WILBERFORCE, WILLIAM

born Aug. 24, 1759, Hull, Yorkshire, Eng. died July 29, 1833, London British politician and philanthropist who from 1787 was prominent in the struggle to abolish the slave trade and then to abolish slavery itself in British overseas possessions. At Cambridge, where he became a close friend of the future prime minister William Pitt the Younger, Wilberforce was known as an amiable companion rather than an outstanding student. In 1780 both he and Pitt entered the House of Commons, and he soon began to support parliamentary reform and Roman Catholic political emancipation, acquiring a reputation for radicalism that later embarrassed him, especially during the French Revolution, when he was chosen an honorary citizen of France (September 1792). From 1815 he upheld the Corn Laws (tariffs on imported grain) and repressive measures against working-class agitation. Wilberforce's abolitionism was derived in part from evangelical Christianity, to which he was converted in 178485. In 1787 he helped to found a society for the reformation of manners called the Proclamation Society (to suppress the publication of obscenity) and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Tradethe latter more commonly called the Anti-Slavery Society. He and his associatesThomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton, Charles Grant, Edward James Eliot, Zachary Macaulay, and James Stephenwere first called the Saints and afterward (from 1797) the Clapham Sect, of which Wilberforce was the acknowledged leader. In the House of Commons, Wilberforce was an eloquent and indefatigable sponsor of antislavery legislation. He achieved his first success on March 25, 1807, when a bill to abolish the slave trade in the British West Indies became law. This statute, however, did not change the legal position of persons enslaved before its enactment, and so, after several years in which Wilberforce was concerned with other issues, he and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton urged (from 1821) the immediate emancipation of all slaves. In 1823 he aided in organizing and became a vice president of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominionsagain, more commonly called the Anti-Slavery Society. Turning over to Buxton the parliamentary leadership of the abolition movement, he retired from the House of Commons in 1825; the Slavery Abolition Act he had sought was passed one month after his death. Additional reading Biographies include Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vol. (1838, reprinted 1972); Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce (1923, reprinted 1968); Oliver Warner, William Wilberforce and His Times (1962); Robin Furneaux, William Wilberforce (1974); John Pollock, Wilberforce (1977, reissued 1986); and Garth Lean, God's Politician: William Wilberforce's Struggle (1980).