Benjamin Lay, the cave-dwelling abolitionist

TRUE: a documented historical figure who lived in a cave

On 19 September 1738 Benjamin Lay walked into the Quaker meetinghouse at Burlington, New Jersey, for the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, wearing a great coat over a military uniform and a sword, and carrying a hollowed-out book with an animal bladder of red pokeberry juice hidden inside. When his turn came he told the gathering of weighty Friends, many of them grown rich on Atlantic trade and many of them slave owners, that slave keeping was the greatest sin in the world. Then he threw off the coat, raised the book and drove the sword through it, and the "blood" ran down his arm and spattered the slave keepers. "Thus shall God shed the blood of those persons who enslave their fellow creatures," he said, and stood still while they carried him out.

He was born in 1682 in Essex, a third-generation Quaker, and worked as a shepherd and an unhappy apprentice glover before running away to sea at 21. On an 18-month stay as a shopkeeper in Barbados he watched an enslaved man kill himself rather than face another whipping, and he never got over it. He stood just over four feet tall, with a sharply curved spine, and called himself "little Benjamin," though he also likened himself to little David facing Goliath. His wife Sarah, a little person too, was an admired preacher.

They reached Philadelphia in 1732, where most Quakers owned slaves, and Lay gave them no peace. He smashed tobacco pipes in a meeting to protest slave-grown goods, stood with one bare leg in the snow outside a meetinghouse, and when Friends worried for his health replied that they felt nothing for the half-clad slaves in their fields. He would leap up when a slave owner rose to speak and cry, "There's another negro-master!" Thrown into the street one rainy day, he lay in the mud at the door so that everyone leaving had to step over him. Benjamin Franklin printed his 1737 book All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, one of the first abolitionist works published in the colonies.

In 1734 the couple moved eight miles north to Abington, and after Sarah died in 1735 Lay lived almost entirely on his own work, in a cave with an entryway built onto it, among two hundred books. He kept bees, grew apples, peaches, potatoes and squash, spun his own flax into clothes, wore no wool, ate no meat and drank only milk and water, refusing anything made by enslaved or animal labour.

He died in Abington in 1759. Four Quaker meetings disowned him; by 2018 every one of them had taken it back.