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Emancipation of enslaved Africans

Wilberforce worked with the members of the African Institution to ensure the enforcement of the abolition of the slave trade and to promote abolitionist negotiations with other countries. In particular, the United States had abolished the slave trade after 1808 and Wilberforce lobbied the American government to enforce its own mandated prohibition more strongly. The same year, Wilberforce moved his family from Clapham to a sizeable mansion with a large garden in Kensington Gore, closer to the Houses of Parliament. In worsening health by 1812, Wilberforce resigned his Yorkshire seat, and became MP for the rotten borough of Bramber in Sussex, a seat with little or no constituency obligations, thus allowing him more time for his family and the causes that interested him. From 1816, Wilberforce introduced a series of bills which would require the compulsory registration of enslaved people, together with details of their country of origin, permitting the illegal importation of foreign slaves to be detected. Later in the same year he began to publicly denounce slavery itself, though he did not demand immediate emancipation, believing incremental change to be more effective in achieving abolition.

In 1820, after a period of poor health and with his eyesight failing, Wilberforce further limited public activities, although he became embroiled in unsuccessful mediation attempts between King George IV, and his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick, who had sought her rights as queen of the realm. Wilberforce still hoped "to lay a foundation for some future measures for the emancipation of the poor slaves". Aware that the cause would need younger men to continue the work, in 1821 he asked MP Thomas Fowell Buxton to take over leadership of the campaign in the Commons. As the 1820s continued, Wilberforce increasingly became more of a figurehead for the abolitionist movement, although he continued to appear at anti-slavery meetings, welcoming visitors, and maintaining a busy correspondence on the subject.

In 1823 Wilberforce's 56-page "Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies" was published. The treatise stated that total emancipation was morally and ethically required and that slavery was a national crime which must be ended by parliamentary legislation to gradually abolish slavery. Members of Parliament did not agree, and government opposition in March 1823 stymied Wilberforce's call for abolition. On 15 May 1823, Buxton moved another resolution in Parliament for gradual emancipation. Subsequent debates followed on 16 March and 11 June 1824 in which Wilberforce made his last speeches in the House of Commons, and which again saw the emancipationists outmanoeuvred by the government.