Slavery Slayer: The Story of William Wilberforce

00:00:09
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. Slavery, to this day, remains one of the ugliest blots in the long history of humanity. It can be traced back as early as 4000 BC. The man who, perhaps more than any other, stirred the conscience of the world about this evil was William Wilberforce. His efforts helped bring liberty to untold millions, and his persistence and conviction influenced major change in thinking and the history of the world, too. Eric Metaxas, the New York Times best-selling author of Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, and Amazing Grace. His biography, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, was the official companion book to the feature film, also titled Amazing Grace. We’d like to thank Eric Metaxas for allowing us to share his story with our listeners. Here’s Eric with the remarkable story of William Wilberforce.

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Speaker 2: The story of Wilberforce is kind of funny, because once you know the story, you’re embarrassed you didn’t know it before. And that happens to me over and over with the characters I write about that you—
00:01:24
Speaker 3: Think this is so important.
00:01:26
Speaker 2: How have I lived this long and I’ve missed this, because this is so important!
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Speaker 3: Let’s put it this way.
00:01:31
Speaker 2: He’s most famous, if you have heard anything about him: he is the man who in Parliament in 1807 had the victory over the slave trade in the British Empire. Right now, a lot of people, you know, it’s kind of like, “What’s that? Was that in slave trade and slavery, or whatever?” Well, the slave trade, just to make it clear, it’s a really weird thing, right? Because in America we had slavery here, so you saw it in front of you. But in England they had a huge slave trade, but they didn’t have any slaves in England. What they would do was they would send these ships from the four harbors—or really, three of their major four harbors—and the ships would go down to the west coast of Africa, pick up their human cargo, and then they would take it across to the West Indies. And all the sugar plantations were there, so they would then take the molasses and whatever back to England. Nobody in England ever saw what was going on. They just knew that their economy was booming and whatever. Most English people didn’t know that they were participating in a satanic slave trade. They just knew that the economy was good, and they got sugar in their tea and that kind of stuff, you know. And so Wilberforce believed that if he ended the slave trade, slavery would go away. So, let me just start at the beginning. He was born in 1759 into a family that really was wealthy.
00:03:11
Speaker 3: They were merchants.
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Speaker 2: But the funny thing, when I tell the story—and I have to say again, I didn’t know this either, right?—I’m not like a guy who knows a lot of stuff, and they say, “I think I’ll write a book about this.”
00:03:21
Speaker 3: I just knew.
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Speaker 2: That this man had led the battle to end the slave trade, so he’s a hero. Okay, I’ll write a book about him. But when I wrote the book, I discovered all kinds of stuff I didn’t know. For example, when he grew up in the middle part of the 1700s. Okay, he’s born in 1759. England was nominally Christian. Okay, officially Christian. But do I need to tell you that if you have a booming slave trade, you’re not that Christian? There are a lot of countries that are officially Christian that don’t behave very Christian.
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Speaker 3: Okay.
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Speaker 2: You could talk about Germany in the 1930s. I wrote about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Germany was officially Lutheran, right? Well, everybody, “We’re German, we’re Lutheran.”
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Speaker 3: Great, except they’re not living it out.
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Speaker 2: If you don’t understand that, you know, hating Jews is not part of God’s plan or speaking against Nazis—that, you know…
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Speaker 3: If you don’t get that, how Christian are you, okay?
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Speaker 2: So a lot of people can be Christian in name only. Or sometimes Christians are Christians more than a name only, but not nearly where God wants them to be, and so people can reconcile all kinds of wicked behavior. But in England at this time, you could really say that they really were Christian in name only. When they said, “We’re Christian,” it means, “We’re not Turks, we’re not Muslims.”
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Speaker 3: Well, they didn’t behave as Christians.
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Speaker 2: Now, the irony is that America today is not officially Christian.
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Speaker 3: We’re not a fish anything.
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Speaker 2: But I would say when you’re not officially something, you have the freedom to really be Christian, because when it’s enforced by the government, you just go, “Well, you know, my birth certificate, it just says that I’m this,” and, you know, “and, you know, it’s not… you don’t own it.”
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Speaker 3: It, it’s not yours.
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Speaker 2: So everybody in England says, “I am a Christian,” because, Christian, we have the Church of England and the Queen or King is the defender of the faith, and so we’re an officially Christian nation.
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Speaker 3: But something happened in the previous century.
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Speaker 2: In the 1600s, there had been some religious wars, and so the culture of England—not that it ever was tremendously Christian—but in the 18th century, they began to retreat from robust faith of any kind, and the pulpits were preaching what you’d call French Enlightenment rationalism, right? French Enlightenment rationalism means we believe in, you know, there’s a God up there someplace, but we don’t believe in Jesus and the Bible. So England was officially Christian, but they were not living it out at all. So Wilberforce was born in the middle of this century into a family that had a good amount of money. But just like all the elites, in particular in that century, they looked down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. If you think about the 18th century, you had the Great Awakening, because of the preaching of George Whitefield and because of the preaching of the Wesley brothers, John and Charles Wesley. You had this revival, but it’s only among the poor.
