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However, one day his owner recaptured him and brought him back to Jamaica. Sharp could not allow this injustice and so took the case to court and the Lord Mayor of London ruled that Strong should be freed. Sharp won Jonathan Strong's case and so helped many other recaptured slaves to freedom. Eventually, Sharp managed to get judges to agree that masters of slaves could not force a slave back into slavery once they had touched British Soil. Sharp did not manage to get slavery or the slave trade abolished, but he had started the campaign against slavery.
William Wilberforce was a Quaker and an Mp; this meant that he had both power and religious views of society. As a Quaker he believed that God made all men equal, this meant that no man could possibly own another man and slavery was against God's will. Moreover, he employed a man named Thomas Clarkson to find out about the conditions on the slave ships and was absolutely horrified at what he'd heard. He made countless speeches in Parliament to get the other Mp's on his side and get the slave trade abolished. William Willberforce and Granville Sharp are both very important people in regards the abolition of the slave trade act as they brought the issues of slavery to the attention of important people of power such as the Lord Mayor of London and Members of Parliament including the prime Minister William Pitt.
The most powerful middle-class Abolitionist was William Pitt the Prime Minister of England. He agreed with the aims and purposes of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Since Quakers were barred from becoming MPs until after 1828 he and William Wilberforce were both the middle-class' and the Quakers' voice in Parliament. He made a speech in the House of Commons in 1792 in which he said, "I know of no evil that has ever existed worse than the tearing of 70,000 or 80,000 people each year from their native land. " He frequently and strongly voiced his opinions to the rest of the MPs to try to persuade them to join the cause for although he was Prime Minister he still had to gain enough votes from his counterparts to pass the act.
