a bi-centenary Remembrance III
As the earlier articles in this series have shown, many people were involved in the political campaign against the Slave Trade in the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Leading this battle was William Wilberforce (1759-1833), without question the most influential and dominant of the anti-slavery activists.
Born at Hull in Yorkshire, he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1776. At the age of twenty-one he became Member of Parliament for Hull and four years later won the much larger parliamentary seat of Yorkshire. In 1785 he had a deeply-personal experience of conversion to Christ and for the rest of his life, his evangelical faith and convictions motivated everything he did. The Rev John Newton (1725-1807), former slave-ship captain and the evangelical vicar of St Mary, Woolnoth, London, became Wilberforce’s spiritual guide and counsellor.
In 1787, with the support of his evangelical friends and Prime Minister William Pitt, Wilberforce launched his crusade to persuade the British Parliament to pass an Act that would abolish the slave trade. In Britain’s colonies in the West Indies the very profitable cane sugar plantations were worked by slaves forcibly brought from Africa.
On 12 May 1789 Wilberforce delivered his first anti-slavery speech in the House of Commons in London. His attack on slavery engaged him for the next thirty-six years. Encouraged by a letter he received from the dying John Wesley in February 1791,
Wilberforce delivered a stirring four-hour speech in parliament on April 18. His attempt to bring in an Abolition Bill was defeated by 163 votes to 88, and in the next six years he suffered six more defeats in the same cause. Wilberforce, however, was undaunted and after ten more years of collecting evidence, lobbying friends in parliament, and delivering speeches, his Abolition Bill was finally successful in February 1807. It became law on 25 March.
This Abolition Bill, however, did not mean an end of slavery in the British Empire. It prohibited British ships from transporting slaves on the high seas but the thousands of slaves on the plantations were not set free. In 1825 Wilberforce retired from parliament but carried on the campaign to abolish slavery entirely. On 26 July 1833, forty-four years after Wilberforce delivered his first anti-slavery speech, the Emancipation Bill was passed. Slavery was outlawed in all British territories. Three days later William Wilberforce, evangelical Christian, friend of the oppressed and tireless campaigner in a host of good causes, died. His name will always be linked with the final defeat of what John Wesley called the scandal of England and of human nature’ slavery.
Dr H B McGonigle is Senior Lecturer in Historical Theology, Church History and Wesley Studies in Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, England.