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The only hero?

William Wilberforce is the name that most people in Britain immediately associate with the fight against slavery. Although he favoured a more cautious and gradual eradication of slavery, he was a key representative of the anti-slave trade forces. Gracious, witty, and devoutly religious, he was also a great orator who was beloved by almost everyone who knew him.

Wilberforce has become a convenient national hero, with 20,000 people attending a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of his death. His house has been turned into a museum and his larger-than-life statue has a prominent place in Westminster Abbey.

Admirers today invoke his spirit to support causes ranging from banning abortion to the need for an Evangelical revival.

Wilberforce certainly deserves some credit for the banning of the British slave trade in 1807 and the act that emancipated Britain's slaves that was finally passed in 1833.

His charm, personal kindness, reputation for integrity and deep conservatism on most issues gave him influence with his fellow MPs that few others in parliament had.

But was the abolition of the slave trade and slavery primarily the work of this likeable, saintly man and his circle of similarly religious friends? Today, most historians see the long struggle to end the slave trade as much more complex and unruly than simply being the work of Wilberforce alone.

A man of his time

Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759 into a wealthy family. His family's money and prominence got him a seat in parliament when he was just 21, and he remained there for all but the final eight years of his life.

While still a young man, he converted to the new Evangelical strain in Anglicanism and this had a huge effect on the issues he took up. Influenced by an anti-slavery essay by Thomas Clarkson, he was also urged by his close friend, Prime Minister William Pitt, to make the abolition cause his own before 'the ground may be occupied by another'.

His Evangelicalism, however, made him equally concerned with other types of sin, and he worked hard to get George III to issue a royal proclamation condemning 'excessive drinking, blasphemy, profane swearing and cursing, lewdness, profanation of the Lord's Day, or other dissolute, immoral or disorderly practices'.

Wilberforce then formed a Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, which at one point succeeded in sending a bookseller to jail who had published Thomas Paine's attack on traditional religion, 'The Age of Reason'.

Despite his challenge to something as embedded in the British imperial economy as the slave trade, Wilberforce was in many ways a conventional, cautious man of his class and time. He wrote to one woman friend to urge her to adhere to 'the submissive, obedient demeanour which certainly should distinguish the wife towards her husband'.

He was uneasy about increasing the tiny percentage of British men entitled to vote. Almost everything about the French Revolution appalled him, and he was horrified by anything resembling a union.

Paradoxically, Wilberforce's right-wing position on such issues probably made him a more effective voice for abolition in a parliament whose members were mostly well-to-do landowners who wanted little change in the status quo.

A clumsy strategist

Wilberforce was not a skillful legislative tactician. Although for more than a decade he introduced an abolition bill every year, he often did it late in the parliamentary session, or at a time when MPs were distracted by other issues.

He seemed to think that supporters would rally because of the innate virtue of the cause, and he was disorganised when it came to the essential task of lining up votes in advance. When he managed to get the House of Commons to vote to abolish the slave trade in 1792, he had done no groundwork in the House of Lords, which failed to pass the measure.

The historic bill was finally passed in 1807, but only after significant help from others.

The movement's indefatigable travelling organiser, Thomas Clarkson, made one of his marathon journeys around the country, generating petitions to parliament. A new and sympathetic prime minister, Lord Grenville, got the measure through the House of Lords. Wilberforce's colleague (and brother-in-law) James Stephen had the previous year shrewdly urged Wilberforce to get parliament to ban British ships carrying slaves to the colonies of France and its allies, which had wiped out most of the British slave trade already.

Following the 1807 victory, Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists fought a series of further actions involving the slave trade, such as trying to prevent France being allowed to resume its slave trade after the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Throughout his life he continued his other philanthropic and Evangelical projects, ranging from visiting prisoners in jail and urging them to repent of their sins, to promoting Christian missionaries in India - work that he declared to be just as important as ending slavery.

He gave generously to those in need, although he wanted the poor to know 'that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God'.

Pressures outside parliament

Whatever Wilberforce's efforts, parliament would have done nothing about the slave trade if there had not been a huge popular movement relentlessly creating pressure outside its walls. For that the credit goes mainly to Thomas Clarkson.

