Wilberforce and the long fight
Abolition and the evangelical conscience
William Wilberforce is twenty-seven years old, newly converted to evangelical Christianity, when he writes in his journal in 1787: God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
He does not know it will take forty-six years.
He introduces his first abolition bill in 1791. It is defeated. He introduces another. Defeated. Again. Defeated. For twenty years, year after year, the bills come and are voted down by a Parliament whose members own sugar plantations and slave ships and have no interest in their own financial destruction.
Wilberforce is sustained by a circle of friends — the Clapham Sect, as they come to be called — who meet, pray, strategize, write, lobby, and refuse to stop. They fund the collection of testimony from enslaved people and from sailors who have witnessed the Middle Passage. They run the campaign with the discipline of people who believe the work is both morally necessary and divinely ordered.
The Slave Trade Act passes in 1807. The trade is abolished. But enslaved people already in the British colonies remain enslaved.
Wilberforce fights on. The Slavery Abolition Act is passed on July 26, 1833. Wilberforce is told of it three days before his death.
He has spent forty-six years on one question.
He dies at seventy-three, three days after the answer comes.
“You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”
— William Wilberforce, speech to Parliament, c. 1791 AD
“Rescue those who are being led away to death! Indeed, hold back those who are staggering to the slaughter! If you say, Behold, we didn't know this; Doesn't he who weighs the hearts consider it? He who keeps your soul, doesn't he know it? Shall he not render to every man according to his work?”
Forty-six years. Twenty years of defeat before the first partial victory. Twenty-six more years after that.
Wilberforce's life is the permanent answer to the question of whether one person's sustained effort on a single moral issue can change the world.
It can. It takes forty-six years. It requires a community of friends who refuse to stop with you. It requires the discipline to keep bringing the bill back after every defeat, the refusal to accept that the way things are is the way they must remain.
You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.
You know something. What are you doing with it? And are you prepared to do it for forty-six years if necessary?