religious lectures with a splash zone, he stabbed it while ranting about the evils of slavery, releasing a bladder full of red liquid that he then splashed on the present slave owners. He was expelled from the Quaker community as a result of these and other actions, but by the time of his death in 1759, he had lived to see the society start to embrace his position widely and was buried in a Quaker cemetery.

Born: January 26, 1682Copford, England
Died: February 8, 1759 (aged 77)Abington, Pennsylvania, U.S.