wilberforce

William Wilberforce entered the world sickly and nearly blind. When he was only nine his father died; his mother, unable to care for him, consigned him to the care of relatives. These people took him regularly to their evangelical Anglican parish church. What the youngster heard there, especially the stories and sermons of his favorite guest-preacher, The Reverend John Newton, went deep. For Newton had been captain of a slaveship, but had by the grace of God been rendered preacher, hymnwriter ("Amazing Grace") and spiritual counselor. His influence upon the boy was incalculable: " I revered him as a parent when I was a child," Wilberforce would later write.

Slaves were picked up in West Africa and brought in chains to England in ships without sanitation facilities. Once put ashore, they were fattened up to disguise the ravages of months of poor nutrition and seasickness. Then they were oiled (dull skin being a sign of ill health) and paraded naked before buyers so that their physique could be assessed and market-value assigned. In the ten years following 1783 one British seaport alone (Liverpool) shipped 303,737 slaves to the New World. In no time Britain, the world’s leader in the trade, had supplied three million to French, Spanish and British colonies.

The bottom line is that Wilberforce played a leading part in stopping 40,000 Africans a year being made slaves to the British. When he first proposed a bill to abolish the trade, the number of people in comparable forms of forced labour throughout the world was an estimated 75%, according to Tomkins. “Today it is one-fifth of 1%,” he noted. “It is enough to say that he fought the greatest evil in the world of his day, and played a part in its defeat. Who could ever claim more?”

Wilberforce was an unlikely hero. He grew up the son of a merchant in the port city of Hull, comfortably well-off but not aristocratic in an age when noble blood guaranteed access to the corridors of power. Physically unprepossessing, Wilberforce barely cleared five feet tall and approached 100 pounds only after a copious feast. He had a sickly constitution from childhood onward, and he suffered both from severe myopia that eventually left him nearly blind and from gastrointestinal difficulties (likely ulcerative colitis), for which he took opium for decades. Hardly the raw material from which legends are forged. But by all accounts, Wilberforce was blessed with a winning temperament, an extraordinary speaking and singing voice, and a vigorous (if somewhat disorganized) mind.

Like most prosperous people in that age, Wilberforce's parents went through the motions of Anglicanism, well assured that its ossified dogma would not interfere with their social practices. Because of family unrest, young William went to live with an uncle and aunt in London for two years, and during this formative time he observed and embraced the living faith of their Methodist circle, which included John Newton, the former slave ship captain and author of the hymn "Amazing Grace."

Back in Hull with a family eager to dispose of his newfound "enthusiasm" and amid fashionable soirees with the right sort of people--those who knew not to take religion too seriously--Wilberforce found his Christian resolve weakening. This trajectory continued at Cambridge and into the beginning of his career in the House of Commons, to which he had won a seat from Yorkshire at the ripe age of 21, thanks to his powerful oratory and savvy campaigning.

In the winter of 1784-5 Wilberforce went on a tour of France and Switzerland with Isaac Milner, a clergyman, who he first knew when he was a pupil at the Hull Grammar School. Milner had been an usher (a teacher) whilst his brother had been headmaster. They read a book by Philip Doddridge, “The Rise and Progress of Religion”, during their travels and this was the beginning of a religious awakening in Wilberforce. During the summer recess he went to the Continent again with Milner. This time they read the New Testament in Greek and Wilberforce began to take Christianity seriously. He became an Evangelical, that is a member of the Church of England who thought that Christianity should be carried into every part of life. He considered becoming a clergyman but was persuaded that he could do more for God as a Member of Parliament. He realised how much time he had wasted at Cambridge and began to re-educate himself, studying for 9 or 10 hours a day every summer.

After his conversion to Evangelical Christianity he looked at society with new eyes and saw the corruption, the gambling and the drunkenness. Wilberforce wanted to reform morals and to do that he obtained a Royal Proclamation against vice and immorality, which was issued on 1 June 1787 by George III. Wilberforce and some Evangelical friends then formed a society to implement the proclamation.

In 1792 Wilberforce’s friend and cousin, Henry Thornton bought a small estate in Clapham called Battersea Rise. Wilberforce lived with him there for 5 years, other friends having houses on the estate. These like minded Christians eventually became known as the Clapham Sect. They were all involved with the abolition of the slave trade as well as other charitable institutions which they either founded or supported.

Wilberforce and his evangelical allies in the famous Clapham group worked doggedly over the next 20 years against entrenched, sometimes vicious enemies to eliminate the scourge of slavery. Wisely recognizing that abolition would be viable only in stages, they first targeted the slave trade, in part by communicating its barbarities to a populace largely kept ignorant by the nautical miles separating Britain and its plantation colonies. With a host of strategies that Metaxas suggests were pioneering innovations in democratic politics, Wilberforce led his troops in aiming above and beyond party interests to reach the people in the streets.

Wilberforce's second great object involved a massive effort at national moral uplift. Repulsed by the complacent, "exquisitely selfish" ways of the rich and powerful, Wilberforce and the Clapham group worked for decades to ease the crushing burden of poverty and the moral degradation that so often held it in place. Again using democratic methods and political skill to broaden the base for reform and enlist key allies, Wilberforce helped establish schools for poor children, reform prisons, limit capital punishment, outlaw bull-baiting, reform child labor practices, assist orphans and widows, counteract widespread prostitution and much more.

As in his abolitionist efforts, Wilberforce faced naysayers who insisted that his Christian principles had no place in politics. "Things have come to a pretty pass," howled anti-abolitionist Lord Melbourne, "when one should permit one's religion to invade public life." Yet Wilberforce knew the cruel suffering of the gin-soaked masses and the brutality of their daily lives. Metaxas informs us, for instance, that in late-18th-century London, fully 25 percent of unmarried women were prostitutes, with an average age of 16, and brothels specializing in girls under 14 were favorites among enlightened gentlemen.

Abetting this wretchedness with their cash and their insouciance, the privileged served as exemplars of turpitude and moral indifference. Wilberforce rejected the assertions of self-serving libertines who would cordon off Christianity into a safely impotent private sphere, and he attacked Britain's debauchery with all the ingenuity and force he could muster. He was a moving force in an astounding array of social reform organizations; at one time, Metaxas indicates, Wilberforce was active in no fewer than 69 such groups.

On the 24th of February, 1793, a tired eighty-eight year old man wrote Wilberforce, "Unless God has raised you up . . . I see not how you can go through with your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy. . . . You will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God is with you, who can be against you? Oh, be not weary in well-doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall banish away before it." One week later John Wesley was dead. It was the last letter he would ever write.

After 20 years of pleading, educating, demonstrating and maneuvering, William Wilberforce emerged victorious — in 1807, making this year the Bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. A year after the great man’s death (in 1833), all the slaves of the Empire were declared to be free (Wilberforce did live to see Parliament enact the bill of abolition). It took almost 30 years before they would be set free in the United States, and more than 50 years in Brazil.

He died 3 days later on 29 July.