John Newton (1725-1807)
/The Reverend Canon Dr Gordon Giles introduced prominent Anglican cleric and slavery abolitionist John Newton. Talk delivered at the Black History Month event ‘The Amazing Grave of a Divine God’ at Rochester Cathedral.
Open Facebook Video
Introduction
Amazing Grace! is one of the most famous and much loved of all Christian hymns. For as well as being a direct expression of Newton’s experience of personal salvation during a tempestuous sea voyage it has gained the weight of relevance to questions such as the slave trade; American identity, Black Christian identity; the global spread and the appropriation of worship music crossing cultural divides.
The hymn has often been used in films and television productions, lending its title to at least six films, one of which, directed by Michael Apted in 2008 is all about the abolition of slavery with William Wilberforce as is central character. A musical about the life of Newton, entitled ‘Amazing Grace’ written by Christopher Smith ran on Broadway for three months in 2015. Somewhat ironically, there is a Tall Ship called ‘Amazing Grace’, available for charter in the Americas.
It must be extremely unlikely that John Newton would ever have imagined his New Year hymn would have such influence and travel even further than even he did, nor that a ship would be named in its honour. He wrote it to be sung on New Year’s Day 1773, so this year we have been celebrating its 250th anniversary.
Grace in Newton’s amazing life
John Newton was the son of a ship’s captain and gently devout mother, who sadly died a week after his seventh birthday, and his happy childhood was curtailed when his father remarried and he was sent to an Essex boarding school where he was bullied.
After two years he went to sea with his father. Service on various ships followed, and having been press-ganged - in Chatham - onto the HMS Harwich in 1742 he ended up on a slaving ship which deposited him on Plantain Island in Sierra Leone for two years. He effectively became a slave trader himself, plying the route between Britain, Africa and the West Indies.
It was while crossing the Atlantic on March 10, 1748 that Newton’s journey took a new course, turned around in a serious storm that saw his ship mercilessly tossed in the waves. He was terrified, tied himself to the ship’s wheel and finally prayed to God for help. When the storm had abated, and from the safety and distance of many years later, he was convinced that his conversion experience had happened on that deck amid the stormy blasts of wind and rain. Nevertheless Newton did not cease from slave trading, seeing no reason to do so.
He is recorded as living in Chatham High Steet in 1754, and perhaps also in Five Bells Lane. By then he had married his childhood sweetheart Mary Catlett (known as Polly) in 1749. In fact his marriage took place a few hundred yards from here, in the parish Church of St Margaret’s, Rochester, on 1 February 1749, and they were both recorded as residing in Chatham, home to the significant Naval Dockyard where the HMS Victory was built, and much other maritime activity. The priest who married them that day 1749 was one John Soane, and he was headmaster of none other than the King’s School Rochester just around the corner. So here in Rochester we have quite a connection to notice and celebrate.
I should digress slightly about dates. For those of you are interested in these sorts of things, around that time, in 1749 the Calendar changed from the Julian to the Gregorian - giving us twelve months rather than ten - and 12 days, and then most of a year were lost. So, for better or worse, Saturday 31 March 1749 was followed the next day by Sunday 1st April 1750.
In 1755 John and Polly left Chatham and went to Liverpool where he became surveyor of tides. In 1758 John Soane – the Headmaster of the King’s School, Rochester, who married John and Polly at the parish church, offered him a curate’s post, but the Church of England refused to ordain him at that time because of his murky past, not so much as a slave trader but for his other dissolute living, for which his own father, incidentally forbade his marriage to Polly for several years.
However, having been influenced by the Wesleys and George Whitefield John was eventually ordained in 1764, serving his first post at Olney in Buckinghamshire. In 1780 he moved to St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London, living for the first six years in Hoxton. While there he met, among others William Wilberforce and became an active campaigner for the abolition of slavery. Writing ‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade’ in 1788 he shuddered to recall his own involvement in it.
Newton and Slavery
And it is Newton’s involvement in slavery that history has smudged, even glossed over, aided perhaps by Newton himself. There has been some very interesting recent research – defective work even - carried out by John Coffey, which shines some dark light onto the paradoxical relationship between John Newton and the African Slave trade. The standard, inherited, popular view is that Newton said very little, if anything against slavery, except for his 1788 document..
