William Wilberforce

Family Background

William Wilberforce was born in Hull, Yorkshire on 24 August 1759, the only son of Robert Wilberforce, a wealthy merchant and his wife Elizabeth. When he was born, he was sickly, delicate and nearly blind but he had an active mind. In 1768, his father died when he was only 9 years of age and his mother, unable to care for him, consigned him to the care of his aunt and uncle.

He attended a boarding school in Putney for two years, spending his holidays in Wimbledon, where he grew extremely fond of his aunt and uncle. And while under their care, became interested in evangelical Christianity because of their influence, especially that of his aunt, who supports Methodist preacher John Wesley and George Whitefield. He also regularly attended the Anglican parish church where he heard John Newton preach.

When Wilberforce's mother and grandfather heard of his christian influences and his leanings towards evangelism, they brought the 12-year-old boy back to Hull in 1771. Wilberforce was heartbroken to be separated from his aunt and uncle. His family opposed a return to Hull Grammar School because the headmaster had become a Methodist; Wilberforce therefore continued his education at nearby Pocklington School from 1771–76. Influenced by Methodist scruples, he initially resisted Hull's lively social life, but as his religious fervour diminished, he embraced theatre-going, attended balls and played cards.

Education and Political Career

A statue of William Wilberforce can be seen outside Wilberforce House in Hull, where Wilberforce was born.In October 1776 at the age of seventeen, Wilberforce attended St John's College, Cambridge. Wilberforce was shocked by the behaviour of his fellow students and later wrote: "I was introduced on the very first night of my arrival to as licentious a set of men as can well be conceived. They drank hard, and their conversation was even worse than their lives." The deaths of his grandfather and uncle in 1776 and 1777 respectively had left him independently wealthy and as a result he had little inclination or need to apply himself to serious study. Instead, he immersed himself in the social round of student life and pursued a hedonistic lifestyle enjoying cards, gambling and late-night drinking sessions. Witty, generous, and an excellent conversationalist, Wilberforce was a popular figure. He made many friends, including the more studious future Prime Minister, William Pitt.

William Wilberforce decided on a career in politics and soon after leaving university at the age of twenty, he decided to become a candidate in the forthcoming parliamentary election in Hull. His opponent was Lord Rockingham, a rich and powerful member of the nobility, and Wilberforce had to spend nearly £9,000 to become elected. Wilberforce attended Parliament regularly, but he also maintained a lively social life, becoming a regular attendee at gentlemen's gambling clubs such as Goostree's and Boodle's in Pall Mall, London.

Then, while he holidayed in the south of France, a devotional book by Philip Doddridge titled "The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul", found its way into his hands and heart. Torment consumed him as he became convicted of his depravity. Now he deplored the "shapeless idleness" of his frivolous life, speaking of it in terms of "deep guilt" and "black ingratitude." With gospel-quickened insight he acknowledged "a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour."

Wilberforce's own account of his conversion

Wilberforce Monument in Queen's Gardens, HullHis discussions with Isaac Milner were continued throughout this journey, until "by degrees I imbibed his sentiments, though I must confess with shame, that they long remained merely as opinions assented to by my understanding, but not influencing my heart. My interest in them certainly increased, and at length I began to be impressed with a sense of their importance. Milner, though full of levity on all other subjects, never spoke on this but with the utmost seriousness, and all he said, tended to increase my attention to religion." So interesting were these conversations now become to him, that his fellow travellers complained of the infrequency of his visits to their carriage. In this state of feeling he arrived at Spa, and spent almost six weeks in that "curious assemblage from all parts of Europe." Amongst the rest were many of his English friends; and though on some few points he now controverted their opinions, yet in general he joined freely in their ordinary pleasures. "Mrs Crewe," he says, "cannot believe that I can think it wrong to go to the play - Surprised at hearing that halting on the Sunday was my wish and not my mother's." Yet though his outward appearance gave little evidence of their existence, deeper feelings were at work beneath. "Often while in the full enjoyment of all that this world could bestow, my conscience told me that in the true sense of the word, I was not a Christian. I laughed, I sang, I was apparently gay and happy, but the thought would steal across me, What madness is all this; to continue easy in a state in which a sudden call out of the world would consign me to everlasting misery, and that when eternal happiness is within my grasp!" Far I had received into my understanding the great truths of the gospel, and believed that its offers were free and universal; and that God had promised to give his Holy Spirit to them that asked for it. At length such thoughts as these completely occupied my mind, and I began to pray earnestly." "Began three or four days ago." he says, Oct 25th, "to get up very early. In the solitude and self conversation of the morning had thoughts, which I trust will come to something." - "As soon as I reflected seriously upon these subjects, the deep guilt and black ingratitude of my past life forced itself upon me in the strongest colours, and I condemned myself for having wasted my precious time, and opportunities, and talents." Thus he returned home; another man in his inner being, yet manifesting outwardly so little of the hidden struggle, "that it was not," says one of his companions, "until many months after our return, that I learned what had been passing in his mind."

