Abolition

A small boy aged ten was playing in the grounds of his uncle?s rural villa on the edge of Wimbledon Common in the summer of 1769 when the family carriage drew up at the door. The carriage contained the boy?s uncle and a clergyman in his forties. The boy was the young William Wilberforce, and the clergyman was John Newton. No one in 1769 would have foreseen that these two men would be the key characters in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Here, John Pollock tells the story of how they came from different backgrounds and amazingly different earlier lives to build a strong friendship and partnership in the gospel?and how God used them to achieve a great victory in the British Parliament and US Congress against the slave trade.