Inspiring Christian Lives

William Wilberforce, 1759-1833

On 12th May 1789 a young Christian rose to give his first parliamentary speech against the slave trade which was then legal in all parts of the British Empire and beyond. It was a momentous occasion, the culmination of a long standing extra parliamentary movement by the Quakers. The young evangelical was known as William Wilberforce. On account of his developing Christian principles, he had gradually become convinced that slavery was unjust. This was in the face of stiff opposition from slavers, their supporters in government and the general culture at large. Indeed, William’s first attempts at abolishing slavery by law were overwhelmingly defeated during the parliamentary vote of 1791. But he persevered and campaigned until the slave trade was abolished in 1807. Slave ownership, though, was not abolished until 1833. Wilberforce resisted this for the time being. Indeed, he pointed out in a pamphlet written in 1807: "It would be wrong to emancipate (the slaves). To grant freedom to them immediately, would be to insure not only their masters' ruin, but their own. They must (first) be trained and educated for freedom." Wilberforce retired from the Commons in 1825, thus playing no further part in the intermittent pressure to remove slave ownership from the statute books. One month after his death, though, in 1833, slave ownership was finally abolished in the British Empire to the horror of its Boer subjects down in South Africa.