William Wilberforce

Life

William Wilberforce was born on August 24, 1759, in the port town of Hull in Yorkshire, England, the only son of Robert Wilberforce, a wealthy merchant. After his father's death in 1768, he lived for a time with his uncle's family near London. His mother is said to have brought him back home because she feared that, under his aunt's influence, he was drifting toward Methodist beliefs. In 1776 he entered St John's College, Cambridge, where he became a close friend of William Pitt the Younger, the future prime minister.

In 1780 he was elected to the House of Commons for his hometown of Hull. He later represented Yorkshire from 1784 to 1812 and the borough of Bramber from 1812, serving as an independent without formal party affiliation. As a young man he embraced evangelical faith, which became the driving force behind his political work. In 1797 he married Barbara Spooner, with whom he had six children. Declining health led him to leave Parliament in the mid-1820s, and he died in London on July 29, 1833. By decision of Parliament, he was buried in the north transept (one of the two arms of a cross-shaped church) of Westminster Abbey, near the grave of Pitt. The Anglican Church commemorates him on July 30.

Work and Achievements

Abolition of the Slave Trade

The British movement against the slave trade began in the early 1780s, when Quakers formed a committee to oppose it. Changing the law, however, required someone to lead the cause within Parliament. Encouraged by campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, Hannah More, and Charles Middleton, as well as by his friend Pitt, Wilberforce became the movement's parliamentary spokesman from about 1787. After launching his parliamentary campaign in earnest in May 1789, he introduced abolition measures nearly every year. His efforts were repeatedly thwarted, however, by opposition from West Indian planters and merchants and by circumstances such as the war with France. In 1792 more than five hundred petitions calling for abolition were submitted to the House of Commons. In 1804 a bill passed the Commons but was blocked in the House of Lords.

The tide turned in 1806 with the formation of the Grenville ministry, which favored abolition. On February 23, 1807, the House of Commons passed the bill by a vote of 283 to 16, and the Slave Trade Act was enacted in March of that year. Banning the slave trade, however, did not free those already enslaved, and Wilberforce therefore continued to campaign for the abolition of slavery itself. He died three days after the bill to abolish slavery passed its decisive vote in the House of Commons; it was enacted as the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

The Clapham Sect and Social Reform

Wilberforce was the best-known member of the "Clapham Sect," a group of evangelical Anglican laypeople centered on the parish church of Clapham, south of London. With them he helped found the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society. He also supported the Sunday school movement, schools and hospitals for the poor, improved conditions for factory workers and child chimney sweeps, the founding of a society to prevent cruelty to animals, the opening of India to missionary work, and the establishment of a settlement in Sierra Leone for freed slaves. In 1787 he worked to persuade King George III to issue a proclamation calling for the suppression of vices such as excessive drinking, blasphemy, and Sabbath-breaking. He afterward founded the Society for the Suppression of Vice to put the proclamation into practice.

Influence on the Korean Church

Wilberforce died roughly half a century before Protestant missions began in Korea, so he had no direct connection with the Korean church. However, the British and Foreign Bible Society, which he helped found, later supported the translation and distribution of the Bible in Korean, and the Korean Bible Society is also said to have grown out of that organization's work.

Assessment

Wilberforce is widely commemorated in Britain as a figure who played a decisive role in the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. The evangelical community holds him in high regard as a model of faith-based social reform.

He has also drawn criticism. On issues other than slavery, he was conservative. He opposed parliamentary reform and supported the temporary suspension of habeas corpus (the legal procedure by which courts review unlawful detention) as well as the Combination Acts of 1799–1800, which prohibited workers from organizing. For this reason, radical writers of his day such as William Cobbett and William Hazlitt attacked him for caring about the plight of slaves overseas while ignoring the suffering of workers at home. On emancipation, too, he advocated a gradual approach, which led campaigners such as Elizabeth Heyrick, who demanded immediate emancipation, to criticize him as overly cautious. Some historians argue that credit for the abolition of slavery has been concentrated too heavily on Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, obscuring the contributions of other activists, including radicals. These assessments also figure in discussions of the relationship between church and politics.