William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759, the son of a wealthy merchant. At Cambridge he became a lifelong friend of William Pitt the Younger, and in 1780, aged 21, he was elected MP for Hull. In 1784 he won the prestigious county seat of Yorkshire. In 1785 he experienced an evangelical conversion, and by 1787 he had concluded that God had given him two tasks: suppressing the slave trade and reforming the nation's morals. Working with Thomas Clarkson and the group of evangelicals later known as the Clapham Sect, he introduced his first abolition bill in 1791. Bills were defeated repeatedly over nearly two decades, partly because of reaction against the French Revolution. The Slave Trade Act passed in 1807, though it did not free people already enslaved. He later supported the campaign for full emancipation, retired from Parliament in 1825 and died in July 1833, days after the Commons passed the bill to abolish slavery in most of the British Empire.

Wilberforce is celebrated as the leading parliamentary voice of the abolition movement and is buried in Westminster Abbey. Admirers see him as a model of faith-driven social reform who also supported prison reform, animal welfare and education for the poor. Critics in his own time, such as William Cobbett and William Hazlitt, accused him of caring for enslaved people abroad while supporting repression of workers and radicals at home. Historians such as Eric Williams later argued that economic change mattered more than humanitarian campaigning in ending the trade, and his sons' biography was criticised for playing down the work of Thomas Clarkson.