Blue plaque commemorating William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect
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.
History
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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]
Summary and context
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.
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]
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 abolishingslavery 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]
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
Members of the Clapham Sect, and those associated with them, included:[19]
^
Nirmala Sharma (21 March 2016). Unraveling Misconceptions: A New Understanding of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Xlibris Corporation. ISBN9781514475218. Retrieved 2 December 2022. '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.'
^
Ditchfield, G. M. (2003) [1998]. The Evangelical Revival. Introductions to history (reprint ed.). London: Psychology Press. ISBN9781857284812. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
^
Carter, Grayson (2006). "Evangelical Religion". In Litzenberger, C. J.; Lyon, Eileen Groth (eds.). The Human Tradition in Modern Britain. Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 56–57. ISBN9780742537354. Retrieved 25 November 2022. 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.
^Ann M. Burton, "British Evangelicals, Economic Warfare and the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1794–1810." Anglican and Episcopal History 65#2 (1996): 197–225. in JSTOR
^Douglas K. Stevenson (1987), American Life and Institutions, Stuttgart (Germany), p. 34
^David Spring, "The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects." Victorian Studies 5#1 (1961): 35–48.
Further reading
Brown, Ford K. Fathers of the Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (1961).
Burton, Ann M. "British Evangelicals, Economic Warfare and the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1794–1810." Anglican and Episcopal History 65#2 (1996): 197–225. in JSTOR
Butler, Ryan J. "Transatlantic Discontinuity? The Clapham Sect's Influence in the United States." Church history 88, no. 3 (2019): 672–695.
Cowper, William. "'The Better Hour Is Near': Wilberforce And Transformative Religion." (Evangelical History Association Lecture 2013) online
Danker, Ryan Nicholas. Wesley and the Anglicans: Political Division in Early Evangelicalism (InterVarsity Press, 2016).
Hennell, Michael. John Venn and the Clapham Sect (1958).
Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-‐1865 (1988).
Hilton, Boyd. A Mad, Bad, Dangerous People? England 1783–1846 (2006), pp 174–88, passim.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. "From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals." Commentary 79.2 (1985): 36.
Howse, Ernest Marshall. Saints in Politics: The 'Clapham Sect' and the Growth of Freedom (University of Toronto Press, 1952)
Klein, Milton M. Amazing Grace: John Thornton & the Clapham Sect (2004), 160 pp.
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