Amazing Grace
by Spencer Warren

“Statesman, Orator, Philanthropist, Saint; one of the greatest Parliamentarians in a great age, a friend of Pitt and Burke, of Fox and Canning – he did more than any other man, by his eloquence and courage, his industry and pertinacity, to bring about the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. No Englishman has ever done more to evoke the conscience of the British people and to elevate and ennoble British Public life.”

This imposing tribute greets the visitor to the room where William Wilberforce was born, in a large Georgian house in Hull, on August 24, 1759. Until the film Amazing Grace opened in this country late in February, to mark the 200th anniversary of the effective enactment by Parliament of the bill outlawing the British Atlantic slave trade, Wilberforce had been largely forgotten here for over a century; nor was his life more than a dim memory in his home country. Now, thanks to the extraordinary reach of the (sometimes) wonderful medium of film, and the internet, more people today know about this great man than at any time in history. His name is all over the web and the anniversary is being commemorated by church groups across Britain, and some in the U.S. as well. The anniversary also is being used to promote awareness of 21st century slavery.

Amazing Grace is an unusual movie for our time: Although it has serious historical omissions, it is an affirmative moral and cultural statement, and an inspiration to its audiences; the one at the show I attended broke into applause at the film’s conclusion, and resumed its clapping when the screen displayed the actor who brilliantly plays Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd). The film accurately, if somewhat abruptly, takes us through the life of its protagonist. Son of a wealthy merchant family, he takes his seat in the Commons as a young man who is more ambitious and fun-loving than serious or knowledgeable. However, in 1785-6, he goes through a religious conversion and joins the growing numbers of Evangelicals in Britain – known as Methodists before it became a denomination outside the Church of England.

Believing his faith calls him to a life of solitude, Wilberforce is persuaded otherwise by certain other Evangelicals, chief among whom is John Newton. Newton (overpoweringly played by veteran Albert Finney) is the former slave captain who is now a preacher begging forgiveness for his sins. Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, advises Wilberforce he should practice his faith by using his invaluable platform to work for abolition of the detestable Atlantic slave trade. Wilberforce’s chief assistant is another clergyman (although he is not portrayed as such in the film), Thomas Clarkson, who, among his many labors, did the exhaustive investigation of conditions on slave ships in the ports of Bristol and Liverpool, where they had transported sugar and other goods after leaving their slave cargoes in the West Indies.

Wilberforce first moved abolition in a factually detailed three and a half hour speech (given extemporaneously, from notes) in the House of Commons on May 11, 1789. The “godfather” of conservatism, Edmund Burke (not seen in the film), rose to tell the House that “principles so admirable, laid down with so much order and force, were equal to anything I have ever heard in modern oratory; and perhaps not excelled by anything to be met with in Demosthenes.” In the course of the next 18 years, many of the most eloquent orations in history were made against the trade, by the Prime Minister, William Pitt (a close friend of Wilberforce’s and a major character in the film), by the long-time Whig leader Charles James Fox, and others. But success had to wait almost two decades – today we know all too well the arthritic ways of legislatures and the mighty power of entrenched interests. Roe v. Wade still stands after 24 years.

Amazing Grace is produced by Walden Media and its partner companies, which made C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (2005) sequels to which are in the works, as well as the forthcoming The Screwtape Letters. We should applaud their production of a film starring an Evangelical Christian politician. Unfortunately, they seem to have felt a need to downplay his faith somewhat. One critic in USA Today complained that Wilberforce is shown praying in a garden, not a church. Actually, this scene is true to life, for on Easter Sunday, 1786, Wilberforce did indeed pray in his garden. But he is not seen in the film speaking of Christ or urging a new spirituality on his people, as he did in his book, Practical Christianity, perhaps the most widely read devotional book of his era (and still in print). The real Wilberforce told a constituent three years after his conversion: “A man who acts from the principles I profess reflects that he is to give an account of his political conduct at the Judgement seat of Christ.” To cite another example, the members of the famous Clapham Sect, of which Wilberforce was a leading member, are portrayed as social reformers but not the Evangelical group they were.

The film’s Wilberforce is a positive, warm-hearted believer (as well as a sickly man, at times dependent on opium, then often used as a drug). But his spiritual passion might have been made stronger. In his public profession of his faith, he always strove to follow what he called the New Testament’s “injunction to rejoice.” He deprecated the view that “Religion is made to wear a forbidding and gloomy air and not one of peace and hope and joy.” Also, brief reference could have been made to some of his many other moral campaigns – the reformation of public morals, relieving conditions of the poor, his role in founding the SPCA, and his giving away large amounts of his fortune to the destitute. This evangelical politician, the greatest humanitarian ever to hold public and elected office, probably had more positive impact on the moral life of his nation than any in all of history.