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Speaker 3: Mainly.
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Speaker 2: The elites looked down on the poor, and they looked down on anybody who had serious Christian faith. In fact, they called them Methodists. They were sort of making fun of the fact that the Wesleys, when they got saved at Oxford University, they became sort of so obsessed with religion and prayer and stuff that they said, “They’re very methodical.”
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Speaker 3: So they made fun of them.
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Speaker 2: They called them Methodists, and of course they eventually took it as a badge of honor. But the Brits also said, “If you’re really serious about God and all that stuff, you’re an enthusiast,” which is like saying a “holy roller,” a “Bible thumper.”
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Speaker 3: The whole culture looked down on it.
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Speaker 2: So the elites were really hostile to any of this Christian faith, and so throughout the culture, they didn’t have much Christian faith.
00:07:11
Speaker 1: And when we come back, the story of William Wilberforce with Eric Metaxas here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here. As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College, and Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of William Wilberforce, and now let’s return to Eric Metaxas and the story of William Wilberforce.
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Speaker 2: The elites were really hostile to any of this Christian faith, and so throughout the culture, they didn’t have much Christian faith.
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Speaker 3: So Wilberforce grows up in a family just like that.
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Speaker 2: When he was about nine years old, his father died and his mother got very ill, and the grandfather and the mother said, “We need to send him to live with this aunt and uncle because she wasn’t able to care for him.” And so they sent him to live with this very wealthy…
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Speaker 3: Aunt and uncle.
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Speaker 2: They were so wealthy that, you know, the mother and the grandfather [thought], “How can we go wrong sending him to them? This is going to be, you know, wonderful.” Well, what they didn’t know was that the aunt and uncle were Methodists—born again, evangelical, whatever you want to call it. In fact, not only were they so wealthy, they were practically funding the entire Methodist movement.
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Speaker 3: So they send this little—
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Speaker 2: Boy off to live with them, and he encountered this loving aunt and uncle, and he came to faith. He was very intelligent, very sensitive, and he came to faith. He came to love this aunt and uncle with all his heart, and they loved him like a son. And John Newton, who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace,” he was the slave trader who became a Christian and then became a preacher. He would visit this home, and little Wilberforce thought of him like a father figure.
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Speaker 3: And so it’s this wonderful time.
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Speaker 2: But then the mother and the grandfather, being classic elites of that day, when they discovered this about two and a half years into this, they were horrified. It was like he’d been kidnapped by a cult. You know, “Those Christians, they’re nuts!” So they brought him back home, and they were determined to scrub his soul clean of Methodism. They didn’t even let him go on Sundays to their Anglican church because he might hear the scriptures read, and so they did everything they could. He tried to cling to his faith, this brilliant young man. He sent letters, secret letters via the maid to his aunt and uncle. He was trying to cling to his faith. But by the time he was sixteen and went off to Cambridge University, it had really evaporated, and he had become exactly what they hoped: you know, an intelligent, insouciant man about town, sophisticated, knowing that, you know, the “enthusiasts” were just way too much.
00:10:32
Speaker 3: It’s not for me.
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Speaker 2: Well, while he was there at Cambridge, he became friends with William Pitt the Younger. William Pitt the Elder was one of the great statesmen of that time, right? He was in the House of Lords, but he was a great political figure, and he was training his young son, William Pitt the Younger, to be a great statesman—you know, memorizing Latin phrases, you know, at his father’s knee. And so Wilberforce, he came from this merchant background, but he met William Pitt the Younger, and they started going together from Cambridge to London to visit the Houses of Parliament, to sit in the gallery and to watch the debates on the floor below. And Wilberforce, 18, 19 years old, was mesmerized by what’s going on. He thinks, “I think I want a life in politics now.” You know, you have to understand: what was the debate going on at that time in the House of Lords that he was watching? Well, this was about 1776, so this was about the fate of the colonies. I mean, this was historical, and he said, “I want to become a politician.” So he graduated at the same time as friend William Pitt the Younger graduated, and they immediately got elected to Parliament, and the two of them rocketed up in the ranks of the political order in their early twenties, so that by the time William Pitt the Younger was twenty-four years old, he was elected Prime Minister of England.
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Speaker 3: Now, William A.
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Speaker 2: Pitt was Prime Minister, but his best friend Wilberforce also got this incredibly powerful position, and they became very powerful figures. They were members of all the top gentlemen’s clubs, and their pictures were in the papers.
