William Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759 to a wealthy merchant family. Sent to an aunt and uncle in London after his father died, he was drawn to Methodism until his mother pulled him home to a round of theater, balls and cards. At St John’s College, Cambridge, from 1776 he coasted on an inherited fortune, and at 21 he spent about 8,000 pounds to win a seat for Hull, voting as an independent and gambling in London clubs with his friend William Pitt the Younger. On a European tour in 1784 and 1785 with Isaac Milner he read Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul and underwent an evangelical conversion. Former slave ship captain John Newton persuaded him to stay in Parliament.
In 1787 Pitt urged him to bring a motion against the slave trade. He relied on Quaker organizing and Thomas Clarkson’s evidence, but his 1791 bill failed and the French and Haitian revolutions let the West India lobby paint abolition as Jacobin. In 1806 lawyer James Stephen’s Foreign Slave Trade Bill, framed as a wartime measure, cut about two thirds of the British trade, and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. At home he backed the Combination Acts of 1799 and, after Peterloo in 1819, the Six Acts. He handed leadership to Thomas Fowell Buxton and died on 29 July 1833, days after learning the Slavery Abolition Act would pass.
- His intestinal illness, likely ulcerative colitis, led doctors to prescribe daily opium for the rest of his life.
- The abolitionists’ diagram of the slave ship Brooks showed over 400 people packed into the hold.
- Members cheered in 1807 as Wilberforce sat weeping with his face in his hands.
- William Hazlitt attacked him for fighting slavery abroad while backing repression of British workers.
- His sons’ five-volume 1838 biography minimized Clarkson, who published a rebuttal the next year.
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