John Newton, the Slave-Ship Captain Who Wrote Amazing Grace

John Newton wrote “Amazing Grace.” He was an English sailor who worked in the Atlantic slave trade, first as a ship’s mate buying captives on the coast of West Africa and then, from 1750 to 1754, as captain of three slaving voyages of his own. Ten years after he left the sea he was ordained in the Church of England, and while he was curate of Olney in Buckinghamshire he wrote the hymn, most likely for his New Year’s Day sermon of 1773. He printed it in Olney Hymns in 1779 under the title “Faith’s review and expectation.” It was 1788, thirty-four years after his last voyage, before he published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade and called the trade he had worked in “unlawful and wrong.”

The sermon was on a question King David asked as he sat before the Lord: “Who am I, O Lord God, and what is mine house, that thou hast brought me hitherto?” (1 Chronicles 17:16). The man who wrote “‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far” had been flogged as a deserter and had lived on the African coast, as he put it, “in effect, though without the name, a Captive and a Slave myself.” Then, after he first cried to God in a storm, he went on buying and carrying enslaved people for six more years. Grace brought him a long way, and it was a long time before he could look back down that road and see plainly what he had done on it.

Here it is as Newton printed it in 1779, words only, with no tune.

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.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed!

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The LORD has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But GOD, who called me here below,
Will be for ever mine.

The title comes from the way Newton kept New Year’s Day. He spent it looking back over the road behind him and forward to what lay ahead, and in his diary for 1 January 1757 he wrote, “I usually consider the first day of the new year as a point in life from which I may and ought to look both backwards and forwards.” The hymn does the same thing. Its first three stanzas look back on the dangers, toils and snares he has already come through, and its last three look forward, to the Lord as his shield and portion for as long as he lives, and to joy and peace within the veil. In his notes for that New Year’s sermon he told his people that God’s mercy “came to us not only undeserved but undesired,” and that is grace as Newton had known it: kindness from God to a man who was not even asking for it.

Two of the best-loved lines sound like the Gospels. “I once was lost, but now am found” is close to the father’s words over the prodigal son, “he was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:24), and “Was blind, but now I see” is close to the man Jesus healed, “whereas I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25). Newton never says he had those verses in mind. He does tell us that on the voyage home in 1748 the parable of the prodigal struck him as “a case, I thought, that had never been so nearly exemplified, as by myself.”

Did Newton write “When we’ve been there ten thousand years”?

No. The verse most of us sing last came to the hymn from other hands, and it took more than a century to get there. Its root, apparently, is a hymn printed in Philadelphia in 1784, whose last verse began “When they’ve been there ten million years.” By 1790 the words we know had turned up in a book of sacred ballads, added to the end of a much older hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home.” Harriet Beecher Stowe set them beside lines of “Amazing Grace” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, but no hymnal put the two together until 1909, and that is how the hymn has come to be known, with a last verse Newton never wrote.

Newton was born on 24 July 1725. His father was “a commander in the Mediterranean trade,” and his mother, whom he remembered as “a pious experienced Christian,” taught him Scripture, catechisms and hymns, so that he could read by the time he was four. She died on 11 July 1732, two weeks before he turned seven, and when he was eleven his father took him to sea.

At eighteen he was pressed into the navy and put aboard the man-of-war Harwich. He was made a midshipman, and on that ship, he says, he “met with companions who completed the ruin of my principles,” for a shipmate talked him into what he called “the free-thinking scheme.” He deserted at Plymouth, was brought back, “kept awhile in irons, then publicly stripped and whipped,” and lost his rank. At Madeira he got himself exchanged into a ship bound for Sierra Leone.

On that coast he left the ship to work for one of the white men settled there, whose business, he says, was “to purchase slaves … and sell them to the ships at an advanced price.” He landed on the Benanoes the day before the ship sailed, “with little more than the clothes upon my back,” and his new master settled on the largest of the Plantanes, three small islands a little farther along the coast. For about eighteen months in Africa, he wrote long afterwards, he “was depressed to the lowest degree of human wretchedness.” He remembered that “I have sometimes been relieved by strangers; nay even by the slaves in the chain, who have secretly brought me victuals, (for they durst not be seen to do it), from their own slender pittance.” In time he moved to another trader on the same island, who sent him to a post at Kittam, and there he lived well. It was at Kittam, in February 1747, that the captain of the Greyhound found him and took him aboard, and after trading along the coast for gold, ivory, dyers-wood and bees-wax, the ship turned for home in January 1748.

On the way home the Greyhound was nearly lost in a storm, and Newton kept the day for the rest of his life. He gave its date as 10 March, by the old calendar England still used. In our calendar it was the 21st. Fifteen years later he wrote, “I have never suffered it to pass wholly unnoticed since the year 1748. On that day the Lord sent from on high, and delivered me out of the deep waters.”

He worked the pumps “from three in the morning till near noon,” and then he steered until midnight. “I concluded, at first,” he says, “that my sins were too great to be forgiven.” By about six in the evening the ship was free of water, and he began to pray, though “my prayer was like the cry of the ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear.”