It is easy to see him as someone who had a conversion experience at sea which turned him away from slavery. This is not true. A bit less easy, but still possible, is to see him as someone who was involved in slavery due to his seafaring connections, who had a conversion experience which turned him towards the Grace of God, but which did not affect his approach to slavery in which trade he continued. Also, not entirely accurate. An indirect consequence of separating his conversation experience at sea from his involvement in slavery, serves to, perhaps inadvertently, exonerate him from that trade. It is far more complex and is not covered by simply saying that they thought differently then and didn’t see the problem. For however hard we try we cannot be authentic on this – we cannot be someone else and the attempt itself renders the attempt unsuccessful because it is itself an attempt. We cannot get under the skin of eighteenth century slave traders, nor indeed of slaves – we cannot be them and to some extent we cannot fully understand them. We are not them and they are not us. But this is not an excuse. We can use our imaginations, our empathy and sympathy. And we can apply the scalpel of historical research to contemporary documents to cut out a clearer shape of what lies within.
So, we know that Newton gave a testimony about slavery in 1788. Did this come from nowhere, or after protracted silence? There are some hints in his Journals of the 1760s that he had developed a conscience. The Quaker Anthony Benezet, a French-born Huguenot refugee who went to America and who helped found the first anti-slavery society, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, wrote ‘A Short account of the part of Africa inhabited by the negroes’. It was based on ‘Two Dialogues on the man-trade, London’, 1766 (Anon). Benezet is a very important figure in the early days of abolitionism, and he can be connected to Newton. One of the characters in his account is ‘WF’.
There is a possibility that ‘WF’ is a dissenting bookseller, William Fenner.
Benezet may have contacted him, and received what is referred to as a ‘relation’ text.
It is a text by a repentant Liverpool slave trader - a rare thing. In it the writer – who some are suggesting was Newton - describes a voyage around 1749, on a ship with 170 slaves on board. This “relation’ text describes how they rebelled and there were brutal reprisals against the slaves. It may be – it may be - that the ship referred to in the relation was in fact the Brownlow, which sailed from Liverpool in 1748. The Relation describes a small vessel (which means around ninety tons) and The Brownlow weighed 92 tons. The Relation describes how the author (who it seems was the Ship’s Mate) was ordered by the captain to go up the country a considerable distance to negotiate the purchase of slaves.
The number of slaves collected was 170, but a ‘design’ or rather insurrection ensued and it was sanctioned with brutal reprisals. So the person who gave the relation used by Benezet describes it.
Meanwhile, the Brownlow, is the right size and weight and sails from the right place at the right time – Liverpool in 1748/9.
Its purpose, as the ship’s log says: in this voyage, “while upon the coast, was to sail from place to place in the long-boat to purchase slaves” involving ‘long journeys through the woods’, travelling three days journey on one occasion, maybe fifty miles from the head of the river Camaranca. (This river is not called that anymore, but is likely the Sierra Leone River). Apparently there were 218 embarked, and 156 disembarked. The First Mate recorded that there was an insurrection, where one white man was killed and three or four slaves.he captain of the Brownlow was Richard Jackson, and it seems that the Chief Mate could well have been John Newton. For as he wrote forty years later, in 1788:
Epidemical fevers and fluxes, which fill the ship with noisome and noxious effluvia, often break out, infect the Seamen likewise, and the Oppressors, and the Oppressed, fall by the same stroke. I believe, nearly one half of the Slaves on board, have, sometimes, died; and that the loss of a third part, in these circumstances, is not unusual. The ship, in which I was Mate, left the Coast with Two Hundred and Eighteen Slaves on board; and though we were not much affected by epidemical disorders, I find, by my journal of that voyage, (now before me) that we buried Sixty-two on our passage to South-Carolina, exclusive of those which died before we left the Coast, of which I have no account.
So the John Newton who was married in Rochester, pressganged in Chatham, moved to Liverpool and who became a convert, Anglican priest of distinction and wrote ‘Amazing Grace’ among hundreds of other hymns, sermons, diaries and much else may have been a Mate on the slaving ship ‘The Brownlow’. He went on to write:
The risk of insurrections is to be added. These, I believe, are always meditated; for the Men Slaves are not, easily, reconciled to their confinement, and treatment; and if attempted, they are seldom suppressed without considerable loss; and sometimes they succeed, to the destruction of a whole ship's company at once. Seldom a year passes, but we hear of one or more such catastrophes.
