William Wilberforce

Wilberforce never held office. He introduced abolition motions and bills almost every year from 1791, lost repeatedly, and worked with the Clapham Sect and campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson on petitions, boycotts and evidence. The breakthrough in 1806 was procedural cunning: a Foreign Slave Trade Act, framed as a wartime measure, cut off much of the trade before the full Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. He lived just long enough to hear that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 would pass.