The tireless efforts of William Wilberforce brought about an end to slavery in the British Empire almost 30 years before the American Civil War. As a young member of the British Parliament, he was one of the first leaders to see slavery not as an economic necessity but as sin, which was the same change of mindset that was coming to the American abolitionists through evangelist Charles Finney and others. 

After rediscovering the extreme faith that he had heard about as a child from John Newton (1725-1807), the evangelical pastor and ex-slave trader who wrote the song “Amazing Grace,” and from his aunt and uncle, who were friends of revivalist George Whitefield, he thought that he should leave his position in government. However, Newton and William Pitt, his college buddy who became England’s youngest Prime Minister, persuaded him to stay in Parliament.

Wilberforce gathered around him notable Christians of his day and they formed what became the “Clapham Sect,” named for the town where Wilberforce lived. Its members included Thomas Clarkson, Edward James Eliot, Charles Grant, Zachary Macaulay, Hannah More, Granville Sharp, James Stephen, and Henry Thornton. They were distinguished leaders in their own right and became energized by Wilberforce’s hope that they could win. During his lifetime, they brought breakthroughs in nearly 70 different social causes—all in the name of Christ.


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Link to YouTube movie trailer for "Amazing Grace"

Statesman's concern that he serve as a true Christian

Wilberforce’s greatest desire was not only to be personally right with God but also to bring his nation into right relationship with Him. His journal for the summer of 1786 reveals his search for Christian discipline and a clear “God-said” for his life. He said, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (a term meaning to restore virtue to public life). That was to become his life’s work.

In 1780, William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was elected a member of the British Parliament. He was 21 years old, and he had carried the election on his natural ability to win people. He didn’t know it at the time, but he was going to need all of that relational ability for defeating one of the greatest evils of his day, the British slave trade.
 
Four years later, Wilberforce, whose family was very wealthy, went to the French Riviera with his family and friends. It was a turning point in his life. Through conversations with his friend Isaac Milnor, an evangelical Methodist, and by reading a book by Philip Doddridge called The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), he became convinced that his wealth and power had left him empty. It pained him to realize that he had been practicing a superficial form of Christianity. He had failed to become a true radical for Christ.

He wrote in his journal, “Often while in the full enjoyment of all that this world could bestow, my conscience told me that in the true sense of the word, I was not a Christian. I laughed, I sang, I was apparently gay and happy, but the thought would steal across me, ‘What madness is all this.’ ”

Out of this spiritual travail was birthed a man of God, an unlikely leader of the nation’s Christians in the public arena. He was short and somewhat deformed, but also eloquent and extremely bright. Combined with an awakened consecration he was hard to beat.