The more he reflected, the deeper became his new impressions. "It was not so much," he has said, "the fear of punishment by which I was affected, as a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour; and such was the effect which this thought produced, that for months I was in a state of the deepest depression, from strong convictions of my guilt. Indeed nothing which I have ever read in the accounts of others, exceeded what I then felt." These were now his habitual feelings; carefully concealed from others, and in some measure no doubt dispelled by company, but reviving in their full force as soon as he retired into himself.

Whilst this struggle was at its height, he commenced a private Journal, with the view of making himself "humble and watchful." The entries of this private record mark the difficulties and variations of his mind, while they show strikingly the spirit of practical improvement by which he was directed. He began to read the bible and pray earnestly, he sought out John Newton and ask for advice - To his mother, who had been alarmed by this sudden change, he explained -

A Changed Man

He began to see his life's purpose: "My walk is a public one," he wrote in his diary. "My business is in the world, and I must mix in the assemblies of men or quit the post which Providence seems to have assigned me."

Wilberforce was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Pitt. This memorial statue was erected in 1840 in the north choir aisle.In particular, two causes caught his attention. First, under the influence of Thomas Clarkson, he became absorbed with the issue of slavery. Later he wrote, "So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition."

Slavery was only one cause that excited Wilberforce's passions. His second great calling was for the "reformation of manners," that is, morals. In early 1787, he conceived of a society that would work, as a royal proclamation put it, "for the encouragement of piety and virtue; and for the preventing of vice, profaneness, and immorality." It eventually become known as the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

In fact, Wilberforce - dubbed "the prime minister of a cabinet of philanthropists" - was at one time active in support of 69 philanthropic causes. He gave away one-quarter of his annual income to the poor. He fought on behalf of chimney sweeps, single mothers, Sunday schools, orphans, and juvenile delinquents. He helped found parachurch groups like the Society for Bettering the Cause of the Poor, the Church Missionary Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the Antislavery Society.

Introduction

On the 24th of February, 1793, a tired eighty-eight year old man wrote Wilberforce, "Unless God has raised you up . . . I see not how you can go through with your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy. . . . You will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils; but if God is with you, who can be against you? Oh, be not weary in well-doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall banish away before it." One week later John Wesley was dead. It was the last letter he would ever write.

William Wilberforce entered the world sickly and nearly blind. When he was only nine his father died; his mother, unable to care for him, consigned him to the care of relatives. These people took him regularly to their evangelical Anglican parish church. What the youngster heard there, especially the stories and sermons of his favorite guest-preacher, The Reverend John Newton, went deep. For Newton had been captain of a slaveship, but had by the grace of God been rendered preacher, hymnwriter ("Amazing Grace") and spiritual counselor. His influence upon the boy was incalculable: " I revered him as a parent when I was a child," Wilberforce would later write.

