Champion of slaves

by Mike Oettle

POLITICS is a dirty word for many Christians. Yet William Wilberforce made a career of it in which God was glorified through the many sorely needed reforms achieved in Britain and beyond it through Acts of Parliament which he either piloted or supported through the House of Commons.

He appears on the calendar at 29 July and is listed as “Philanthropist, 1833”. The year of his death (he was born in 1759) was when the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, outlawing slavery at a future date throughout the British Empire – a month after he had died. It was an Act Wilberforce had fought for all his life: at the age of 14 he had written a letter to a newspaper in his hometown of Hull, in Yorkshire (now in Humberside), attacking the evils of that “odious traffic in human flesh”.

The foundations of his political career were laid first. William was educated at Cambridge, where he became a lifelong friend of future Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. At the age of 21 he was elected to the House of Commons; Pitt entered the Commons in the same year. Wilberforce was to spend another 41 years as an MP.

A more important foundation for his life was laid in 1784-85 when, while on a Contintental tour, he was converted to evangelical Christianity and became even more convinced that slavery was evil. In 1787 he helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, as well as a society for the “reformation of manners”, called the Proclamation Society. Aimed at suppressing the publication of obscenity, it also attacked such practices as cock-fighting, bull-baiting and bear-baiting, all of which eventually died out as a result of evangelism and, in part, the society's work. This was especially the case after the appearance in 1797 of Wilberforce’s book A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in which he contrasted what he called “real Christianity” with the nominal religion that then prevailed in England.

Wilberforce was one of a group of evangelicals in the Commons – including Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton, Charles Grant, Pitt’s brother-in-law Edward James Eliot, Zachary Macaulay and James Stephen – who were known derisively as the Saints or, from 1797 onwards, as the Clapham Sect. Wilberforce, Grant and Macaulay were among the 15 Anglican evangelicals who, with 21 others, founded the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804.

His first parliamentary success came on 25 March 1807, when a Bill to abolish the slave trade in the British West Indies became law. However, those who were already slaves were not freed by this Act. From 1821 Wilberforce and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton began pressing for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. In 1823 he helped found the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, and became its vice-president. On his retirement from Parliament in ’25 he handed the parliamentary leadership of this group to Buxton.

It has been unfairly claimed that the Clapham group was only concerned with black slaves overseas, and not with the “white slaves” of industrial England. But Wilberforce was one of the few MPs who felt that the ineffective Factory Acts of 1802 and 1818 did not go far enough. However, it was only when a Yorkshire group of evangelical MPs took up the cudgels that an effective Factory Act was passed in 1833 – the same year as the Slavery Abolition Act. Wilberforce had nonetheless paved the way for this advance through an Act which provided relief for boy chimney sweeps, attempts to reform the prison system and moderate parliamentary reforms. He had also helped to open India to missionaries in 1813 and to protect popular travelling evangelists in Britain from government interference.

On the debit side he had also supported repressive laws between 1795 and 1819, but as this period fell mostly into the Napoleonic era one can understand his concern to preserve constitutional order.

William Wilberforce “used his charm, tact and eloquence in a political life to which he was sure he had been called by God”.[1]

[1] Quoted from The History of Christianity, a Lion Handbook.

Champion of slaves

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This article was originally published in Western Light, monthly magazine of All Saints’ Parish, Kabega Park, Port Elizabeth, in July 1991.

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