Thomas Clarkson
A Cambridge graduate in deacon’s orders who gave up a career in the church to work against the slave trade, helped to found the London committee of 1787 and wrote the history of the campaign.
Clarkson tells his own story in his History: in 1785, as a senior bachelor at Cambridge, he won the first prize for a Latin essay on the question set by the vice-chancellor, whether it is right to make slaves of others against their will (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 7). Riding back to London afterwards he stopped near Wades Mill in Hertfordshire with the thought that, if what he had written was true, someone should see these calamities to their end (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 7). He says that he was then twenty-four (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 7), that he had advanced as far as deacon’s orders, and that he gave up his prospects in the church for the cause (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 8).
He was one of the members of the committee formed in London on 22 May 1787, and he tells how, at a dinner arranged for the purpose, William Wilberforce agreed to raise the matter in Parliament (Clarkson, History of the Abolition ch. 10). See Christians and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
In the timeline
- 25 March 1807, firm dateChristians and the Abolition of the Slave Trade
After twenty years of campaigning by Quakers, Anglicans and a formerly enslaved writer, Parliament makes the British slave trade unlawful. Other Christians had defended the trade from the Bible, and a missionary society held slaves of its own.