William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759, in a merchant's house on the High Street of Hull, a busy port town in Yorkshire. The building, now preserved as Wilberforce House museum, belonged to a family that had grown wealthy in the Baltic trade ^[1]. His father, Robert Wilberforce, was a partner in the trading firm founded by William's grandfather, who had twice served as mayor of Hull ^[2].

Robert died in 1768, when William was eight. The boy was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Wimbledon, where he came under the influence of early Methodism; his mother, wary of what she considered religious enthusiasm, brought him back to Yorkshire and enrolled him at Pocklington School ^[2]. He was small and physically frail throughout his life, with poor eyesight and a delicate constitution, but contemporaries consistently remarked on his charm, wit, and a singing voice fine enough that the diarist and society figure Madame de Staël later called him striking company ^[3].

In 1776 he entered St John's College, Cambridge. Inheritances from his grandfather and uncle had left him independently wealthy, and by his own later admission he applied himself more to cards, supper parties, and conversation than to study ^[2]. The most important result of his Cambridge years was a friendship with a fellow student named William Pitt, the son of the Earl of Chatham, who would soon become the youngest prime minister in British history.

Anyone asking who was William Wilberforce in 1780 would have met an ambitious 21 year old spending a fortune on his first election. That September he won the parliamentary seat for Hull, reportedly at a cost of over 8,000 pounds in the treating and payments customary at the time ^[2]. Four years later he captured the far more prestigious county seat of Yorkshire, one of the largest constituencies in England, which he would hold until 1812 ^[1].

He entered the Commons as an independent, aligned with no party, though his closeness to Pitt gave him unusual access to power. His speaking ability drew early notice; James Boswell, hearing him address a vast outdoor crowd in York in 1784, wrote that the shrimp he had seen on the platform grew into a whale as he spoke ^[3].

The decisive turn in his life came not in politics but in religion. During a continental tour in 1784 and 1785 with Isaac Milner, a Cambridge tutor and formidable intellect, Wilberforce read the Greek New Testament and Philip Doddridge's devotional writing, and underwent a gradual evangelical conversion ^[2]. He considered leaving public life altogether. John Newton, the former slave ship captain turned Anglican clergyman and author of the hymn Amazing Grace, urged him instead to serve God where he stood, in Parliament ^[4]. In 1787 Wilberforce recorded in his diary that God had set before him two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners, meaning public morals ^[2].

By the late 1780s British ships carried tens of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic each year, and ports such as Liverpool and Bristol had grown rich on the traffic ^[5]. A network of campaigners, including Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and the members of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded in 1787, gathered evidence of the trade's horrors and needed a parliamentary champion. Wilberforce, with his eloquence, his independence, and his friendship with Pitt, accepted the role ^[5].

He delivered his first major abolition speech in the Commons on May 12, 1789, speaking for around three and a half hours and laying out the evidence of mortality and cruelty on the Middle Passage ^[1]. The West India interest, the merchants and planters who profited from slavery, fought back with delay and counter testimony. Bill after bill failed. The French Revolution and the slave uprising in Saint-Domingue made reform look dangerous to nervous members, and through the 1790s Wilberforce's annual motions were defeated or gutted ^[5].

He did not stop. Working with the evangelical reformers of the Clapham Sect, including Henry Thornton, Hannah More, and Zachary Macaulay, he kept the question before Parliament and the public ^[4]. The breakthrough came after Pitt's death, under the ministry of Lord Grenville. A tactical measure of 1806 restricting the trade to foreign territories weakened the opposition, and on February 23, 1807, the Commons passed the abolition bill by 283 votes to 16, with members rising to cheer Wilberforce as he sat with tears on his face ^[2]. The Slave Trade Act 1807 received royal assent on March 25 of that year ^[5].

