By Ray Blunt
JEFFERSON AND WILBERFORCE, PART I
Page I | Page 2
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In the annals of history, there are singular individuals who by superior and often unique personal qualities are able to energize many others to shape or transform their times. Often their influence seems to come from the exercise of power-military, economic, or political. Sometimes their impact comes from unique insights and galvanizing ideas that capture the imagination of large numbers of people. For people of faith, there is the added dimension of God's activity in the world, shaping events and lives for his purposes, and raising up leaders of all stripes to positions of influence, particularly in times of crisis.
A Search for Heroes
We live in an era that many describe as unprecedented in history. Various commentators refer to it as chaotic, a time of continuous, unpredictable change- permanent white-water. Rapidly spreading technology; bewildering and deadly religious and ethnic passions; moral and cultural decline-especially in the West; a global economic, political, and media influence; and the widespread availability of stunningly lethal weapons that can be employed by a single person. This is the stuff of our everyday lives and daily headlines. In such times people often greet the day with a sigh and search for wise and good leaders who can navigate the treacherous shoals. Often there is a deep need and even a craving for past examples-heroes- who have exercised transformational moral leadership and who have changed their times to give us hope and to encourage our hearts in these difficult days.
In recent years, Americans have begun to rediscover the time of our nation's founding, closely studying the lives of a small group of Revolution leaders. Authors have relentlessly mined history in a number of biographies, searching for clues to the character and wisdom that brought the world's first freely elected democracy into being in a time of great testing. But, perhaps we have been a bit myopic and limited in this search for leaders and heroes.
If we turn to examine England during the same time period, we would find the entire moral culture of a nation being transformed over the course of some 40 years-largely by the determined leadership of another small group, most of them scarcely known. They were men and women of Christian faith who gave up their lives and ambitions for a great moral cause. This remarkable story is perhaps best embodied in one man, called to the vocation of politics: William Wilberforce. His career spanned the administrations of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams. But his impact in transforming English morals, practices, and culture arguably gave rise to the greatest era in English history and accomplished what America could not without its bloodiest war ever-the peaceful abolition of slavery in the entire British Empire.
If we then juxtapose the founding era in America, we find one man in particular, who gave eloquent voice to the freedom of man that would roll down through the ensuing centuries as his legacy: Thomas Jefferson.
Both men, Wilberforce and Jefferson, challenged perhaps the most perplexing cultural and moral issue of their time-the existence of slavery in a free and advanced society. How each approached this challenge and how they influenced others to engage their culture is one of the more interesting and compelling lessons of leadership to be found.
Parallel Paths
To begin, what is particularly intriguing in comparing these two great men is the remarkably similar nature of their early paths in life, in their public commitments, and in their choice of career. Only later in life would their actions begin to diverge-starkly.
They entered the world in the same era-Thomas Jefferson born on April 13, 1743; William Wilberforce on August 24, 1759. Each came from famous bloodlines and a privileged, achieving background: Wilberforce's father and grandfather were wealthy merchants and his grandfather a revered politician; Jefferson's father was an important plantation owner and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses; his mother was a Randolph, the first family of Virginia with a line to British aristocracy. They subsequently lost their fathers at an early age, Jefferson at 14 and Wilberforce at the age of 10. They went on to receive an excellent education for their time, one that opened doors to important careers. Wilberforce would attend Cambridge while Jefferson attended William and Mary. Most significantly for our initial focus, each man was to come under the early influence of significant male role models who would not only mentor them but also provide them with an example and a worldview that shaped their entire lives.
In their choice of vocations, while in their early twenties, both young men embarked on a political career. And then, early on as young legislators, they made it a matter of priority to sponsor bills to eradicate slavery. And, not surprisingly, they received a common reaction from their older peers-legislative failure and personal vilification. But, the lessons each drew from those early setbacks would be quite different. In observing the roads each man subsequently chose, we come to the heart of what we will attempt to discover-why do common beliefs and common commitments not always translate into common actions in leaders? Or, in today's vernacular, what causes some to walk the talk and others not.
For while Jefferson continued to ever more sporadically speak and write against slavery for the rest of his life-most importantly in his memorable phrasing in the Declaration of Independence-he never did embody his early words with consequent actions. He died in 1826 with slavery more firmly ensconced in the culture, not only in the south, but also in the growing western lands of America as he failed to even lend a hand to a growing abolition movement. Forty years later, that failure would come home with a vengeance.
By contrast, Wilberforce would for 40 years keep a clear-eyed focus on abolishing the slave trade and then slavery itself in all of England's colonies. Before his death in 1833, word came to him that his lifelong objective had become a legal reality. In the course of his pursuit of this objective, he was to see the beginning of a cultural and moral transformation in England that made it fashionable to do good, ushering in the Victorian era for decades to come.
Their Times
To be fair, for both men the difficulty of their abolition task was enormous and it daunted many others who shared their views. Not unlike our time today, each country faced threats to their national survival. They came of age in a time of revolution in both Europe and America. There was not only the common threat of military conquest but also economic failure if the slave-driven engines of the largely agrarian economies were to run down and imperil national security.
England was confronted by the threat of France, and the example of the French and American revolutions loomed as frightening possibility at home. As an island nation that relied so heavily on trade, England's wealth was dependent on its colonies and their use of slaves to produce trading goods. Abolishing slavery would be tantamount to surrendering to their enemies and a crippling of their economy opening the door potentially to chaos.
America , throughout most of Jefferson's lifetime, would contend for freedom from what they saw as the overt and then latent tyranny of England as well as military threats from France and Spain. In addition, the passions of regional contention between the states of the industrial north and the agrarian south were fueled by a plantation economy which required more slaves as the landholdings expanded farther south and then west when the soil was depleted. This issue, alone-slave or free-as the nation grew, threatened the very capacity of a United States to hold together.
The Role of Mentors
We begin by focusing on one important explanatory factor for why Wilberforce and Jefferson took different roads: the critical role their early mentors played-particularly in shaping their character and their contrasting worldviews. A significant relationship with older, wiser people is one of the key lessons of experience that shape a leader. 1 In particular, it is these relationships that do more to shape character than anything else. 2 In one of the best analyses of what shapes a leader, the authors of The Ascent of a Leader use the metaphor of two ladders. One is the short capability ladder where individuals identify their gifts, develop their capabilities, acquire a position or title, and ultimately reach their potential. But what is ignored in this typical pattern of developing a leader is the very reason people follow others-character leading to trust in difficult times. The longer character ladder is a development process that doesn't ignore capability but which focuses greatly on important shaping relationships such as good mentors provide. It is here that individuals learn to trust God and others with their lives, make choices to be vulnerable and open about their entire lives, align their actions with time tested truths, often paying a price for choices made, and reaching not simply a position of power, but one they have been called to by their Creator and co-laborer. This examination of their mentors is a good illustration of how the development of character and capability were different for Jefferson and Wilberforce. It is at least a beginning explanation for where and why their paths ultimately diverged.
James Houston has rightly observed that the whole subject of mentoring today has taken a turn toward intense interest as we look for exemplars in an age of alienation. 3 Indeed, talk of mentors is rare in the pages of history; it was more a matter of fact. Houston ascribes it, in part, to a hunger for soul friendship in today's culture. Another more prosaic reason might be the changing demographics that find the aging population becoming much larger proportionately as younger persons acquire the leadership roles earlier than they would normally expect. The hunger for mentors we see today may be even more shaped by the whole range of issues surrounding missing parents- divorce, busyness, self-preoccupation, and absent parents (particularly fathers).
JEFFERSON AND WILBERFORCE, PART I
Page I | Page 2
