JOSEPH STURGE

                                                                                           Joseph Sturge (1793-1859)

Joseph Sturge was a Birmingham businessman and one of the 'new men' who advanced a moral revolution that would reshape the values of early Victorian Britain.  By the mid-1830's he and his circle of associates were calling themselves the Moral Radical Party, and over the next twenty years they played a significant role in several of the best-known reform movements of the day, including the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.  Although his career as a social activist was probably marked by more failures than triumphs, Sturge's substantial contribution to the  anti-slavery movement was recognized when the Rev. William Knibb erected a memorial to the liberation of Jamaican slaves, at the Falmouth Baptist chapel in Jamaica, with relief profiles of  William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and Joseph Sturge.   There is also a statue of Sturge in Birmingham, England and of course his name proudly lives on in Sturge Town, Jamaica.

Sturge, the consummate radical, would cheerfully admit that he only felt comfortable in public life when he was in a minority and was not accountable to a diverse constituency of opinion.  The satisfaction he derived from public life would often come, not from the successful implementation of specific proposals, but from the consistency with which he upheld his moral values.

Restored Joseph Sturge Monument in Birrmingham England.
Photograph courtesy of Peter Sturge

Joseph Sturge was born on August 2, 1793 in the parish of Elberton near the village of Olveston about nine miles north of Bristol, England.  Joseph was the second of six sons and the fourth of twelve children.  The Sturges lived in dignified comfort, making a nice living buying sheep and cattle for fattening and resale.  The family were Quakers and all his life Joseph's speech, clothing and many of his fundamental attitudes followed Quaker tradition.  When, in 1812, he was drafted into the militia he refused either to serve or to pay the ten pound fine.  As a result two ewes and six lambs were confiscated from the farm.  He also refused to pay the taxes used to support the Church of England.  In later years, as a grain merchant, he would become a teetotaler and refused to supply grains to distillers or malt to brewers or to rent his warehouse space to wine and spirit merchants.

By the age of seven Joseph had already earned a reputation as a person prepared to work very hard.  With the exception of four years at school he worked on the family farm until about age twenty-one.   Then, in 1814 he accepted the offer of a partnership in the grain trading business with fellow Quaker Henry Cotterel.  The family had been farming in the Bristol area for two centuries and this career change came as 'a considerable tryal' to his father.  Young Joseph however would be liberated to experience a whole new world.  In July he arrived in Bewdley, a port on the Severn River just south of Birmingham, to set up operations for the new company.  His sister Sophia and then his brother Charles moved to Bewdley and by 1816 they were describing themselves as well settled.  With two short breaks Joseph and Sophia would live together until her death in 1845.  Sophia never envisaged marriage.  Severely ill from early childhood, by age twenty-five she was describing herself as  'debilitated  by disease and medicine'.  She was her brother's housekeeper, commercial bookkeeper, secretary and confidante.  Although Joseph would marry twice in middle age, Sophia was certainly the most important woman in his life.  Being a 'surrogate wife to a bachelor brother' was a status that attracted less comment than it might today.

Soon after his arrival in Bewdley, Sturge penned a paper entitled 'A Proposed Plan of Life Which I Hope to Pursue'.  The plan divided his time and income between business, family, religion and charitable commitments.  Household expenses were not to go beyond 250 pounds per year and after the needs of the business were satisfied, any income was to be used for good causes.  Although the plan would break down in the face of business failures at Bewdley, Sturge persisted with the general strategy, and for several years cut domestic expenditures to one hundred pounds per year.

In 1816 the partnership badly misjudged the grain markets and although the firm's fortunes recovered somewhat, by 1821 Sturge had lost most of his capital.  Seeing only one way out of his difficulties he left the remnants of the business to be managed his brother Charles and moved to Birmingham for a fresh start in 1822.  His losses had been so severe that for a time he was forced to take lodgings instead of maintaining his own household.  The appeal of Birmingham to Sturge was clear, it was a rapidly expanding urban and industrial centre where attitudes to business and money making prompted observers to think of the United States rather than Britain.

