In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a small circle of evangelical Anglicans gathered around the village of Clapham in south London to worship together, raise their children together, and plan the moral reform of their nation. William Wilberforce, Hannah More, Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, and Henry Thornton were among them, and the abolition of the British slave trade was one of the fruits of their long, patient, hard-eyed labor.