Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter and industrialist born at Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent. He had very high standards of workmanship and a keen interest in scientific advancements. He became well respected and his customers embraced the rich and famous, including royalty. He was also a keen abolitionist.
Because he was a respected business man, people listened to his views and he was able to convince friends and colleagues of the evils of the Slave Trade. He also had the money to provide financial assistance. From 1787, he actively participated in this cause, becoming a member of one of the abolition committees. His interest possibly developed through his friendship with Thomas Bentley, his business partner, and his association with Thomas Clarkson.
He read widely on the subject and became a shareholder in the Sierra Leone Company, (which provided a colony for the habitation of enslaved people who had been made free). On the 9th January 1792, Clarkson suggested that he might consider helping to distribute a pamphlet compiled by William Fox, calling for a sugar boycott. A man of ideas, Wedgwood wrote back suggesting the pamphlet would have more impact if the society's emblem (which showed an enslaved person in chains, kneeling, with his hands lifted up to heaven) was included in the front. The emblem's motto read: "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" He proposed to have a woodcut made at his own expense and ordered 2000 more pamphlets.
Using his knowledge of the pottery trade, Wedgwood also had the design reproduced in a porcelain cameo. He donated hundreds of these to the Society for distribution. It became the most famous image of the campaign. The emblem was worn by fashionable ladies as a brooch or hair piece and, as Thomas Clarkson said, was the first time that "fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen ... promoting the cause of justice, humanity and freedom." Josiah Wedgwood also conversed with William Wilberforce but did not see the end of the Slave Trade, as he died on 3rd January, 1795.
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Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was born in Essex in 1786. He was privately educated and went to Trinty College, Dublin. He became a close friend of Joseph Gurney after his mother (a Quaker) introduced him to the Norfolk based family.
He started to attend Quaker meetings with the Gurney family and married Joseph's sister, Hannah, in 1807. He became a partner in a brewing company and became involved in several campaigns for social reform. Another of Joseph's sisters was Elizabeth Fry and Buxton became involved in her campaign for prison reform.
In 1818, Buxton was elected MP for Weymouth, a position he held until 1837. He was a strong advocate for the abolition of slavery in the British Colonies. In 1823, he formed the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade, the committee that co-ordinated the campaign for total abolition. In 1824, he succeeded William Wilberforce as head of the anti-slavery party in Parliament, continuing the struggle until the Slavery Abolition Act, in 1833, freed all enslaved people in the British Empire.
In 1838, Buxton published The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy. In this book, he told the British government to make treaties with rulers in Africa. An expedition was sent in 1841 to put the plan into action but it failed, mainly because of the large number of deaths among the expedition members from yellow fever and malaria.
You can read an account of this expedition in White Dreams, Black Africa: Antislavery Expedition to the Niger, 1841-42 by Howard Temperley, 1991.
Thomas Fowell Buxton was made a Baron in 1840 and is famous for saying. "With Ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable."