William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was a British politician and evangelical Christian who led the parliamentary campaign against the transatlantic slave trade for twenty years, until Britain banned it in 1807. In later life he supported the movement to end slavery itself in the British Empire, and he died in 1833 just after its abolition was assured. His conservatism on questions at home, where he backed laws restricting protest and trade unions, has drawn criticism both in his own day and since.

Wilberforce was born on 24 August 1759 in Kingston upon Hull, in Yorkshire, the only son of a wealthy merchant whose family fortune came from trade with the Baltic. After his father's death he spent some years with an uncle and aunt near London who drew him towards evangelical Christianity. In 1776 he entered St John's College, Cambridge, where, independently wealthy, he enjoyed gambling and late nights and became friends with William Pitt, the future prime minister.

In 1780, while still a student and aged 21, Wilberforce won election as member of parliament for Hull, and in 1784 he became member for the county of Yorkshire, which he represented until 1812. He sat as an independent but was a close ally of Pitt, prime minister from December 1783.

During a European tour in 1784 and 1785 he underwent an evangelical conversion. He considered leaving public life, but the clergyman John Newton, among others, urged him to stay, and from then on his politics were shaped by his faith.

British ships then dominated the Atlantic slave trade, carrying in peak years some forty thousand captives a year across the Atlantic. In 1787 the campaigner Thomas Clarkson began bringing Wilberforce evidence of its horrors, and abolitionists, Quakers among them, asked him to lead their cause in parliament. His first major Commons speech against the trade came on 12 May 1789, but opponents delayed the vote. His first abolition bill was defeated by 163 votes to 88 in 1791, as fear of the French Revolution and slave revolts in the French Caribbean turned opinion against reform. A compromise for gradual abolition passed in 1792, which Wilberforce saw as a ploy for delay.

With war against France from 1793, abolition was tarred by association with radicalism, yet Wilberforce kept introducing bills. Meanwhile he and his friends of the Clapham Sect helped found a colony for free Black settlers in Sierra Leone in 1792. After Pitt's death in 1806 a new government, aided by a quiet measure banning British involvement in supplying foreign colonies, brought in a full abolition bill. On 23 February 1807 the Commons passed it by 283 votes to 16, as members paid tribute to Wilberforce.

Wilberforce married Barbara Spooner in 1797 and they had six children. His book A Practical View, published that year, called for a revival of Christianity among the upper classes. He supported missions in India, helped found what became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and backed Sunday schools and prison reform.

He was also deeply conservative. He supported the suspension of habeas corpus in 1795, the Combination Act of 1799 against trade unions, and opposed an inquiry into the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Radicals such as William Cobbett and William Hazlitt accused him of caring for enslaved people abroad while ignoring poverty at home.

From 1816 Wilberforce began to denounce slavery itself, though he favoured gradual emancipation, and in 1821 he passed parliamentary leadership of the cause to Thomas Fowell Buxton. Ill health forced him to leave the Commons in 1826. On 26 July 1833 he learned that the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was certain to pass; he died in London three days later and was buried in Westminster Abbey near Pitt. Historians now stress that abolition equally depended on Clarkson's research and public campaigning.

Wilberforce's career spanned the late Kingdom of Great Britain and the early United Kingdom. Our 1783 and 1800 maps show the British world in which he began his campaign, and the 1815 map shows the empire in the years after the slave trade was abolished.