William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) was an English politician, philanthropist and the leading parliamentary campaigner against the slave trade. Elected member of Parliament for Hull in 1780 and later for Yorkshire, he underwent an evangelical conversion in the mid-1780s and devoted his career to moral and social reform. For twenty years he pressed for abolition of the British slave trade, finally achieved in 1807, and he continued to work for the end of slavery itself, which Parliament voted days before his death. His A Practical View of Christianity was widely read.