William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was the grandson of a British merchant who had made his fortune trading with the Baltic nations. William's father died when William was nine, and his temporarily overwhelmed mother sent him to live with an aunt and uncle who were Methodists.
At age 17, William was sent to study at Cambridge, and the deaths of his grandfather and uncle in the next couple of years left him independently wealthy while still a teenager. In those days, wealthy gentlemen students pursued cards, drinking and theater more avidly than studies, and young Wilberforce was no exception. He excelled socially, however, and became friends with William Pitt, the younger, who was to become prime minister just a few years later (at age 24!) and who talked Wilberforce into a career in politics.
Wilberforce stood for parliament at age 20, while still at Cambridge, and obtained his seat, as was the custom, by spending a princely sum of money buying votes. His political career did not impinge on his primary activities of cards, drinking and socializing in circles appropriate to a man of his standing. The influential salon hostess Germaine de Staël called Wilberforce “the wittiest man in England,” and he must have had a fine singing voice, as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, remarked that the Prince of Wales would go anywhere to hear Wilberforce sing.
In 1785, while on a tour of the European continent, Wilberforce read, “The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul” by a leading non-conformist minister, Philip Doddridge. He resolved to give his life to Jesus Christ. He began to rise early in the morning to pray and study the Bible, and he began keeping a journal.
The upper classes of Wilberforce's England considered religious fervor a faux pas, and stigmatized it. Wilberforce has serious doubts as to whether he should even continue in public life, and sought advice from John Newton, a former slaver and the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Both Newton and William Pitt advised Wilberforce to remain in parliament and allow his religious convictions to inform his legislative work.
One of the many things Wilberforce accomplished was to mainstream the view that Christians should “vote their values” and seek to improve the society around them. One of his best-remembered quotes was, “A private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all.” During the battle for abolition, one of Wilberforce’s opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce sought enshrine his Christian values in legislation: “Things have come to a pretty pass,” thundered Melbourne, “when one should permit one’s religion to invade public life.” A pretty pass, indeed. How beautiful that pass was only became obvious near the end of Wilberforce’s long career.
In the previous article, we saw how slavery gradually withered away in Christendom and was replaced by the feudal system. Unfortunately, a few centuries later the nations of Christendom became involved with slavery in the “New World.” It soon became apparent to the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and Dutch colonizers of the Americas and Caribbean islands (or “West Indies”) that the best opportunity for gain came from growing sugar cane and other warm weather crops not grown in Europe. It was believed that Africans would be best suited to the back-breaking labor necessary to operate the plantations, and more resistant to the tropical diseases that took a heavy toll on Europeans.
Slavery was well established in Africa; the Islamic ummah had been buying African slaves for several centuries. Europeans found many places in West Africa where they could purchase slaves from African slave-dealers. A triangular trade route developed in which British ships took manufactured goods from Britain to Africa to be traded for slaves, then delivered the slaves from Africa to the West Indies for sale to plantation owners—the infamous “middle passage” of the triangular route—and finally delivered sugar, rum, molasses, and tobacco from the Americas and West Indies to Europe. This terrible triangular traffic was to continue for centuries.
By the late 18th Century, the stark inhumanity of the trans-Atlantic slave traffic was widely known. In 1787, many of the drafters of the United States Constitution wanted to outlaw the traffic, but southern slave-holding interests negotiated a compromise which postponed any ban for at least 20 years, until 1808. This compromise became Article 1, section 9, of the constitution. On March 2, 1807, congress passed a bill, which was signed into law the next day by President Thomas Jefferson, forbidding the importation of slaves into the United States, effective January 1, 1808, the first constitutionally permissible date. The disdain for the slave traffic was so great, however, that by 1808 every state except South Carolina had already banned the importation of slaves.
The year 1787, the year of America’s constitutional convention, also marks the beginning of William Wilberforce's campaign to outlaw the slave traffic in the British Empire. He wrote in his journal, “God almighty has set before me . . . the suppression of the slave trade.”
Wilberforce met with Thomas Clarkson, a Christian abolitionist who had been studying and researching the slave trade for many years, and who was to provide the witnesses and other evidence supporting Wilberforce's legislative efforts. Wilberforce met with the newly formed “Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” a group of Quakers and abolitionist Anglicans. He met with Prime Minister William Pitt and future Prime Minister William Grenville, and both encouraged him to introduce a bill banning the slave trade.
