Quakers and the Abolitionist Movement
In this inaugural installment, Denis is joined by guest Dr. Marcus Rediker as they discuss Quaker involvement in early movements for the abolition of slavery through the lens of Benjamin Lay's revolutionary and controversial practices.
Dr. Rediker taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d'études mondiales / Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. Dr. Rediker has written, co-written, or edited ten books, including The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press, 2017). He has, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty.
Thank you for listening, and join us as we Meet Quaker History.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION
[Denis 0:07]: Hello everyone, welcome to the very first installment of Arch Street Meeting House’s series on Quakers and social justice movements. My name is Denis long, I'm a senior year history major at Rowan University, currently interning at the meetinghouse and going to be the host of the series of podcasts. Today's first installment is going to be on Quakers and the Abolitionist movement, and I am joined here today by Dr. Marcus Rediker. Marcus if you'd like to introduce yourself go right ahead.
[Marcus 0:40]: Sure. Thank you, Denis. My name is Marcus Rediker, professor of history at University of Pittsburgh. I write what is called history from below, meaning the history of people, ordinary working people who are usually left out of the history books, and my most recent book is entitled The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Benjamin lay lived from 1682 to 1759, and he played a very important role in making Quakers one of the leading forces for abolition around the Atlantic world. So, I've been thinking a lot about Quakerism and history of late and happy Denis to have a chance to talk with you about it.
[Denis 1:29]: I'm very happy to have you here. We will certainly be talking about Benjamin Lay in a pretty great extent. During this during my research, I found many, many fascinating things about him. So, we will get onto that quite soon. But in the meantime, I want to start this out by just, you know, discussing about how, you know, when I, when I first started doing this research, I began to notice a lot of things involving how the Quaker ideology very much so coincided with anti-slavery ideologies, mainly when it comes to you know having that equal ideology of, you know, we're all friends you know as the title of the Quaker organization implies there are they're all friends together, and many Quakers were able to go beyond just the white male demographic that most people in the early American history, often thought of they were able to go beyond into among women and among African Americans and that's especially with the series we're going be talking about later on we're going be talking about Quakers women's rights movements, Quakers and LGBTQ+ rights movements, and I'm really happy to have a historian like you on here who, like you said, has a perspective from the bottom up because I personally really love that type of historical perspective, one of my favorite books is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States because I feel like it's a very excellent, excellent telling of the American people on the whole, you know, it's great to hear about key figures and such and other great leaders but in the end I feel like it really does boil down to the people themselves. Unfortunately, when it comes to the first little portion of what we're going to be talking about when it comes to pre-colonial Quakers and abolition it's more so focused on key figures than anything because there were still of course Quakers that owned slaves. They were not a majority, I would say, from the research that I gathered but they still had a bit of a hold on the Quaker community. I believe it was in your book that I saw, where you talked about how a lot of the people who had anti-slavery premonitions were of the working class of laborers, and it's mainly those who were in power and who were so-called quote-unquote enlightened, that were pro-slavery, you know, how could you find an enlightened type of figure to be pro-slavery, which is, which is a very important question, but nonetheless I want to talk about one of the first instances of anti-slavery protests by Quakers, which is more of a people-oriented thing. It was protests in Germantown, and as well as something that was called An Exhortation and Caution to Friends Concerning Buying or Keeping of Negros, which was a document published in 1693, this was kind of a series of events in Philadelphia that kind of had that had a large anti-slavery message to it. I could not find a whole lot on this, unfortunately, but it seemed that this was, you know, the first printed I'd say instance of this anti-slavery movement that began to move forward, and then of course we have major figures like George Fox, who while he didn't exactly directly address the institution of slavery he began to support this idea that slaves were fully human, much like their fellow Quakers. So we kind of see these developing ideas slowly begin to snowball into what is eventually the anti-slavery movement. We also have people like Ralph Sandiford, who I know that you mentioned a few times in your book. A few quotes from some articles that I found were that he had a quote “defined mission to testify against slavery” and saw slavery as a quote “embodiment of evil”. So, as we see as time goes on, we begin to see more and more gradually grasping this anti-slavery message on a greater extent until we eventually get to someone like Benjamin Lay, who you referred to in your book as the first revolutionary abolitionist. If you'd like to just give a kind of brief biographical overview of Benjamin Lay, go right ahead.