English traders raided the African coast on the Gulf of Guinea, captured between 35,000 and 50,000 Africans a year, shipped them across the Atlantic, and sold them into slavery. It was a profitable business that many powerful people had become dependent upon. One publicist for the West Indies trade wrote, "The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent this traffic being dropped. The necessity, the absolute necessity, then, of carrying it on, must, since there is no other, be its excuse." Slaves were brought in chains to England in ships without sanitation facilities. Once put ashore, they were fattened up to disguise the ravages of months of poor nutrition and seasickness. Then they were oiled (dull skin being a sign of ill health) and paraded naked before buyers so that their physique could be assessed and market-value assigned. In the ten years following 1783 one British seaport alone (Liverpool) shipped 303,737 slaves to the New World. In no time Britain, the world’s leader in the trade, had supplied three million to French, Spanish and British colonies.

Witty, generous, and an excellent conversationalist, Wilberforce was a popular figure in university.In the meantime Wilberforce had found his way to Cambridge University, where he did little besides play cards. He later reflected, "As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make me studious." A neighbor at Cambridge added, "When he [Wilberforce] returned late in the evening to his room, he would summon me to join him . . . He was so winning and amusing that I often sat up half the night with him, much to the detriment of my attendance at lectures the next day."

Soon his talent for eloquence got him elected to Parliament. He was twenty-one, and newly immersed in upper-class degradation. His earlier Christian formation appeared to recede as he groped and stumbled in gambling and intemperate drinking. By now he had scorned his Methodist upbringing as "vulgar" and "uninformed."

Then, while he holidayed in the south of France, a devotional book by Philip Doddridge, an English clergyman, found its way into his hands and heart. Soon he was reading the New Testament in Greek. Torment consumed him as he became convicted of his depravity. Now he deplored the "shapeless idleness" of his frivolous life, speaking of it in terms of "deep guilt" and "black ingratitude." With gospel-quickened insight he acknowledged "a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Saviour."

Immediately he resigned from five fashionable clubs, renounced gambling, and found himself fired with an intellectual zeal unknown at university. He abstained from alcohol and practiced rigorous self-examination as befit, he believed, a "serious" Christian. He abhorred the socializing that went along with politicking. He worried about "the temptations at the table," the endless dinner parties, which he thought were full of vain and useless conversation: "[They] disqualify me for every useful purpose in life, waste my time, impair my hecaptionh, fill my mind with thoughts of resistance before and self-condemnation afterwards." For the rest of his life he would labour ceaselessly on behalf of the earth’s wretched.

Wilberforce’s first target was the abolition of the trading in slaves. (He felt that if trafficking in black people ceased, slave-owners would have to treat their "property" more humanely, there being no replacement.) Admiral Nelson wrote from his ship, H.H.S. Victory, that as long as he would speak and fight he would resist "the damnable doctrines of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies." An irate sea-captain pummeled Wilberforce on the street. It was whispered slanderously when he was yet unmarried that his wife was black and that he beat her. His friends were accused of being spies in the service of the French.

The House of Commons in Wilberforce's dayWhile petitions poured into government offices to end slavery, the petitioners themselves were not at risk. Wilberforce was, for his position was never going to advance his political career even if he survived assassinations. In 1793 he advanced a bill in the House of Commons advocating gradual abolition. It failed by eight votes, most members absenting themselves form the House so as not to have to vote. Next he brought forward a bill prohibiting British ships from carrying slaves to foreign territories. It lost by two votes in a near-empty House. Promised the support of some Members of Parliament, he found himself abandoned. Nevertheless his resolve never abated even as his courage and eloquence never diminished. The tide began to turn. In 1807 Britain outlawed trading in slaves. Wilberforce incessantly lobbied the governments of other nations and was rewarded by seeing them do the same.

One task remained: the freeing of those already enslaved. That task absorbed all his energies for the next twenty-five years. The night that Wilberforce died, his supporters in the House of Commons were passing the clause in the Emancipation Act that declared all slaves free in one year and their masters given twenty million pounds in compensation. William Wilberforce died on 29th July, 1833. One month later, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act that gave all slaves in the British Empire their freedom.