Newton, Wilberforce, and the Spirituality of Abolition
Wilberforce was no mere humanitarian; his motivations were much deeper (Part 1 of 2).
As the world prepares to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by the British Parliament on March 25, 1807, with all manner of commemorative events ranging from Congressional and Parliamentary ceremonies to book publications, academic lectures, TV documentaries, and the new Hollywood movie Amazing Grace, two fault lines seem to be emerging in the character of the forthcoming festivities. They can be described as secularisation and solitarisation. These words mean the tendency to present the abolitionist achievement primarily as a humanitarian and legislative triumph driven by the solitary will power and political tenacity of William Wilberforce. He alone is being given most of the twenty-first century glory for what was accomplished two centuries ago.
The version of history that presents the saga of William Wilberforce as a lone-ranger’s secular political success story goes roughly as follows:
A talented and well-connected young MP became horrified by the brutalities of the slave trade. With great moral courage he launched a humanitarian campaign to abolish it. He confronted the vested economic interests of the time, primarily the shipping industry, and gradually wore down the opposition in Parliament. He made alliances with the leading politicians in the House of Commons, notably William Pitt and Charles James Fox. He swung public opinion over to his side by joining forces with the Clapham Sect and the Anti-Slavery Society, two formidable teams of eighteenth-century spin doctors. He converted a sufficient number of MPs to his cause by calling good witnesses in committee hearings and by the usual black arts of political deal-making in smoke-filled rooms. Even so, the abolitionist campaign failed for its first twenty years. Then it had a major breakthrough when Wilberforce’s Bill prohibiting slave transportation in British ships was passed at the twelfth attempt. Eventually, after forty-six years of Parliamentary struggle, Wilberforce lived to see slavery outlawed completely. He died a national hero, and now two hundred years later he is about to be venerated as a humanitarian saint.
The above summary is more or less the consensual judgement of history on Wilberforce. What it omits, or at least downplays, is that the real motivation for the campaign to abolish slavery came from Wilberforce’s passionate Christian faith. To understand what a powerful driving force this was in his life a reader should put aside many of the popular biographies or histories and instead concentrate on Wilberforce’s less well known spiritual writings, particularly his A Practical View of Christianity (1797). Even more revealing are Wilberforce’s contemporary letters and conversations, especially those with his spiritual mentor, the Reverend John Newton.
The importance of the Newton-Wilberforce relationship is crucial to an understanding of the spirituality that lay behind the abolitionist movement. It is a relationship that is often underestimated by today’s historians—and indeed by Walden Media’s new movie Amazing Grace. Newton, who wrote the original hymn, is given a significant cameo role in the movie, but he is played by Albert Finney as a croaky, crumbling old monk swabbing church floors in his bare feet as he mutters sepulchral asides to Wilberforce. The acting in the key scenes is brilliant but the history is bosh. To understand what really made Wilberforce tick, a far better starting point is his relationship with Newton, much of it greatly illuminated by hitherto unpublished letters and diaries.
John Newton, a one-time slave ship captain who in the 1780s was the Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London—enjoying a status equivalent to Norman Vincent Peale in New York during the 1960s—received a strange letter from William Wilberforce on December 2, 1785. Its emphasis on secrecy was so mysterious that it could almost have come from a spy seeking to arrange a clandestine assignation:
“I wish to have some serious conversation with you,” wrote Wilberforce. “I have had ten thousand doubts within myself whether or not I should discover myself to you, but every argument against it has its foundation in pride. I am sure you will hold yourself bound to let no-one living know of this application or of my visit . . . Remember I must be secret.”
The secret Wilberforce divulged was that he was in emotional turmoil as a result of a recent religious conversion. This was not a conversion from ungodliness to godliness or from unbelief to Christian belief. It was a change to something the respectable world of English society regarded as far more dangerous—a conversion to “enthusiasm.” This was a pejorative label in established religious circles, for it meant what would now be called evangelical Christianity. On the whole enthusiasts were Dissenters, Independents, Moravians, Baptists, and Methodists. They were rare birds in the Church of England, but one of them was John Newton, the only evangelical incumbent of a parish in the whole of London north of the River Thames.
In his schoolboy years Wilberforce had met Newton through his aunt Hannah, who was herself an evangelical. She had brought her 11-year-old nephew to hear Newton preach and to stay overnight in his then-vicarage at Olney in rural Buckinghamshire. The young Wilberforce had apparently made a good impression on Newton, for he wrote to Hannah just after this visit in 1771, “I hope William will daily draw the water of life with joy and like a tree of the Lord’s planting will strike root downward, bear fruit upwards, and experience that the Lord is able to keep, establish, and comfort him.”
