The Yorkshire MP who introduced the bill almost every year from 1791 and died three days after the emancipation bill passed the Commons
He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
History · Revolutions & empires
The Abolition of the slave trade
Royal assent 25 March 1807
Britain outlaws the Atlantic traffic; slavery itself follows in 1833
After twenty years of petitions, boycotts and parliamentary defeats, an Act received royal assent in March 1807 making it illegal for British ships to carry enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. The United States prohibited imports from the start of the following year. Slavery itself survived in the British colonies until an Act of 1833 freed some 800,000 people from August 1834, with compensation paid to the owners and an apprenticeship system that lasted until 1838.
How to spot them
- ▸A Yorkshire MP who brought the bill year after year; a Clapham circle of evangelicals behind him
- ▸A Wedgwood medallion asking whether the kneeling figure is not a man and a brother
- ▸A diagram of a Liverpool ship packed with 482 bodies, printed as a broadside
- ▸A Royal Navy squadron then stationed off West Africa to enforce it
What happened
The campaigner who rode thousands of miles collecting shackles, thumbscrews and sworn testimony from sailors
His 1786 Cambridge essay set him on the cause; his evidence chest is in the Wisbech museum.
A Wedgwood medallion of a kneeling man in chains, worn as a brooch and hair ornament (1787)
Produced for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The 1781 atrocity in which 132 captives were thrown overboard so the owners could claim insurance (1781)
The insurance case Gregson v Gilbert brought the trade's brutality into the English courts.
The 1772 King's Bench ruling that a man could not be forcibly removed from England to be sold (1772)
Lord Mansfield's judgment was widely, if loosely, read as saying slavery was unsupported by English law.
The 1789 memoir by a formerly enslaved Igbo writer that became a bestseller and a campaigning tool (1789)
Equiano toured Britain promoting it; he was a leading figure among the Sons of Africa.
The 1833 Act that freed some 800,000 people from 1 August 1834 and paid £20 million to their owners (1833)
The compensation loan was only finally paid off by the Treasury in 2015.
Quick-fire facts
- •The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787; nine of its twelve founders were Quakers
- •The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807, under the Ministry of All the Talents led by Lord Grenville
- •The United States Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, signed in March 1807, took effect on 1 January 1808
- •Granville Sharp, Hannah More and Zachary Macaulay were leading figures; the evangelical group around them is known as the Clapham Sect
- •The plan of the Liverpool ship Brookes, showing enslaved people packed in tiers, was the campaign's most reproduced image
- •Sugar boycotts involving hundreds of thousands of households were an early consumer protest
- •The West Africa Squadron, based at Freetown, seized well over a thousand ships and freed around 150,000 people during the 19th century
- •Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, three days after the Slavery Abolition Bill passed its Commons stages
- •Full freedom came only in 1838, when the apprenticeship system was ended early under public pressure
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Sources
- The National Archives (UK) — Education resources on slavery and abolition
- British Library — Learning collections on abolition and the transatlantic slave trade