******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
“By the time he himself died, in 1759, Lay had eked out a strange and deeply principled life for himself in the Philadelphia area. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, and walked everywhere. He had become a vegetarian and felt that animals, including horses, should not be exploited for their labor or their meat. In 1737 he published the revolutionary tract All Slaveholders That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a mixture of polemic, musings, and autobiography, put together in a curiously nonlinear, almost postmodern, format. (The publisher—Benjamin Franklin, a longtime, if a little wary, friend—chose to keep his own name off the text.) Despite his requests to be cremated, which would have been tantamount to paganism, Lay was buried in an unmarked grave close to his wife’s, in the Quaker burial ground. “During his life and after his death, many people, Rediker says, thought of Lay as deranged. “[Historians] thought he was not sane, and this was a very effective way of putting him at the margins.” Ableism, too, seems to have factored in this general unwillingness to take him seriously. But some of those in the abolitionist movement did feel the need to celebrate this “Quaker comet,” as he came to be known. Benjamin Rush, one of his earliest biographers, said Lay was known to virtually everyone in Pennsylvania; his curious portrait was said to hang in many Philadelphia homes. This early abolitionist burned bright, and, despite his exclusion from many abolitionist narratives, refuses to be extinguished from history.” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-18th-century-quaker-dwarf-who-challenged-slavery-meat-eating-and-racism _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
