Amazing Grace

Eric Metaxas

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061863387
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Amazing Grace tells the story of the remarkable life of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833). This accessible biography chronicles Wilberforce's extraordinary role as a human rights activist, cultural reformer, and member of Parliament.

At the center of this heroic life was a passionate twenty-year fight to abolish the British slave trade, a battle Wilberforce won in 1807, as well as efforts to abolish slavery itself in the British colonies, a victory achieved just three days before his death in 1833.

Metaxas discovers in this unsung hero a man of whom it can truly be said: he changed the world. Before Wilberforce, few thought slavery was wrong. After Wilberforce, most societies in the world came to see it as a great moral wrong.

To mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade, HarperSanFrancisco and Bristol Bay Productions have joined together to commemorate the life of William Wilberforce with the feature-length film Amazing Grace and this companion biography, which provides a fuller account of the amazing life of this great man than can be captured on film.

This account of Wilberforce's life will help many become acquainted with an exceptional man who was a hero to Abraham Lincoln and an inspiration to the anti-slavery movement in America.

CHAPTER 1

LITTLE WILBERFORCE

“…if it be a work of grace, it cannot fail.”

On August 24, 1759, William Wilberforce was born into a prosperous merchant family in the city of Hull. The impressive, red-brick Jacobean mansion in which he was born was situated on the city’s High Street, overlooking the Hull River. The Hull in turn flowed into the much larger Humber, which flowed eastward into the North Sea.

The Wilberforce family proudly traced its lineage in Yorkshire to the twelfth century and the reign of Henry II. Burke’s Peerage places them as one of the very few families who can be traced to the far side of the river 1066 and Saxon times. In those days and for centuries afterward, on into Wilberforce’s own century, the family name was Wilberfoss. It was changed by Wilberforce’s grandfather, who seems to have had something of a “forceful” personality, as evinced in part by his penchant for changing whatever he disliked. It’s likely that he wasn’t fond of the roots of the suffix foss, which means “vassal” or, in Irish, “servant.” That wouldn’t do for a political figure with grand ambitions to wealth and power. And Wilberforce it became.

As a boy, the young Wilberforce could see the river from his house’s windows and watch the great sailing ships unloading American tobacco and Norwegian timber and Prussian iron before they were loaded with local exports and then sailed away, down the Hull, and down the Humber, and out to the oceans of the world. In his own lifetime, Hull would become an important whaling port, complete with the seasonal stench of rendered cetaceans. But most important to our story are not those cargoes that came in and out of Hull’s harbor, but the one that didn’t. Though Hull was the fourth-largest port in England, it was the only one that did not participate in the slave trade. It was this happy detail that would enable Wilberforce to remain in political office in years hence. Any member of Parliament from Bristol or Liverpool, whose economies depended on the slave trade, would not have been able to get away with leading the abolitionist movement for long.

Though the Wilberforce family had been merchants in this part of England for two centuries, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that their fortunes rose dramatically. The rise was due largely to William’s grandfather, also named William. (Though he had changed Wilberfoss to Wilberforce, he did not fuss with the name William, which means “valiant protector.”) Born in 1690, Wilberforce’s grandfather had found great success in the Baltic trade and had inherited considerable property from his mother, an heiress of the Davye family. It was this William Wilberforce, twice elected mayor of Hull and thenceforth known as “Alderman” Wilberforce, who was the patriarch of the family.

The Alderman’s second son, Robert, married William’s mother, Elizabeth Bird, and joined the family business in Hull, taking over as managing partner in 1755. The Alderman’s first son, William, had opted out of the family business by marrying Hannah Thornton and moving to London, where her father was director of the Bank of England and a member of Parliament. It was this couple who, following a series of unexpected events, would soon end up having more influence in the life of the young William than his own parents.

By all accounts, William Wilberforce was a glorious little child, a veritable cherub of twinkling luminosity. Upon his death in 1833, his middle sons, Samuel and Robert, began a five-volume biography of their father, which was published in 1838. An “unusual thoughtfulness for others marked his youngest childhood,” they tell us, and of course they would have had access throughout their lives to many who had known their father as a child. We have only one first-person recollection of him during this time, from a visiting guest sometime in the early 1760s: “I shall never forget how he would steal into my sickroom, taking off his shoes lest he should disturb me, and with an anxious face looking through my curtains to learn if I was better.” Indeed, according to all who remembered his earliest days, he was possessed of a “temper eminently affectionate.”

