William Wilberforce is one of the great forgotten men of history. That will change, and Wilberforce will be simply one of the great men of history, when the remarkable new film Amazing Grace opens nationwide this weekend.
Amazing Grace commemorates the bicentennial of the British ban on the slave trade (1807), an antislavery movement led by Wilberforce. Without him, there would have been no end to the slave trade, certainly not in his time. And, without his conversion to Christianity, Wilberforce might have lived a forgettable life as a rich man’s son. Instead, he helped give birth to new freedom in the British Empire, hope in America, and inspiration to abolitionists everywhere. Today, with slavery spreading in Africa and Asia, and an estimated 27 million in slavery worldwide, Amazing Grace is more than a period piece: It is a timely and enduring lesson on what one man can do to stop the spread of evil.
“Religion in politics” is a topic hot enough to spark a barroom brawl–or, at least, an inter-cubicle dispute. Yet there is no getting around the religious passion that fed abolitionism, or, for that matter, the later civil-rights movements. Slavery mocked the rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, as abolitionists made clear. Yet many abolitionists in both Britain and America were also inspired to fight passionately against this injustice by the moral teachings of Jesus Christ. The fervor of abolitionism came from the New Testament, a body of literature providing the universal principles of natural law with which to attack slavery.
The story of the abolitionist movement really begins in Britain, where an unlikely Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, courageously took up the cause of human emancipation, despite virtually universal opposition. The son of a wealthy merchant, young Wilberforce led the typically hedonistic lifestyle of a college student at Cambridge. Bored with his father’s business, he entered Parliament at age 21 and made friends easily. Five years later, he had a conversion experience leading him to devote his life to freeing those in bondage. In 1791, his bill to abolish the slave trade failed by a wide margin, but he persisted. In 1807, Wilberforce released A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade on the eve of Parliament’s overwhelming vote to end the trade in human beings–a remarkable change in 15 years.
In 1823, “God’s politician” began a ten-year campaign to end slavery entirely, releasing his Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, in which he claimed that total and unqualified emancipation was a moral and ethical duty before God. Wilberforce died in 1833, just as Parliament abolished slavery.
Under Wilberforce’s leadership, the anti-slavery movement in Britain developed tactics similar to those that would be used by American abolitionists: speakers on lecture circuits, mass petitions to Congress, distribution of abolitionist tracts, and the use of “respectable” women as advocates. And in both Britain and the United States, Christianity impelled individuals to organize in opposition to man’s ownership of man.
Slavery, of course, never fully disappeared. Millions remain enslaved in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Inspired by Wilberforce’s example, the producers of Amazing Grace hope to stir public opinion against the slave trade through a website which sponsors the “Amazing Change Campaign,” which aims to launch “a campaign to abolish modern day slavery and allow children and adults around the world to live in freedom.” Just as Wilberforce should not be forgotten, neither should his cause.
– Jonathan J. Bean is a research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the forthcoming book Race and Liberty: The Classical Liberal Tradition of Civil Rights.