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

Author:Rediker, Marcus [Rediker, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2017-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

BOOKS AND A NEW LIFE

AFTER THE DOUBLE EXPLOSION OF 1738, when Benjamin spattered the blood of God’s vengeance on Quaker slave owners and, less than a month later, published his fierce prophetic attack on them, he entered a new phase of life. Although he had been disowned and denounced, he would remain involved with the Quaker community, attending worship services and arguing, through word and deed, about the evils of slavery. At the same time he turned his attention to building a new revolutionary way of life, which would fold his antislavery principles and practices into a broader, more radical vision of human possibility. He would build the New Jerusalem, on a small scale, and he would live there. He would embody his own hopes for the future. At fifty-six years of age, Benjamin decided that he would become more dangerous as he grew older.

Benjamin loved books, as autodidacts often do. He collected books and he read voraciously. Reading and reflection were his favorite pastimes. He carried books—probably his single most important possession—with him to Philadelphia in 1732. He worked as a bookseller, off and on, for much of his life. He participated in the print culture of the city, subscribing to the Pennsylvania Gazette , raising subscriptions to publish books he admired, and joining newspaper debate. He proudly built a personal library of two hundred volumes, some of which he loaned to friends. He had the fullest collection of early Quaker writings to be found in Pennsylvania, and probably in the Americas. His love of books connected to his love of children: “He took great pleasure in visiting schools, where he often preached to the youth. He frequently carried a basket of religious books with him, and distributed them as prizes, among the scholars.” He wrote and published his own book, which few people of his class ever managed to do. Near the end of his life, when Deborah and Benjamin Franklin commissioned his portrait, the artists featured him holding his favorite book. Books were probably the only “worldly good” he cared about. Even though he called himself “illiterate,” Benjamin Lay was very much a man of the book. 1

As it happens, we know a great deal about Benjamin’s books, and what he thought about them, from four sources. First, he published the list of books he thought it important to bring to Pennsylvania when he and Sarah migrated in 1732. Second, he included an extensive, thirty-page annotated bibliography of many of his books in All Slave-Keepers . . . Apostates , published in 1738. Third, various books he had read show up in other documents, for example an inventory taken in 1759 at his death and in the memoir about his life published by Roberts Vaux in 1815. Finally, a couple of books from Benjamin’s personal library have survived. Taken together, these illuminate the reading and thinking of a self-made intellectual and prophet.

In imagining a new life Benjamin drew ideas and inspiration from many writers across a

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