The Man Who Stabbed a Bible

Benjamin Lay was four feet seven inches tall, hunchbacked, and absolutely certain he was right about everything. In the 1730s, more than a century before the Civil War, he wrote a 278-page abolitionist manifesto so incendiary that no printer in the American colonies would touch it.

Except one.

Lay lived in a cave outside Philadelphia that he'd furnished with over two hundred books. He grew his own food, spun his own linen, and refused sugar because enslaved people harvested it. He once kidnapped a Quaker slaveholder's child for an afternoon, then returned the child and explained, calmly, that now the parents knew how enslaved families felt. He stood outside a meetinghouse in winter with one bare foot buried in the snow to illustrate what enslaved people endured. The Quakers expelled him from at least four meetings. He kept showing up.

His masterpiece came at the 1738 Burlington meeting. Lay arrived in a military overcoat concealing a hollowed-out book filled with a bladder of pokeberry juice. He delivered a speech, drew a sword, and plunged it into the book. Red liquid sprayed across the white clothing of every slaveholder in range. Several people fainted.

The one printer who'd published his manifesto the year before was Benjamin Franklin. At the time, Franklin personally owned enslaved people.

By the time Franklin died in 1790, he was president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.

Lay died in 1759. He never found out.