William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was rich, charming, and already in Parliament at twenty-one when a reading trip in 1785 changed him. He assumed his new faith meant leaving public life; John Newton told him to stay where he was. In 1787 he took up the abolition of the slave trade, and for eighteen years he introduced the bill and watched it die — beaten by the West India lobby, by war with France, by the argument that abolition was Jacobin madness.

He and the Clapham circle answered with evidence: eyewitness testimony, ship diagrams, a sugar boycott, petitions by the hundred thousand. The trade was outlawed in 1807. Wilberforce, worn out and ill, handed the fight against slavery itself to younger men, and on 26 July 1833 word reached his sickbed that the emancipation bill had passed. He died three days later and was buried in Westminster Abbey.