1. Joseph Gerrald was a political reformer, one of the "Scottish Martyrs".
21 Facts About Joseph Gerrald
1. 2.
Joseph Gerrald worked with the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information and wrote an influential letter, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin.
3.
Joseph Gerrald was arrested for his radical views and convicted of sedition in 1794.
4.
In 1780, Joseph Gerrald moved back to the West Indies to tend to matters of the family fortune.
5.
Joseph Gerrald's wife died soon after the birth of the second child and he was left to raise two young children without much money.
6.
Joseph Gerrald then decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he was a lawyer for several years.
7.
Joseph Gerrald returned to London in 1788, but in 1789 he moved to Bath due to his declining health.
8.
Joseph Gerrald became popular among radical reform groups due to his eloquence and pleasant demeanor.
9.
Joseph Gerrald was mostly concerned with parliamentary reform and was a large proponent of a national convention, alongside Thomas Paine.
10.
Joseph Gerrald drew his ideas from the successful precedent of the Saxons' Convention, and outlined his plans in his pamphlet, A Convention the Only Means of Saving Us from Ruin.
11.
Joseph Gerrald believed that this was important because of the eruption of war between England and France, caused by the majority British opposition to French Revolution.
12.
On this front, Joseph Gerrald uses the young United States, an example showing that there exists a country that doesn't go to war unless its citizens decide to.
13.
Joseph Gerrald found civic involvement necessary because the wars themselves were not constructive.
14.
Joseph Gerrald suggests that negotiations could have made a larger impact on the people because the outcomes of the wars left civilians in a worse state than they had started with.
15.
Joseph Gerrald argues that because the deputies are elected with the specific purpose of speaking for their constituents, the people will have more political liberty while politics will have less corruption.
16.
Joseph Gerrald was then in a poor state of health suffering from tuberculosis and was allowed to buy a small house and garden in which he lived.
17.
Joseph Gerrald was a man sustained by his belief in the rights of mankind.
18.
Joseph Gerrald was buried in the plot of land he had bought at Farm Cove.
19.
Joseph Gerrald's associates included Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving and Maurice Margarot.
20.
Joseph Gerrald's name appears on the Political Martyrs' Monument on Calton Hill at Edinburgh and a similar monument at Nunhead Cemetery in London.
21.
Gerrald's son Joseph was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1800 at the age of 17.