1. Joseph Sturge was an English Quaker, abolitionist and activist.
34 Facts About Joseph Sturge
1. 2.
Joseph Sturge founded the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.
3.
Joseph Sturge worked throughout his life in Radical political actions supporting pacifism, working-class rights, and the universal emancipation of slaves.
4.
In Jamaica, Sturge helped found Free Villages with the Baptists, to provide living quarters for freed slaves; one was named Sturge Town in his memory.
5.
Joseph Sturge's brothers included John Sturge, who became a manufacturer in Birmingham, and Edmund Sturge.
6.
The abolitionist and pacifist Sophia Joseph Sturge was his sister, and Charles Gilpin was a nephew.
7.
Joseph Sturge then farmed with his father, and on his own account.
8.
Joseph Sturge opposed the building of the Birmingham Town Hall, to be used for performances, because of a conscientious objection to religious oratorios.
9.
Joseph Sturge became interested in the island of Jamaica and the conditions of its enslaved workers.
10.
Joseph Sturge visited it several times and witnessed firsthand the horrors of slavery, as well as the abuses under an apprenticeship system designed to control the labour of all former slaves above the age of six for 12 years.
11.
Joseph Sturge worked for emancipation and abolition with African-Caribbean and English Baptists.
12.
In 1838, after full emancipation was authorised, Joseph Sturge laid the foundation stone to the "Emancipation School Rooms" in Birmingham.
13.
Joseph Sturge was supported by William Allen, Lord Brougham, and others.
14.
In 1834 Joseph Sturge sailed to the West Indies to study apprenticeship as defined by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
15.
Joseph Sturge intended to open it to criticism as an intermediate stage en route to emancipation.
16.
Joseph Sturge travelled throughout the West Indies and talked directly to apprentices, proprietors, and others directly involved.
17.
Joseph Sturge bought two plantations on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, Olveston, and Elberton to demonstrate that slavery was unnecessary.
18.
In 1837, keen to act independently of the consensus in the Anti-Slavery Society, Joseph Sturge founded the Central Negro Emancipation Committee.
19.
In 1841 Joseph Sturge travelled in the United States with the poet John Greenleaf Whittier to examine the slavery question there.
20.
Joseph Sturge ended up organising both, after the death of Nun Morgan Harry.
21.
Joseph Sturge's movement was based squarely on the middle classes.
22.
Joseph Sturge envisaged a platform that could unite the League and the Chartist movement.
23.
Joseph Sturge had a measure of further Chartist and nonconformist support, but by the end of the year the Chartist leaders William Lovett and Feargus O'Connor had swung against him.
24.
Joseph Sturge was defeated by John Walter, the proprietor of The Times.
25.
The idea of teaching not only scripture, but basic skills such as reading and writing, was taken up by Joseph Sturge, who opened a similar school around 1845.
26.
Joseph Sturge then contested Birmingham in 1844 as a Chartist candidate, in a by-election caused by the death of Joshua Scholefield.
27.
Joseph Sturge was strongly supported at the election hustings, split the liberal vote, but ultimately came bottom of the poll: Richard Spooner [Cons] 2095, William Scholefield [Lib] 1735 and Sturge [Chartist] 346.
28.
Joseph Sturge took up the cause of peace and arbitration being pioneered by Henry Richard.
29.
Joseph Sturge was instrumental in the founding of the Morning Star in 1855 as a newspaper through which to promote the Peace Society and his other social ideas.
30.
On this trip Joseph Sturge bought Robert Wilhelm Ekman's painting Sunday Morning in a Farmhouse, which was shown in the exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1858.
31.
Joseph Sturge married, first, in 1834, Eliza Cropper, sister of John Cropper.
32.
Joseph Sturge was a cousin of whaling shipowner, industrialist and philanthropist Thomas Sturge.
33.
Joseph Sturge died suddenly at his home on Wheeley's Road, in Edgbaston, Birmingham, on 14 May 1859 of heart disease.
34.
Joseph Sturge was buried in the graveyard at the Friends Meeting House, in Birmingham, England.