The man who 'murdered' slavery ... Mark Steyn

Two centuries ago, a British backbencher changed an entire way of seeing the world

'William Wilberforce,' writes Eric Metaxas in Amazing Grace, 'was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again -- and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.'

What did Wilberforce 'cure'? Two centuries ago, on March 25, 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories. It's not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic -- a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such -- as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition. In reality, it was more like the common cold -- a fact of life. The institution predates the word's etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, 'Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.'

I'm not sure whether Amazing Grace the movie is the film of the book or whether Amazing Grace the biography is the book of the film. But Metaxas's book does a better job of conveying the scale of the challenge than Michael Apted's film. The director of Gorky Park and 007's The World is not Enough and the ongoing 7 Up TV documentaries, Apted has made a conventional period biopic -- men in wigs sparring with each other across the floor of the House of Commons, some rather flat scenes with the little woman back home, the now traditional figure of the 'numinous Negro' (in Richard Brookhiser's phrase), though for once he's not played by Morgan Freeman; and a lot of argument by empathy -- the chains in which slaves are transported to the Indies being slapped down dramatically on the tables of London dining rooms. In between come irritating slabs of plonkingly anachronistic dialogue -- Wilberforce has to choose between doing 'the work of God or the work of a political activist' -- and more subtly so: Pitt the Younger rebukes his friend with the words, 'I warn you as your prime minister' -- not a phrase the king's first minister would have used back then, though I can imagine it from the mouth of Mr. Chrétien.

But the costume dramatics and the contemporary emotionalizing miss the scale of the abolitionist's achievement. 'What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,' says Metaxas, 'something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.' Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century, and in the United States for another 60 years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Atatürk abolished it in the twenties and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the sixties, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a broadly accepted 'human good.'

There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: the Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. There had been some important court decisions: in the reign of William and Mary, Justice Holt had ruled that 'one may be a villeyn in England, but not a slave,' and in 1803 William Osgoode, chief justice of Lower Canada, ruled that it was not compatible with the principles of British law. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce 'murdered' (in Metaxas's word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, 'God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.'

The latter goal we would now formulate as 'changing the culture' -- which is what he did. The film of Amazing Grace shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of 'the people.' But, in fact, 'the people' were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced democracies are easily distracted. The 18th- century Church of England preached 'a tepid kind of moralism' disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blasé even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded 7,000 women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five per cent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was 16; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of 14.

Many of these features -- weedy faint-hearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees -- will strike a chord in our own time. 'There is a deal of ruin in a nation,' remarked Adam Smith. England survived the 18th century, and maybe we will survive the 21st. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don't shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as 'the Victorian era' was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the 20th century, mock our 19th-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a 'social conscience': in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the nineties as the 'broken windows' theory: 'The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.'

The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we're nearer the 18th century than their own. A 'social conscience' obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors -- though the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn't societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is 'the reformation of manners.'

It's funny. Wilberforce is well-known and a hero to the Christian homeschooling community, who celebrate his accomplishments and association with John Newton. However, he is ignored by the secularists (and their government schools), who claim to be the enlightened, color blind conscience of the nation. Probably too "Christian."

My husband and I saw it this afternoon. I highly recommend it. Many of the themes in this film will have a hint of familiarity. Wilberforce was all for bringing the British Army home from the colonies.

Please do not let the early part of the film, where this argument is taking place, make you discount the rest of the film. It is historically accurate; Wilberforce was against the British fighting the American colonists.

This was well-acted, and I give it higher marks than does Mr. Steyn. The recreation of the London docks was realistic and a bit awe-inspiring. The costumes were meticulously done, and even captured the change in women's clothing and men's hairstyles between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I have seen very few films manage this with accuracy.

I found the film inspiring. We are going to England next year, and we will say a prayer for Wilberforce and Pitt, who are buried next to each other in Westminster Abbey.

I think it has more to do with having to thank the man for starting the end of slavery in western civilized countries.

Remember that to the MSM, the reparations folks and slavery victimization folks, it is not allowable to thank a white, Christian man for anything.

They cannot abide the thought that it was Christians, and even worse, evangelical Christians, who pretty much on their own brought down one of the oldest and most evil of human institutions. In England and in America.

