William Wilberforce

Life and work

Wilberforce was elected to Parliament at age 21 and lived initially as a fashionable young politician before undergoing an evangelical conversion in 1785 that reoriented his life around what he came to describe as his two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of public morals.

Working closely with a circle of evangelical reformers known as the Clapham Sect, and drawing on evidence gathered by campaigners including Thomas Clarkson and formerly enslaved writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Wilberforce introduced a bill to abolish the British slave trade nearly every year from 1789, facing repeated defeat amid powerful commercial and political opposition.

The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807, abolishing the trade (though not slavery itself) throughout the British Empire, a landmark achieved substantially through Wilberforce's persistence, parliamentary skill, and moral appeal, encouraged in his early efforts by a final letter from the aging John Wesley.

Wilberforce continued to campaign for the complete abolition of slavery itself for another quarter-century; the Slavery Abolition Act finally passed Parliament in 1833, just three days before his death, freeing enslaved people throughout most of the British Empire.

In their own words

"You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know."speech to Parliament, 1789

Further reading

• Encyclopedia Britannica: William Wilberforce