[Marcus 5:27]: Well, Denis let me actually start with the origins of Quakerism, if I may, because I think Quakers…
[Denis 5:44]: Yeah, go right ahead.
[Marcus 5:45]:...had a rather divided soul. By that I mean, beginning of the 1640s and 1650s when Quakerism was first formed in the fires of the English revolution, Quakerism was very radical at that time. And one of its great leaders was a man named James Nayler, who was antinomian and radical - meaning that he rejected the authority of magistrates and ministers and thought that individuals could perceive the truth, individually through the inner work life. James Nayler proved to be too radical for George Fox and so, what happens is that a kind of war broke out between the radical Quakers and the moderate Quakers. George Fox led a whole series of reforms in the 1660s and 1670s to root out people like James Nayler, including another man named John Thoreau, a very active very radical Quaker. Benjamin Lay is of this radical tradition, within Quakerism. But I think a lot of people actually think that George Fox is the only representative of a Quaker tradition. Now Fox himself was extremely radical in the early days, you know, he would go into a church with Nayler or practically any other Quaker and shout out that the minister, the Church of England was evil and corrupt. I mean they would literally disrupt church services people tend to forget that about George Fox.
[Denis 7:06]: I see where he got his inspiration from.
[Marcus 7:07]: Well that is right, Lay was channeling that older Quaker radicalism. Now, that practice of disrupting church services was made illegal in 1655 and actually a lot of Quakers went to jail for continuing to do it, but here's my point. These people like James Nayler, and especially the radical Quakers came out of the English revolution with a critique of slavery already formed. Now, it wasn't the case that slavery had been fully racialized yet. So, when people talked about slavery in the 1640s and 1650s, they meant racial slavery, but they also meant indentured servitude, they meant people being forcibly conscripted into the Army or the Navy, they meant poor people losing the commons, their access to the common land. And then what happened was, as slavery around the Atlantic was increasingly racialized some Quakers continued this critique and developed it, and became formal abolitionists. Now, what's really remarkable is that even though Quakers were equipped with this kind of oppositional ideology, a kind of implicit anti-slavery. It took almost a century of debate among Quakers to abolish slavery. That first Germantown protests that you mentioned was 1688 Quakers as a group, don't decide to disown the slave owners until 1776. So, you see the power of the institution of slavery that even among a very progressive group like Quakers, it took a long time to convince people that this was the way to go. So that's one thing to keep in mind. When Benjamin Lay arrived in Philadelphia in 1732, half of the members of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting owned slaves. Half of them - that's a lot of people. And of course, all of the wealthy Quakers or the wakey Quakers, they all owned slaves. And this infuriated Benjamin. So, he got involved with Ralph Sandiford - Ralph Sandiford died quite young and Benjamin was the main spokesperson for anti-slavery ideas for the next 20 years or so. But you've got to remember, and contemporary Quakers have to remember, that when Ralph Sandiford, and Benjamin Lay spoke out against slavery, they got disowned for it. Right. This is a really important thing to remember, the Quaker leadership was firmly in favor of slavery, because they, you know, there’s a saying that people say that Quakers came to America to do good and in fact they did well. And when they did well, they made a lot of money, they get on other people with money, white people with money in early America did they bought enslaved Africans. So, this was a real issue inside the Quaker community and Benjamin Lay was not having any of it. He thought this was wrong, that slavery had to be abolished and he thought slavery was destroying Quakerism, that it was a sign of corruption and degradation. And he did everything he could in his life to convince Quakers that they had to abolish slavery immediately and that's the point. There were a number of Quakers who said well let's do it gradually, Benjamin Lay said no, it's got to stop now, because it's wrong, it's immoral, it's evil. It has to be ended now.
[Denis 10:50]: I found the anecdote that you provided of him in your book where he walks into the meeting with the sword hidden away in his jacket and the book with…what was is it inside of it, it was…
[Marcus 11:03]: Pokeberry juice!
