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William Wilberforce: Abolishing the Slave Trade in the Late 1700S, When

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William Wilberforce: Abolishing the Slave Trade in the Late 1700S, When 1 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 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 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, Robert Wilberforce, died when William was only eight years old, and his mother, Elizabeth, sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in London. His aunt, Hannah, had become a devotee of George Whitefield, an Anglican minister who, along with the brothers John and Charles Wesley, are regarded as the founders of Methodism. 2 Wilberforce admired Whitefield, Wesley, and John Newton (a reformed slave trader and the author of the much beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace”) 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. 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.” 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 British Empire. 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 slave ship. 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.
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