Thomas Clarkson is less remembered than William Wilberforce, but he can claim to have played an equally important role in the British abolition campaign, as one of the founders of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the author of its manifesto, and its indefatigable researcher and propagandist. Clarkson was born on 28 March 1760 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. His father was John Clarkson, headmaster of the Wisbech Free Grammar School and curate of Walsoken; he eventually died of a fever caught while attending a sick parishioner, thus setting an example of self-sacrifice that would not be lost on his son. His wife's first name has not been recorded, but her maiden name was Ward. Earl Leslie Griggs's biography Thomas Clarkson: The Friend of Slaves (1936) describes Clarkson's mother as "a woman of great energy of character," a trait her son inherited: Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later call Clarkson "the...