Rare Autograph Letter Signed by William Wilberforce Eleven Days After Parliament Passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807
An extraordinary autograph letter signed by William Wilberforce - the man who devoted his life to ending the British slave trade - written just eleven days after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, discussing the distribution of his own published Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade to as wide an audience as possible. Palace Yard, Westminster, 11 February 1807. 2 pages, octavo (183 x 110 mm), complete with conjugal blank leaf. Folded for mailing, subsequently tipped into an album, now removed. Written from Wilberforce's London house in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, to a publisher - presumably Cadell and Davies or Longman, Hurst Rees and Orme - the letter requests a cheaper, more accessible edition of his treatise on abolition, that the arguments which had helped end the slave trade might reach the broadest possible readership. The Letter had first been published by Cadell and Davies on 31 January 1807, and by the third edition later that same year the page count had been reduced from 396 to 196 pages. The edition being arranged here was likely that of Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, who compressed the work to a remarkable 48 pages - bringing Wilberforce's moral argument within reach of any reader. Evidence of glue to the lower blank leaf, which has discoloured the central fold, else in very good condition.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was a British statesman, philanthropist, and moral reformer whose name has become synonymous with the campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. Born in Hull and educated at Cambridge, he entered Parliament in 1780 and underwent a profound evangelical conversion in 1785 that would shape the entire trajectory of his public life. In 1787 he became the parliamentary leader of the abolitionist movement, forming a close alliance with Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and the broader network of reformers known as the Clapham Sect, whose combined efforts marshaled evidence, shaped public opinion, and sustained legislative pressure over two decades of defeat and near-defeat in Parliament. The Slave Trade Act of 1807, which abolished British participation in the slave trade, represented the culmination of that effort - though Wilberforce continued to press for the emancipation of those already enslaved throughout the British Empire. He lived just long enough to learn, three days before his death in July 1833, that the Slavery Abolition Act had passed its third reading in the House of Commons. Beyond abolition, Wilberforce was a tireless advocate for what he called the reformation of manners - the improvement of public morals and social conditions in Britain - and his 1797 work A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System became one of the most widely read religious texts of its era. He remains one of the defining figures of the long humanitarian tradition in British public life.
