On September 19, 1738, worshippers gathered in a Quaker meetinghouse in Burlington, New Jersey, expecting the usual business of a religious assembly. They were about to receive something considerably less usual: a sermon involving a military uniform, a sword, and a book that appeared to bleed.

The man responsible was Benjamin Lay, an English-born Quaker who believed slavery was an abomination and that his fellow Christians had spent far too long finding reasons not to do anything about it. Beneath his plain outer coat, Lay concealed military clothing and a blade. Inside a hollowed-out book was an animal bladder filled with red pokeberry juice. He had come to make a theological argument, and he had evidently decided that the usual sermon illustrations were inadequate.

When he confronted the assembled Friends about enslaving their fellow human beings, he threw off his coat, raised the book, and stabbed it. Red liquid spilled over his arm and splashed those nearby. The gathering dissolved into disorder, and several men carried him outside.

It was a memorable way to conclude a sermon. It also raises an obvious question: What sort of person goes to a Quaker meeting armed with a sword and a homemade blood effect? To answer that, we have to go back several decades, cross the Atlantic, and meet a man who had been making religious authorities uncomfortable long before anybody had to clean fake blood off the furniture.

Benjamin Lay: A Small Man With a Remarkably Large Capacity for Trouble

Benjamin Lay was born in Essex, England, around 1682, into a Quaker family. He had dwarfism and a pronounced curvature of the spine. He stood approximately four feet tall, although historical descriptions vary on his precise height. His physical appearance attracted attention throughout his life. So did his determination to tell powerful people exactly what he thought of them, an activity for which he required remarkably little encouragement.

He had limited formal schooling but read widely. As a young man he apprenticed to a glove maker, worked in agriculture, and went to sea. The last occupation exposed him to international commerce, sailors of different backgrounds, and forms of human exploitation that were easier to ignore when viewed from a comfortable English meetinghouse. Aboard ship, the captain’s authority was nearly absolute. In ports, Lay encountered the commercial machinery that turned human beings into merchandise.

In 1718 he married Sarah Smith, a fellow Quaker who, like him, was a person of short stature. Sarah was also a respected religious minister. Quakers generally did not employ ordained clergy in the conventional sense; their worship encouraged participants to speak when they believed the Spirit moved them. Benjamin, unfortunately for congregations seeking a peaceful meeting, was frequently convinced the Spirit wanted him to say something that the people in charge would prefer not to hear.

Even before he made slavery his consuming cause, Lay quarreled with Quaker authorities over religious sincerity, wealth, and preaching. His confrontations brought disciplinary problems in England. He remained devoted to Quaker beliefs, but he had already developed a strained relationship with the notion that a religious institution should be allowed to decide when he had said enough.

Barbados: Where Slavery Stopped Being an Abstract Question

Benjamin and Sarah spent time in Barbados, where Lay operated a business in a plantation colony whose prosperity depended on enslaved African labor. Sugar production generated immense wealth for merchants and plantation owners, while enslaved people endured violence, forced labor, and the constant threat of sale or punishment. Some of those profiting from the system were Quakers, a detail that Benjamin found impossible to reconcile with the faith’s professed commitment to spiritual equality.

Lay had heard about slavery during his seafaring years. Barbados forced him to confront its daily reality. According to accounts explored by historian Marcus Rediker, a particularly devastating experience was seeing an enslaved man kill himself rather than endure another whipping. Lay also encountered people whose families, freedom, and labor had been taken from them for the financial benefit of others.

To Lay, this was not simply an unfortunate abuse of an otherwise acceptable institution. The institution itself was wrong. He rejected the familiar evasions by which Christians could condemn excessive cruelty while continuing to buy, sell, or own people. If enslaving a neighbor violated the command to love one’s neighbor, the solution was not to provide that neighbor with a more comfortable form of captivity.

Sarah shared his revulsion. An early biographer records her fear that remaining in Barbados might gradually make them resemble the plantation society around them, characterized by pride and oppression. The couple ultimately returned to England before crossing the Atlantic again to settle in Pennsylvania in 1732. They hoped that the Quaker colony would offer a community more willing to live according to the ideals it professed.

It was an understandable hope. It was also about to be disappointed.

Welcome to the City of Brotherly Love. Certain Restrictions Apply.

Pennsylvania had been established by William Penn as an experiment in religious toleration, and Philadelphia’s name promised brotherly love. But the colony’s economy included slavery, and prominent Quaker merchants and leaders owned enslaved people. Religious liberty, it turned out, was not always being extended to the individuals doing the cooking, cleaning, and heavy lifting.

