bio notes:
born: 3/28/1760
died: 9/26/1846
born as: Thomas Clarkson

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. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him, "the moral Steam-Engine, or the Giant with one idea." At Saint John's College, Cambridge, he entered a Latin dissertation contest with an extended work which was translated into English and published as An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African. Shortly after winning the contest, for which he undertook considerable research, Clarkson experienced a spiritual epiphany and decided to devote his life to abolition. Through his work, the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was directly responsible for the ending of the trade in the British Empire in 1807, and the abolition of slavery itself throughout most of the British Empire in 1833. He was writing for the cause up to his death in 1846.