What we know of him in later years seems to corroborate this picture perfectly. Already as a little child he had a weak constitution and poor eyesight, as he would all his life. Wilberforce often said that in less “modern” days he wouldn’t have stood a chance at survival. But despite his sickliness and myopia, he seems from the very beginning to have captivated all who knew him. Most of us have met children like that, whose piercing innocence and brightness are a refreshment for the adult soul. Little Wilberforce seems to have been one of these—the sort of boy who could lead even the most jaded misanthropes to think that perhaps the supremely cracked-up race of bipeds of which they were a member was not entirely, not hopelessly, unredeemable.

In 1766, when William was seven, he was enrolled at the Hull Grammar School, which the poet Andrew Marvell had attended as a boy during the previous century. Wilberforce was said to have been tiny all of his life; he never grew taller than five-foot-three, and his boyish frame was so slight that, as an adult, during one of his many illnesses, he weighed seventy-six pounds. One can only imagine how tiny he was at the age of seven.

Now and again he would visit his grandfather, who had removed to the bucolic village of Ferribly, on the Humber, seven miles away. But, truth be told, men like Alderman Wilberforce never really seem to retire. Indeed, it was this grandfather who roughly pulled some strings to install one Joseph Milner as the Hull Grammar School’s new and very young headmaster, at the age of twenty-three, just in time for little Wilberforce to start there. This power play was executed over the objections of the other members of the corporation and town of Hull. But the crafty old Alderman was not about to let a mere seven miles’ distance mitigate his considerable and hard-won powers over the town he’d run since two King Georges before. We cannot divine his reasons for wanting to install Milner in that post, but the Alderman’s meddling in this affair would soon end up having some unintended and ironic results, as we shall see.

The new headmaster was the son of a humble weaver from Leeds. But Milner had left behind the simple homeliness of the family’s wool looms to go up to Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in no uncertain terms by winning the Chancellor’s Medal. After Cambridge, Milner became curate and assistant schoolmaster at Thorparch in Yorkshire, where he caught the shrewd eye of the old Alderman.

Accompanying Joseph was his seventeen-year-old brother, Isaac, an unrefined and positively gargantuan figure who would serve as a temporary assistant, or “usher,” but whose accomplishments at Cambridge in a few years’ time would far outshine even his brother’s. Indeed, this clumsy giant would eventually reveal himself to be the owner of one of the brightest minds on the surface of the planet. Three decades after his lowly stint as temporary usher at the Hull Grammar School, he would occupy the most famous academic chair in the world, the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, among whose previous occupants had been Isaac Newton and whose future occupants would include Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking, who occupies it at the time of this writing. At Cambridge, Isaac Milner would later become president of Queens’ College and vice chancellor of the university, and he would also be elected to the Royal Society—as an undergraduate.

Before he had been rescued to help his brother teach at Hull, Isaac had sat glumly at his father’s looms, a hulking and sulking figure reading Tacitus on the sly. But things were suddenly looking up. For one thing the Hull schoolroom didn’t reek of wool, nor was reading Tacitus rewarded with imprecations and buffets about the head.

It now fell to this younger Milner to assist in the schooling of tiny children, one of the tiniest of whom was a remarkable little imp named William Wilberforce. Decades later, when Wilberforce had become famous throughout London society for his extraordinary voice, both as a singer and a speaker, Milner proudly recalled that even as a diminutive schoolboy, “his elocution was so remarkable that we used to set him upon a table and make him read aloud as an example to the other boys.”

William Wilberforce was the third of four children born to his parents, and their only son. When he was eight, his eldest sister, Elizabeth, died. She was fourteen and had been at a prestigious boarding school in London. Soon after her death, Wilberforce’s mother gave birth to another daughter, her fourth child. But a few months later her husband died suddenly, at the age of forty. A few months after that, Wilberforce’s mother fell ill with a serious fever, and so it was decided that Wilberforce—“Billy” as he was then called—should go to live with his Uncle William and Aunt Hannah in Wimbledon.