Not every Quaker accepted this contradiction. In 1688, four Friends in Germantown had presented a petition opposing slavery, arguing that Christians should not do to others what they would dread having done to themselves. The petition reached the yearly meeting in Burlington, where leaders declined to pronounce judgment. There was already a moral argument against slavery, in other words, long before Lay arrived. What was missing was a collective determination to act on it.

Lay also found inspiration in Ralph Sandiford, another Quaker critic of slavery who had challenged the religious establishment and suffered for it. Sandiford died in 1733. Lay had no intention of allowing his friend’s objections to disappear quietly with him. If anything, resistance from influential Friends convinced him that the problem involved more than individual slaveholders; it implicated the institutions protecting their standing.

Lay treated slaveholding ministers as walking contradictions. During meetings, when an enslaver rose to speak, he might stand and publicly call attention to the person’s ownership of human beings. He refused to accept the idea that a man could claim spiritual authority on Sunday while exercising ownership over another human being for the rest of the week.

Quaker leaders considered his interruptions unacceptable. Lay considered their acceptance of slavery considerably worse. Thus began a long dispute in which one side wanted decorum, the other wanted emancipation, and neither was particularly interested in the other’s preferred timetable.

When the Sermon Needed Props: Snow, Tobacco Pipes, and Tea Cups

Lay’s religious protests were remarkably inventive. He did not merely repeat his arguments until audiences grew tired of hearing them. He arranged situations in which the people he addressed were forced to experience, if only briefly, some small part of the discomfort they were willing to impose on others.

On a bitter winter day, according to an early account preserved in Roberts Vaux’s 1815 biography, Lay stood outside a Quaker meetinghouse with one leg and foot exposed to the snow. Concerned worshippers warned him that he might become ill. Lay responded by asking why their concern did not extend to enslaved people compelled to work through winter with inadequate clothing.

It was a devastatingly simple demonstration. The Friends could see his suffering, understand its cause, and urge him to end it. Lay wanted them to realize that they possessed the same ability to respond to the suffering of people they enslaved. The difference was that those people did not have the luxury of withdrawing their feet from the snow whenever they wished.

On another occasion, he brought three tobacco pipes into a Quaker gathering and dashed them among the assembled Friends—one among the male ministers, another among the female ministers, and the third among the wider congregation. The demonstration protested enslaved labor, luxury, and the unhealthy habit of smoking. Other accounts describe him publicly smashing teacups and saucers to challenge the exploitation behind fashionable consumption. Lay was developing a distinctive approach to consumer education, although it was hard on the crockery.

Modern marketers would call these attention-grabbing demonstrations. Lay might have called them a necessary response to people who had demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to ignore written complaints. Either way, he understood that a shattered pipe made considerably more noise than a polite request to form a committee.

The Child Who Disappeared: A Protest That Crossed Another Line

One of the strangest stories about Lay involves a slaveholding family and a missing child. In Vaux’s nineteenth-century telling, Lay persuaded a neighbor’s young son to spend the day at his home without the parents knowing where he was. As the hours passed, the increasingly frightened parents searched for their missing child. Eventually, they approached Lay in distress.

He assured them that their son was safe, then asked them to consider the anguish they had imposed on the family of an enslaved girl who had been taken from her parents. His demonstration transformed an abstract discussion of family separation into an experience the slaveholding parents could understand immediately. It was also an alarming thing to do to a child and his family, whatever the moral objective.

The anecdote comes from a biography published decades after Lay’s death, so its dialogue and precise circumstances deserve caution. Still, it reveals the kind of conduct remembered as characteristic of him. Lay wanted people who exercised power over others to feel what helplessness was like. He did not always concern himself with whether his methods would qualify as prudent, lawful, or remotely acceptable to the people selected as participants.

That tension matters. Lay’s opposition to slavery was morally serious, but recognizing the justice of his cause does not require treating every tactic as exemplary. Some of his demonstrations were ingenious acts of moral persuasion. Others leave a modern reader admiring the point while nervously checking the location of the children.

The Man Who Tried to Boycott an Entire Economic System

Lay eventually arranged his own life around the conviction that he should not benefit from human exploitation. He settled near Abington, north of Philadelphia, in a modest dwelling built partly into the earth and commonly described as a cave. He cultivated food, tended trees, and practiced an unusually austere form of self-sufficiency. His living arrangements were less a retreat from society than a continuing argument with it.