Among other criticisms, the film could have worked in a brief reference to the early leading role against slavery of the Quakers and Granville Sharp. The final, crucial role of the new Prime Minister, William Wyndham, Lord Grenville, in pushing abolition first through the House of Lords on February 5-6, 1807 (by a vote of 100 to 36) also is left out. (Grenville, following Wilberforce’s practice, emphasized in his speech morality and justice, not policy issues, a lesson that some social conservatives today should note when they argue against homosexual “marriage” mainly on utilitarian policy grounds; this allows our opponents to confuse the issue in the limited format of TV “debates.”) These omissions can be excused on the ground of narrative clarity. What is not excusable is the treatment of the grand scene in the House of Commons early that February morning in 1807, when after almost twenty years of difficult exertion, abolition was approved overwhelmingly, by 283 to 16. The House is shown standing and rather politely clapping, when in fact the members were cheering three hurrahs. And the fantastic tribute to Wilberforce by the penal law reformer and Solicitor-General, Sir Samuel Romilly, is given to Fox, who practially mumbles his speech. Worse, this tribute is completely rewritten and dumbed down, as is so typical in contemporary entertainment (and education as well). Here is what Sir Samuel did say, comparing Wilberforce to Napoleon, the French tyrant. It merits quoting at length:

When I look to the man at the head of the French Monarchy, surrounded as he is with all the pomp of power, and all the pride of victory, distributing Kingdoms to family . . ., seeming, when he sits upon his throne to have reached the summit of human ambition, and the pinnacle of earthly happiness, and when I follow that into his closet or to his bed, and consider the pangs with which his solitude must be tortured, and his repose banished, by the recollection of the blood he has spilled, and the oppressions he has committed; and when I compare with these pangs of remorse, the feelings which must accompany my hon. Friend from this House to his home, after the vote of this night shall have confirmed the object of his humane and unceasing labours; when he shall retire into the bosom of his happy and delighted family, when he shall lay himself down on his bed, reflecting on the innumerable voices that will be raised in every quarter of the world to bless him; how much more pure and perfect felicity must he enjoy in the consciousness of having preserved so many millions of his fellow-creatures, than the man with whom I have compared him, on the throne to which he has waded through slaughter and oppression.

Amidst the subsequent cheers, Wilberforce sat with tears streaming down his cheeks. In the outstanding six-part BBC “docu-drama,” The Fight Against Slavery, broadcast in New York in 1975 shortly before Roots, this speech is given verbatim and the scene is inspiring; here it is clumsy and relatively flat.

A film can take reasonable liberties with history, for it is a different medium. But Amazing Grace would have been even better had it shown more fidelity to the stirring facts. It also is somewhat limited by screenwriter Steven Knight’s jumbled narrative and director Michael Apted’s mostly tight shots and “in-your-face” direction, so typical of modern films but more suited to TV shows or commercials than to the big canvas of the silver screen. In the end, what makes this film inspiring is its extraordinary story, the moral and religious character of its protagonist, its outstanding acting (all the historical characters are real, believable individuals) and its vivid feeling of time and place, thanks to the superb candle-light cinematography.

Finally, I do not wish to be too critical of a film that deserves praise. But due to its historical nature, it must be open to wider judgment. And three more historical criticisms must be added. The film begins with a title explaining that from the 15th to the 19th centuries an estimated 11 million Africans were enslaved in Africa by their own people and transported across the Atlantic by Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the United States. The title places much of the onus on Britain as the then “super-power,” when in fact, according to Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade (1997), Portugal and Spain were responsible for 57 percent of the trade and Britain about 20 percent, although it was the worst transgressor in the eighteenth century. The film also fails to tell the audience that after the 1807 abolition (well ahead of the other countries), the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, for most of the remainder of the century, fought to suppress the trade, later also fighting our Arab Muslim friends’ thriving trade on the east coast of Africa.

The film also inexplicably and totally fails to inform the audience that in July 1833 (less than three days before Wilberforce died) Parliament enacted a bill to emancipate all slaves in the British Empire, a fight which Wilberforce continued to lead until his later years. Why was no title appended at the end to explain this to the audience? Would it have seemed too pro-British, too pro-West? What an astonishing omission.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s media critic.