We can only imagine what it was like for this brilliant and sensitive little boy to see his parents suffer the loss of their darling daughter—and then to lose his own father. For his mother to then become so sick must have been devastating. It would certainly have been difficult to be sent away from her and all that he had ever known, and to live with an unknown aunt and uncle at their country villa in faraway Wimbledon.

But off to Wimbledon Wilberforce now went. His new guardians were extraordinarily wealthy. His Uncle William’s brother-in-law was John Thornton, one of the wealthiest men in all of England. In addition to their Wimbledon home, called Lauriston House, they had a magnificent home in London, in St. James’s. Wilberforce was now ten, and they enrolled him at the Putney School, which, as Wilberforce remembered, was not terribly distinguished. “Mr. Chalmers, the master,” he recalled, “himself a Scotsman, had an usher of the same nation, whose red beard—for he scarcely shaved once a month—I shall never forget.” Even many years later the usually gracious-to-a-fault Wilberforce shuddered to describe Mr. Chalmers’s assistant as “a dirty disagreeable man.” “I can remember even now,” he wrote, “the nauseous food with which we were supplied, and which I could not eat without sickness.” One wonders whether his lifelong stomach difficulties weren’t exacerbated or even instigated during these years. As for the quality of the education, he was no longer basking in the terra-watt brilliance of the Milner brothers. Wilberforce said that at Putney he was “taught everything and nothing.”

If Wilberforce disliked his new school, however, he quickly came to love his aunt and uncle, whom he visited on holidays. And they fell in love with the extraordinary boy who had been dropped into their lives. “They had no children,” Wilberforce wrote, “and I was to be their heir…. I loved [them] as if they had been my parents.” Without question the greatest influence they had on him was spiritual.

The society to which they exposed him was a far cry from what he had known in Hull. Hull was a gay, prattling world of card parties and theater—second only to London for its worldly amusements—but in terms of anything deeper, in terms of real “soul” food, the larder was, as it were, bare. Wilberforce’s mother and father, like the rest of their wealthy and fashionable friends, did not encourage introspection or deep thinking on the meaning of life. That was not the sort of thing one trilled about at card parties. One’s “spirituality” was confined to one’s rented wooden pew. One attended one’s church, and one stood and one kneeled and one sat at the proper times and did what was required of one, but to scratch beneath this highly lacquered surface was to venture well beyond the pale in that society and invite stares and whispers and certain banishment. Wilberforce was from the beginning as serious as he was charming and fun-loving, and his sensitive and intellectual nature was now, at Wimbledon, for the first time fed something far more satisfying than the niceties—the thin gruel and weak tea—of High Church Anglicanism.

That’s because Wilberforce’s aunt and uncle, quite unbeknownst to his mother and grandfather, were at the epicenter of a spiritual renaissance in England at that time. They were close friends with one of the greatest figures of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield—the principal human force behind the social earthquake known as the Great Awakening, which transformed not only England but the thirteen colonies across the Atlantic. They were also very close with John Newton, another larger-than-life figure whom most of the world knows today as the former slave-ship captain who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” It was he who would have given little Wilberforce his first knowledge of slavery. These two connections and many more can be traced to Wilberforce’s aunt’s half-brother, John Thornton, who, besides being extremely rich, was at that time, according to the secretary of the Treasury, “in great credit and esteem, and of as much weight in the City as any one man I know.” Thornton had been converted to a serious faith through the itinerant preaching of Whitefield around 1754. Since then, he had become known less for his wealth than for his generosity, funding many efforts to help the poor and suffering.

It is worth dilating for a moment on George Whitefield and the state of the Christian faith in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Since the time of the Puritans and the religious wars of the previous century, England had decidedly turned its back on any expressions of what we might call serious Christian belief. Having led to so much division and violence, religion was now in full-scale retreat. The churches of mid-eighteenth-century England all but abandoned orthodox, historical Christianity and now preached a tepid kind of moralism that seemed to present civility and the preservation of the status quo as the summum bonnum. And so, understandably, people looked less and less to the churches for the ultimate answers to their questions, and a fog of hopeless and brutal superstitious spiritualism crept over the land. The poor, as is ever the case, would suffer the most from these changes in Britain’s religious atmosphere.