Sophia and Charles rejoined Joseph in Birmingham at a house in Monument Lane and later accompanied him to the fashionable suburb of Edgbaston.  Later he would build Southfield on Wheeley's Road in Edgbaston for Sophia and other brothers and sisters who followed them to Birmingham.  Soon brothers John and Edmond set up a chemical company in Birmingham and settled as neighbours in Edgbaston. Beginning with a wharf warehouse and a one room office by 1830 the new enterprise had grown to a value of 22,000 pounds.  The firm, J & C Sturge, would continue to grow and would eventually became a major importer of grains from Ireland, the Baltic and the Black Sea.  The Sturge business empire would also extend into the expanding Midland's transportation system with investments in railways and canals.  The company would grow to employ as many as eighty people and at annual company gatherings Sturge would present new employees with bookcases and over the years they were given books to build up a personal library.  In 1825 Sturge helped establish a Mechanics Institute where working men could enroll for lectures relevant to their trades and enjoy access to a reading room and facilities for scientific demonstrations.

Meanwhile, after the triumph of abolishing the slave trade in 1807, the anti-slavery movement was now in an advanced state of decline,  The West Indian planters and their allies were dominate in Parliament and had significant influence in every government Ministry.  William Wilberforce, the longtime supporter of the anti-slavery movement in Parliament, confined himself to trying to ameliorate the slaves' conditions and discouraging any advocacy for immediate emancipation.  He reckoned that completely banning the use of the whip was going too far, proposing instead that slaves only be flogged at night, after the day's work was done.  By 1823 the anti-slavery movement had changed its name to 'The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Empire', marking a low point for the movement.

Sturge would start his involvement with the movement by reactivating the sugar boycott that had first been used in the 1790's.  Between 1824 and 1829 the boycott was recast and linked to the cry for immediate emancipation and taken to the nation's doorsteps by women abolitionists,  lead by Quakeress Elizabeth Heyrick.  Sophia Sturge personally visited three thousand households.  Although the boycott was only a modest success, it helped build a network of supporters that would be very important in the coming years. The assertive Heyrick declared that parliamentary manoeuvres for gradual emancipation were: 'the very masterpiece of satanic policy'.  There was nothing gradual about Elizabeth!  She would build a network of seventy women's anti-slavery societies across Britain.  It was as if she had given women permission to speak and for a time in the 1820's women were in the forefront of the anti-slavery movement.

By 1830, with financial support  from Sturge, the women's society was refusing to send funds to the London leadership until they put to death 'gradualism'.  By the following year, with funding from Sturge and several other Quakers of means, the militants set up the Agency Committee which financed a team of paid lecturers, or Agents, who toured the country giving speeches.  Joseph was now  spending much of his time coordinating the work of the Agency Committee in the Midlands, helping to breathe new life into the movement and also making extended visits to London.  The recently passed Reform Act had redistributed seats in the House of Commons and Sturge was canvassing candidates for their support for immediate emancipation.  Such lobbying was viewed by the more traditional MP's as a shocking invasion of their privacy.  The Agency Committee, which had now spawned 1200 antislavery groups across the country, estimated that they would have strong support in the new Parliament and that the power of the West Indian interests would be substantially reduced.  The planters replied as best they could to the Agents, but events conspired against them when a slave uprising broke out in western Jamaica during Christmas of 1831, the so called Baptist Riots.  If the planters had not over-reacted the conflict could have actually damaged the anti-slavery cause by reviving old fears of mayhem.  However, the planters restored their authority with arbitrary executions, harassment of the missionaries and encouraging mobs to destroy chapels supported by the slaves.  As a result, by the summer of 1832 the planters saw their support in Parliament start to evaporate.

Lord Stanley, the new Prime Minister, proposed a bill calling for emancipation on August 1, 1834, but requiring the former slaves to serve a twelve year 'Apprenticeship', working a 40 hour week with no pay.  Also, the planters would receive a 20 million pound gift, representing 40% of the national budget, as compensation for loss of property.  Thomas Buxton, Wilberforce's successor in Parliament supported the bill, but was able to negotiate a reduction of the Apprenticeship term to six years.  For Sturge and the Agency Committee this was simply slavery under a different name.