Wilberforce believed that government was best left to the propertied and educated, so he was always uncomfortable with mass expressions of political opinion, and he opposed the idea of boycotting sugar. He recognised that some form of public pressure on parliament was essential, and, despite their differences on other issues, he and Clarkson were friends and colleagues for more than 40 years.

Wilberforce was most comfortable with his fellow Anglicans, but it was Clarkson who had forged the essential alliance with the Quakers, which brought financial support to the movement and a nationwide network of volunteers from the first religious denomination in Britain to take a stand against slavery.

The huge slave rebellions that shook the West Indies are another factor that helped to end British slavery, but they have received little attention in Britain until recently.

The first time the British army faced a slave revolt beyond its control was actually not on British territory. In 1793, when Britain was at war with France, it invaded the French territory of St Domingue (Haiti). The British army wanted to seize this lucrative colony for itself and to suppress a vast slave uprising taking place in St Domingue before it could spread to the nearby British colony of Jamaica.

The army failed. Five years and more than 12,000 British deaths later, the redcoats withdrew. An army of rebel enslaved Africans had defeated the army of the world's superpower, and the largest slave-trading nation.

The humiliation of this defeat sent a shock wave through the British establishment and, indirectly, strengthened the forces in parliament that voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807.

New uprisings shook the British Caribbean in later years. The greatest of them erupted in Jamaica at the end of 1831. More than 20,000 captives seized control of much of the northwest corner of the island, setting planters' houses on fire. Many of these were on ridges or hilltops, and as they burst into flames, they acted like beacons to spread the revolt.

It took the British army and militia a month to get the country under control. Some 200 enslaved Africans and 14 white people died in the fighting. At least 340 more slave rebels were hanged or shot afterwards.

In Britain, news of the revolt almost certainly hastened the coming of emancipation. Both private correspondence and testimony before parliament showed that colonial officials and high-ranking military men expected more revolts - and feared that the British military might not be able to contain them.

It was no coincidence that a new parliament voted to free the slaves the following year.

The final years

Wilberforce resigned from parliament in 1825 due to ill health. He followed the final stages of the battle for emancipation from a distance.

He died in the summer of 1833, just before the emancipation measure became law. It was the last chapter of a long struggle - 45 years after he had first spoken against the slave trade.

During their lifetimes, Wilberforce and Clarkson shared public attention and both were much honored for their role in ending slavery. After Wilberforce's death, two of his sons produced a five-volume biography that greatly downgraded Clarkson's role in the movement and did not credit the role the slave revolts played.

Since then, writing some two dozen later biographies, Evangelical admirers have often portrayed Wilberforce as being almost single-handedly responsible for ending British slavery.

Clarkson, whose political radicalism made him unpopular with Evangelicals, has had no comparable lobby of supporters. And until recently, few Britons have wanted to recognise either the crucial role of the Caribbean slave revolts, or of black or women abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano or Elizabeth Heyrick.

William Wilberforce deserves an important place in the story of emancipation, but he shares it with many others, both black and white, men and women, in Britain and the Caribbean.

Find out more

Books

African History: a Very Short Introduction by John Parker and Richard Rathbone (Oxford, 2007)

William Wilberforce by Robin Furneaux (Hamish Hamilton, 1974)

Thomas Clarkson: A Biography by Ellen Gibson Wilson (William Sessions Ltd., 1996)

The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano, edited by Vincent Carretta (Penguin, 2003) (also online at )

Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (Macmillan, 2005)

Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies by Michael Craton (Cornell University Press, 1983)

The Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 by Hugh Thomas (Phoenix Press, 2006)

Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire by James Walvin (Blackwell, 2001)

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 by David Brion Davis (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer (Pluto Press, 1984)

About the author

Adam Hochschild is the author of six books, most of them dealing with human rights. They include Bury the Chains: the British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (Macmillan, 2005), a narrative history of the abolition movement, and King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Macmillan, 1999), which concerns the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium.