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 24, 1794, Birkbeck married Prudence Bush, daughter of Richard and Prudence Bush of Wandsworth, Surrey. After ten years of marriage, on October 25, 1804, Prudence died from the complications of childbirth, leaving her husband with seven young children. Birkbeck remained a widower for the rest of his life. In 1814, accompanied by his friend and fellow Merino sheep breeder George Flower (1788-1862), son of Richard 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 Quaker faith, but that also required him to be tithed by a church he did not belong to, and in fact held in contempt.