He explained why:
Usually, about two-thirds of a cargo of Slaves are males. When a hundred and fifty or two hundred stout men, torn from their native land, many of whom never saw the sea, much less a ship, till a short space before they are embarked; who have, probably, the same natural prejudice against a white man, as we have against a black; and who often bring with them an apprehension that they are bought be eaten: I say, when thus circumstanced, it is not to be expected that they will, tamely, resign themselves to their situation. It is always taken for granted, that they will attempt to gain their liberty, if possible.
And then, possibly even speaking of Captain Richard Jackson, under whom he may have served, he wrote:
I have often heard a Captain, who has been long since dead, boast of his conduct in a former voyage, when his Slaves attempted to rise upon him. After he had suppressed the insurrection, he sat in judgment upon the insurgents; and not only, in cold blood, adjudged several of them, I know not how many, to die, but studied, with no small attention, to make death as excruciating to them as possible. For my reader's sake, I suppress the recital of particulars.
Newton was in Liverpool between 1755-64. He was engaging with John Wesley between 1757-61. He undoubtedly learned some scruples from him, for example on not taking any more bribes. Wesley was very anti-slavery - surely they discussed it experiences and practises such as these … Furthermore, textual analysis of the Relation document suggests that the ‘Relation’ might well be by Newton himself…. If so it would be his first critical writing (1762).
John Coffey believes Newton wrote the Relation, but can’t prove it. I wonder if you are convinced – it is certainly possible. Should we therefore see everything that followed in the light of these particular events at sea which he may well have experienced? He wasn’t just converted by a storm at sea, but also by an experience of brutality towards rebellious slaves, which may have sowed the seeds of abolitionism in him. What this means is that John Newton’s spiritual awakening and his rejection of the slave trade are in fact connected.
And that there is some chance that John Wesley was instrumental in that change of heart.
And it means that we cannot simply say that ‘Amazing Grace’ was not about slavery, nor was it not about slavery.
Newton was converted in 1748, he worked on slave ships, wrote about it, discussed with Wesley, sought ordination in 1764 and then wrote ‘Amazing Grace’ in 1772, 250 years ago, while serving his first post at Olney in Buckinghamshire. In 1780 he moved to St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London, living for the first six years in Hoxton.
Soon the man who met William Wilberforce and became an active campaigner for the abolition of slavery was someone who have been on slave ships and had begun to feel remorse for it and contempt for the trade in which he had played a part. Until now it has been accepted that it was only in 1788 that he wrote ‘Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade’ in which he shuddered to recall his own involvement in it.
It begins:
The nature and effects of that unhappy and disgraceful branch of commerce, which has long been maintained on the Coast of Africa, with the sole, and professed design of purchasing our fellow-creatures, in order to supply our West-India islands and the American colonies, when they were ours, with Slaves; is now generally understood. So much light has been thrown upon the subject, by many able pens; and so many respectable persons have already engaged to use their utmost influence, for the suppression of a traffic, which contradicts the feelings of humanity; that it is hoped, this stain of our National character will soon be wiped out.
He goes on to confess:
I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders. My headstrong passions and follies plunged me, in early life, into a succession of difficulties and hardships, which, at length, reduced me to seek a refuge among the Natives of Africa.
Thus I was unexpectedly freed from this disagreeable service. Disagreeable I had long found it; but I think I should have quitted it sooner, had I considered it, as I now do, to be unlawful and wrong. But I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought once suggested to me, by any friend. What I did, I did ignorantly; considering it as the line of life which Divine Providence had allotted me, and having no concern, in point of conscience, but to treat the Slaves, while under my care, with as much humanity as a regard to my own safety would admit.
To some extent, that apologetic document makes a plea for the fate, moral and physical of seafarers, living in fear and brought up to hate:
Such is the nature, such are the concomitants, of the Slave Trade; and such is the school in which many thousands of our Seamen are brought up. Can we then wonder at that impatience of subordination, and that disposition to mutiny, amongst them, which has been, of late, so loudly complained of, and so severely felt? Will not sound policy suggest, the necessity, of some expedient here? Or can sound policy suggest any, effectual, expedient, but the total suppression of a Trade, which, like a poisonous root, diffuses its malignity into every branch?
