Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery - Eric Metaxas
Written by
Eric Metaxas
Having previously read Metaxas’ biographies on Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Amazing Grace has confirmed to me that if Eric Metaxas writes a book about someone from history I will read it. In this book he takes us back to the late-1700s, where a young English parliamentarian named William Wilberforce was born again and decided that, amongst other things, he would devote his life not only to ending the North Atlantic slave trade, but to abolishing slavery itself. It was an impossible goal, but Wilberforce, driven by a love for God and for all men, actually did it.
Absolutely everything. Metaxas writes about serious events with such a light touch; he describes people with the wink of an eye, as if he understands them. Writing about history means simply reporting facts, but sometimes you get a sense of the person writing the facts as well, and Metaxas, in my opinion, might just be the best out there. He made me feel like I loved Wilberforce, that tiny little man who roused a nation with his speeches, literally serving as the conscience of a country. I didn’t want to leave him; I felt like I’d made a friend.
If anything was hard, it was the descriptions of how the many African slaves suffered so deeply at the hands of their captors. It’s as though everyone was corrupt: the tribal chiefs rounding up their own countrymen for profit, the ship captains transporting humans in unimaginable conditions, the cruel plantation owners in British-controlled Jamaica, the indifferent or hostile government officials more interested in money than in mercy. It’s hard to read, but God used William Wilberforce to do something about it.
Honestly, everyone. We must get history right, because people are making it what they want it to be. The narrative today is that British Christians delighted in inflicting misery on slaves, but that’s not true. The people engaging in these things were Christians in name only - they were not serving Jesus. In fact, it was the actual Christians who bravely fought to stop it.
Yes, without reservation!
You will want to know more and more about the events of history, and about the radical upheavals of the late 1700s, and you will be the better for it.
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