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Tom Coop 1 Timothy 6:11-21 August 14, 2016 William Wilberforce: Abolishing the Slave Trade In the late 1700s, when William Wilberforce was a teenager, English traders raided the African coast on the Gulf of Guinea, capturing between 35,000 and 50,000 Africans a year, shipping them across the Atlantic, and selling them into . It was a profitable business that many powerful people had become dependent upon. One publicist for the trade wrote: “The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent this traffic from being dropped. “The necessity, the absolute necessity, then, of carrying it on, must, since there is no other, be its excuse.” By the late 1700s, the economics of slavery were so entrenched that only a handful of people thought anything could be done about it. That handful included William Wilberforce.

William Wilberforce was born in 1759 into a prosperous merchant family in the North Sea port city of Hull, in England. His father, , died when William was only eight years old, and his mother, Elizabeth, sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in . His aunt, Hannah, had become a devotee of , an Anglican minister who, along with the brothers John and Charles Wesley, are regarded as the founders of . 2

Wilberforce admired Whitefield, Wesley, and (a reformed slave trader and the author of the much beloved hymn, “”) as a child. His mother, though, was more high church and was concerned her son was “turning Methodist.” So, she took him out of the boarding school where they had sent him and sent him to another. But at this new school Wilberforce said later, “I did nothing at all there.” And that became his lifestyle right through St. John’s College at Cambridge. By this point he was rich and able to live off his parents’ wealth and get by with little work. And, he lost any interest in religion and instead preferred circulating among the social elite. At St. John’s College he wasn’t a serious student. A fellow student at Cambridge wrote: “When William 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.” One of his contemporaries wrote, “His gregarious nature, his talents, his wit, his kindness, his social powers, and his love of society (made him) the center of attraction to all the clever and idle of his own college.” 3

One thing did happen at St. John’s that would affect the rest of his life. Wilberforce met and became friends with fellow student of William Pitt, the future prime minister of England (in 1783 at the age of 23). Pitt was to become a life-long friend and ally.

In 1780, at the age of 21 and while still a student at St. John’s, Wilberforce decided to run for office and was easily elected member of Parliament for his hometown of Hull. Wilberforce quickly gained a reputation for eloquence and integrity. He was a politician all his adult life, never losing an election. Thus began a fifty-year investment in the politics of England. He began it as a late-night, party-loving, upper-class unbeliever. He was single and would stay that way happily until he was 37 years old. It was then that he met Barbara Spooner on April 15, 1797. He fell immediately in love. In the next eight days he proposed to her and on May 30th they were married, six weeks after they met. And stayed married until William died 36 years later. In the first eight years of their marriage they had four sons and two daughters. The couple were devoted to each other and Wilberforce often spent hours playing with his children, taking them out or reading to them. 4

Wilberforce viewed his own role as father as more important than his role as politician.

In 1785, Wilberforce began reading evangelical discourses that caused him to reflect deeply on his life, which led to a period of intense sorrow. “I am sure that no human creature could suffer more than I did for some months,” he later wrote. His unnatural gloom lifted on Easter 1786. He experienced a spiritual rebirth. He called it “the Great Change.” Wilberforce briefly considered abandoning Parliament in order to enter the ministy, but Newton, Pitt, and other friends persuaded him that he could serve God more effectively in public life. As a result of his “Great Change,” Wilberforce abstained from alcohol and practiced rigorous self-examination as befit, he believed, a “serious” Christian. He now loathed the socializing that went along with politicking. He worried about 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 health, fill my mind with thoughts of resistance before and self-condemnation afterwards.” Although his conversion changed some of his habits, it did not change his nature: he remained outwardly cheerful, interested and respectful, tactfully urging others towards his new faith. 5

Inwardly, he underwent an agonizing struggle and became relentlessly self-critical, harshly judging his own spirituality, use of time, vanity, self-control and his relationships with others.

Following his conversion to Methodism, he looked for a way of following his religious and humanitarian beliefs and moral conscience. In particular, two causes caught his attention. First, under the influence of Rev. , 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.” Initially, he reasoned that if trafficking in Africans ceased, slave-owners would have to treat their “property” more humanely, there being no replacement. Later, he would advocate for the total and complete abolition of slavery throughout the . Slavery had been practiced for thousands of years by the eighteenth century, but the Transatlantic Slave Trade was dramatically different in nature and scale to anything that had existed before. Great wealth was generated by this trade, which was operated with a brutally efficient system. 6

Ships would sail full of trading goods on one leg of the journey. Numerous goods produced in Britain were rare and valuable in Africa, including guns, ammunition, alcohol and manufactured cloth. Trading these for slaves formed the cargo of the ships known as ‘slavers’ sailing from Europe to America. The economies of many British cities and trading ports depended on the slave trade. Initially, slaves were prisoners of war taken in conflicts between African states. Later, up to 70 per cent, were simply kidnapped. The middle passage itself, the journey from Africa to the Americas, took around three months. The conditions on board for slaves were horrific. They wore chains, shackles and neck collars and were densely packed in the hold of the . Many died in route from disease or the effects of overcrowding. One captain of a British slave ship threw 132 slaves overboard during a mid-ocean storm in order to lighten the vessel. Upon returning to England he made an insurance claim on the lost cargo! People were outraged. The Attorney-General, however, insisted that the captain was without “any show or suggestion of cruelty”; it was his privilege to do with the cargo as he pleased. Once put ashore, slaves were fattened up to disguise the ravages of months of poor nutrition and seasickness. 7

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.

