The Anti-Persecution Union was a British organisation established by the freethinkers George Jacob Holyoake and Emma Martin in 1842, to aid in defending individuals accused of blasphemy and blasphemous libel.
[3] Following the prosecution of Charles Southwell, and building on the "Committee for the Protection of Mr. Southwell" established for him,[4] The Oracle of Reason encouraged its readers to assist in the formation of a Union:[5]whose great and glorious objects shall be to abolish all law or legal practice which shackles expression of opinion, and to protect and indemnify all, or whatever persuasion, whether Jew, Christian, Infidel, Atheist, or other denomination in danger of similar tyrannies.David Nash has noted that, despite the inclusion of all denominations and none, the Union was "clearly aimed at freethinkers".
[6] By the Union's first meeting, at the radical John Street Institution on Tottenham Court Road, London, the prosecutions of Southwell, Holyoake, and George and Harriet Adams were discussed.
It was, Barbara Taylor has suggested, in part her anger at this absence of support that she and Holyoake formed the Union.
[12] An appeal in The Oracle of Reason stated that the Union was:[13]made up of individual professors of almost every kind of opinion - political, religious, and irreligious... [and] formed for the sole purpose of setting free the tongue and the press; therefore, all who are persecuted for expressing, or otherwise publishing their opinions, will have a legitimate claim to its support.In February 1844, a Leicester Committee of the Anti-Persecution Union was formed.