The five years between 1787 and 1792 were an important watershed in the development of evangelicalism within the wider context of world history. On 1 June 1787, eighteen months after William Wilberforce had experienced an evangelical conversion, King George III issued at his instigation a proclamation for ‘the encouragement of piety and virtue’. Wilberforce formed the Proclamation Society to advance its implementation, pioneering a format that was to be adopted by a plethora of evangelical voluntary societies pursuing religious, moral and social reform. Across the Atlantic in Philadelphia on 17 September 1787, the United States Constitution was adopted. Its ratification by the former British colonies created an expanding new nation which, despite – or perhaps because of – its rigorous separation of church and state, was to provide fertile soil for the flourishing of a multitude of evangelical institutions. John Wesley's appointment of Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke as general superintendents of American Methodism in 1784 had already reflected both the national independence of the United States and the evolution of Methodism into a distinct denomination. Then, in January 1788, the movement gained a presence on the far-flung shores of New South Wales, with the arrival of the First Fleet and its evangelical chaplain, Richard Johnson, who on 3 February celebrated the first Christian service on the site of what was to become Sydney. Back in London, on 12 May 1789, William Wilberforce rose in the House of Commons to deliver his first speech calling for the abolition of the slave trade, initiating a moral and political crusade that became emblematic of the aspirations of evangelicals not only to save souls but to transform society, on a global stage as well as a national one. The campaign against the slave trade, and eventually slavery itself, was to lead to great successes but also bitter division from those evangelicals in the slaveholding communities in the American South.