William Wilberforce was born in Hull, England, the son of a prosperous merchant, and grew up amid material comfort and an active social life. Elected to the British Parliament at age 21, while still a student at Cambridge, he seemed destined for a talented political career, though without any deeper spiritual purpose.
Between 1784 and 1785, a long journey through Europe alongside Isaac Milner, his former teacher in Hull, changed the course of his life. Reading the devotional book by Philip Doddridge and conversations about faith led him to a profound evangelical conversion, which he would later call his great change.
In crisis, Wilberforce considered leaving politics to become a clergyman. The pastor John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace and a former slave ship captain, advised him to remain in Parliament and there put his newfound faith to the service of the nation.
In October 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 the nation’s manners. That same year, he joined Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and other abolitionist activists.
For twenty years, he repeatedly introduced bills against the slave trade in Parliament, facing defeats and the resistance of powerful economic interests tied to the slave trade. In 1807, the Slave Trade Act finally banned that trade throughout the British Empire.
His path, however, was not free of contradictions. Wilberforce supported the Combination Act of 1799, which banned the organizing of British workers, going so far as to call trade unions a general disease of society, and he voted for measures that suspended habeas corpus and restricted public gatherings in the country. This earned him the accusation, made by contemporary critics such as William Cobbett, of never having done anything for England’s poor workers while he fought for enslaved people abroad.
Wilberforce also helped found the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Church Missionary Society, and in 1824 joined the founding group of the world’s first animal protection society. In 1797, he published A Practical View of Christianity, a work that became a bestseller and reignited evangelical fervor among the British elite.
Already ill and weakened, Wilberforce lived to know that the project to abolish slavery had been secured in Parliament, three days before he died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his life remains a symbol of how personal faith can translate into lasting social transformation, even though marked by contradictions regarding the poor of his own country.