[Denis 11:04]: Pokeberry juice, right, and he...
[Marcus 11:06]: Bright red juice...
[Denis 11:07]: ...and he sticks the sword into the book to represent kind of like this dying of the value of the Quaker religion and I find that just so fascinating to see the extents that he went to. There is an account of him that I found while doing my research to see if I can pull it up here real quick. He, post his death and published in 1792, just kind of detailing his life and they talk specifically about his anti-slavery, what’s the word exactly his practices, his anti-slavery practices, and one of them he went to, he was in Chester County, Pennsylvania talking to a married couple of farmers who own slaves and he was saying to them, you know, you really should not be doing this at all. This is immoral, this is wrong, this is against God and they and this married couple tried to defend the slave trade to him. And so, in retaliation he pretended to kidnap one of their children, their only child, to show them what exactly it was like to have people taken away from you, to have family split apart, and you know he brought the daughter back. And the parents, you know, were obviously very distressed, and he said to them, you know, this is what you are doing to these people. And when I read that I was like floored for a second because I was like wow this guy is really just going with any, any opportunity he can get, and honestly I, well, while it's a little bit like mmm it's still really fascinating to see people in this time period to go to this extent now see I respect them for that, relative to the people that they were with.
[Marcus 12:35]: Well let me say a little bit more about this particular story about Benjamin Lay because…
[Denis 12:39]: Of course, yeah.
[Marcus 12:40]: …some people have interpreted it the wrong way saying that Benjamin Lay was a kidnapper, but these were actually his neighbors, near Abington.
[Denis 12:49]: Oh, okay.
[Marcus 12:50]: So he knew these people, he knew the child, and he basically just invited the child to his home which was in a cave, Benjamin lived in a cave. And he just kept the child there and entertaining him all day and then when the parents got frantic, they came looking for him. Benjamin spoke to them with real compassion, he said I understand how you feel; your child is perfectly safe, but how do you think the parents of the girl, the African girl that you own, how do you think they feel...now that you can identify with this loss? So, he was really applying this very simple but very radical golden rule that you should treat other people, as you would want them to treat you. And this is actually fundamental to Benjamin Lay’s view of slavery, and to a great many Quakers and to a great many abolitionists in general, the idea is, you wouldn't want to be enslaved so therefore, by what right do you enslave other people. This is a basic ethical principle of life.
[Denis 13:55]: Yeah, exactly. I’m not surprised that is the full story; I'm also not surprised that you know the account from that I have looked through from 1792 I believe it was, probably do not give the full story because I can imagine that there were people who were thinking, should we really be praising this guy but now looking back on it now it's, yeah, no doubt, now knowing the full story with all the full records and, you know, he definitely I feel like he's definitely a man worthy of his ideology, and worthy to be respected for that.
[Marcus 14:25]: But here, let me just point something out.
[Denis 15:07]: Of course!
[Marcus 14:28]: Benjamin Lay was a deliberately polarizing figure. In other words, he would go into a meeting, he wanted to draw a line and say, are you for slavery, or are you against it, there is no middle ground, which is it? And a lot of people really hated him for doing that. Partly because they thought he was too, too angry. This is not a Quaker value, by the way, to be angry but rather, peaceful, he was too angry about it. And they also thought that he was contradicting the other Quaker value of harmony and consensus by introducing conflict into all these situations. So, you need to know that he was really disliked by a lot of Quakers, but he was also, this is crucial to note, beloved by a lot of Quakers who agreed with him but who were afraid to speak out against the way the weighty Quakers who opposed him. So, Benjamin realized that his job was to slowly encourage the rank-and-file? Quakers to speak out. And this is where anti-slavery comes from, as you mentioned earlier, among the Quakers it comes from the bottom up, it’s the ordinary Quakers who basically forced the leaders to declare themselves against this very widespread practice.
