William Wilberforce Campaigns 46 Years for Abolition

The smoke from the committee room lamps stung my eyes as I stood against the wall, listening to the men argue over how to begin. Wilberforce sat at the head of the table, his thin frame bent forward, the diary open before him. He had written the line only days earlier, the one about his great purpose, and now he repeated it quietly to the others gathered in the London house. Clarkson spread maps across the boards. Sharp spoke of the Somerset judgment and what it might still mean on English soil. I held the stack of fresh petitions that had already begun arriving from the northern towns, the ink still damp on some of the signatures.

Outside, the city moved as it always had, sugar and rum moving through the docks in casks stamped with island names. Inside, the talk turned to the first motion. Wilberforce would bring it to the Commons in the spring. No one expected it to pass on the first try, yet the room felt charged with the certainty that the attempt itself mattered. I carried the petitions to the printers that night and watched the broadsheets come off the press, the Wedgwood seal already stamped on the back of some of them.

By the second session the resistance had hardened. Planters bought seats and filled the benches. Wilberforce rose anyway, his voice steady through the long hours of evidence about holds and chains and fevers. The vote went against us. He came back the next year with the same papers and new witnesses. I stood in the public gallery and counted the faces that turned away when the numbers were read out. Clarkson kept traveling, collecting testimony from sailors who had worked the Middle Passage. The medallions appeared on more wrists and coat lapels each month.

The war with France pushed the question aside for years. Wilberforce waited through the suspensions and the renewed debates, always returning to the same facts about tonnage and mortality. In 1807 the bill finally cleared both houses. I was in the corridor outside the Commons when the messengers carried the news to the waiting crowd. Men who had never spoken to one another clasped hands. Wilberforce walked out last, his head lowered, already speaking to someone about the next step, the enforcement at sea.

The West Africa Squadron began its patrols the following year. Reports came back of captured vessels and landings in the Bahamas and Jamaica. I helped copy the lists of freed people for the committee records. The numbers grew, yet the trade continued under other flags. Wilberforce wrote letters to foreign ministers and pressed for treaties. He retired from the Commons in 1825 but kept the correspondence on his desk at home, the same desk where the 1787 diary still lay.

The Anti-Slavery Society formed in the same year the trade bill had passed. New names joined the old ones. Buxton took the lead in the Commons. I attended the meetings where the question shifted from the trade to slavery itself. Petitions arrived again, thicker than before. The Reform Act removed the pocket boroughs that had sheltered the planters. In 1831 the rebellion in Jamaica reached London in the form of official dispatches and missionary letters. Parliament ordered inquiries. The evidence of burned estates and executed leaders filled the committee rooms once more.

Wilberforce was by then an old man, often confined to his house. He still received visitors who brought the latest drafts of the emancipation bill. Stanley introduced the measure in the spring of 1833. The apprenticeship clauses and the twenty million pounds in compensation were argued line by line. I stood in the gallery on the night the second reading passed without opposition. Wilberforce had died the week before. The vote was announced while the candles burned low.

The Act took effect the following August. In the West Indies the field work continued under the new name of apprenticeship. The records showed six years for those tied to the land, four for the rest. I watched the final papers leave the Colonial Office and wondered how many of the original committee members would live to see the last indenture end. The ships still sailed, but the holds carried different cargo now, and the old ledgers of human property were boxed and stored.

The apprenticeship registers in the Colonial Office recorded 800,000 names by the spring of 1834, each entry noting age, occupation, and the island plantation to which the person remained bound until 1840 for field hands and 1838 for domestics. Joseph Sturge sailed from Bristol on the packet Isis in November 1836 and returned with sworn depositions from magistrates in St. Ann and Trelawny parishes describing floggings of twenty lashes for short weight of cane and the withholding of the weekly allowance of salt fish. He placed these before the committee at 18 Aldermanbury on 15 March 1837, where Buxton moved that the apprenticeship clauses be struck from the statute. The House divided at two o’clock the next morning, 269 to 62, and the Colonial Office circular of 30 July 1838 ordered the immediate termination of all remaining indentures. In Kingston the workhouse gates opened on 1 August and the former apprentices walked the roads carrying bundles tied in cloth, some heading toward the free villages founded by Baptist missionaries at Sligoville and Stewart Town.