"I am sure that no human creature could suffer more than I did for some months," he later wrote. My own distinction was my darling object."īut he began to reflect deeply on his life, which led to a period of intense sorrow.
But he later admitted, "The first years in Parliament I did nothing-nothing to any purpose. Yet Wilberforce had political ambitions and, with his connections, managed to win election to Parliament in 1780, where he formed a lasting friendship with William Pitt, the future prime minister. John & Charles Wesley's evangelical conversions He was so winning and amusing that I often sat up half the night with him, much to the detriment of my attendance at lectures the next day." He later reflected, "As much pains were taken to make me idle as were ever taken to make me studious." A neighbor at Cambridge added, "When he returned late in the evening to his rooms, he would summon me to join him…. He was a native of Hull and educated at St. This would have surprised those who knew Wilberforce as a young man. That handful included William Wilberforce. The necessity, the absolute necessity, then, of carrying it on, must, since there is no other, be its excuse."īy the late 1700s, the economics of slavery were so entrenched that only a handful of people thought anything could be done about it. One publicist for the West Indies trade wrote, "The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent this traffic being dropped. It was a profitable business that many powerful people had become dependent upon.
In the late 1700s, when William Wilberforce was a teenager, English traders raided the African coast on the Gulf of Guinea, captured between 35,000 and 50,000 Africans a year, shipped them across the Atlantic, and sold them into slavery. Let the consequences be what they would: I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition." "So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for abolition.
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