In 1788, however, Wilberforce became seriously ill and had to leave London to convalesce at Bath. During his absence, Pitt ordered the privy council to investigate the slave trade and report to parliament. In 1789, a recovered Wilberforce gave his first major speech against the slave trade, and introduced his first anti-slave trade bill. Opponents sidelined the bill with two years of absurdly drawn out hearings after which the bill was defeated, 163 to 88.
Wilberforce would annually re-introduce the anti-slave trade bill every year through 1799. In 1793, his measure failed by only 8 votes, but the radical phase of the French Revolution and war between Britain and France put the cause on the back burner. In 1796, the measure failed by only 4 votes; at least six abolitionist members chose that day to see a new Italian comic opera playing in London. Wilberforce wrote in his diary: “Enough at the Opera to have carried it. I am permanently hurt about the Slave Trade.”
William's lack of success in ending the slave trade was ameliorated by happiness in his personal life. In 1797, Wilberforce was introduced to Barbara Ann Spooner; was instantly infatuated, and proposed marriage only 8 days later. The couple were married six weeks later, and had six children over the next 10 years.
In 1804, Wilberforce introduced his bill for the first time since 1799; this time it passed the House of Commons but died in the House of Lords, as Wilberforce mistakenly trusted men in the upper chamber who were not as committed to the cause as he was.
Thanks to constant, unflagging efforts of Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and many other Christian activists, the slave trade was a prominent issue in the Parliamentary election of 1806, which returned a good number of abolitionists to the House of Commons. In 1807, Lord Grenville introduced the anti-slave trade bill, it again passed the House of Commons, and Grenville guided it through the House of Lords, which approved it and returned it to Commons for final passage. On February 23, 1807, after many members of parliament rose to speak and salute Wilberforce's tireless, twenty-year effort to ban the slave trade, the bill passed overwhelmingly, 283 to 16. Wilberforce's face streamed with tears as the final tally was taken.
After at last winning his two-decades-long fight to ban the slave traffic, Wilberforce did not immediately call for abolition of slavery, feeling that the slaves were ill-prepared to fend for themselves. In 1816, however, Wilberforce began to denounce slavery itself. In 1823, Wilberforce at last lent his considerable prestige to the cause of total abolition of slavery within the British Empire. He published a tract entitled, “Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies.”
In June 1824, Wilberforce gave his last speech in Parliament, calling for the abolition of slavery. Declining health forced his resignation from Parliament in 1825, although he continued to be active in the anti-slavery movement.
In his final years, financial reverses forced him to sell his homes; he and Barbara live with their second and later third son. Even during his final decline, he kept up with the progress of the abolition movement.
On July 26, 1833, Wilberforce received word that the great dream of his political life was at last coming to pass; the commons had just passed the bill abolishing slavery in the British Empire; West Indian planters would be compensated at about half the market value of their slaves. “Thank God,” he rejoiced, “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery.” He died not three full days later, at 3:00 a.m. on July 29, 1833.
He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near his good friend, William Pitt. On his tomb it is written:
In an age and country fertile in Great and Good men
He was among the foremost of those who fixed the character of their times
Because to high and various talents
To warm benevolence, and to universal candour,
He added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life.
Eminent as he was in every department of public labour,
And a leader in every work of charity,
Whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellow men
His name will ever be specially identified
With those exertions
Which, by the blessing of GOD, removed from England
the guilt of the African slave trade,
And prepared the way for the abolition of slavery
In every colony of the empire:
In the prosecution of these objects,
He relied, not in vain, on GOD;
But in the progress, he was called to endure
Great obloquy and great opposition:
He outlived, however, all enmity:
And, in the evening of his days,
Withdrew from public life and public observation
To the bosom of his family.
Yet he died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country:
The peers and commons of England,
With the Lord Chancellor and the speaker at their head,
Carried him to his fitting place
Among the mighty dead around,
Here to repose:
Till, through the merits of JESUS CHRIST,
His only redeemer and savior,
(Whom, in his life and in his writings, he had desired to glorify)
He shall rise in the resurrection of the just.
“A year later, at midnight on July 31, 1834,” wrote Reginal Coupland in a biography of Wilberforce, “eight hundred thousand slaves became free. It was more than a great event in African or in British history. It was one of the greatest events in the history of mankind.”
What Wilberforce vanquished,” writes Eric Metaxas, a recent biographer of Wilberforce, “was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone.”
Christianity was the animating force behind the incomparable career of William Wilberforce. “A man who acts from the principles I profess,” he said, “reflects that he is to give an account of his political conduct at the judgment seat of Christ.”