The slave trader who became a hymn writer
John Newton and Amazing Grace
John Newton has been a slave trader. Not tangentially — centrally. He captained ships that transported enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage, the most lethal trade route in human history. He did this for years after his conversion, after the storm in 1748 when he cried out to God and believed. He saw no contradiction.
He eventually leaves the slave trade — not primarily on moral grounds initially, but because of ill health. He is ordained in 1764 and becomes a country curate in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he writes hymns with his friend the poet William Cowper.
Amazing Grace is published in 1779 in the Olney Hymns collection. It is written out of Newton's specific testimony — a wretch, the worst of sinners, a man who participated in one of history's great evils and was nonetheless found by grace.
The hymn works because Newton does not minimize what he was. A wretch. He means it literally. The amazing is amazing because of the specific darkness it reached into.
Newton eventually becomes an abolitionist — testifying before Parliament in 1788, at age eighty-two, supporting Wilberforce's campaign, saying publicly that he spent years in the slave trade as a professing Christian and that the memory never stops working on him.
He requests a simple epitaph: John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the mercy of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long labored to destroy.
“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
— John Newton, Amazing Grace, 1779 AD
“The saying is faithful, and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. However, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me as chief, Jesus Christ might display all his patience, for an example of those who were going to believe in him to eternal life.”
Newton wrote the words a wretch like me and meant them with a specificity most singers of the hymn do not share.
He had transported enslaved human beings across the Middle Passage. He had done it as a professing Christian. The grace that found him found him in that.
This is the scandal and the comfort of Amazing Grace simultaneously: if it reached Newton, there is no depth it cannot reach. If it found him there, it can find you where you are.
The hymn is not about mild inadequacy or general sinfulness. It is about a grace so specific and so deep that no history makes a person unreachable.
Amazing. Because of exactly what it found.