By 1834, with Charles running the day-to-day operations of the company, Joseph had time to think of marriage.  He chose one Eliza Cropper, the daughter of his closest associate in the anti-slavery movement.  Eliza was 'a stiff damsel' but well suited to Sturge: James Cropper had brought his children up as reformers and philanthropists.  On her wedding day the bride was thirty-three and Joseph was forty-one.  On February 14, 1835 Eliza gave birth to a daughter but four days later she and her child were dead.  The Sturges' had been married just ten months.  Joseph was sustained in his grief by Sophia's support.  For her, his decision to marry had been virtually a form of divorce that displaced her from the closest relationship and the only role she had known since 1816.  After Eliza's death she resumed her accustomed place, and while she lived Sturge seems never again to have considered marriage.

Meanwhile, reports from missionaries in the West Indies indicated the persistence of a significant degree of brutality under Apprenticeship.  Some Jamaican planters were using Apprenticeship as an excuse to withdraw many privileges that had been enjoyed under slavery, including exempting pregnant women from heavy field work.  Another damaging report was that treadmills were being constructed as punishment devices but were so badly built that they became instruments of torture.  The leaders of the London based successor to the Agency Committee made it clear that, although they saw the need for agitation against  Apprenticeship, they had no intention of allowing it to fall into the hands of a Radical like Sturge!   Meanwhile relations between Sturge and Buxton were steadily deteriorating.  Buxton tried to influence British policy within the  competing pressures of the political system.  As a provincial Quaker and businessman Sturge judged policies by a simpler standard of morality and he had little faith in government as an agent of change.  But, until 1837 it was Thomas Buxton who in effect led the anti-slavery movement and in April 1836 he persuaded Parliament to set up a Select Committee to inquire into the workings of Apprenticeship.  When the Committee reported in June that Apprenticeship was working well and should be kept in place, Sturge immediately resolved that the statements had to be disproved.  In typical Joseph Sturge style he would bypass official channels and go directly to the scene of the crime.  He now committed himself to visiting the West Indies and investigating the condition of the apprentices.  Three supporters, Thomas Harvey, William Lloyd and the Rev. John Scoble immediately agreed to join him.  The party set sail on November 17, 1836, taking twenty-seven days to reach Barbados.  Scoble and Lloyd went on to Guyana while Sturge and Harvey proceeded to Jamaica via Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica and Martinique.  The investigations would take seven months to complete.

Sturge clearly wanted an immediate end to: 'that crazy and criminal system of expiring despotism'.  In his investigations Sturge made it clear that he set little store in the opinions of officials including Sir Lionel Smith, the Governor of Jamaica.  Smith reported that Sturge had snubbed him: '... and placed himself in the hands of violent, disaffected people of colour, or certain partisan magistrates'.  Sturge would have a somewhat different assessment, declaring: “In every essential particular, it (Apprenticeship) has been violated by the planters with the connivance and even the active participation of the Executive government.”

Upon his return to Birmingham Sturge immediately began a hectic round of speaking engagements.  He was clearly energized by the crowds, some as large as five thousand people.  One observer saw Sturge so overcome by his emotions, when speaking of the conditions of the apprentices, that he was unable for some time to proceed with his address.   He and Thomas Harvey also published a book “The West Indies in 1837” documenting their findings in great detail.

Under increasing public pressure the Select Committee was re-convened, but Buxton refused to relent to what he viewed as a complete lack of caution and prudence on the part of the Moral Radicals.  This opposition did little to hinder Sturge.  He exploited the authority conferred on him by his first hand knowledge and called together a national meeting of supporters, at Exeter Hall in London, in late 1837.  The core leadership included four Baptist and Methodist Ministers, eight Quakers and eight provincial businessmen-no Anglicans and no members of the 'gentry'.  Many thought that with such a narrow base of support the lobby group was doomed to failure.  But, Sturge's strategy was not designed to give Parliament much opportunity to indulge their sense of hierarchy. He was determined to 'humble the Colonial Office and awaken the nation from its trance'.  His battering ram of public opinion would smash its way through Parliament, and at the same time William Knibb, from his base of operations in Falmouth, Jamaica would put pressure on the Jamaican planters. 

