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.
Birkbeck was born at Settle, 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 1,500 acres (6.1 km2) at Wanborough, Surrey, where he joined others in England and France who were experimenting with crossbreeding Merino sheep. On April 24, 1794, Birkbeck married Prudence Bush, daughter of Richard and Prudence Bush of Wandsworth, Surrey. After ten years of marriage, Prudence died from the complications of childbirth on October 25, 1804, leaving her husband with seven children. Birkbeck remained a widower for the rest of his life.
In 1814, accompanied by his friend and fellow Merino sheep breeder, George Flower, Birkbeck traveled in recently defeated France. His Notes on a Journey through France (1814) revealed a good-tempered, fair-minded observer, well grounded in science and the humanities. A radical in both politics and religion, Birkbeck was increasingly annoyed at being taxed by a government that denied him a vote because of his religion and that also required him to be tithed by a church he did not believe in and held in contempt. In London, Birkbeck met Edward Coles, President James Madison's secretary who had been sent on a diplomatic mission to Europe. Coles had recently travelled into what was then the newly formed Illinois Territory, and extolled its virtues as well as proclaimed his intent to move there. In early 1817, with a party consisting chiefly of his children and wards, Birkbeck emigrated to the United States. George Flower had emigrated first, leaving his wife and two young sons in England in 1816, and had spent most of the previous winter with former President Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, as well as with Coles' family in Virginia. Flower, Birkbeck and their fellow English idealists jointly headed west in search of land on which to settle and try to establish a utopian community.
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