The night slavery ended in Britain
Royal Assent to the Slavery Abolition Act
The Slavery Abolition Act receives Royal Assent on August 28, 1833. It will come into force on August 1, 1834 — Emancipation Day, the day over eight hundred thousand enslaved people in British territories become legally free.
Wilberforce does not live to see August 1. He dies on July 29, three days after being told the act has passed. His body lies in state in the House of Lords. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
The night of July 31, 1834 — the night before Emancipation Day — is described by those who were there as one of the most extraordinary nights in the history of the Caribbean. In Jamaica, in Barbados, in Trinidad, in the other islands, enslaved people gather in churches and chapels and hold watch night services, waiting for midnight.
Missionary accounts describe thousands of people on their knees in the hours before midnight, praying, singing, weeping. When the clocks strike twelve, the weeping becomes something else — the sound of people who have been in chains so long that freedom is not fully real until they are standing in it.
The credit for this moment belongs partly to Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect. It belongs partly to the enslaved people themselves who resisted and fled and testified and prayed. It belongs partly to the Moravian and Methodist and Baptist missionaries who taught people to read and gave them a language of justice rooted in the God who heard the cries of slaves in Egypt.
August 1, 1834. People who had been property became people in the eyes of the law.
It took forty-six years of Wilberforce and centuries of prayer.
“Thank God that I have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the abolition of slavery.”
— William Wilberforce, upon hearing the bill had passed, July 26, 1833 AD
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, Because he anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim release to the captives, Recovering of sight to the blind, To deliver those who are crushed,”
People on their knees in Caribbean churches at midnight, waiting for the clocks to strike, weeping and then something more than weeping.
The gospel that arrived in the Caribbean on slave ships produced people who prayed for freedom in the name of the God who sets captives free. The colonizers brought the scriptures to the people they enslaved, and the enslaved found in those scriptures the resources for their liberation.
The Bible they were given said: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim liberty to the captives.
They believed it. They prayed it. They waited forty-six years for it.
Liberty came at midnight, to people on their knees.