William Wilberforce

Born to a merchant family in England’s east coast port of Kingston-upon-Hull, William Wilberforce (b. 1759–d. 1833) went on to become the most famous of British abolitionists. Educated at Cambridge University in the late 1770s (during the American War of Independence), he became a member of parliament (MP) for his hometown in 1780 at the age of twenty-one. He struck up a close personal friendship with a Cambridge contemporary, William Pitt, son of “Pitt the Elder,” and after “Pitt the Younger” became prime minister in 1783, Wilberforce was elected as an MP for Yorkshire, England’s largest county constituency, a seat he held until 1812. The key turning point in his career came in 1785–1786, when he experienced a protracted evangelical conversion and was drawn into a circle of Anglican reformers opposed to the slave trade. They included the Teston Set gathered around the Reverend James Ramsay, as well as the former slave ship captain, the Reverend John Newton, author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Wilberforce discovered “two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners [i.e. morals].” He became the parliamentary spokesman of the abolitionists, giving his first great speech on the Atlantic slave trade in 1789, though his many attempts to secure abolition failed until it became an official government measure in 1806–1807, after Pitt’s death. During this time, he assembled an inner circle of brilliant collaborators, including Henry Thornton, James Stephen, and Zachary Macaulay. Their influence was seen in different parts of the Atlantic world, from Sierra Leone to the British Caribbean and even Haiti, although they were thwarted in their efforts to secure an international ban on the Atlantic slave trade and amelioration of West Indian slavery. They did, however, create a plethora of philanthropic and evangelical organizations, forging a religious public that could be mobilized in massive petitioning campaigns. In 1823, Wilberforce was a founder of the Anti-Slavery Society, although he passed on the parliamentary leadership of the campaign to Thomas Fowell Buxton. He retired from Parliament in 1825, after forty-five years as an MP. Since 1807, or even 1789, he had been a national icon, but a controversial figure too, mocked for his strait-laced piety, excoriated for his abolitionism, and criticized for his domestic political conservatism. He died in July 1833, as the Slavery Abolition Bill was passing through Parliament. As a result of that happy coincidence, he became known, rather misleadingly, as “the emancipator.”