Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies

About the Author

In early 1833 a proposal was presented to the houses of Parliament suggesting an end to slavery in the British Empire. Other such bills had been introduced before, but the 1833 proposal was met with three months of ultimately positive debate. In July of that year the abolitionist proposition was approved—and just three days after receiving the news that the bill had won parliamentary approval, William Wilberforce, its inspiration, passed away. Although he had retired from the public political arena, Wilberforce, a voice of British abolitionism for almost fifty years, was universally credited with the penning of the bill that became the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Many other persons, such as Thomas Fowell Buxton, who from the early 1820s became the British abolitionist movement leader, and persons belonging to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, likely had an influence on the form of the emancipation bill, as it was known before being presented to Parliament. Many of its clauses were probably derived from the original abolitionist motions that Wilberforce had offered to Parliament in the 1790s.

Employed as a member of Parliament from October 1780 until February 1825 for three successive constituencies, Wilberforce acquired the reputation of a reformer by as early as the mid-1780s. In 1787 he was instrumental in the formation of SEAST, Britain's first abolitionist society, and at the suggestion of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger he was also asked to become the parliamentary leader of the abolitionist movement. He thus attained the status of Britain's most vocal abolitionist elected official and, against a lack of wider political commitment to abolitionism within Parliament, endeavored to effect the emancipation of those in enslavement. In Parliament on May 12, 1789, he gave what is still widely considered one of the most eloquent speeches in British political history, a talk calling for what was in “the interests not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole world”: the ending of slavery (Cobbett, column 41).

Strong in religious and moral character and yet highly skilled in political maneuvers, Wilberforce, along with Thomas Clarkson, was a key motivating force in bringing about the abolition of slavery. Although best known for his parliamentary activities, including the seemingly countless bills associated with slave trading, slave registration, and slave keeping that he put forward, Wilberforce's greatest legacy was the 1833 abolition bill, which, given to Parliament eight years after his retirement, acknowledged his tireless humanitarian work. Following Wilberforce's death in July 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act not only freed over eight hundred thousand slaves in the British colonies but also established for the world at the highest political level the principle of granting human rights for all. Through the transitions in global society since the 1830s, Wilberforce's name still represents the promotion of social action and social rights and the ethical drive to reshape attitudes and laws when necessary so as to ensure that social equity is not compromised.