Wilberforce and the Long Wait for Justice

In 1787, William Wilberforce sat in his garden at Holwood House in Kent, weeping over Thomas Clarkson's evidence of the slave trade — iron shackles sized for children, diagrams of human beings packed like cargo in ship holds. He brought his first abolition bill to Parliament in 1789. It failed. He brought it again in 1791. It failed again. For eighteen years, Wilberforce stood before the House of Commons and cried out against an injustice so monstrous it defied language, and for eighteen years, the powerful shrugged.…