The Clapham Sect, or Clapham Saints, were a group of social reformers associated with Holy Trinity Clapham in the period from the 1780s to the 1840s. Despite the label "sect", most members remained in the established (and dominant) Church of England, which was highly interwoven with offices of state.
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The Clapham movement grew from 18th-century evangelical trends in the Church of England (the Anglican Church) and started to coalesce around residents of Clapham, especially during the rectorship there of John Venn (in office: 1792-1813) [1] and came to engage in systematically advocating social reform. [2]
In the course of time the growth of evangelical Christian revivalism in England [3] and the movement for Catholic emancipation fed into a waning of the old precept that every Englishman automatically counted as an Anglican. [4] Some new Christian groups (such as the Methodists and the Plymouth Brethren) moved away from Anglicanism, and the Christian social reformers who succeeded the Claphamites from about the 1830s [5] often exemplified Nonconformist conscience [6] and identified with groups functioning outside the established Anglican Church. [7]
These were reformists and abolitionists, being contemporary terms as the 'Sect' was – until 1844 – unnamed. They figured and heard readings, sermons and lessons from prominent and wealthy Evangelical Anglicans who called for the liberation of slaves, [8] abolition of the slave trade and the reform of the penal system, and recognised and advocated other cornerstone civil-political rights and socio-economic rights. Defying the status quo of labour exploitation and consequent vested interests in the legislature was laborious and was motivated by their Christian faith and concern for social justice and fairness for all human beings. Their most famous member was William Wilberforce, widely commemorated in monuments and credited with hastening the end of the slave trade.
Electoral and other political rights were a main cause of all Radicals then their Northern successors the Chartists, their shared earliest success being the Great Reform Act 1832. Many of the other key rights saw a comparative context in treatises of the Age of Enlightenment, and Age of Revolutions. France's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, together with the 1689 English Bill of Rights, the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, and the 1789 United States Bill of Rights, inspired, in large part, the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [9]
The name stems from most of its figures being non-dissenting parishioners of Clapham, then a village south of London (today part of south-west London), where Wilberforce and Thornton, its two most influential leaders, often lived and met. Liturgy, sermons and sometimes meetings at Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common were a central feature, largely neighboured by upmarket new homes and expensive single-home plots of land (fashionable villas in the terms of the time).
Henry Venn, since seen as the founder, was lesser clergy, Curate, there (from at least 1754) and his son John became rector (parish priest) (1792–1813). The House of Commons politicians (MPs) William Wilberforce (first elected 1780) and Henry Thornton (first elected 1782), two of the most influential of the sect were parishioners and many of the meetings were held in their houses. They were encouraged by Beilby Porteus, the Bishop of London, himself an abolitionist and reformer, who sympathised with many of their aims. The term "Clapham Sect" is an almost non-contemporaneous invention by James Stephen in an article of 1844 which celebrated and romanticised the work of these reformers. [10]
The reformers were partly composed of members from St Edmund Hall, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Charles Simeon had preached to students from the university, some of whom underwent an evangelical conversion experience and later became associated with the Clapham Sect.
Lampooned in their day as "the saints", the group published a journal, the Christian Observer , edited by Zachary Macaulay and were also credited with the foundation of several missionary and tract societies, including the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Church Missionary Society.
After many decades of work both in British society and in Parliament, the reformers saw their efforts rewarded with the final passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, banning the trade throughout the British Empire and, after many further years of campaigning, the total emancipation of British slaves with the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. They also campaigned vigorously for Britain to use its influence to work towards abolishing slavery throughout the world.
Some of the group, Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, were responsible for the founding in 1787 of Sierra Leone as a settlement for some of the African-Americans freed by the British during the American Revolutionary War; it thus became the first non trading-post British "colony" akin to a fledgling mission state in Africa, whose purpose in Clarkson's words was "the abolition of the slave trade, the civilisation of Africa, and the introduction of the gospel there". [11] : 11 Later, in 1792, another of the group John Clarkson was instrumental in the creation of its capital Freetown.
The group are described by the historian Stephen Tomkins as "a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its centre of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage". [11]
By 1848 when evangelical bishop John Bird Sumner became Archbishop of Canterbury, it is said that between a quarter and a third of Anglican clergy were linked to the movement, which by then had diversified greatly in its goals, although they were no longer considered an organised faction. [12]
Members of the group founded or were involved with a number of other societies, including the Abolition Society, formally known as the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (founded by Clarkson, Sharp and others) [13] and run largely by white middle-class women [14] of Quaker, Unitarian and Evangelical faiths [15] The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions followed, in 1823, and there was also the Proclamation Society, [16] [17] the Sunday School Society, the Bettering Society, [18] and the Small Debt Society. [16]
The Clapham Sect have been credited with playing a significant part in the development of Victorian morality, through their writings, their societies, their influence in Parliament, and their example in philanthropy and moral campaigns, especially against slavery. In the words of Tomkins, "The ethos of Clapham became the spirit of the age." [11] : 248
Members of the Clapham Sect, and those associated with them, included: [19]
William Wilberforce was a British politician, philanthropist, and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, and became an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Yorkshire (1784–1812). In 1785, he underwent a conversion experience and became an Evangelical Anglican, which resulted in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform.
Clapham is a district in south west London, England, lying mostly within the London Borough of Lambeth, but with some areas extending into the neighbouring London Borough of Wandsworth.