He avoided goods produced through enslaved labor, an ambitious undertaking in a world where plantation commodities circulated through everyday commerce. Sugar, tobacco, and other goods did not arrive at the consumer’s door accompanied by an honest explanation of the suffering involved in their production. Lay refused to treat that distance as a moral exemption.

His concern extended to animals. He refused to eat meat and avoided leather and other goods obtained by killing animals. He spun material for his own clothing. Historical accounts say he drank milk and water, and descriptions of his use of honey mean that labeling him a strict modern vegan would be inaccurate. Nevertheless, he was practicing a strikingly broad form of ethical consumption long before anyone thought to package the concept as a lifestyle brand.

A surviving portrait painted by William Williams Sr. shows the bearded Lay standing before his cave-like home with a book, walking stick, and produce nearby. The painting was commissioned for Benjamin Franklin, whose wife Deborah later owned it. For a man so frequently dismissed by the respectable people of his age, Lay left behind an unusually memorable image of someone entirely comfortable being himself.

Benjamin Franklin Prints a Book That Nobody Wanted to Approve

Lay eventually put his arguments into a substantial book whose title dispensed with the traditional publishing practice of gently easing readers into the subject. It began: All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates. The full title continued at considerable length to accuse professing Christians, especially religious leaders, of spreading corruption through their participation in slavery.

Lay’s work was part theological attack, part personal testimony, and part indictment of powerful Quakers who protected slaveholding while defending their own religious authority. He argued that the problem was not merely the slave trade’s worst excesses. Owning another person was itself incompatible with Christian discipleship. Slaveholders, he insisted, had no business exercising religious leadership while maintaining that relationship of domination.

The manuscript was hardly likely to receive enthusiastic approval from Quaker overseers responsible for reviewing religious publications. So Lay approached printer Benjamin Franklin, who produced the book in 1738. Some surviving copies bear the date 1737 on the title page, but the Library of Congress identifies the actual printing as 1738. Scholars commonly place its publication in August of that year.

Franklin’s involvement adds a particularly interesting complication: he was himself an enslaver during this period. The man who helped put Lay’s uncompromising antislavery argument into circulation had not yet fully embraced its implications. Franklin would later become prominent in abolitionist activity, but the printer of 1738 was not the reformer of the 1780s.

Franklin, of course, was no stranger to delivering biting criticism in print. This was a man who would later suggest sending Britain rattlesnakes as a thank-you gift for shipping convicts to America, write a helpful guide to losing a great empire in twenty easy steps, and explain how to become a thoroughly disagreeable companion with the precision of someone who had met the target audience. Printing Lay’s denunciation of slaveholders put another man’s uncompromising argument into the hands of a printer who would build an impressive reputation for making powerful people wish he had taken up a quieter profession. Lay preferred a sword and berry juice; Franklin generally found that a printing press could leave stains of its own.

Quaker authorities were not amused by Lay’s publication. Leaders publicly repudiated the book and its author, complaining about attacks on individuals and the Society of Friends itself. One might suspect that being named among the defenders of an institution Lay regarded as evil took some of the pleasure out of reading the latest offering from Franklin’s press.

Disowned Before the Blood Started Flowing

Here the chronology contains an important surprise. It is tempting to imagine that Lay staged his bloody demonstration and was immediately expelled from the Quaker movement for the spectacle. In reality, Abington Monthly Meeting had already recorded his disownment months before the September protest. Its records give the date as the thirtieth day of the eleventh month, 1737—a date the meeting’s later explanation identifies as January 30, 1738, under the calendar conventions then in use. Whatever difficulties the bookkeeping presents, the sequence is clear: Lay had been disowned before he arrived with the sword and berry juice.

Lay had also experienced earlier rejections by Quaker meetings in England. His exclusion was not a single dramatic punishment following a single dramatic offense. It was the culmination of years of institutional conflict involving his confrontational methods, criticism of leaders, and unwavering opposition to slavery.

What makes the story especially uncomfortable is that, as Abington Friends would later acknowledge, at least two of the men involved in his disownment owned enslaved people themselves. Lay was being judged for the disruption he caused by opposing slavery, while the participation of slaveholders in the disciplinary process raised a rather more consequential question about who was being permitted to judge whom.

Disownment did not cause Lay to abandon his faith. Nor did it persuade him to stop showing up. When the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting assembled in Burlington that September, he arrived with a message that could not be mistaken for a routine request to revisit the agenda at a more convenient date.

The Day Benjamin Lay Made a Book Bleed

According to later accounts, Lay had prepared the hollowed-out volume by removing its pages and fitting an animal bladder inside. He filled the bladder with the deep red juice of pokeberries. A military coat and small sword went beneath his outer clothing. The combination had obvious symbolism: a man dressed for war confronting a congregation that professed peace, and a harmless book transformed into an image of mortal injury.

