Four Feet Tall and Fearless: The Tale of History's Forgotten and Eccentric Revolutionary American Abolitionist Benjamin Lay

On September 19, 1738 a four foot tall man strode into the Burlington, New Jersey Quaker meeting house with a purpose.  The Quaker meeting house in Burlington was the largest building between there and Philadelphia, and on this day when the little man with the big ambition walked in, the meeting house was packed with hundreds of the most influential men and women--a veritable who’s who of Quaker religious and secular leadership, in the colonies of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The diminutive man was a well known local eccentric named Benjamin Lay.  Some people, those of a more religious bent among the Quaker faithful, claimed that Benjamin Lay was a prophet like a modern day eighteenth century John the Baptist.  Others among the Quaker faithful, probably the majority, thought Benjamin Lay was nothing more than a local crackpot who was best to be avoided.  For his part, Benjamin Lay didn’t care what anyone thought--he was on a mission to abolish slavery on this September day in 1738.

When he entered the meeting house everyone stopped and looked, not because they all weren’t already used to the antics of Benjamin Lay who lived in the woods nearby and usually wore nothing more than rags and had a long gray beard down to his belly, but everyone looked at Benjamin Lay because of how he was dressed.  He wore a mish-mash of military accoutrements and an army officer’s uniform with a large greatcoat that went all the way down to the top of his boots. 

As he strode past the pews and benches where the Quaker leaders were gathered, his hobnailed boots thumped against the hardwood floor and a large curved cavalry sabre rattled at his side.  The entire meetinghouse was hushed and silent and waiting expectantly for something unusual to happen, but after making an entrance Benjamin Lay did nothing but sit silently and watch and the Quaker meeting continued uninterrupted and soon Lay’s presence, if not completely forgotten because it never really could be entirely forgotten, than at the very least was pushed aside to the periphery.

But Benjamin Lay--prophet; crackpot and abolitionist who was years ahead of his time, was only waiting for the right moment to utterly shock these upstanding Quaker men and women of 18th century Pennsylvania and New Jersey, like they had never been shocked before.

Soon, Lay, as was the custom at Quaker meetings, said that he was being moved by the Holy Spirit, stood up and requested to speak.  From underneath his military greatcoat he pulled out a large book that had been hollowed out within and contained a secret compartment.  Inside the hollowed out book was an animal bladder filled with blood-red pokeberry juice--a poisonous liquid from a wild type of red grape that grows only in North America and mimics the milky consistency of human blood.

Benjamin Lay rose with his right hand extended, holding the book that contained the animal bladder with the blood-red liquid high in the air and declared in a loud and forceful voice, “God created all men equal!  Rich, poor, white and black--all are equal before the eyes of God!  Slavery is the greatest sin in the world!  How can men like you, who profess the Golden Rule, keep other men as slaves?”

A hush fell over the staid audience of Quaker clergy and political leaders, a group not used to such emotional outbursts as the one that was just then occurring before their very eyes.  But, now that he had his audience’s rapt attention, Benjamin Lay was nowhere near done with his anti-slavery spectacle.

He shouted at the top of his voice, “Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures!”

With the book filled with “blood” raised above his head, Benjamin Lay pulled out the sword that was strapped at his side and plunged it into the animal bladder.  The crowd around him was showered with “blood” as Lay continued to rant and rave saying that evil would rain down upon the Quakers, and upon his fellow citizens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, if they continued to follow the wickedness of human enslavement.  Lay prophesied doom and shouted that God would send a great earthquake that would cause the Quaker meeting house to tumble to the ground.

When Lay was done shouting the room exploded into utter chaos.  People screamed and ran for the doors.  A witness inside reported that Lay, after he was done with his act of political theater, stood there, “Transfixed like a statue.”

Eventually, several of the largest men in the meeting house tackled Benjamin Lay and brought him down upon the wooden floor before they forcibly carried him outside.  It was reported that as the men threw the four-foot tall Benjamin Lay roughly onto the ground outside that he kept a triumphant, almost ecstatic look, on his gray bearded face the whole time.

Today, though Benjamin Lay’s anti-slavery protest at the Burlington Quaker meeting house is his best remembered stunt, but it was by no means, his only shocking act of anti-slavery activism. In truth Lay had spent his entire life up to that point protesting the world around him and shocking members of 18th century Quaker society in the American colonies with his eccentricities.

Benjamin Lay was known to walk miles with his bare legs exposed to the snow in anti-slavery protest.  He said that the physical pain caused by the frigid temperatures to his exposed skin was nothing in comparison to the pain and suffering caused on a daily basis to enslaved peoples by their masters. 

While walking half naked through the snow Lay would tell passersby, “Ah, you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel compassion for the poor slaves in your fields who work half-clad all winter.” 

But really what made Benjamin Lay stand out so prominently from the very day that he was born, were not his liberal views or even his eccentric behavior, but it was his height.  Benjamin Lay was a dwarf, a little person, who stood just over four feet tall.  At a time in history, when such a diminutive height could have caused a person to be completely ostracized by the staid society in their midst, Benjamin Lay never let his disability hold him back from expressing what he believed.

His contemporaries described Lay as a “hunchback” and they ridiculed his appearance by labelling him as ugly and nearly monstrous in appearance.  However, as has been noted by most historians, there is no historical evidence that Lay himself ever considered his appearance different from anybody else’s, nor did he ever bother to remark negatively upon it in any of his voluminous journals and letters.  To the contrary, Benjamin often referred to himself as, “Little Benjamin” or as the “The Little David who was placed on earth to slew the giant Goliath.”

In the years before the American Revolution, nearly a full century before slavery was abolished in the United States, the name of Benjamin Lay was known across the American Colonies.  He was renowned as a uniquely American philosopher and well known for his abolitionist and pacifist views.  Throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, during the first half of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Lay was well respected for his challenging views that called into question the sinful and materialistic nature of society in contrast to the Christian values preached by his Quaker peers.

Of Benjamin Lay, Benjamin Rush founding-father and famous signer of the Declaration of Independence said, “There was a time when the name of this celebrated Christian philosopher (Benjamin Lay) was known to every man, woman and child…”.  In the 18th century, especially after his death in 1759, everyone in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had a story to tell about the eccentric and remarkable four foot tall abolitionist Benjamin Lay.  Lay was directly responsible for the abolition of slavery in the northern colonies during the years prior to America’s War for Independence.

But then, in the years after the American Revolution, something happened; something changed and Benjamin Lay became first ridiculed and then completely forgotten about by history.

Early abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates--who were never quite as progressive as they would have liked to believe-- in the years leading up to the American Civil War labelled Benjamin Lay as deranged, or somehow having possessed of a “slow” intellect.  Nineteenth century thinkers were unable to believe that a man who suffered from what they considered to be a physical disability, could possibly have been such a far-sighted thinker and abolitionist.

In 1738, after his stunt with the “blood-filled” bladder, Benjamin Lay became the last documented person to be kicked out of active participation in the Quaker community due to his eccentric behavior and nonconformist beliefs.  However, he continued to protest slavery and spent years writing abolitionist tracts that were published widely in the United Colonies and in Europe.

At the age of seventy-five his health began to deteriorate and lay was forced to move back indoors permanently--something his friends and acquaintances said that he was loath to do--and be carried for by his wife Sarah.

Benjamin Lay is buried in an unmarked grave next to his beloved wife Sarah in the Quaker Burial Ground in Abington, Pennsylvania near the home he built with his own hands.  Only today, in the twenty-first century over two-hundred and fifty years after he was buried in that unmarked grave, is the remarkable courage of a remarkable four foot tall American, Benjamin Lay, once again being remembered by historians around the world.