James Stephen was the principal English lawyer associated with the movement for the abolition of slavery. Stephen was born in Poole, Dorset; the family home later being removed to Stoke Newington. He married twice and was the father of Sir James Stephen, grandfather of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen, and great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Beilby Porteus, successively Bishop of Chester and of London, was a Church of England reformer and a leading abolitionist in England. He was the first Anglican in a position of authority to seriously challenge the Church's position on slavery.
Thomas Clarkson was an English abolitionist, and a leading campaigner against the slave trade in the British Empire. He helped found the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and helped achieve passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended British trade in slaves.
Henry Thornton was an English economist, banker, philanthropist and parliamentarian.
Zachary Macaulay was a Scottish statistician and abolitionist who was a founder of London University and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and a Governor of British Sierra Leone.
Thomas Gisborne was an English Anglican priest and poet. He was a member of the Clapham Sect, who fought for the abolition of the slave trade in England.
The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions, founded in 1823 and known as the London Anti-Slavery Society during 1838 before ceasing to exist in that year, was commonly referred to as the Anti-Slavery Society.
Edward James Eliot was an English Member of Parliament.
William Smith was a leading independent British politician, sitting as Member of Parliament (MP) for more than one constituency. He was an English Dissenter and was instrumental in bringing political rights to that religious minority. He was a friend and close associate of William Wilberforce and a member of the Clapham Sect of social reformers, and was in the forefront of many of their campaigns for social justice, prison reform and philanthropic endeavour, most notably the abolition of slavery. He was the grandfather of pioneer nurse and statistician Florence Nightingale and educationalist Barbara Bodichon, a founder of Girton College, Cambridge.
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also known as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and sometimes referred to as the Abolition Society or Anti-Slavery Society, was a British abolitionist group formed on 22 May 1787. The objective of abolishing the slave trade was achieved in 1807. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies followed in 1833.
John Thornton (1720–1790) was a British merchant and Christian philanthropist who became wealthy through investment in the North Sea Russia trade. In accordance with his Christian faith, he gave much of his money away to good causes, as one of the major philanthropists of the eighteenth century. It was said that, at the time of his death in 1790, Thornton had become the second richest man in Europe.
Charles Grant was a British politician influential in Indian and domestic affairs who, motivated by his evangelical Christianity, championed the causes of "social reform" and Christian mission, particularly in India. He served as Chairman of the British East India Company, and as a member of parliament (MP), and was an energetic member of the Clapham Sect. The "Clapham Sect" were a group of social activists who spoke out about the moral imperative to end slavery. Henry Thornton founder of the Clapham sect regarded Grant as his closest friend, after Wilberforce, and Grant planned and paid for a house called 'Glenelg' on Henry's estate in Battersea. It was a twin to, and lay near to the house built on the same estate for Wilberforce after his marriage, the location of which is marked by a plaque at No.111 Broomwood Road, west of that section of Battersea Rise now called Clapham Common West Side. Grant later moved to live in Russell Square.
Henry Venn was an Anglican clergyman who is recognised as one of the foremost Protestant missions strategists of the nineteenth century. He was an outstanding administrator who served as honorary secretary of the Church Missionary Society from 1841 to 1873. He was also a campaigner, in the tradition of the Clapham Sect, who frequently lobbied Parliament on social issues of his day, notably on ensuring the total eradication of the Atlantic slave trade by retaining the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy. He expounded the basic principles of indigenous Christian missions: these were much later made widespread by the Lausanne Congress of 1974.
John Venn was a priest of the Church of England who was a central figure of the group of religious philanthropists known as the Clapham Sect.
Abolitionism in the United Kingdom was the movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to end the practice of slavery, whether formal or informal, in the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the world, including ending the Atlantic slave trade. It was part of a wider abolitionism movement in Western Europe and the Americas.
Marianne Thornton was an English human rights activist, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery.
The Holy Trinity Church is an Anglican church located in Clapham, London. Completed in 1776, it was the base for the so-called Clapham Sect who worshipped there. It is located on the north side of Clapham Common and is a Grade II* listed building.
[...] John [Venn] was the founder of an evangelical sect at Clapham (where his father had also been curate), and of the Church Missionary Society [...].
'The Clapham Sect was a group of evangelical reformers that presented a new "crystallization of power: parliament, the Established Church, the journals of opinion, the universities, the City, the civil and fighting services, the government of the Empire. Clapham found a place in them all, not infrequently a distinguished one.' [...] The Clapham Sect was also noted for its 'advocacy of the abolition of the slave trade.'
Every Englishman had been automatically transformed by government decree into a member of the new Anglican church.
The 'Claphamites' were a group of powerful and influential men associated with the Clapham congregation [...].
[...] the [...] very important contribution made by Nonconformity to British life in the nneteenth century.
By the end of the long eighteenth century [1688-1832], the members of the Clapham Sect were quickly passing from the scene. [...] The successors of the Clapham Sect lived at a time of rapid and fundamental social change, arising primarily from the continued effects of industrialization. [...] various issues challenged in different ways the spiritual aspirations of the evangelical movement, producing considerable pressure (and even unrest) within its ranks. As a result, during the late 1820s and early 1830s, the 'Gospel movement' began to fragment into a number of diverse, but not altogether distinct, parties and even denominations. Examples of millennial and apocalyptic speculation, ultra-Calvinistic doctrines, and even extreme forms of Pentecostalism, could now be found among the adherents of evangelical religion, leading many traditional evangelicals to lose confidence in the ability of the 'Gospel movement' to bring about the spiritual renewal of the English church and the nation as a whole.
...originally appeared in the Summer 2001 issue of the C. S. Lewis Institute Report.