When Wilberforce first began his campaign to abolish the slave trade, he was initially optimistic, naively so. He expressed “no doubt” about his chances of quick success. But Wilberforce’s battle was not to be an easy one. Powerful interests in the slave trade itself and in port cities such as Liverpool that had grown prosperous on the income the trade generated ensured the failure of his bill. Wilberforce did not give up. During every successive session of Parliament he introduced his bill, and it was defeated every time--although there were minor victories over the years, such as limits on the number of slaves who could be crowded into the ships’ holds. The pathway to abolition was blocked by vested interests, parliamentary filibustering, entrenched bigotry, international politics, slave unrest, personal sickness, and political fear. When it became clear that Wilberforce was not going to let the issue die, pro-slavery forces targeted him. 8

He was vilified; opponents spoke of “the damnable doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.” The opposition became so fierce, one friend feared that one day he would read about Wilberforce’s being “broiled by Indian planters, barbecued by African merchants, and eaten by Guinea captains.” The final push in the campaign came on January 2, 1807, over twenty years after it began, when a bill was read in the House of Commons which provided that, after May 1, the African slave trade and all manner of dealing and trading in the purchase of slaves or their transport from Africa to the West Indies or any other territory is utterly abolished, prohibited and declared to be unlawful. The bill finally passed this time with a tremendous majority – 283-16, ending nearly four hundred years of slaving in the British Empire. America followed suit with its own law banning the slave trade in 1808. Applause rained down upon Wilberforce as he sat, head in hands, tears streaming down his face. Unfortunately, France and Spain didn’t initially follow suit. France abolished the slave trade in 1823 and Spain in 1836. The last eighteen years of Wilberforce’s life would be a sustained effort to bring about the total emancipation of existing slaves. 9

Tracts would be distributed, Wilberforce would write, Thomas Buxton would be brought in to take over from the aging and infirm Wilberforce to spearhead the movement. Finally, three months before he died, an ailing Wilberforce was persuaded to present one last petition for abolition before the House of Commons. I had never thought to appear in public again, but it shall never be said that William Wilberforce is silent while the slaves require his help! On July 26, 1833, the bill for the total abolition of slavery was passed, and three days later William Wilberforce died. The battle was won!

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.” 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. 10

He helped found parachurch groups like the Society for Bettering the Cause of the Poor, the Church Society, the British and Foreign Society, and the Antislavery Society. He was involved in , was governor of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and founder of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. And he was involved in the founding of the Society for the Relief of Debtors, which over a five-year period obtained the release of 14,000 people from debtor’s prisons.

At the suggestion of Wilberforce and Bishop Porteus, King George III was requested by the to issue in 1787 the Proclamation for the Discouragement of Vice, as a remedy for the rising tide of immorality. The proclamation commanded the prosecution of those guilty of “excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord’s Day, and other dissolute, immoral, or disorderly practices”. As one might imagine, it was not met with overwhelming support.

Wilberforce accomplished all this in spite of the fact that poor health plagued him his entire life, sometimes keeping him bedridden for weeks. 11

He survived this and other bouts of debilitating illness with the help of opium, a new drug at the time, the affects of which were still unknown. Wilberforce soon became addicted, though opium’s hallucinatory powers terrified him, and the depressions it caused virtually crippled him at times. He had to also wear a steel frame for support during the last fifteen years of his life because of curvature of the spine . His condition was described as follows: “One shoulder began to slope; and his head fell forward, a little more each year until it rested on his chest unless lifted by conscious movement. “He could have looked grotesque were it not for the charm of his face and the smile which hovered about his mouth.” Regarding this steel frame he had to wear, he wrote: How gracious is God in giving us such mitigations and helps for our infirmities.

Wilberforce was, above all, a Christian man. The fruit of the Spirit was abundantly evident in his life. He was a humble man. He was able to take criticism and also sought to avoid taking credit. He considered himself unworthy of a title. Throughout his life he saw the need to cooperate with other men, realizing he could not do it alone. He was humble enough to see the need to “network”. 12

He was a prayerful man. The morning hours were particularly precious to him as he considered them seasons of unusual importance for communing with God. He was also a joyful man, and people enjoyed being around him. He was described as both the most religious man in England as well as the wittiest. He labored faithfully and fervently and left the results with God. His faith was resilient because it was not a faith in himself, but in God. As he said after one of his defeats, God, has given the very small increase there has been thus far and I must give all if there be more.

Ultimately, Wilberforce’s faith in Jesus Christ changed him from a careless, wealthy young politician to a tireless, compassionate public servant. He developed and used his gifts of leadership and persuasion to champion countless efforts to better society. He was a moral leader who voted against his party when principle required it. He persisted for decades in the tasks God had called him to, despite illness, physical threats, and enormous opposition. At his death the British nation honored Wilberforce by burying him in Abbey and erecting a statue in his memory. For all of these reasons and many more, Wilberforce is a man who needs to be on our list of Christian heroes. 13

Let me leave you with this: Here is William Wilberforce’s mantra – Never give up and do what is right. Now look at the two quotes on the front and back of the bulletin. “A private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all.” And, “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” Thanks be to God! Amen…