“He was beloved in general society; but if he sparkled there, he shone at home.”
London, England: 1796.
As a member of Parliament, mover and shaker in most every benevolent, evangelistic, and missionary endeavor in Hanoverian England, as well as the key figure in the abolition campaign, William Wilberforce, to put it mildly, had a full plate. Given his pace of life, Wilberforce thought it very possible he would never marry or have a family.
After almost a decade of incessant labor on behalf of his “First Great Object,” the abolition of the slave trade, he watched as lukewarm friends failed him, away at the opera or on holiday in the country, instead of voting in support of his abolition bill. It was thrown out of the House of Commons, voted down 74 to 70.
Wilberforce had failed. He was devastated. And he wanted to quit.
It was shortly after this point, as Wilberforce was toying with the idea of retirement from politics, that he met and almost immediately wed Barbara Spooner. They would enjoy marriage and family life for the next thirty-six years, raising four boys and two girls.
Marriage proved to be a source of encouragement and strength; children were icing on the cake. Despite the demands of political life (and social norms), Wilberforce carved out time for his family—playing with the children, prioritizing time for races and picnics and walks in the woods, chess games, reading aloud, family worship, random pets, holidays away, and long letters to the children when they went off to university. While the work to which Wilberforce had been called required that he pour himself out, family life seems to have kept filling him up.
By 1807, after twenty years of persevering, the tides had changed, and Wilberforce would finally see his abolition bill pass. Throughout the British Empire, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was no more. Yet Wilberforce wasn’t done; he would continue to work to see the trade abolished in other nations, and ultimately hoped and worked for total emancipation. Only three days before his death, on July 26, 1833, William Wilberforce learned that Parliament was going to abolish not only the trade, but slavery itself.
Some forty-seven years after putting his hand to the plow, eight hundred thousand slaves became free.
When two of Wilberforce’s sons wrote a five-volume biography of their dad, they would contend that though their father was a famous and beloved Christian leader and statesmen, only his own family knew “the full sunshine of his kindliest affections.”
After all, they were the ones who had helped him, perhaps more than any other, to go the distance.