Wilberforce’s world-changing home group
(From Briefing reader, Roslyn Phillips, National Research Officer of Festival of Light Australia.)
It's been 200 years since British MP William Wilberforce's bill to abolish the slave trade was finally proclaimed into law in 1807, after a 20-year battle. The world, including Australia, is celebrating that well-known achievement. But less well-known is the fact that William Wilberforce was a committed evangelical Christian. Moreover, his Christian friends—who formed a type of home fellowship group—played a key role in the long and bitter anti-slavery campaign, praying for, encouraging and advising Wilberforce in the face of powerful enemies, including some Church of England leaders.
John Newton, the former slave trader who committed his life to Christ during a violent storm at sea and who later wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, made a deep impression on the young Wilberforce, as did John Wesley, the famous evangelist and founder of Methodism. Both men encouraged Wilberforce to use his parliamentary power for good. Wilberforce was also a member of a group of Christians known as the ‘Clapham Sect’ by their detractors —influential citizens who lived near and worshipped in Holy Trinity church on Clapham Common in south London. Under Rev John Venn's faithful biblical ministry, men (including MP and financier Henry Thornton and East India Company chairman Charles Grant) and their families lived near each other, prayed, studied the Bible and encouraged one another.
Clapham Sect members were wealthy, but lived modestly. They used their money to finance projects like helping and teaching the poor at home, and spreading the gospel overseas. Wilberforce and his friends founded the Church (of England) Missionary Society, which still flourishes in Britain and Australia. He also founded a group similar to Festival of Light, quaintly titled the Society for the Reformation of Manners.
Wilberforce never set foot in New South Wales, but he played a key role there. Historian Keith Windschuttle writes,
[T]he Australian colony harboured a vigorous Evangelical movement ... It aimed to apply the principles of the Gospels to social life. Its major causes were penal reform, the abolition of slavery, and missions to the native peoples of the empire. ...
While Wilberforce's main project was the abolition of slavery, he was also concerned with improving the living conditions of convicts, Aborigines and Pacific Islanders. From the outset, he took a close interest in New South Wales, soliciting reports from his Evangelical followers in the colony and acting as patron of their appointments. (Source.)
Wilberforce successfully nominated the colony's first two chaplains, Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden. Colonists who had dealings with Wilberforce, or who gained positions in New South Wales on his recommendation, included Matthew Flinders and Charles La Trobe. Ralph Darling and George Arthur were governors who owed their appointments in part to their actions against the slave trade.
Elizabeth, the second wife of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, was also highly influential. She had a strong Christian faith, and opposed all forms of slavery, believing that human creatures are equal in the eyes of God. Her respect for all human life made a deep impression on her husband, causing him to turn the “punitive regime for convicts” into “a program for their regeneration”. He also
moderated corporal punishment, reduced life sentences to fifteen years, and reprieved a number of convicts sentenced to death. Where William Bligh had granted two pardons during his eighteen-month term as governor, between 1810 and 1820 Macquarie gave 366 absolute pardons, 1365 conditional pardons and 2319 tickets-of-leave (certificates of exemption from compulsory labour).
He granted land to emancipists and expirees and even invited some to dine with him. (Source.)
Sadly, Lachlan Macquarie's generosity and mercy led to dissension among Sydney's free settlers which finally brought him down. But Macquarie's policies worked: a significant number of the 160,000 convicts transported in 80 years were transformed from the criminal subculture of their youth into useful citizens, farmers, tradesmen, soldiers and, in a small but notable number of cases, successful professional and business men and women.
Moreover Macquarie implemented Wilberforce's Aboriginal policies. He established an institution to teach Aboriginal children, settled Aboriginal adults on a farm at George's Head, built huts for others at Elizabeth Bay, and gave them a boat, tools and supplies. In 1814 he held the first annual gathering and feast for all Aboriginals in the Sydney region. While his policies were unsuccessful in the long-term, his efforts are a reminder that Christian values were promoted by some leaders in the new Australian colony from the beginning.
William Wilberforce's contribution is well-known because, as a great MP and orator, his words were widely reported. But those compassionate policies would not have existed without the prayer and encouragement of the many less prominent members of the Clapham Common ‘home fellowship’, and the power of God working where “two or three” were gathered in his name (Matt 18:20).
(For further reading, see G R Balleine's A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, Church Book Room Press, London, 1951.)