Joseph Sturge - International Anti-slavery Campaign

International Anti-slavery Campaign

In 1837, keen to act independently of the consensus in the Anti-Slavery Society, Sturge founded the Central Negro Emancipation Committee. More significantly, in 1839, one year after abolition in the British dominions (a time when many members of the Anti-Slavery Society considered their work to be completed), Sturge led a small group to found a new Anti-Slavery Society. They named it the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, based on the ambitious objective of achieving emancipation and an end to slavery worldwide. This society continues today as Anti-Slavery International; its work is far from achieved since slavery exists on a large scale in many countries, albeit no longer legally.

In the 19th century, the Society's first major activity was to organise the first international conference, as well as the first devoted to abolition. It was known as the World's Anti-Slavery Conference and took place in June 1840 in London. Others were held in 1843 (Brussels) and 1849 (Paris). The convention was held at the Freemasons Hall on 12 June 1840. It attracted delegates from Europe, North America, and Caribbean countries, as well as the British dominions of Australia and Ireland, though no delegates from Africa attended. It included African-Caribbean delegates from Haiti and Jamaica (then representing Britain), women activists from the United States, and many Nonconformists.

Commissioned by the society and its "moral radicals", a great painting of the event was completed. It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London to this day. The conference's political significance lay in the fact-finding groups it set up to report about slavery worldwide. It also created studied links between British investment and business and overseas slavery.

The conference was historically notable within the women's suffrage movement due to delegates' having excluded women's participation just prior to its opening. Activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were galvanised to organise a United States movement advocating woman's rights. Stanton, on her honeymoon at the time, and Mott were active in the US anti-slavery movement. The issue of women's participation provoked the split between followers of Garrison of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Lewis Tappan's American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The latter was ideologically congruent with Sturge's English counterpart.

In 1841 Sturge travelled in the United States with the poet John Greenleaf Whittier to examine the slavery question there. He published his findings to promote American abolition. In 1845, Sturge visited Nottingham as he was local parliamentary candidate. There he visited a Sunday School run by Samuel Fox. The idea of a school that taught not only scripture, but also basic skills such as reading and writing was taken up by Sturge. Sturge opened a similar school in about 1845.