Any honest account of William Wilberforce achievements has to range well beyond the slave trade. He helped found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, the body that became the RSPCA, and supported the Church Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society ^[1]. He promoted smallpox vaccination, prison reform, and education for the poor, and he backed the campaign to open British India to missionaries ^[2]. His Proclamation Society, launched in 1787, pursued his second great object, the improvement of public morals, with results historians judge far more modest than his abolition work ^[3].

In 1797 he published A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, a critique of nominal religion among the comfortable classes. The book became a bestseller by the standards of the day and remained in print for decades, cementing his position as the leading lay voice of the evangelical revival ^[4].

That same year, at 37, he married Barbara Ann Spooner after a courtship of only a few weeks. The marriage was by all accounts devoted, and the couple had six children between 1798 and 1807 ^[2]. Two of his sons, Samuel and Robert, became prominent churchmen; Samuel Wilberforce rose to be Bishop of Oxford and later of Winchester ^[1]. William's health, never strong, required regular doses of opium, then a standard medical prescription for his digestive ailments, and he suffered from a curvature of the spine that in later years forced him to wear a steel brace ^[3].

His record was not without contested ground. He supported the repressive wartime measures of the 1790s, including restrictions on political assembly, and opposed early trade union organizing, positions that radical contemporaries such as William Cobbett attacked sharply ^[3].

Abolition of the trade did not free a single enslaved person already in bondage, and enforcement proved difficult. Wilberforce pressed for a registry of enslaved people in the colonies to expose illegal trafficking, and he supported the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron in its interception of slave ships ^[5]. For years he and many allies hoped that ending the trade would push planters toward gradual emancipation. It did not, and by the early 1820s the campaigners turned to abolishing slavery itself.

In 1823 Wilberforce helped found the Anti-Slavery Society and published an appeal on behalf of the enslaved people of the West Indies ^[2]. His body, however, was failing. He gave up his parliamentary seat in 1825 after 45 years in the Commons, passing leadership of the cause to Thomas Fowell Buxton, and retired to a quieter life marked by financial losses from a son's failed dairy business, which forced him to give up his own household and live with his children ^[1].

He made his last public appearance at an anti-slavery meeting in Maidstone in April 1833. On July 26, 1833, he received word that the government's emancipation bill had cleared its decisive stage in the Commons; three days later, on July 29, he died at a relative's house in Cadogan Place, London ^[2]. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 became law the following month, providing for the freeing of some 800,000 enslaved people in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape, though it bound many to a transitional apprenticeship and compensated the slave owners rather than the enslaved ^[5].

Wilberforce was buried in Westminster Abbey on August 3, 1833, near his friend Pitt, with members of both Houses of Parliament among the pallbearers and mourners ^[1]. A seated marble statue of him was placed in the Abbey, and Hull raised a 31 meter column, the Wilberforce Monument, in his honor; his birthplace opened as a museum of the man and of the history of slavery in 1906 ^[1].

His reputation has shifted with the times. Victorian biographers, beginning with the five volume life published by his sons in 1838, presented him as a near saint. Later historians restored the fuller picture: the campaign against the slave trade was a mass movement built on the research of Clarkson, the testimony of formerly enslaved writers such as Olaudah Equiano, petitions signed by hundreds of thousands, and above all the resistance of enslaved people themselves, with Wilberforce serving as its indispensable parliamentary voice rather than its sole author ^[5]. Scholars also weigh his social conservatism at home against his humanitarianism abroad ^[3].

Even so, the basic William Wilberforce facts retain their force: a man of fragile health introduced abolition motions for nearly twenty years in the face of repeated defeat, and lived three days past the assurance that slavery in the British colonies would end. Universities, schools, and institutions from Hull to Ontario carry his name, and the University of Hull's Wilberforce Institute continues research into historical and modern slavery ^[1]. The 2007 film Amazing Grace, released for the bicentenary of the 1807 Act, introduced his story to a new audience ^[3]. Any William Wilberforce biography ends where his own effort did, with the largest emancipation the British state had ever enacted.