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.
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.
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.
Birkbeck and his family rejoined Flower and some fellow English idealists, and together they headed west in search of land on which to settle and try to establish a utopian community free of the repression and restraints of their homeland.
Birkbeck and Flower hoped to establish a new community in the sparsely-settled Wabash River Valley where English men and women would be able to escape the economic and political tyranny they believed England had become.
An account of the party's emigration travel experiences, with vague references to their plans for establishing a wilderness sanctuary, it became immensely popular, with its promise of improving the lives of downtrodden working and middle-class Europeans.
The radical nature of the anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic vision presented in Birkbeck's writings frightened Britain's conservative establishment, even as it excited thousands to dream of following him to the Illinois prairies.
[7] She was the orphaned niece of John Towill Rutt (an English political activist, social reformer, nonconformist man of letters, and Joseph Priestley's biographer).
[13] In 1823, Birkbeck, through newspaper articles under the pen name "Jonathan Freeman," helped to consolidate the antislavery forces in Illinois and ensure that it remained a free state.
He had been travelling with his twenty-three-year-old son Bradford Birkbeck, as well as Judge James O. Wattles and other 'English Prairie' residents, who were interested in Owen's newly proposed utopian community at New Harmony.
Pioneering American journalist and early women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller lauded Birkbeck in her book Summer on the Lakes (1844), praising him for his generous communal vision, and recounting the sad circumstances of his death.
In 1852 he emigrated with his family to the British colony of New South Wales (Australia), to become the inaugural Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at the newly opened Sydney University.
After several years of mining management in Mexico, Bradford and Charles Birkbeck also emigrated to Australia, to raise sheep at their pioneer settlement at Rockhampton, in Queensland.