[Denis 16:27]: I feel like we see a lot of that today too in politicians that are very you know farther left on the American politics standard, you know, we get a lot of very polarizing politicians who are very pro-worker, but yet also among more moderate and other sectors of political parties, you know, might be a little bit, you know less attuned to them they might not, you know, be more in favor of them, you know, I don't mean to delve too deep into modern politics but I definitely see that people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I feel like you know those are great modern examples of something like this of course they were not to the point of going into Quaker meetings and sinking a sword through a book to represent the dying of a religion, but of course they definitely have these more radical views on our modern standards compared to what most other established politicians really have. So, it's really, really interesting to see that that connection.
[Marcus 16:40]: Well Benjamin, another thing to remember about him is that he saw himself in the biblical tradition of being a prophet, and his prophecy was that you slave owning Quakers are destroying Quakerism, you're destroying Christianity, and you're destroying society. If you don't stop it, stop, slavery now, he said it's going to be like the poison of dragons living inside you, and was he ever right about that. I mean we live today with the consequences of slavery that existed from the 17th century, well into the 19th century that poison is still in our society. So Benjamin was quite a prophet about that he said, if you don't abolish it you're going to live with pain of the violence of slavery for a very long time.
[Denis 17:35]: Exactly. He’s very much so a Nostradamus in that sense in which he really did see the future, whether it be intentionally or not. I feel like you know as we see this evolution of abolitionists, do you feel of Quaker abolitionists to be specific, do you feel like that this is representative of, you know, a lot of the social justice movements that we see as time goes on, you know, slowly becoming more and more, I guess polarizing and radical to where you know could these be because we've gotten to a point in our society where there's a lot of problems that either really need to be fixed immediately and if not, you know, they're going cause a lot of trouble. So, I feel like you know, do you also believe that this evolution of the Quaker abolitionists could kind of be representative of this?
[Marcus 19:03]: Well, I think that the Quakers have played an extraordinary role in the development of the abolition movement -- which was by the way one of the very first great successful social movements in all of history. In other words, slavery was abolished in Britain and the United States, only with tremendous difficulty. In the United States it took a bloody war, in Great Britain, first they abolished the slave trade in 1807, then in two stages in 1838 they abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, and it was a broad-based movement that kind of made that happen. So one of the things that I think we can draw from this kind of history is that social movements from below create history. They forced the leaders to do something different. And I think that's one of the things that we need to remember. Now, another thing that I think your listeners would want to know, Benjamin Lay’s radicalism was not simply only about slavery, he was a passionate abolitionist, but he was also in favor of gender equality.
[Denis 19:30]: Animal rights too!
[Marcus 19:31]: Animal rights, he was a committed vegetarian, and he was environmentally conscious. This is a really important thing for our day! He said, beware rich men who poisoned the earth for gain. That's something somebody could have said last week, you know. Yeah, he's saying this kind of thing in the 1730s.
[Denis 19:53]: Absolutely, yeah.
[Marcus 19:54]: 300, years ago. So, the question becomes how do you create change from below? I think, Quakers have played very important parts in helping that to happen. For example, in the movement against the war in Vietnam.
[Denis 20:11]: Yeah, yeah.
[Marcus 20:12]: The issue of draft counseling, my friends, Staughton and Alice Lynd, were very active in that struggle. So, there is this is a very honorable part of the Quaker tradition, but Quakers need to remember that it hasn't always been that way -- and that the radical side of Quakerism has been kind of latened at times. And then in moments of kind of upheaval it tends to emerge. But Benjamin Lay and there are lots of other Quakers do embody this really more radical tradition among Quakers, and I think that deserves more study.
[Denis 20:52]: Absolutely.
[Marcus 20:53]: And it deserves to be made a part of the ongoing education of Quakers and the rest of society.
[Denis 21:01]: There's a lot of radical history in America that, you know, many public schools and just general public areas don't really teach that often. And I feel like a lot of places such as Quaker Meeting Houses, you know, definitely. I know Arch Street does a very good job, I can imagine that there are probably some who kind of lightened back on the a bit of the radical history as well and even in every in every movement in American history too. Especially the civil rights movement of the mid-1900s, there’s a lot of watering down of exactly how radical these things were. I'm currently in a Civil Rights of Black Power Movements course in my senior year here, and we're covering a lot of really, really interesting stuff that I honestly would have never known about unless I went out of my way to research these things or go to a, an African American History Museum that talks about these types of things and it makes me realize that like yeah we never really lost the spirit of revolution that we always talk about, people just try to kind of water this down in order to keep this kind of sense of law and order when really we need this type of thing, you know, and because we didn't heed to someone like Benjamin Lay or really all of the African American slaves who constantly voiced their suffering. We never listened to those and now we are pretty much paying the price for that.