The fact is that slavery was ended in England by Evangelical Christians, and in America by Republicans. Needless to say, this is simply unacceptable to the leftists, who cannot stomache the idea that progress is made by anyone by leftists, so they have simply written it out of history.

Instead, the British Empire and the Republicans are the designated villains, and Christianity is a menace to all right (i.e., left) thinking people.

One ironic result was that in the 60s blacks were persuaded that Christians were the oppressors, and so they turned to Islam--even though Islam did more than any other force to spread slavery through the post-classical world.

"Moreover, the story of abolition is also the story of the power of the gospel. The unseen background of Wilberforce’s work was the spiritual movement known as the Great Awakening. All throughout England and America the gospel was ablaze under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield, and many thousands of people came to Christ in a generation. What we did not learn from the movie, is that when Wilberforce presented Commons with petitions from “the people,” a vast majority of these were Quakers, Methodists, Baptists, Dissenters and Anglican – many of whom had been touched by the Great Awakening. Had it not been for the Great Awakening there would have been no abolition—at least not in Wilberforce’s day."

from:
http://www.reformation21.org/Shelf_Life/Shelf_Life/309/vobId__5459/

I think the Great Awakening in the Anglo-American community, and the lack of anything comparable in the rest of Europe, is largely responsible for the fact that Britain, Canada, and Australia are our closest allies. Europe remained wallowing either in reactionary corruption or brutal radical movements, while the English-speaking world proceeded with liberal (in the true sense) reform.

'The fact is that slavery was ended in England by Evangelical Christians, and in America by Republicans.'

I fully agree with your sentiments, but I must point out a small fact that has not been mentioned yet in this thread - slavery has never been legal in England itself. It has always been illegal under English common law and was actually first written specifically into statute in 1102. Slaves brought into England could not be bought or sold and effectively had the status of indentured servants or employees until the case of James Somerset in 1772 who ran away from his 'master' who intended to send him to work on his Jamaican plantations. James didn't want to go and the Lord Chief Justice ruled that as slavery was illegal, he could not be made to. This technically freed between 10 and 14 thousand 'slaves' in England, though most carried on as they were, not considering themselves slaves, certainly their working conditions and rights were no worse than the indigenous population at that time.

So, good as Wilberforces work was, he only outlawed slavery in the semi-autonomous colonies, not in England.

Must admit I am looking forward to seeing the film!

Yes, I'm familiar with the Great Awakening and the work of John Wesley. Indeed, a friend of mine wrote a book, "The Triumph of Augustanism," on the unimaginable extent of disbelief and atheism in the society of the English 18th Century.

If you visit the English countryside, among other signs of this history you will find that almost every ancient church in England had to be repaired after major neglect in the 18th century. Wesley not only founded Methodism, he reinspirited the Church of England as well.

It was not entirely Evangelical. One descendant of this re-inspiriting was the Oxford Movement, which led to High Church Anglicanism and produced Cardinal Newman, who to some degree transformed the Catholic Church in England and Ireland.

Yes. Very true.

In fact, I would take this further. Slavery disappeared all across Christian Europe during the "dark" and middle ages. There were serfs and peasants tied to the land, but not slaves.

What ended slavery was, in short, Christianity. When the Conquistadors went to South America and enslaved the Indians they found there, the Pope held a meeting and decreed that these slaves would have to be freed. So, the Catholic Church was opposed to slavery.

In other words, what Steyn says is true, but what he leaves out is that slavery vanished all over Europe and then was REINTRODUCED during the Renaissance, when explorers went out and encountered the slave trade in Africa. Slavery was universal in all places and times except where real Christianity was dominant, whether Catholic or Evangelical.

There was slavery during the middle ages, but it was imposed on captured Christians by Muslims. Christian nations did not have slavery, as such, until the early modern period.

Wilberforce represented a pure strain of enthusiastic Christianity, and you might say that awoke the souls of Christians who had gone to sleep during the Renaissance and the so-called Age of Reason.

I should qualify that and say that Christian nations did not USUALLY have slavery. But it disappeared gradually. In fact, the Bible does not explicitly outlaw slavery. There were Christian slaves and slaveowners in the early years of the Church. But the implications of all men being created equal, and the implications of a Savior who died for all, whether Jew or Greek, slave or free, inevitably led in that direction.

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