After unsuccessful candidatures at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1858 and Leicester in 1861 , he was elected unopposed as a Liberal MP for Leicester in February 1862 . At his election , when his programme included abolition of church rates and separation of church and state , he was attacked as ‘ anti-everything ’ . He was a member of the Emancipation Society , founded in 1862 to promote the cause of the northern states in the American Civil War . He was a vice-president and one of the few middle-class supporters of the Reform League , constituted early in 1865 to campaign for manhood suffrage and the ballot , and appeared on league platforms during the parliamentary reform crisis of 1866 – 7 . He attempted to achieve unity with the National Reform Union , which sought the more limited aim of household suffrage . With John Stuart Mill he was a parliamentary spokesman for the Jamaica Committee , formed in response to Edward John Eyre 's brutal suppression of riots in Jamaica during the Morant Bay rebellion
Morant Bay rebellion
Morant Bay rebellion
Peter Alfred Taylor