Clapham Sect

The third book in the Creek Indian family saga begun with Swimming with Serpents has taken me on a new research adventure. I am tackling the issue of slavery and the anti-slavery movement in the late 18th and early 19th century. The Clapham Sect, founded by evangelical Anglican pastor in the Clapham section of London, Henry Venn, figures prominently in this movement. According to historian Stephen Tomkins the Clapham sect was "a network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its center 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".
Members of the Clapham Sect included:

• Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845), MP and brewer
• William Dealtry (1775–1847), Rector of Clapham, mathematician
• Edward James Eliot (1758–97), parliamentarian
• Thomas Gisbourne (1758–1846), clergyman and author
• Charles Grant (1746–1823), administrator, chairman of the directors of the British East India Company, father of the first Lord Glenelg
• Katherine Hankey (1834–1911), evangelist
• Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838), estate manager, colonial governor, father of Thomas Babington Macaulay
• Hannah More (1745–1835), writer and philanthropist
• Granville Sharp (1735–1813), scholar and administrator
• Charles Simeon (1759–1836), Anglican minister, promoter of missions
• James Stephen (1758–1832), Master of Chancery, great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf.
• Lord Teignmouth (1751–1834), Governor-General of India
• Henry Thornton (1760–1815), economist, banker, philanthropist, MP for Southwark, great-grandfather of writer E.M. Forster
• Henry Venn (1725–97), founder of the group, father of John Venn and great-grandfather of John Venn (originator of the Venn diagram)
• John Venn (1759–1813), Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Clapham
• William Wilberforce (1759–1833), MP successively for Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire and Bramber, leading abolitionist. He was also a Wesleyan and it was to Wilberforce that John Wesley wrote his last letter.

This group of men and women had influence far beyond England's shores.