Marcus Rediker - The Fearless Benjamin Lay

Of all the people who resisted slavery and fought for its end, Benjamin Lay is perhaps one of the most fascinating and tenacious. Born in 1682, in Essex, he was shaped by an earlier generation's radical religious ideas - Ideas born from the English Revolution. As a Quaker, a labourer and eventually a sailor, he was also shaped by the the radical Atlantic; the politics that arose from the three cornered slave trade between the Africa, the Americas and Europe. This created enormous suffering, but also radical struggle. Within this, Lay ideas developed. His Quakerism gave Lay a enormous dislike of suffering, and a firm eglitarianism. But a trip to the West Indies opened his ideas to the brutal reality of slavery and from then onward Lay, and his partner in struggle his wife Sarah Smith Lay, become radical abolitionists.

Marcus Rediker's book The Fearless Benjamin Lay is aptly titled. Lay was certainly fearless. Repeatedly he punctured the cosy reality of Quaker meeting houses, exposing the hypocrisy of the rich slaveowners who lived a life of luxury while decrying injustice elsewhere. Today it seems inconceivable that Quakers and others could condone slavery, but in his lifetime Lay was denounced and mocked as being mentally ill for his suggestion that slavery should be abolished. It is important to note that Lay went much further than most of his contemporaries, calling not just for the abolition of all slavery, but demanding that fellow Quakers should refuse to have anything to do with it as part of a struggle to destroy the trade.

As Rediker points out Lay was an early proponent of activists tactics that we would today call boycotts and divestment. He refused to drink tea, use sugar, or sit at the table if a slave was serving. These were bold and radical statements for a man of his era. Later he would become vegetarian and his lifestyle changed to reduce as much as possible the suffering of other creatures. His egalitarian ideas were not abstract, but rooted in a personal and political struggle against injustice. 

When Marcus Rediker's book was first published few had heard of Benjamin Lay. During his lifetime he was, however, well known. In part this was a result of his political activism, not least his public theatre. The book opens with an inspiring, and hilarious, account of how Lay disrupted a Quaker meeting by drawing a sword from under his cloak and puncturing a book within which was hidden a bladder of fruit juice. The red juice sprayed all over his slaveowning audience, covering them in metaphorical blood. 

As a result of this struggle Lay became very well known, despite, after his wife's death, living a life as a hermit. On his deathbed he heard news that his struggle against slavery within the Quakers had borne fruit. During the later part of his life, and immediately after his death he was known and celebrated by a growing number of people who opposed slavery. But his life and struggles quickly faded into obscurity. 

Rediker's book unearths much that had been lost of Lay's life and introduced a new generation to his ideas. Lay had been kicked out of numerous Quaker meetings, and its satisfying to know from the introduction to this, the second edition, that recently various groups of Quakers have apologised for this mistake. Rediker traces these internal struggles in details, sometimes losing the reader in the detail. But they are important, not simply for historical reasons. But also because they were important to Lay, who always framed his wordly view through the religion that meant so much to him. Nonetheless, he wasn't held in a straightjacket by those ideas, but used them to demand and fight for change from the very organisation he was part of. 

Reading the book, and noting how Lay's opponents denounced him as "mad". I was reminded that revolutionaries who dream and fight for a different future, are often described thus. No doubt Lay's disability, personal lifestyle and activity fuelled these slurs. But reading Rediker's account of Lay's struggles I was reminded of the quote by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, who said "The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce." How true that was of Benjamin Lay.

Marcus Rediker's books on the revolutionary Atlantic are crucial reading for everyone who is trying to understand how modern capitalism was born from blood and violence, and what that means to us today. But they also celebrate the struggles against that violence, and the fight for a better world. Benjamin Lay is restored through this work to his rightful place among in the list of brave individuals who refused to back down.

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Rediker - The Slave Ship
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