[Marcus 22:20]: Well I think this is an important point that the one of the big projects of what I call, the ‘new left’ -- the generation that emerged in the 60s and 70s -- demanded a new kind of history, and that's what history from below is. We wanted a history that took race and slavery, seriously. It took working class movements seriously. It took seriously the history of women, the larger part of humanity. There were demands for new kinds of history and the value of this I think Howard Zinn's book which you mentioned is one of the most successful examples. It makes activists realize that they too come from a tradition, there are traditions out there that can empower you, that you're not the first person who felt this way about racism or about sexism, but there are people who fought, and they fought and sometimes they lost frequently they lost and their stories were suppressed. But that's why we need this history from below to bring those things back, because those things can empower us and make us see that another World really is possible.
[Denis 23:26]: Absolutely, absolutely! Just kind of transitioning on the timeline, I'd like to bring it forward into the future of Quaker history, we're going to post revolution into the antebellum period. At this point, this is where we begin to from the research that I did yeah that's this is where we get to see even larger scale recognition of the Quaker support for abolition. I have found a few documents, one of them being from the Quaker Yearly Meeting in New York City, from 1837, in which a -- let me try to find this quote real quick -- cause it's a really, really interesting quote from this person who's speaking. It's a direct address to the citizens of the United States of America on the subject of slavery from the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends... called Quakers held in New York City. One of the sentences that really stood out to me, “...Being who has bestowed his favors upon us so bountifully, were we to remain silent, while within the borders of our territory, more than two millions of human beings are held in servile bondage.” So, you see that a lot more Quakers on this very big scale at the Yearly Meeting in New York City are recognizing hey, so many of us have been silent about this and now we're paying the price. This is not what God wanted us to do.
[Marcus 24:41]: Well, you got to remember that it was a tremendous struggle among the Quakers for someone to be able to say that.
[Denis 24:49]: Exactly.
[Marcus 24:50]: Ralph Sandiford wrote a very serious indictment of slavery and the Quaker overseers would not allow him to publish it as a Quaker. They booted him out and he published it on his own. Benjamin Lay published his book on his own. He went to Benjamin Franklin, the leading printer in Philadelphia and said here would you publish it; I'll pay you to publish it. So, we've got to remember that even those things that we don’t regard as progress, they're based on an internal struggle. And this is really the history of slavery. It was a hugely powerful, profitable system. And that has to be born in mind the profits, the power of slave owners both as economic actors but as political actors, you know, with a great deal of governmental power. So, we got to remember that, you know, whatever, success was achieved in this struggle against slavery, it was, it really was hard work, at every step of the way. The racism that supported the slave system was everywhere. Now, what's really interesting about Benjamin Lay in this respect, is that he never talked about race at all, he used the word color. Yeah, some people have a different color than we are. And then he would invoke this biblical idea, what I would call an anti-racializing strategy he would say, we are all of one blood. This is what a radical Quakers and radical abolitionist would say affirming the unity of all humankind against those who were busy dividing the world up by race, which was then becoming a so-called scientific concept. Of course, it was pseudoscience. But to reject that way of thinking about the world was itself a declaration of liberation.
[Denis 26:48]: Absolutely, yeah, it's very much so going beyond the categorizations that are created in order to oppress people, and even along with that too you definitely see that in class as well how many wealthy slave owners, go off to in a way manipulate the poor who do not own slaves to kind of get them onto their side, we kind of see this in the Quakers a little bit. How I'm sure many wealthy slave owner Quakers have probably convinced other working Quakers onto their side a little bit because they have the power to do this type of thing, you know, that maybe they owned the lands that they had worked on so they couldn't really go against them, but you also see this in the south to pre-, and during the Confederacy, where many of the soldiers really weren't slave owning, they were just convinced that you know slavery was a part of their Southern identity. And so they wanted to fight and since they wanted to fight for this southern identity, the institutionalized slave owner has really picked up the hearts of them, and it's honestly kind of tragic. We talked about this a lot in my public history course last semester how even today, you still see plenty of people who have such a strong like ancestral tie to the Confederacy, in a way, even though this was kind of the result of institutions manipulating the people.
