Before fighting the slave trade, Wilberforce was a gambling Cambridge socialite
As a rich student, William Wilberforce spent his nights on cards and drink, and at 21 he bought a seat in Parliament for over £8,000. A religious conversion in 1785 redirected him. For twenty years he led the parliamentary fight against Britain's slave trade, dying days after slavery's abolition was assured.
Wilberforce was born in Hull on 24 August 1759, the only son of a wealthy merchant family whose fortune came from Baltic trade. A small, sickly boy with poor eyesight, he was sent at nine to live with an uncle and aunt in London and Wimbledon after his father's death. Their evangelical leanings alarmed his Church of England relatives, who brought him home to Hull at twelve. Inheritances left him independently wealthy by the time he reached St John's College, Cambridge, in 1776, where he studied little but made friends easily, among them the future prime minister William Pitt.
The two young men watched Commons debates together, and in September 1780, still a student, Wilberforce won Hull by spending heavily, as custom then required. He sat as an independent, promising to be no party man. Society adored him: Madame de Staël called him the wittiest man in England, and James Boswell described watching a mere shrimp climb onto a table and grow into a whale as he spoke. In 1784, aged twenty-four, he became member for Yorkshire.
On a European tour in 1785 he and Isaac Milner read a book by the nonconformist Philip Doddridge, and Wilberforce underwent an evangelical conversion. Unsure whether a devout man should stay in politics, he consulted the clergyman John Newton, who urged him to remain. In 1787 Thomas Clarkson and fellow activists including Granville Sharp and Hannah More persuaded him to champion abolition. The stakes were vast: by one estimate about 11 million Africans were carried into slavery, some 1.4 million dying on the voyage.
His campaign culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807. He also backed missionary work, a free colony in Sierra Leone and the forerunner of the animal cruelty society, yet his conservatism led him to support repressive laws at home, drawing criticism. He left Parliament in 1826 because of failing health but kept working for full emancipation. Three days after learning that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 would pass, he died, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Source: William Wilberforce