These pious hopes were initially unfulfilled. Wilberforce’s youth was spent in “shapeless idleness,” which did not improve even after his election to the House of Commons as a 21-year-old MP. “The first years I was in Parliament I did nothing—nothing to any purpose,” was Wilberforce’s description of his early political life. Instead he had become a fashionable figure in London society; a frequenter of the gaming tables in St James’ Street clubs such as White’s and Boodle’s; and an object of admiration in that beau monde on account of his inherited fortune, his melodious singing voice, and his close friendship with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, who was also 26 years old. But his views began to change during the summer of 1784 and 1785 when he travelled around Europe with Isaac Milner, his former schoolmaster at Hull Grammar School. Wilberforce regarded Milner as “very much a man of the world in his manners.” If those manners had been known to include evangelical leanings, it is unlikely that Wilberforce would ever have invited his old teacher to be his holiday companion. Yet once Milner’s views on religion had emerged in casual conversation during their journey across France, the two friends engaged in many discussions about faith and the truth of Scripture. They also studied a popular evangelical book The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by Philip Doddridge.
By the end of their second summer holiday together in 1785, William Wilberforce had been converted by Isaac Milner. So powerful was this conversion that Wilberforce began wrestling with his conscience, which he thought might be telling him to leave his worldly role as a Member of Parliament and to serve God as a minister of the church. Believing that he had to make a choice between these two careers, Wilberforce resolved to approach his decision with the utmost care. But before he took any irrevocable steps toward what he thought was his religious vocation, he decided to consult the only evangelical clergyman he knew. Such a meeting had potential dangers because Members of Parliament were respectable and evangelicals were not. Wilberforce well understood this, which was why his letter to Newton put so much emphasis on secrecy.
The meeting between John Newton and William Wilberforce, which took place on the evening of December 7, 1785, turned out to be of the highest public and political importance. However, its preliminaries continued to maintain the secret atmosphere of espionage. While Newton waited anxiously at his home for his guest to arrive, the even more anxious Wilberforce was so paranoid about his visit being spotted that he made two circuits around the tree‑lined central area of Charles Square where Newton lived, double-checking that the coast was clear. But once he had knocked on the door and entered, he received the warmest of welcomes from Newton followed by the deepest of conversations, which ended in advice of such wisdom that it changed the course of history.
Wilberforce described his reactions to the meeting in his diary the following day:
After walking about the Square once or twice before I could persuade myself, I called upon old Newton—was much affected in conversing with him—something very pleasing and unaffected in him. He told me he always had hopes and confidence that God would sometime bring me to Him. . . . When I came away I found my mind in a calm tranquil state more humbled and looking more devoutly up to God.
“Old Newton,” who at 60 was thirty-four years and twenty days older than his visitor, was full of sympathy for Wilberforce’s spiritual and political turmoil. For Newton remembered all too well the ragings of a new convert’s awakened conscience. By describing his own turmoil in the aftermath of his conversion on board the slave ship Greyhound forty-seven years earlier and by giving Wilberforce a copy of his autobiography, An Authentic Narrative, which explained it, Newton was able to reassure his confidant by speaking to him with the authority of personal experience about the upheavals which the Holy Spirit can create in the heart of a new convert. This wise spiritual counsel was matched by equally wise political reassurance. Newton strongly advised Wilberforce not to withdraw from politics, not to desert the Prime Minister and other friends in the government, but to serve God as a Christian statesman.
Persuading Wilberforce to combine the life of a Christian with the life of a politician was John Newton’s finest hour as a pastor. It was not the obvious advice from a senior clergyman meeting a potential young future minister of the Church, bursting with spiritual zeal. What would have happened if Newton had recommended to Wilberforce that he should cut himself off from public life and explore what he thought was his call to a religious vocation? The loss to politics, to Parliamentary history and, above all, to the cause of abolishing the slave trade would have been devastating.
It is clear from Wilberforce’s diaries that his meeting with Newton was a turning point in his life. During the next few months the older man’s mentoring became increasingly intense and the younger man’s faith became increasingly committed. Wilberforce immediately joined the congregation of St Mary Woolnoth, and heard Newton preach his Rector’s sermons there on the three remaining Sundays in December, also attending his midweek lectures on Wednesdays. This was the beginning of a personal as well as a spiritual friendship between the younger and older man which soon included regular visits to each others homes and an extensive correspondence. “Whenever you can call you will be a welcome guest,” said Newton in a letter to Wilberforce on March 21, 1786, which underlined the warmth of their relationship. “Great subjects to discuss, great plans to promote, great prospects to contemplate will always be at hand,” he continued. “Thus employed, our hours when we meet will pass away like minutes.”
The greatest subject Newton and Wilberforce discussed was the Gospel. As they read it together and prayed over it they began to apply their spiritual conversations to an important political topic. It was a matter in which Newton had remarkable expertise and in which Wilberforce was developing a considerable interest, encouraged to do so by a prayer group in South London whose members included some of Newton’s oldest friends, such as John Thornton, the patron of his church living at St Mary Woolnoth, and the Reverend John Venn, the vicar of Clapham. The subject which began to obsess all these good Christian gentlemen, both spiritually and politically, was the abolition of the slave trade.
Jonathan Aitken is an author, broadcaster, and Executive Director of The Trinity Forum in Europe. His twelfth book, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace is to be published by Crossway in the US and by Continuum in the UK in March 2007.
Features, Good and Evil, Meaning and Calling, Mon 12 Mar 2007
