William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was a British politician and reformer who led the parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire.

His decades-long effort culminated in the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which banned the trade, and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, passed shortly before his death.

A devout evangelical Christian, Wilberforce believed abolition was a moral imperative.

His name remains synonymous with the antislavery movement.