2) to protest slavery: spattering pokeberry juice as ersatz blood at Quaker slaveholders attending the Friends' Philadelphia Yearly Meeting kidnapping the child of slaveholding neighbors for a short period to induce the panic that bondage had caused their servants' parents and smashing fine china teacups and saucers in an open-air Philadelphia market to protest the mistreatment of labourers who produced tea and sugar. He indulged in a number of "guerrilla theater" tactics (p. It was there that Benjamin devoted himself to more radical views, including antinomianism, vegetarianism and animal rights, egalitarianism, and, most famously, abolitionism. Lay was an autodidact and worked as bookseller in Pennsylvania. He and his beloved wife, Sarah, a Quaker minister, lived for a time in Barbados before obtaining permission to settle in the North American Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. Born a Quaker commoner in Essex in 1682, Lay learned a number of trades in England before he became a sailor, in which capacity he first witnessed the harsh realities of Atlantic slavery. This fascinating and engaging biography illuminates the life of Benjamin Lay, who became an early "prophet against slavery" in the British colonial world.
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