The song Amazing Grace is sung in nearly every language in the world, a symbol of new beginnings and forgiveness. Few know that its author was a slave ship captain before becoming a clergyman. The life of John Newton unites, in a single person, the brutality of human trafficking and the experience of the grace he described.
The son of a merchant ship captain, Newton lost his mother at the age of six and grew up without firm religious instruction. While still young, he was forcibly conscripted into the British Royal Navy, tried to desert, and was publicly flogged as punishment. Shortly afterward, he began working on slave ships and was even mistreated as a slave by a female trader in Sierra Leone.
On March 10, 1748, amid a storm that nearly sank the ship Greyhound, Newton prayed for mercy while struggling to keep the vessel afloat. The storm passed, and he attributed his survival to the grace of God, the slow beginning of his conversion.
His budding faith did not immediately move him away from the slave trade. Married to Mary Catlett in 1750, Newton returned to sea and commanded slave ships for several more years, among them the Duke of Argyle and the African. Only a sudden illness in 1754 ended his seafaring career. Even so, he continued for some time to invest financially in the slaving voyages of the merchant Joseph Manesty, his former employer, a detail the popular memory of the hymn tends to leave out.
Settled as a customs officer in Liverpool, he devoted himself to the self-taught study of theology, Greek, and Hebrew. He sought ordination in the Anglican Church for years, turned down by several bishops, until he was ordained in 1764 and took up the humble parish of Olney.
In Olney, he became friends with the poet William Cowper. Together they published, in 1779, the hymnal Olney Hymns, with texts written for the parish services. Among them was Amazing Grace, written for a New Year’s sermon in 1773, today one of the best known hymns in the world.
By then rector of the church of St Mary Woolnoth, in London, Newton became the spiritual mentor of the young parliamentarian William Wilberforce in 1785, advising him to remain in politics. In 1788, he published Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, a public confession of his participation in the trade, and testified before the British Privy Council about the horrors he had witnessed. In the work itself, he acknowledged that his confession came too late, writing that it would always be a cause for humiliation to have actively taken part in a trade that now made his heart shudder.
Newton died in December 1807, months after the British Parliament passed the law that abolished the slave trade in the empire. His journey, from the cabin of a slave ship to the pulpit, remains a testimony that no story is too far from the grace he described in his most famous hymn, even though his own delay in breaking with the trade and speaking out publicly against it remains an inseparable part of that story.