[Marcus 28:05]: Now this current debate that we have about statues of Confederate Generals is very interesting in this regard.
[Denis 28:13]: We talked about that a lot too.
[Marcus 29:07]: Well, I have a colleague named Kirk Savage, University of Pittsburgh who has worked on these Confederate Memorial statues.
[Denis 28:22]: Oh, okay.
[Marcus 28:23]: One of his points is that when these things were erected in the late 19th and early 20th century, they were all considered to be weapons in the return of the South, to power weapons in the reestablishment of racism against the challenges that they’d received. So we need to understand that these things were never innocent monuments, they always had very deeply political purposes. I personally think that we should have monuments of people who represent a better set of more democratic and egalitarian ideals, just like Benjamin Lay, just like Nat Turner. There is a statue of Denmark Vesey now in Charleston, South Carolina, so the progress is being made, but the battle over the narrative history takes place in books in discussion, and in the material landscape of monuments. You may have heard of the direct action taken in the Black Lives Matter movement in England where a statue of a slave trader named Edward Colston was torn down…
[Denis 29:35]: Oh, yes!
[Marcus 29:36]: ...dumped into the harbor. I did a lot of research in Bristol for a book I wrote called The Slave Ship: A Human History, I walked by that statue - and this is about 2005 - and I remember thinking to myself, somebody is going to tear this down. Because it was already groups in Bristol who were protesting against it. So that's another thing. The statue came down because people had been organizing against it for a long time, for years. There's something called…
[Denis 30:11]: There’s no isolated events, really.
[Marcus 30:13]: …Yeah, there's something called the Bristol Radical History Group, which has been protesting against Colston and that statue for at least 10 years. So again, we see how movements from below are the real makers of history.
[Denis 30:28]: Speaking of a most from below that there was a really interesting article that I found in my research that talked about how in Chester County, Pennsylvania and some of Cumberland County New Jersey, there were these parallel communities that's as it's called between Quakers and African Americans, and while they weren't exactly fully mixed, inclusive, communities they were kind of separate but connected in the sense that they both recognized that they had the same goal in mind and that they were hoping to be able to keep their peaceful lifestyles together. It talks about the article here that there are some instances of Quakers following slave catchers and slave kidnappers back into places such as in Maryland to regain some of the people from the parallel communities that have been kidnapped. There's a story of a man, an African American named Thomas Mitchell, who had been captured and then basically later that night a few Quakers from the same community rode their horses down to bring him back to his family. And so, like I said while they weren't exactly fully inclusive and fully, you know, integrated to where you know, there were African American Quakers being introduced and stuff like that you know they had their own separate churches, but they still were connected in that general sentiment of, you know, trying to keep slavery away from coming back up to the north and keeping it away. This way African Americans can continue to attempt to live a prosperous life.
[Marcus 31:55]: Well, I would make two points about that. One is, I think a lot of scholarship has shown in recent years, that many white abolitionists were opposed to slavery, but they were not in favor of racial equality.
[Denis 32:10]: Exactly
[Marcus 32:11]: And that would apply to a considerable number of Quakers as well. That was one thing to abolish slavery, but to really imagine equal society was something that a lot of white abolitionists were really not willing to do.
[Denis 32:25]: Yeah.
