One evening in 1787 a young MP pored over papers by candlelight in his home beside the Houses of Parliament. William Wilberforce had been asked to propose the Abolition of the Slave Trade, although almost all Englishmen thought the Trade necessary, if nasty, and that economic ruin would follow if it stopped.
He studied first the state of Negro slaves in the West Indies. He found it bad. Then, the harm to Africa. This disturbed him. Then he examined the conditions for the wretched men, women and children as they were shipped across the Atlantic and he was appalled. The death rate on this 'middle passage' was dreadful. Every dead slave meant loss to a slave ship's owner, yet hundreds died every year.
Wilberforce hesitated no longer. 'So enormous, so dreadful' he told the House of Commons later, 'so irremediable did the Trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.'