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Speaker 3: That’s not true, there’s no photography.
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Speaker 1: Okay.
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Speaker 3: In 1780, I tricked.
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Speaker 2: You can you imagine all this came to him, and then one day he decided, because, you know, the recess from Parliament was months long, he wanted to take a long vacation.
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Speaker 3: His mother’s health, you know, was not so good.
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Speaker 2: So they thought, “Oh, we need to go to the French and Italian Rivieras for the climate.”
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Speaker 3: So this is a trip.
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Speaker 2: Can you imagine to go from England all the way across the continent with, you know, horses, with a coach, to the southern part of France?
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Speaker 3: It’s a vast journey. Okay.
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Speaker 2: So his mother was going to travel in a coach with a cousin, and he was going to travel in a coach with a friend.
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Speaker 3: So he picks a friend.
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Speaker 2: The friend couldn’t come, and then he said, “Well, I need somebody to, you know, it’s going to be very boring.” So he stumbled on an old schoolmate who became my favorite character in the book. In the story, his name is Dr. Isaac Milner. And Isaac Milner was a physical giant. I don’t know how big he was, but he was—everybody just—he was a giant of a man. Now it became funnier when you think Wilberforce was literally five-foot-two, and at one point during his illness, he weighed seventy-six pounds. So he picked Milner. Now, Milner was not just famous for being a giant. He was probably literally the smartest man in England at the time. He had the “location chair” in the chemistry or physics, I forget, at Cambridge. Okay, Isaac Newton, who invented calculus, and Stephen Hawking, who just passed away. You know, they had this lifetime appointment. So it’s super-smart people, the smartest people in the world. So that’s Isaac Milner. Okay, so not only was this super genius, but he also was famous for being a teller of comic stories, funny stories, and so you think, “Who could possibly be a better companion?” And they just, “Okay, we’re going to go together. We’re going to, we’re going to take this trip across the continent. Is this going to be months, you know, to get there and months to come back?” So they went on the journey, and they talked about everything. Wilberforce was a fascinating conversationalist himself and very witty, and, uh, they had gone just far enough that they couldn’t turn back. I don’t know how far that is—five hundred miles, something like that. And the subject of religion came up, and to Wilberforce’s horror, Isaac Milner revealed that he was a Methodist, and he kind of tried to crack some jokes to kind of bat it away, but Milner said, “Well, you know, no, no, no, I think, you know, you’re above that, Mister Wilberforce.” “I think,” you know, “if you’d like to have a serious conversation, we should.” So they had a serious conversation. And I always picture this giant Milner crushing Wilberforce’s intellectual objections like walm nuts in his big meaty poils. You know, I’m throwing the shells out the window. As the miles went by, he’s just one by one. And Wilberforce, to his credit, was intellectually honest. Okay, like a lot of people today would just be like, “Hey, I don’t care.” Wilberforce thought, “If you’re making the case and you’re right, I’m stuck.” And by the time of this trip’s ending, he knew that he had been wrong, that the Bible was true, that Jesus was his Lord and Savior. There was no way out.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: I’m in. It’s true.
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Speaker 2: But when he got back to London, he was very bummed out, because he knew the world in which he had been traveling. He remembered these five gentlemen’s clubs where they stayed out drinking and singing and gambling and joking till four and five in the morning, and that whole life. He realized, “I can’t do that anymore. I probably have to leave politics.”
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Speaker 3: What am I going to do? He was not happy.
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Speaker 2: So he went to visit his old friend John Newton. Remember I said he, when he was a little boy, he’d befriended him. He hadn’t seen him in all these years, and I imagine John Newton had been praying for him. Can you imagine that this guy that you knew back then had drifted away from the faith and now he was one of the most powerful people in England? So he went, like Nicodemus, secretly to meet John Newton to ask him, “What do I do?” But he didn’t want people to see him going there because he was so famous at this point that if people saw him going there, they were going to know something’s up. So he went there secretly, and John Newton said to him, “I think God would call you to bring him into politics and to let him use you as a top political figure for his purposes in history at this time.” Wilberforce, to his credit, accepted this, and he said, “Even though it’s going to be hard, even though I’m going to be mocked by these elites, I believe this is God.” And so he decided to stay in politics, but he was going to pray and study the Scripture and other books about, “Lord, what…”
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Speaker 3: Would you have me do? So?
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Speaker 2: Two years into his faith, he wrote in his journal 20 famous words.
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Speaker 3: I don’t remember what they are, but there’s 20 of them. Just kidding, I do so.
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Speaker 2: Basically, he wrote these words in his diary, and these are the 20 words. He said, “God Almighty has set before me two great objects.”
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Speaker 3: Okay, God has set befor—