Born in England, probably at Portsea where he was baptised in May 1787,[1] he was orphaned at an early age and brought up by paternal relatives in Caithness who provided him with ‘that excellent educational and religious training which is given to the children of the middle and higher classes in Scotland’.

[7] Their administrative efficiency was evidenced in 1838 when more than 100,000 signatures were collected for the Society's petition demanding an end to the ‘apprenticeship’ of freed slaves in the West Indies — a powerful response by the Empire's second city to Lord Melbourne’s negative stance at a meeting with Murray and other Glasgow delegates a few months earlier.

He ‘used more than one ream of paper for manuscripts upon the great cause which he seemed born to carry out’, supplying information and argument to other abolitionist organisations, arranging speaking engagements, preparing addresses and resolutions, and bombarding political leaders at home and abroad with reasoned protests and carefully formulated proposals.

[14] Among others from the American movement on familiar terms with Murray was Frederick Douglass, who described him as ‘the firm, the untiring, the devoted friend of the slave’ and captured the force of Murray's commitment when recalling the campaign for the Free Church of Scotland to return American slaveowners’ donations: ‘While he lived that Church obtained no repose.’[15] From 1841 onwards the Glasgow Emancipation Society became increasingly militant not only in the abolitionist interest but across a range of issues dear to its officers, including international peace, constitutional reform, and temperance.

[16] On returning from the West Indies he had set up as a spirit merchant but, becoming convinced of the evil of strong liquor, he gave up the trade and donated his stock to Glasgow Royal Infirmary.

[17] Even as early as 1841 the wide-ranging radicalism of his views was observed by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers: ‘If there is a revolution in Scotland within twenty years, the name of John Murray will not be undistinguished in its history.’[18] Shortly after the death of the American statesman Henry Clay in 1852, James McCune Smith compared the legacy of Clay's forty years at the heart of American public life with the enduring achievements of John Murray.

The elder boy, James Oswald Murray (1823–70), contributed verses in support of the abolitionist cause to various publications,[25] and arranged the printing of the French translation of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative in 1847, but was so impregnated with ‘the Garrison spirit’ that Elihu Burritt had to abandon plans to involve him in his peace campaign.