It was Rogers and Hammerstein in South Pacific who helped us understand that ‘you have to be taught to hate’.
Newton closes his account with these words:
I have likewise written without solicitation, and simply from the motive I have already assigned; a conviction, that the share I have formerly had in the trade, binds me, in conscience, to throw what light I am able upon the subject, now it is likely to become a point of Parliamentary investigation.
No one can have less interest in it, than I have at present, further than as I am interested by the feelings of humanity, and a regard for the honour, and welfare of my country.
Though unwilling to give offence to a single person; in such a cause, I ought not to be afraid of offending many, by declaring the truth; if, indeed, there can be many, whom even interest can prevail upon to contradict the common sense of mankind, by pleading for a commerce, so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive, as the African Slave Trade!
Time does not permit us here to look closely into the text of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, which does reward extensive analysis, but, in the light of the story of Newton’s involvement with and rejection of, slavery, we might be reminded:
I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
The Biblical overtone is clear, drawing on stories of Jesus restoring sight to the blind or healing the man born blind. Biblically blindness is connected to sin: In Exodus 4:11 it is clearly God who ‘makes’ people blind, and restoration of sight to the blind needs to be seen in that context: “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?”
As the disciples ask Jesus of the man born blind in John 9, ‘who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’. Famously Jesus quotes Isaiah when he proclaims the evidence of the coming of the Kingdom of God saying “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” (Luke 4:18-19).
He says a very similar thing to John the Baptist’s disciples when they are sent to ask him if he is the Messiah in Luke 7:22: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them.” Is it possible that John Newton saw his turning away from slavery as a restoration of sight form the blinding sin of slavery? It is possible.
For Newton, drawing on this range of scripture, imagery and spiritual meaning of blindness, likely meant nothing more complicated than that he was unaware – blind – to the saving power of God, which he ‘saw’ in the storm, and which thereafter illuminated his path of faith. In this we liken his experience to that of St Paul on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:1-9). Paul’s blindness comes as a confirmation of his previous blindness to the gospel, a sign of what he has been. Then his eyes are opened aften a few days as the scales fall from his eyes (Acts 9:18) and the irony of the light that has plunged hm into the temporary darkness of blindness, now reflect the true light which has, actually, ended the blindness of lack of faith which he was hitherto living in. These are the contexts in which we should see Newton’s phrase ‘I once was blind but now I see’, and his maritime conversion experience is a Damascene one.
Nowadays there is a new dimension, poignant given Newton’s associations with the slave trade, which itself saw him converted from one position to another. His abandonment of slavery was not Damascene, but rather slower and his Christian conversion did not persuade him to abandon his day job nor even it seems to consider it as in any sense incompatible with Christian faith.
In this he was by no means alone. In terms of his attitudes towards slavery, he did remain blind and could not see, for many years. Remember that the hymn was written twenty-five years after the Damascene experience at sea and five years before his 1788 treatise against slavery. He could not – yet – see that the trafficking of human beings was as unacceptable then as it so clearly still is in our day and age. His eyes may have been opened spiritually on that ship, but he remained – in our terms – morally blind.
To some extent we remain so when it comes to the legacies of the slave trade in our own age. ‘Black Lives Matter’, demonstrations and awareness campaigns have begun to help many see that there is a certain colour-blindness that exists particularly where white and other privileges exist: that is, that when one is white, middle class, male, able-bodied, heterosexual and educated (like me), there are obstacles that exist for so many people who are not, to which those who are, are blind. If one is able bodied, it is very hard to ’see’ how life is for those who are not. And of course, it is not as simple as closing one’s eyes to see what it is like to be blind – it is more ingrained, deeper.
In terms of the spirituality and morality of Newton’s text, the hermeneutics of this single line of the first verse plunge us into stormy depths where there is much to challenge and be challenged by. Not leastly one might ask how such ‘amazing grace’ lands on the ears of those who were enslaved or oppressed, then or now. Their fears were not relieved and they were not saved.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear
the hour I first believed!
The hymn is, obviously, about grace: God’s grace revealed in Christ, the grace which lifts a wretched and immoral soul to new heights of salvation, no matter how depraved they may have been.
