William Wilberforce's Mission for Humane Rights

William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833)

In the late 1700s, when William Wilberforce was a teenager, English traders raided the African coast on the Gulf of Guinea, captured between 35,000 and 50,000 Africans a year, shipped them across the Atlantic, and sold them into slavery. It was a profitable business that many powerful people had become dependent upon. One publicist for the West Indies trade wrote, "The impossibility of doing without slaves in the West Indies will always prevent this traffic being dropped. The necessity, the absolute necessity, then, of carrying it on, must, since there is no other, be its excuse."

By the late 1700s, the economics of slavery were so entrenched that only a handful of people thought anything could be done about it. That handful included William Wilberforce.

This would have surprised those who knew Wilberforce as a young man. He grew up surrounded by wealth. He was a native of Hull and educated at St. John's College at Cambridge. But he wasn't a serious student. A neighbor at Cambridge recalled, "When he [Wilberforce] returned late in the evening to his rooms, he would summon me to join him…. He was so winning and amusing that I often sat up half the night with him, much to the detriment of my attendance at lectures the next day."

Olaudah Equiano - The African

Recent scholarship has raised doubts about whether or not abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who was known in  his own lifetime as Gustavus Vassa, was born in Africa. While baptismal and naval documents indicate that he was born in South Carolina, it is argued here that his autobiographical account is nonetheless accurate, although allowing for reflection and information that was learned later in life. Information on facial markings (ichi) and other cultural features that are recounted in Vassa’s account indicate that he had first hand experience of his Igbo homeland and that he was about the age he thought he was at the time of his forced departure from the Bight of Biafra on a slave ship in 1754.

My life and fortune have been extremely chequered, and my adventures various. Even
those I have related are considerably abridged. If any incident in this little work should
appear uninteresting and trifling to most readers, I can only say, as my excuse for mentioning it, that almost every event of my life made an impression on my mind, and
influenced my conduct. I early accustomed myself to look at the hand of God in
the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and
in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of importance.

On this day - 18th May

1302   The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.

1652   In Rhode Island, a law was passed that made slavery illegal in North America. It was the first law of its kind.

1804   Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor by the French Senate.

1944   Monte Cassino, Europe's oldest Monastic house, was finally captured by the Allies in Italy.

1974   India became the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.