Quaker meetings did not operate like conventional church services with one appointed preacher delivering a scheduled sermon. Lay could rise and speak, although he was hardly guaranteed a receptive audience. He challenged the slaveholders present and their claim to obey the Christian Golden Rule. Then he cast aside his coat to reveal the uniform and weapon beneath it.

He raised the book and thrust his sword through the hidden bladder. The liquid spilled out and spattered nearby Friends. In one famous later version of the story, he warned that God would shed the blood of those who enslaved others. Another early retelling emphasizes his accusation that enslaving a person was as unjustifiable as running that person through with a sword. The precise words cannot be established with certainty; the surviving detailed narratives were written long after the event.

The basic point, however, did not require a transcript. Lay wanted his audience to see blood where they had preferred to see profit, commerce, and respectable religious custom. The weapon also emphasized the violence beneath the everyday language of buying and owning human beings. People who might have considered themselves peaceful Christians were being asked to confront the brutality involved in preserving their comfort.

The Quakers Change Their Minds, but Not Overnight

Lay did not invent Quaker abolitionism, and his dramatic protests did not single-handedly abolish slavery among Friends. The 1688 Germantown petition preceded him by half a century. Sandiford had written against slavery, and later reformers such as John Woolman and Anthony Benezet would challenge the practice through sustained persuasion, writing, organizing, and patient engagement with Quaker communities.

There was a significant difference in temperament. Woolman often emphasized quiet personal appeals and careful religious discernment. Lay preferred confronting slaveholders in front of their neighbors and occasionally introducing a theatrical prop. Both approaches challenged the same contradiction, although it is safe to assume that an invitation to hear Woolman speak produced fewer concerns about concealed weapons.

In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took an important step toward disciplining Friends involved in the slave trade and restricting slaveholders from religious leadership. Lay lived long enough to hear encouraging news of this shift, though he did not live to see its final institutional consequences. Philadelphia Quakers moved to disown members who continued to hold enslaved people in 1776, seventeen years after his death.

These developments were consequential but neither instantaneous nor universal. Individual meetings proceeded at different speeds, and formal declarations did not by themselves free everyone who remained enslaved. Still, the institution that had once treated Lay’s insistence as intolerable would eventually adopt the central principle for which he had argued: slavery and Christian membership could not comfortably coexist.

According to the later biographical tradition, when Lay learned of the change beginning among Philadelphia Friends, he offered thanks to God and said, “I can now die in peace.” The sentiment was earned, even if the victory remained incomplete. His was one contribution among many to a movement that would continue for generations.

Nearly Three Centuries Later, an Awkward Institutional Reassessment

Lay died in February 1759 and was buried at Abington, near Sarah, who had died in 1735. His grave was unmarked, in keeping with Quaker practice at the time, rather than as a special rebuke to a troublesome member. Although formally disowned, he continued worshipping with the community for the rest of his life. The relationship remained complicated: Lay refused to abandon his fellow Friends, and he remained equally unwilling to let them become comfortable with their contradictions.

In November 2017, Abington Monthly Meeting formally reconsidered that history. Its minute recognizing Benjamin Lay acknowledged his commitment to equality, the disruptive character of his activism, and the role slaveholders had played in the decision to remove him. The meeting did not claim it could reinstate a person who had been dead for more than two and a half centuries. Instead, it recognized him as a “Friend of the Truth” and as being in unity with the spirit of the meeting.

The larger lesson of Benjamin Lay’s story is not that everyone with a shocking demonstration is necessarily right, or that religious institutions are uniquely resistant to criticism. It is that institutions can become so invested in preserving their own order that they confuse an inconvenient messenger with the actual moral problem. Lay made people uncomfortable because their comfort was part of what he believed needed challenging.

For years, people who owned other human beings attended religious meetings where they could expect to be treated as respectable members of the community. Benjamin Lay refused to cooperate with that arrangement. He stood in the snow, broke pipes, rejected slave-produced goods, published a book that accused Christian slaveholders of apostasy, and ultimately walked into a meeting with a sword and a bladder full of berry juice.

The Quakers eventually embraced much of the moral argument that made him so troublesome. Benjamin Lay did not live to see the end of American slavery, and he did not solve the problem by himself. But he had recognized a contradiction his contemporaries preferred to manage rather than confront. And when polite words failed, he made certain the people in the meetinghouse could not miss the point—even if they spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get the stains out.

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