The Slave Trader Who Wrote Amazing Grace

John Newton was born in London on July 24, 1725, to a sea captain and a devout mother who died when he was six. His father sent him to sea at eleven. By his twenties, Newton commanded ships in the slave trade, transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. He saw them as cargo. He profited from their suffering for years before it occurred to him that something was wrong.

In March 1748, his ship hit a violent storm off Newfoundland. Newton expected to die. The ship barely survived. He called it a miracle. But the change was slow -- he continued in the slave trade for six more years. Conversion is not instant redesign. It is gradual recognition that the system you inhabit is broken and you helped build it.

Newton left the sea and became an Anglican minister. In Olney, Buckinghamshire, he wrote "Amazing Grace" in 1772 for a New Year's Day service. A wretch saved by grace, someone blind who now could see. The hymn spread slowly, paired with the tune "New Britain" in the 1830s. It worked because it was modular -- adaptable to any melody or context.

the olney hymns collection, 1779, containing the first published text of amazing grace. source: wikimedia commons

Newton did not denounce slavery for decades. In 1788, he published "Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade," describing horrors he had participated in. He died in 1807, the year Britain abolished the trade. "Amazing Grace" outlived him by centuries -- sung at protests, funerals, and civil rights marches by people whose ancestors he might have trafficked. The hymn escaped its author. It belongs to whoever sings it.

The question it leaves is whether recognizing your own wretchedness is enough, or whether you must spend the rest of your life dismantling the systems that made you wretched.