On a bitter Sunday morning some two hundred years ago, a frail, middle-aged man lay in the snow at the gateway to one of the Friends’ meeting houses in Philadelphia. His right leg and foot were bared to the icy winds. When passing worshippers warned him, “Benjamin, thee will catch thy death of cold!” he retorted, “Ah, you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half clad.”

The rebuked Quakers shrugged their shoulders and hurried into meeting. Benjamin Lay’s protests against slavery were an old story. In an era when the keeping of slaves was considered no more sinful than keeping horses or cattle, he made a full-time career of trying to convince his fellow Philadelphians that it was not possible to be both a slaveholder and a Christian. He buttonholed government officials, harangued civic leaders, and preached—usually uninvited—to church congregations of all denominations.

His approach was often dramatic. One Sunday he strode into a rural church near Philadelphia wrapped in a mantle of sackcloth. He stood motionless and listened to the sermon, his mantle and flowing white beard giving him the look of an Old Testament prophet. At the conclusion of the services he fixed the congregation with a piercing eye, and proceeded to denounce those members who held slaves.

On another occasion he removed the leaves from a thick book and between the covers stowed a bladder filled with pokeberry juice. Then he arrayed himself in a military uniform—complete with sword—and concealed the costume beneath his Quaker’s greatcoat. With the book tucked under his arm, he found a prominent seat at the yearly meeting of the Society of Friends at Burlington, New Jersey, and claimed his right to speak. After berating his listeners for holding their fellow creatures in bondage, he concluded: “You might as well throw off the plain coat as I do [casting off his Quaker coat] and thrust a sword through their hearts as I do this book.” Whereupon he drew his sword and pierced the bladder, sprinkling bloodcolored pokeberry juice over half a dozen indignant Quakers sitting nearby.

Arousing indignation was a lifelong habit with Lay. Born into a Quaker family—in Colchester, England, in 1677—he was a merchant seaman until his mid-thirties, when he married a country woman and settled on a farm near his native town. Here he engaged in such heated religious controversies that the Quakers finally “disunited” him from membership.

Emigrating with his wife to the West Indies, he opened a store in Barbados, at that time a center of the slave trade. Appalled by its cruelties, he launched a vociferous one-man crusade against slavery.

Each Sunday hundreds of slaves gathered at his house, where he preached to them and fed them—a hospitality denounced by the colony’s white populace, who feared he would stir the blacks to rebellion. Eventually the anti-Lay sentiment grew so clamorous