[Marcus 32:26]: But then again, there were radical Quakers who kind of put it all on the line, who fought for people. That was a Quaker in Delaware and named William Garrett*, who was a very important figure in the Underground Railroad, he actually was quite seriously attacked in his own day. Even so, in acknowledging the importance of that, I think that many people have over-emphasized the role of white abolitionists in the Underground Railroad. Because the truth is that most of the heavy lifting was done by the support networks among enslaved people in the south, and by the free Black communities in the north, and this is actually a subject that I'm working on right now. Escaping slavery by sea in the 19th century. It was black sailors and dock workers and working-class people who helped to smuggle those who wanted to escape slavery onto the vessels and then they would take them to a place like Philadelphia, New York, or Boston, where those people will then be housed within the free Black community. So, we need to bear in mind that the struggle against slavery had this very foundational element in the enslaved communities and in the free Black communities and that the abolitionists certainly played a significant role. Sometimes that's been allowed to hide the role that black actors play.
[Denis 33:58]: Absolutely, yeah. The article does mention to their history has kind of put them on too much of a pedestal than they really deserve you know, obviously they should be praised for taking these acts. But in the end, it's not really just them that were holding the entire movement together. But I'm excited to see how that research goes. I'm very excited to see that in the future. Just to kind of go into some concluding questions, this has been a really, really great discussion, once again thank you so much for coming on. I have a few questions that I know we talked about many modern parallels that we see with this, whether it be religiously based or secular and I know that we definitely talked about how Benjamin Lay’s centrism and is very much so willingness to express his ideas absolutely pushing the moment but I guess I first like a final question you know, what can we learn from these Quaker approaches, whether it be their religious beliefs coinciding with this, or whether it just be from their organization as people you know, what do you think that we can learn from this.
[Marcus 35:08]: Well, I'll tell you one thing that strikes me as important about the life of Benjamin Lay. Benjamin Lay was an agitator. He wanted to stir up trouble. He wanted, literally, to wake people up, he says that is in his book, he says, people have gone to sleep, they're not thinking about what's right involve (?), the customer of slave owning makes them disinclined to question their own behavior and their own ethics. So, we need agitators, I think. So that's one thing we should learn from Benjamin Lay's life. You need people who are going to put themselves on the line, stir up things, and basically cause everyone to debate what is going on. You know, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, a Philadelphia physician named Benjamin Rush, was the first biographer of Benjamin Lay, and he said that Benjamin Lay in his day was the best-known person in all of Pennsylvania. I can assure you it wasn't because of his book, because it's a very difficult book to read. It was because of his guerrilla theater. It was the things he acted out in public, which were provocative in intention and they made everyone say, did you know what Benjamin Lay just did. Well do you think he was right, or do you think he was wrong? And so, his idea was, we've got to debate this. And so, to force the debate to bring up the questions that people don't want to talk about, to get into the issues that are really deep and profound, Benjamin Lay really insistent on that and that fearlessness of speaking truth to power. Okay, this was one of the principles of his life. This goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher, Dr. Diogenes. A very important thinker. And I think we need that in our times, be always willing to speak truth to power. I think that Benjamin Lay and a lot of Quaker abolitionists can help us learn to do that.
[Denis 37:20]: Lay is definitely an early practitioner of the late John Lewis’s ideology of good trouble. I feel like that's a very great way of putting it, you know, getting into trouble if it's for the right cause it's absolutely good trouble. But I would like to say thank you again so much for coming on to discuss, this was an absolutely wonderful discussion. And I'm very happy that we got to kick off the series this way and I'm sure that everyone listening will enjoy it very much so and now approach these things with a new open mind. So, once again, thank you very much. And to those listening, thank you very much for joining us. We'll see you next time.
*We would like to make a correction: William Garrett was named, rather than Thomas Garrett.
WORKS CITED
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“Letter on the Slave Trade, Written by Anthony Benezet.” American Museum, or, Repository of Ancient & Modern Fugitive Pieces, &c. Prose & Poetical (Philadelphia, PA - 1790-1793), January 1793, 122–25. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.rowan.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9h&AN =37315424&site=ehost-live.
Parsons, Samuel. “Address to the Citizens of the United States of America, on the Subject of Slavery, from the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, (Called Quakers) Held in New York.” Friend: A Religious & Literary Journal 10, no. 39 (July 1837): 309–11. https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.rowan.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=h9i&AN= 43869023&site=ehost-live.
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Rediker, Marcus. The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the Very First Revolutionary Abolitionist. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books, 2017.
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