Morris Birkbeck
Morris Birkbeck (January 23, 1764 – June 4, 1825) was an English agricultural innovator, author/publicist, anti-slavery campaigner and early 19th-century pioneer in southern Illinois, in the United States. With George Flower he founded the English Settlement and the town of Albion, Illinois, and served briefly as the Secretary of State of Illinois. Early years Birkbeck was born at Settle, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, the son of an influential Quaker also named Morris Birkbeck, and his wife Hannah Bradford. He is of the same Birkbeck family as George Birkbeck (1776-1841), doctor, educationalist, philanthropist, reformer, and founder of Birkbeck College, London, and the Mechanics' Institutes; and of John Birkbeck (1817-1890), a Yorkshire banker, alpinist, and pioneer potholer. By 1794, as leaseholder, Birkbeck was farming an estate of at Wanborough, Surrey, where he joined others in England and France who were experimenting with crossbreeding Merino sheep. On April ...
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Anti-slavery
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people. The British abolitionist movement started in the late 18th century when English and American Quakers began to question the morality of slavery. James Oglethorpe was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery, banning it in the Province of Georgia on humanitarian grounds, and arguing against it in Parliament, and eventually encouraging his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause. Soon after Oglethorpe's death in 1785, Sharp and More united with William Wilberforce and others in forming the Clapham Sect. The Somersett case in 1772, in which a fugitive slave was freed with the judgement that slavery did not exist under English common law, helped launch the British movement to abolish slaver ...
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