Abolition of the British Slave Trade

The event

William Wilberforce, a British member of Parliament who underwent an evangelical religious conversion in 1785, resolved to devote his political career substantially to what he described as two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the broader moral reformation of British public life.

Working closely with a circle of like-minded evangelical reformers who became known as the Clapham Sect, and drawing on painstaking documentary and testimonial evidence gathered over years by fellow campaigner Thomas Clarkson, along with the powerful firsthand testimony of formerly enslaved writers including Olaudah Equiano, Wilberforce introduced parliamentary bills to abolish the British slave trade repeatedly from 1789 onward, facing years of defeat amid powerful and well-organized opposition from British commercial interests profiting from the trade.

The campaign was substantially, though not exclusively, framed and motivated in explicitly Christian moral terms, drawing heavily on evangelical convictions about the fundamental equality of all human beings before God; among the last acts of the aging Methodist founder John Wesley was a letter of encouragement to Wilberforce written just days before Wesley's own death in 1791, urging him to continue "in the name of God and in the power of His might" until American slavery, "the vilest that ever saw the sun," should vanish.

The Slave Trade Act finally passed both houses of Parliament in March 1807, formally abolishing the transatlantic slave trade (though not the institution of slavery itself) throughout the British Empire, with the Royal Navy subsequently deployed to help enforce the ban internationally. Wilberforce continued campaigning for the complete abolition of slavery itself for over two further decades; the Slavery Abolition Act, freeing enslaved people throughout most of the British Empire, finally passed Parliament in 1833, just three days before Wilberforce's own death.

Other witnesses

• Slave Trade Act, 1807 (full text)
• William Wilberforce, parliamentary speeches, various

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 53: William Wilberforce and the Century of Reform — free full issue