Reform - Wilberforce and his influence
Dr John Wolffe
Many people - black and white, men and women - contributed to the campaigns that eventually led to the abolition of the British slave trade (1807) and to the emancipation of the slaves already in the Caribbean (1833). These movements are, however, particularly associated with the name of William Wilberforce (1759-1833). Following his conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1785, Wilberforce believed that God had called him to two great causes to which he committed the rest of his life, the suppression of the slave trade and the ‘reformation of manners’. As an MP and a close friend of the prime minister, William Pitt, he was ideally placed both to exert influence where it counted, and to understand the political obstacle course that had to be negotiated.
Many people - black and white, men and women - contributed to the campaigns that eventually led to the abolition of the British slave trade (1807) and to the emancipation of the slaves already in the Caribbean (1833). These movements are, however, particularly associated with the name of William Wilberforce (1759-1833). Following his conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1785, Wilberforce believed that God had called him to two great causes to which he committed the rest of his life, the suppression of the slave trade and the ‘reformation of manners’. As an MP and a close friend of the prime minister, William Pitt, he was ideally placed both to exert influence where it counted, and to understand the political obstacle course that had to be negotiated.
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The campaign against the slave trade took twenty years to bear fruit. It was delayed particularly by the outbreak of war with France in 1793, which made parliament nervous about making a potentially economically destabilizing change. Nor was the eventual legislation in 1807 prohibiting the use of British ships for the slave trade the end of the matter. Ships of other nations could still trade slaves, and nothing was done to change the situation of those already enslaved, although Wilberforce and other abolitionists hoped – vainly as it turned out – that cutting off the supply of new slaves would force plantation owners in the West Indies to treat their existing slaves better.
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Hence Wilberforce continued his campaigns, notably with efforts to get a more general abolition of the slave trade, and subsequently in the 1820s initiating the movement to get slavery itself abolished. Due to age and poor health, he then passed on parliamentary leadership to Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), but on his death bed heard of the passing of the Emancipation bill in by the House of Commons.
Meanwhile, although Wilberforce’s aspiration for the ‘reformation of manners’ was less focused, it was nevertheless a stimulus to significant endeavours at home. He was himself involved in a variety of philanthropic endeavours to improve the moral and material condition of the working classes in Britain. He was, however, criticised for his failure to commit the same passion to the cause of ‘white slaves’ in the growing industrial towns of his own Yorkshire constituency as he gave to that of black slaves in the Caribbean.
Subsequently factory reform was a cause taken up enthusiastically by younger men who shared Wilberforce’s commitment to evangelical Christianity, notably Michael Sadler (1780-1835), Richard Oastler (1789-1861) and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-85). Their greatest triumph was the Ten Hours Act of 1847, which by placing legal limits on the hours that could be worked by women and children, freed them from the worst excesses of exploitation. Nevertheless, just as the terms of the slavery emancipation act of 1833, which compensated the enslavers rather than the enslaved, left an abiding legacy of injustice, even the best efforts of Victorian reformers could not eliminate all the oppressive aspects of the factory system at home.
Dr John Wolffe is Associate Dean Research Scholarship & Enterprise at the Open University Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and an advisor to MJR.
[Image: Hull City Council]
[Image: Hull City Council]