William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce
William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was an English politician and evangelical Christian who led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the British slave trade. Elected to Parliament for Hull at twenty-one, he enjoyed early success until a deep Christian conversion in 1784–85 led him to rethink his purpose. Encouraged by John Newton, the former slave-ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace," to remain in public life, he wrote in 1787 that God had set before him two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. For twenty years he championed abolition until the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. He also supported education, missions and the founding of what became the RSPCA. He died in 1833, days after learning that the bill to abolish slavery in most of the British Empire was assured of passage, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
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From Abolition to Civil Rights
William Wilberforce led the campaign that abolished the British slave trade in 1807, and in America Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation while Harriet Tubman guided enslaved people to freedom. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery, built the Tuskegee Institute into a leading center of education. Mahatma Gandhi's method of nonviolent resistance later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. in the American civil rights movement.
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Britain's Reformers and Philanthropists
John Howard exposed the harsh conditions in prisons and inspired lasting reform, and William Wilberforce led the parliamentary campaign that abolished the British slave trade in 1807. George Müller cared for more than ten thousand orphans in Bristol, Florence Nightingale transformed nursing and hospital sanitation, and William Booth founded The Salvation Army to serve the poor.