This mattered to Newton; was a key part of his inner journey with God, and although as we have seen it was not so much his slave trading that gave him initial cause for regret but his debauched and immoral lifestyle, now Newton is thought of, as he thought of himself, as someone who had fallen a long way from grace before his conversion.
Later Life
Having moved to St Mary Woolnoth in 1780, Newton remained there until his death in 1807, aged 82. Towards the end of his life he became frail and, ironically, nearly blind, having to be helped when preaching. In his final year he preached a sermon containing the phrase “Jesus Christ is precious”. Probably due to his failing sight, he read the sentence aloud twice successively, so his amanuensis whispered to him, that he had already said it twice. Newton, responding, shouted out, “I have said it twice and I shall say it again - Jesus Christ is precious!”. Not in anger where these words uttered, but in faith, hope and joy.
He wrote at the time: “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner and Jesus is a great saviour”. In the church is an epitaph, written by Newton himself, which reads:
John Newton, Clerk,
Once an infidel and libertine
A servant of slaves in Africa,
Was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ,
restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach
the Gospel which he had long laboured to destroy.
He ministered,
Near sixteen years in Olney, in Bucks,
And twenty-eight years in this Church.
The Legacy of Amazing Grace and Slavery
John Newton was a seafarer, the son of a Sea captain, who went to sea young, served in the navy, was pressganged and, perhaps even inevitably became involved in the Slave Trade. Slavery was conducted at sea, and he is a classic example of how so many people were caught up in something which, on one hand was not thought controversial, and yet which even today gives us problems. People didn’t think slavery was wrong - or they didn’t think about it all. Legally speaking slavery was always illegal in this country - as early as 1569 English Law did not recognise slavery and in 1700 it was decided that a slave was free as soon as they set foot in Britain.
However it took place in other parts of the British Empire and being a worldwide phenomenon, just like today it was hard to eradicate. Not least in America where laws were passed to make it legal. So in England there was no law for it, nor against it. In parts of America they made laws approving it.
In Britain the antislavery movement began around 1783 and William Wilberforce is the person most associated with it. Newton himself described how opinions changed:
The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived. It is otherwise at present; the mischiefs and evils, connected with it, have been, of late years, represented with such undeniable evidence, and are now, so generally known, that I suppose there is hardly an objection can be made, to the wish of thousands, perhaps of millions, for the suppression of this Trade, but upon the ground of political expedience.
In 1807 – the year that Newton died, ironically - the Slave Trade Act was passed making the slave trade illegal in the British Empire. Upper Canada - what we now call Ontario was the first place in the British Empire to abolish slavery in 1793. These acts did not really have an impact until 1833 when the Slavery Abolition Act was published. The problem is, that while there were several acts of parliament against slavery and many good people who campaigned against slavery, it is still with us. There are 46 million people who are trapped in modern slavery in 167 countries worldwide today.
Which brings us back to the hymn. Written almost exactly 250 years ago, Amazing Grace was virtually unknown for nearly 200 years. It was never written to be about slavery, it is about being saved from a sinful life, and the person who wrote it says he didn’t think that slavery was a sin, until much later in his life.
The hymn didn’t reappear until the mid 20th century. We didn’t know it. First republished in Faith, Folk and Clarity, 1967, where it was published alongside radical hymns about homelessness. A thunderbolt into our worship. So don’t think of it as an old hymn - it is a fairly recent one, as we know it. Think of it as a radical song, that remembers that we can only be saved by God, but which has been adopted as an anthem for freedom for oppressed people, a song that reminds us all that we are all sinners who have fallen short of the grace of God, which happens to have been written by someone who spent time as a slave trader.
For buying and selling and transporting people against their will is one of the greatest human crimes, it was in 1748, 1773, 1788, 1807 and it still is. It is a crime that has a past, a present and sadly, a future. It connects us all, condemns us all, demands of us all, recognition, remorse, repentance, resolution, restitution. We cannot and must not rewrite history, but it needs to be reclaimed, redeemed, and resolved. History needs to be unchained, that we all, like the slaves of the past, present and future, of whatever colour, race or creed can be released into the fulness of life, brought and promised in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
The Rev’d Canon Dr Gordon Giles,
Rochester Cathedral Canon Chancellor
Rochester Cathedral features an exceptionally large collection of Colonial-era military memorials and artefacts. This series has begun to highlight the stories behind these collections and their place in our global heritage.
