Your column says William Wilberforce "fought relentlessly to ban the slave trade in Great Britain and who ultimately succeeded, against all odds, decades before the United States fought a bloody civil war to do the same."
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That is incorrect. In fact, the importation of slaves into America was outlawed in 1808, just ONE YEAR after Britain banned the transatlantic slave trade. This was in accordance with a compromise in the Constitution that allowed the slave trade to continue for 20 years after that document was ratified. All states except South Carolina had banned the slave trade before then.
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Slavery itself was abolished in the British Isles in 1838, twenty-five years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and twenty-seven years before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery forever in the United States.