But three young men arrived at Oxford University in the 1730s who soon changed things rather dramatically. John Wesley and his brother Charles were two of the three. They formed a small group called the Holy Club whose members prayed fervently and conspicuously. They were soon mocked as “Methodists” because other students thought they were too “methodical” about how they spent their time. George Whitefield, the third of the trio, soon came to Oxford and joined them.

After a few years, something surprising occurred. All of the trio’s fussy doctrines and white-knuckled efforts to be “holy” and “moral” melted away when Whitefield came to a realization that would have far-reaching effects. He saw that the Bible didn’t teach that we must work harder at becoming perfect and holy, but that we must instead throw ourselves on God’s mercy. Moral perfection wasn’t the answer: Jesus was the answer. Jesus had been morally perfect and we weren’t supposed to save ourselves—we were supposed to ask him to save us.

No less than discovering electricity or splitting the atom, this theological about-face was the beginning of a revolution. When Whitefield began to preach this new revelation, people came running to hear it. No one had heard anything like it, and soon thousands were coming from near and far to hear him. He was just twenty-two at the time. Shocking the starched theological establishment of his day, Whitefield even began preaching in open fields so that more people could hear him, and crowds approaching thirty thousand people would gather.

The phenomenon that was George Whitefield is scarcely conceivable to modern minds. Lives by the thousands were changed all across England. Bitter miners wept and sang, and nasty fishwives leapt for joy. No one had ever told these poor people what this man with the voice like a trumpet was telling them, but it was as if they were hearing something they had always known was true but had forgotten. Their previous experience with religion was nothing like this. They had exchanged cod liver oil for sunshine and would never be the same. Whitefield touched down across England like a tornado, and what was left in his wake was unrecognizable from what had been there before. After he had thoroughly scrambled the English countryside and given hope and joy and meaning to the miserable poor who came to hear him, he hopped on board a ship like a fugitive and took his egregious troublemaking to the American colonies. And then returned to England. In his lifetime Whitefield would cross the Atlantic thirteen times.

As one might imagine, Whitefield was despised by the Church of England. But the press and those opposed to religion hated him too. He didn’t mince words on the subjects of sin and hell, and he was increasingly impossible to avoid as his fame grew and grew. Whitefield was forever on the march, like some one-man salvation army. He carried a collapsible pulpit with him and sent handbills and posters ahead to the towns where he would preach; in his lifetime, he preached eighteen thousand sermons, none dull. As one would expect, Whitefield was viciously mocked for every aspect of his ministry and person, including the grave sin of being noticeably cross-eyed. For this pronounced ocular abnormality, he was tagged with the unflattering moniker “Dr. Squintum.” But some admirers, seeking to put a positive spin on things, said that “even his eyes make the sign of the cross upon which Jesus died.” Touché.

In the American colonies, Whitefield preached in fields from Maine to Georgia and routinely addressed crowds of thirty thousand there too. That he accomplished this without microphones almost seems to throw natural selection into doubt, arguing for the decline in vocal projection and/or hearing in the last two and a half centuries. Either that or the crowd numbers were exaggerated, as Benjamin Franklin, good Yankee skeptic that he was, initially suspected might be the case. When Whitefield came to Philadelphia in 1739, Franklin—ever the empiricist—resolved to walk around the circumference of the crowd and measure its size for himself. After completing the vast circuit, Franklin estimated that there were indeed at least twenty thousand there, and he said that he had never been out of the range of Whitefield’s voice. Franklin eventually became a fan and friend of Whitefield’s, and later became his publisher, though never quite a convert.

There was a great fear among those in power, especially ecclesiastical power, that men like Whitefield—and John and Charles Wesley—were threatening the social order. The lower classes were being encouraged to think for themselves, to resist the more orderly religion found in most of the Church of England congregations. Blacks and women were finding a place in this new, vibrant form of Christianity, and it was all very troubling. Social ferment and movements like the Great Awakening inevitably seem to echo Euripides’ The Bacchae: wild Dionysian forces threaten to tear society apart, and are fought by the repressive forces of Apollinian order.

George Whitefield departed England for his final trip to America in 1769, about the ti...