Anglican Commemoration
Renewer of Society
July 30 · d. 1833
William Wilberforce was the evangelical Member of Parliament whose Christian conviction drove the long campaign to end the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire. Converted in midlife, he gave the rest of it to two great causes, the abolition of the trade, won in 1807 after twenty years of defeats, and the abolition of slavery itself, secured as he lay dying in 1833. With the Clapham Sect he made the practice of faith and the reform of society a single work.
William Wilberforce was born in 1759 in Hull, in Yorkshire, the son of a wealthy merchant family, and he entered Parliament at twenty-one, a brilliant young man with a fine voice and a gift for friendship, including the friendship of the future prime minister, William Pitt. For a few years he was little more than a charming and ambitious politician. Then, in his middle twenties, he underwent the deep evangelical conversion he called the Great Change, and it turned his whole life around. He thought at first that a serious Christian must leave the dirty world of politics for the church, but the old slave-trader turned hymn-writer John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace," counseled him to stay where God had placed him and serve from there. In 1787 Wilberforce wrote in his diary the sentence that became his life: "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners."
The slave trade was the engine of the empire's wealth, defended by planters and merchants and the inertia of a whole nation that profited from it. Wilberforce took it on, and in 1789, rising in the House of Commons, he refused to point the finger at any one party and laid the guilt on the whole nation, himself included: "I mean not to accuse any one, but to take the shame upon myself, in common, indeed, with the whole parliament of Great Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority." "We are all guilty," he told them. Year after year he brought his motion, and year after year it was defeated. For twenty years he persisted, gathering the evidence, enduring the mockery and the delay, until in 1807 Parliament at last abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
It was a victory, but not the victory. The trade was ended; slavery itself, the holding of human beings as property, went on. Wilberforce, his health failing, fought on for that greater abolition, and lived just long enough to see it come. In July of 1833, on his deathbed, he heard that the passage of the bill to abolish slavery through the Empire was at last assured; he died three days later, and the act became law that summer. He had given forty-six years to the cause, from his first resolve to his last breath.
Alongside the great campaign he wrote a book, A Practical View of Real Christianity, urging his comfortable countrymen that faith was not a respectable Sunday opinion but a fire in the heart that must burn out into action; and with his friends of the Clapham Sect, the network of praying reformers his enemies mocked as "the Saints," he labored at a hundred works of mercy and reform. He was no plaster saint, and on some questions of his day he was cautious and conservative. But on the one great question he never wavered, and he spent himself utterly upon it. He is the enduring proof that a Christian in public life can change the world, not by seizing power but by refusing, for half a lifetime, to stop asking it to do right.
How we know Wilberforce is from an unusually full record, all in the public domain: his own diaries and letters, his speeches preserved in the parliamentary record, his book A Practical View of 1797, and the great five-volume life written by his sons in 1838. He was born at Hull in 1759 and first elected to Parliament for Hull in 1780, becoming member for the county of Yorkshire in 1784; his conversion followed in 1784 and 1785, and his resolve against the slave trade dates from 1787. Two distinct achievements should not be confused: the Slave Trade Act of 1807 abolished the trade in enslaved people, while the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished the institution of slavery through most of the Empire. Wilberforce did not quite live to see the second become law; he learned on his deathbed in July 1833 that its passage was secured and died three days later, the act receiving royal assent the following month. An honest account adds that on domestic questions he was politically conservative, wary of some labor reforms and supportive of repressive measures during the war years; his greatness lay in the one cause to which he gave his life entire.
William Wilberforce is commemorated on July 30 in the calendars of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Church in North America, sometimes together with the wider company of abolitionists who labored beside him. He is honored as the Christian statesman whose evangelical faith drove the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery, and as a leader of the Clapham Sect, the band of evangelical reformers who joined the renewal of personal religion to the reform of society. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, near his friend Pitt. His memory is above all a memory of persistence: of a faith that held to one great work of justice across forty-six years of defeat and delay, and would not let go until it was done.
Further reading. Wilberforce's own spiritual manifesto is A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians (1797), often reprinted in modern form as Real Christianity; the original is freely available in the public domain. Among modern lives, William Hague's William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner is the fullest recent biography, and Eric Metaxas's Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery is a popular, sympathetic account.
Online resources. A Practical View (1797) and Wilberforce's 1789 abolition speech are freely available in the public domain at the Internet Archive and in the online abolition archives.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant William Wilberforce to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.