Inexperienced Humanitarians? William Wilberforce, William Pitt, and the Execution Crisis of the 1780s

Abstract

For most historians, William Wilberforce is not immediately associated with the history of capital punishment, at least not beyond his occasional efforts to solicit mercy for individuals sentenced to death, and his distinctly subaltern role in the decisive early nineteenth century parliamentary debates over the abolition of the death penalty in England. Most scholars concern themselves with the first of the two “great objects” of which, in a diary entry for October 28, 1787, Wilberforce declared that “God Almighty has set before me … the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” That concern is easily justified: the abolition of the slave trade quickly became the central preoccupation of Wilberforce's public life, and its implications were of global significance. His second professed mission of 1787 onwards—to help launch and sustain the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality—has inspired a smaller, although no less rich, body of scholarship. Our broad perspective on Wilberforce's public life remains that which was first laid down half a century ago, and which has subsequently been reinforced by historians of gender such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. Wilberforce and his associates are principally seen as the progenitors of nineteenth century moral earnestness and spiritual idealism, as well as the feminine ideal of “the Angel in the House.” They were, as Ford K. Brown suggested in 1961, the “Fathers of the Victorians.”