Sturge now proceeded to build up a crisis and await a failure of nerve in London and Spanish Town.  He got the campaign off the ground by publishing a twenty-four page pamphlet entitled 'The Narrative of James Williams'.  Williams was a young Jamaican apprentice, from St. Ann, whose freedom Sturge had purchased and whom he brought back to Britain as living proof of the horrors of Apprenticeship.  Williams' personnel account of Apprenticeship was a chillingly simple story of persistent brutalization by flogging, use of the treadmill and confinement in an estate dungeon.  The Colonial Office investigated and confirmed the worst of the allegations and Sturge soon had Agents at work throughout Britain, turning the scandal to good advantage.  They hunted down nearly every member of both Houses of Parliament seeking their support.

At the same time Sturge and his Baptist missionary allies were setting out to make Apprenticeship unworkable in Jamaica.  It was a potentially dangerous policy which carried an undeniable possibility of disorder, but there was nothing mealy mouthed about the Moral Radicals.  Sturge had established an important foundation for this stage of the campaign when he was in Jamaica.  Not only had he arrived with bundles of anti-slavery posters, but the way he pursued his inquiry convinced many people that he was the “Great Buckra”, who had come to terminate Apprenticeship.  Some apprentices were observed wearing broad-brimmed black 'Sturge Hats'.  While in Jamaica Sturge had also urged Rev. Knibb to instruct the members of his Baptist churches to immediately free their apprentices, and to do so with great fanfare and publicity. The objective was to create an expectation that the whole population would be set free on August 1, 1838.  Knibb would soon report to Sturge that the strategy had created a great deal of excitement and that Lord Sligo and some of the other more progressive planters were persuaded  to set their apprentices free and 'blow the system to atoms'.  Knibb even encouraged reports that a General Strike would take place in August 1838, a form of protest which would have required a remarkable degree of restraint at a time when the Baptist Riots were still very fresh in everyone's memory.

The Colonial Office had now concluded that the force of public opinion and the difficulty of maintaining tranquility in the slave colonies demanded action on the part of the planters.  So, on the urging of Governor Smith, the Jamaican Assembly passed the Jamaican Act on June 16^th abolishing Apprenticeship effective August 1, 1838.  In a letter to Sturge one former slave described the celebrations in his part of Jamaica, on that first Emancipation Day:

At daybreak the people assembled in the Moravian mission and hailed the free sun...Later in the day there was a universal scene of animation during a religious service which culminated in an address of praise for the labours of Joseph Sturge and  the other abolitionists.”

The celebrations continued throughout the island for five days.

In Birmingham the day opened with a Festival and a March through the city by 3500 children, mostly from the Baptist Sunday schools.  However, the guest list for a celebratory breakfast at City Hall did not include Thomas Buxton.  He would not have felt at ease with the 'new men' who had rallied to the anti-apprenticeship movement and were intent on celebrating a triumph over all their opponents. After emancipation Sturge's life was a ever-growing commitment to various reform movements and philanthropy, but no project would ever match his contribution to the anti-slavery movement.  But, slavery was still in place in the United States, in the Caribbean colonies of other European Powers, in most of South America and in different forms in Russia, in most of Africa and the Islamic world.

Although Sturge had never worked with anti-slavery pioneer Thomas Clarkson, who was now retired and well into his seventies, he had great admiration for the elder statesman of the movement.  At a conference in 1840 Sturge assisted a frail Clarkson to the stage and delivered an elequent tribute to Clarkson's achievements culminating in an emotional prayer.  Clarkson then addressed the conference, and there was not a dry eye in the crowd.

