Being Numerous: A Reconsideration of Benjamin Lay's All Slave-Keepers

Abstract: This article performs a rare close reading of the disowned Quaker Benjamin Lay's sprawling book, All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1738), and argues for Lay as a serious political thinker concerned with the organization of social life. The article places Lay's work in intertextual relation with Ralph Sandiford, who, like Lay, opposed colonial Pennsylvania's religious and political elites. Ultimately, this article demonstrates, Lay theorizes and embraces reformist projects such as replacing corporal punishment with penal labor. He also offers his book as its own kind of print public sphere. Even as both represented alternatives to illegitimate colonial leadership meant to save Pennsylvanians from themselves, Lay's settler colonial assumptions still prevented him from acknowledging the dispossession of Indigenous people at a moment when members of Pennsylvania's elite were engaged in unprecedented land theft.