Quaker abolitionists are having their moment. In the last decade, book-length biographies of antislavery Quakers John Woolman (Thomas Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman: Apostle of Abolition [Hill and Wang, 2008] and Geoffrey G. Plank, John Woolman's Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012]), Warner Mifflin (Gary B. Nash, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012]), Anthony Benezet (Maurice Jackson, Let this Voice be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism [University of Philadelphia Press, 2009]), Lucretia Mott (Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America [University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011]) have appeared, highlighting Friends’ central role in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century campaigns to end slavery. Marcus Rediker's passionate and sympathetic biography of Benjamin Lay joins this growing list of important scholarship. Rediker contends that the often-ignored Lay played a seminal role in the development of antislavery sentiment within the Society of Friends and more broadly. More interesting, he places Lay in the rich context of seventeenth and eighteenth-century English radicalism, in the process identifying the roots of abolitionism in working class activism rather than bourgeois paternalism.

Rediker's emphasis on Lay's intellectual roots reflects the dearth of primary sources available to study his life. Unlike many other Quakers, Lay did not leave behind a personal paper trail for the historian to follow. Thus Rediker relies heavily on Lay's antislavery tract, All Slave-Keepers … Apostates, Quaker meeting records in England and British North America, and anecdotes about Lay that appeared in early biographies by Robert Vaux, Benjamin Rush, and Lydia Maria Child. Equally important, Rediker draws on a rich body of recent scholarship—much of it his own—about sailors, slaves, rebels, and common folk in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to understand the origins and nature of Lay's radical thought. Consequently, he sees a variety of sources for Lay's embrace of antislavery, most notably the radical equalitarianism—or antinomianism—at the heart of the early Quaker faith and espoused by seventeenth century English radicals such as Thomas Tryon. In addition, the Cynic values of ancient Greek philosophers such as Diogenes, filtered through early Christian thought, shaped Lay's view of the world, specifically the asceticism and vegetarianism he embraced after the death of his wife in 1736.

These intellectual influences intersected with Lay's varied personal experiences. For nearly a dozen years, Lay labored as a sailor, working and interacting with a diverse range of people and developing a cosmopolitan outlook. During his two years in Barbados, between 1718 and 1720, Lay witnessed firsthand the violence and terror that undergirded slavery, leading him to conclude that sugar, the island's lucrative staple, “was made with blood” (35). When Lay arrived in Philadelphia in 1732, he again saw the brutality of slavery and the hypocrisy of many leading Friends—“men of renown” (49)—who profited from the institution. Finally, Lay's physical appearance, a product of dwarfism, increased his awareness of discrimination and his empathy for those who suffered (while also contributing, Rediker notes, to historians’ tendency to disregard his influence). Out of this mixture of ideas and experience, Lay developed an “integrated, ethical worldview” (6) with abolitionism at its core, but which also embraced a range of radical ideas—among them anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal rights, and opposition to the death penalty—that collectively he believed would save the world.

Rediker's analysis of Lay also centers on his extremist tactics and “lifelong pattern of troublemaking” (30). Beginning the 1710s, Lay antagonized Quaker meetings because he adopted, like the Cynic philosophers he admired, the practice of speaking bluntly and candidly to figures of authority, especially Friends whom he believed failed to embody the ideals of the Society. He publicly attacked leading Friends at a variety of English meetings for the sin of “Conceit,” which led Quaker preachers to speak “their own words” (31) rather than “from the Spirit of Truth” (36), and “Covetousness” (41), leading wealthy Friends to abandon the Society's original ideals of simplicity. In response to his public outbursts and attacks, which he directed at both Friends and other religious societies, two meetings disowned Lay. But they could not quiet him. After arriving in Philadelphia in 1732, Lay escalated his public critiques of Quakers, directing particular scorn at slaveholding Friends. In what Rediker labels “guerrilla theater” (2), Lay initiated a series of public confrontations with wealthy and slaveholding Friends, most famously at the 1738 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, where he prophesied that God “shall shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures” (2), and then dramatically showered “blood” (in reality, pokeberry juice) over slaveholding Friends.

As in England, Lay faced disownment and public shaming for his actions. Rediker concedes that Lay was both “self-righteous” and “intolerant” (9) and that his tactics alienated large numbers of Friends. But he also argues that Quaker attitudes toward slavery changed most profoundly in the 1730s and 1740s, the years when Lay was most active. Lay's radical tactics, Rediker contends, forced Friends to confront the reality of slavery and take sides on the issue. As a result, later eighteenth-century Quaker antislavery activists, men like Woolman and Benezet who reiterated Lay's message but rejected his tactics, found a receptive audience among Friends. In short, Lay sowed “the seed of truth” (150) upon which subsequent abolitionists built a movement.

Ultimately, Rediker's emphasis on rehabilitating Lay as a progenitor of antislavery is less significant (and convincing) than his efforts to trace Lay's ideas and tactics to the working-class milieu he inhabited. The question of which Quaker radical most influenced the rise of antislavery can have no definitive answer, even if historians have clearly established their cumulative impact. Quakerism provided a well of common spiritual and ethical values that inspired many early opponents of slavery, but Lay's tenacity and integrated militant vision grew out of a broader world of working-class activism and thought. Rediker's lively biography, in highlighting these alternative origins of abolitionism, has much to commend it.