The book Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, by Eric Metaxax should be mandatory reading for every serious student and practitioner of government. What a wonderful story and how wonderfully it is told. Wilberforce’s was a life well lived. Few men have ever been born with more intellectual, financial and social advantages than Wilberforce and few have put their advantages to better use.

Wilberforce was born during days of great challenge when great men rose to the occasion by meeting those challenges head on. The dying exhortation to the British Parliament by William Pitt the Elder before he collapsed to the floor gives us a taste of it: “Shall this kingdom fall prostrate before the House of Bourbon? Shall a people that fifteen years ago was the terror of the world now stoop so low as to tell its ancient inveterate enemy, ‘Take all we have, only give us peace’? In God’s name . . . let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!” Oh, if only we had one Pitt in the US House or Senate today how different things would be on Capital Hill and throughout the nation.

But this story is about ending slavery throughout the British Empire, not oratory. It is about how, in 1787, three young men in their twenties: William Pitt who one day would become Prime Minister, William Grenville who would follow Pitt as Prime Minister and William Wilberforce, Member of Parliament, met under an ancient oak tree on a little hill and through their combined efforts changed the world.

Each year for twenty or so years Wilberforce would introduce a bill in the House of Commons outlawing the slave trade and each year it would fail to get enough votes to pass. The reasons for the failures and the logic of the men who opposed his efforts by themselves make reading the book worthwhile. Finally the dam breaks and not only is the slave trade outlawed, but slavery as an institution is abolished.

This is a book that celebrates hope, courage and bravery. It celebrates how it is possible for political leaders to reach high above themselves to accomplish great feats, and it is well written as well. I cannot recommend it as highly as it deserves.