As Sturge approached his fiftieth year: 'he was apt to forget that his associates might not be favoured with equal physical strength'.  He was still also the centre of an extended family and he recruited them to his reforming ventures.  His commitments often took him away from Birmingham for extended periods of time and even Sophia was hard pressed to save him from a punishing workload.  Anti-slavery matters remained in the forefront of his focus. He would become the driving force behind the Jamaican Education Society which financed the  opening of schools in neglected parts of the island.  His saw education as the key to making  the former slave colonies truly self-governing.  He also helped finance the Baptists in their most ambitious plan so far, a scheme to create free villages.  Sturge had seen free villages in Antigua in 1836, where he observed they had filled a useful function as a reservoir of labour, enabling planters to employ many or few hands, according to their actual needs and resulting in a labour force that was far more productive than slaves could ever be.  Between 1838 and 1844 tens of thousands of former slaves settled in free villages in Jamaica.  It was also a time when the Baptist missionaries permanently altered the map of Jamaica by scattering the names of their benefactors over the newly established villages: Clarksonville, Sligoville, Clark Town, Wilberforce, Buxton and of course Sturge Town.

Upon Sophia's death in June 1845, Sturge contemplated leaving public life.  However, by year end he was back at work and in October of 1846 married Hannah Dickinson.  She was from the same Quaker community as Joseph and would dedicate her life to the many causes that her husband supported.  She was twenty-nine and he was fifty-four.  The couple would have five children, including a son Joseph and a daughter Sophia. 

By the 1850's West Indian planters were lobbying the Colonial Office to expedite the importation of Irish, Chinese and Indian indentured labourers, claiming that the former slaves were simply no longer interested in working on their plantations and they were seeing their properties reduced to ruin.  Sturge began to cast around for a decisive argument to refute the charges that the West Indian black population was indolent.  He decided on a bold counter-stroke: he would become a West Indian planter.  His intention was to support his claim that the West Indian economy was declining, not because of the sloth of the former slaves, but because of the incompetence of the absentee landlords.  He purchased a sugar estate of eleven hundred acres in Montserrat, naming it Elberton, after his birthplace.  In the same year his brother Edmund also purchased a nearby estate and named it Olveston, after the village where the family had farmed near Bristol.  Lime orchards were planted and gave rise to the Montserrat line of lime juices and lime juice concentrates, described a being: 'Cool, Satisfying, and Thirst Quenching'. The estates also shipped citric acid to the family's Birmingham chemical works.  Thus, when Sturge made public statements on West Indian matters during the last two years of his life he could open with the words: 'Speaking as a planter...', enabling him to cite his own experience as proof that there was no need to recruit 'coolie labour'.  He would observe that there was no difficulty in finding sufficient labour, if the resident labouring population was treated judiciously and kindly.

By early 1859 Joseph's health was starting to fail, he was having difficulty walking and giving speeches.  However, true to form no public matter seemed to be too large or too small to merit his attention; the day before his death he approached John Cadbury, of chocolate fame, to see if a horse trough could be installed on the boundary between Birmingham and Edgbaston.  He died on May 14, 1859.  His funeral had no parallel in Birmingham history:  three hundred gentlemen headed by the mayor and followed by sixty carriages processed through the town.  Every segment of society was well represented. 

Hannah, along with Joseph's brothers Charles and Edmond sustained his good causes for another thirty years.  For a time Edmond lived in Montserrat to direct the affairs of the Montserrat Lime Juice Company.  Son Joseph would later enter the family business and was active in many of his father's projects, especially the Montserrat Company where he served as managing director from 1875 to 1922.  The Sturge's daughter, Sophia, would be active in the peace movement until her passing in 1936.

Joseph Sturge's statue stands today at Five Ways Road, on the boundary of Birmingham and Edgbaston.  Dressed in a lapel-less coat of the 'plain Quaker', hand on Bible he commends the message: 'Charity, Peace and Temperance'.   In 1925 his statue was moved from the middle of the Five Way corner to an adjacent area and a plate was added with the inscription: “He laboured to bring freedom to the negro slaves, the vote to British workmen and the promise of peace to a war-worn world”

REFERENCES:

Hochschild, Adam “Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves” ( Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston New York, 2005)

Temperley, Howard “British Antislavery 1833-1870 (University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1972)

Tyrrell, Alex “Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party” (Christopher Helm Ltd, London, 1987