Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries · Character
William Wilberforce
He lost the same vote for almost twenty years. He and his friends kept coming back until the vote was won.
The moment
William Wilberforce entered Parliament in 1780 at the age of twenty-one: wealthy, witty, and a close friend of the future prime minister. In 1785 he came to a serious Christian faith and wondered whether he should leave politics.
He sought out John Newton, the former slave ship captain turned pastor. Newton urged him to stay where he was. In 1787 Wilberforce wrote in his diary that God had set before him two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.
At that time British ships carried tens of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic every year, and much of the nation’s wealth depended on the trade.
What he did
He brought the question back every year. His first bill to abolish the trade was defeated in 1791 by 163 votes to 88. He introduced motions again and again through the 1790s and lost each time, through war with France, political reversals, and repeated illness.
He worked as part of a team. Wilberforce was the voice in Parliament. Thomas Clarkson gathered the evidence, traveling the country to interview sailors and collect the instruments used on slave ships. Granville Sharp brought legal experience. Hannah More wrote for the public. James Stephen supplied legal strategy. Henry Thornton opened his home at Clapham, where many of them lived as neighbors. Olaudah Equiano, once enslaved, published his own account in 1789.
He argued from evidence. The campaign put facts in front of the nation: testimony, statistics, and the diagram of a slave ship showing how human beings were packed below deck.
He lived to see the result. In 1807 the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 to abolish the British slave trade. Wilberforce then worked toward ending slavery itself, and handed the leadership to a younger member, Thomas Fowell Buxton, when his health failed. The bill abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire passed its decisive vote in July 1833. He died three days later.
What leaders can take from him
Some work takes twenty years. Most leaders overestimate what one year can do and underestimate what two decades can. Wilberforce measured faithfulness, and the result came late.
Stay where your influence is. Newton’s advice kept him in the one place where he could do the most good.
A cause needs more than a champion. The researcher, the lawyer, the writer, and the host were as necessary as the speaker. Take any one away and the campaign fails.
Hand the work on before you must. He chose and backed his successor while he could still help.
He had blind spots. Wilberforce supported harsh laws against workers’ associations and political dissent at home, and critics then and since have said he saw injustice abroad more clearly than injustice near him. He also moved more slowly toward full emancipation than some of his allies wanted.
Try this week
- Name the one thing you would work on for twenty years. Write down what you will do about that this month.
- List the roles your cause needs: evidence, voice, strategy, a place to gather. Put a name beside each, and find the missing one.
- Decide who will carry your most important work after you, and tell that person.
Read the ROAR issue Change the metric, on measuring faithfulness before outcomes.
Sources and further reading
Hague, William. William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner. London: HarperPress, 2007.
Pollock, John. Wilberforce. London: Constable, 1977.
Find out where your team stands.
The LEADS Self-Check takes five minutes and shows which step to work on first.