The broken ship sailed on until the watch sighted Tory, and on 8 April she anchored in Lough Swilly in Ireland, “just four weeks after the damage.” “About this time,” he says, “I began to know that there is a God that hears and answers prayer.” He stopped swearing, took the sacrament at Londonderry, and “to all appearance, I was a new man.” Yet he was careful not to make that night more than it was. “I cannot consider myself to have been a believer (in the full sense of the word) till a considerable time afterwards,” he wrote. He reached Liverpool in May 1748, and the next six years show how much in him the storm had left untouched.

Yes, and he said so himself, in print, in 1788: “I soon revisited the place of my captivity, as mate of a ship, and, in the year 1750, I was appointed commander, in which capacity I made three voyages to the Windward Coast, for Slaves.” On that first voyage as mate, he wrote, “my business in this voyage, while upon the coast, was to sail from place to place in the long-boat to purchase slaves.” On the same voyage he fell ill with a fever at the Plantanes and prayed, and there, he says, “I was enabled to hope and believe in a crucified Saviour.” Nearly forty years later he still had the journal he kept on that voyage, and he found in it that the ship left Africa with 218 captives and that “we buried Sixty-two on our passage to South-Carolina,” not counting those who died before she sailed. More than one in four of the people in that hold never reached America.

He married Mary in February 1750, and that summer he sailed in command of his own ship. He had, he wrote, “the command and care of thirty persons,” and he “endeavoured to treat them with humanity.” He “established public worship, according to the liturgy, twice every Lord’s day, officiating myself.” On those same voyages, he admits, “the slaves on board were likewise frequently plotting insurrections.”

His last command was the African, from October 1753, and at St Kitts on that voyage he met another captain, Alexander Clunie, who helped him in his faith. He was back in Liverpool in August 1754 and was meant to sail again that autumn in the Bee. Within two days of sailing he “was in a moment seized with a fit, which deprived me of sense and motion,” and he gave up the command the day before she left. The captain who went in his place died on that voyage, and so did most of the officers and many of the crew.

Long after the storm, and long after he left the sea. Here is what he wrote about the trade at each stage:

Year	Where Newton was	What he wrote about the trade
1748	Storm at sea; turns to God	Nothing; goes back to Africa as mate
1750–1754	Captain of three slaving voyages	Later: “I never had a scruple upon this head at the time”
1763–1764	Liverpool; writes his life story	“Never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness”
1788	London; publishes Thoughts	“Unlawful and wrong”

Nearly ten years after his last voyage he wrote his life story as a set of letters, and they came out in 1764 as An Authentic Narrative. In them he put it plainly: “During the time I was engaged in the slave trade, I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness.” He was “upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me,” and it was, he says, “accounted a genteel employment, and is usually very profitable.” He never liked the work all the same. “I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey,” he wrote, “and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles,” and he had prayed that the Lord would “fix me in a more humane calling.” But in those letters, already longing to preach, he did not call the trade wrong.

More than twenty years went by. In December 1785 the young member of Parliament William Wilberforce, who had first met Newton at Olney as a boy of eleven, came to him for guidance. After their talks Wilberforce chose to stay in politics rather than enter the ministry, and became the voice of the cause against the trade in Parliament. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade was founded in 1787, and in January 1788 Newton published his Thoughts, writing, he said, “after an interval of more than thirty-three years.” He gave his reason for speaking at last: “silence, at such a time, and on such an occasion, would, in me, be criminal.”

“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,” he wrote, and then, “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.” So he had disliked the work all along without judging it wrong.

Looking back on his years in command, he wrote, “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.” That is the same word Paul used of his own past: “Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief” (1 Timothy 1:13). Newton saw his own blindness in his country too. “Perhaps what I have said of myself may be applicable to the nation at large,” he wrote. “The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived.” Newton never says what changed his mind between 1764 and 1788, and we should not guess.

The pamphlet goes on to describe what he had seen with his own eyes: the irons, the captives packed “like books upon a shelf,” the deaths and the cruelty to women. It closes on “a commerce, so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive, as the African Slave Trade!” The abolition committee bought what was left of the first printing, paid for 3,000 more copies and sent one to every member of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Newton gave evidence to the Privy Council and to a committee of the House of Commons, and he preached against the trade from his London pulpit.

After his fit Newton never sailed for Africa again. He became tide surveyor at the port of Liverpool, and from October 1755 he and Mary were settled there. He taught himself Greek, then Hebrew, then Syriac, with no teacher, and he met preachers such as George Whitefield and John Wesley. His wish to preach, he said, “arose many years ago, from a reflection on Gal. i. 23, 24,” where the churches of Judaea, who had never seen Paul’s face, “had heard only, That he which persecuted us in times past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed.” The archbishop of York refused to ordain him, and it was the support of Lord Dartmouth that opened the way. Newton was ordained deacon in the Church of England at Buckden on 29 April 1764 and went that year to Olney, where he served for nearly sixteen years. His life story came out the same year, without his name on it, and near its start he says, “I know no case more extraordinary than my own.”

In 1767 he met the poet William Cowper, and the two of them began writing hymns, which were sung at the meetings in the vicarage and the Great House at Olney. Cowper’s part was cut short, Newton says, “by a long and affecting indisposition,” and when the book came out in 1779 it held 348 hymns, 67 by Cowper and 281 by Newton. In the preface, signed at Olney on 15 February 1779, Newton calls the book a monument “to perpetuate the remembrance of an intimate and endeared friendship,” and gives the hymns to “my dear friends in the parish and neighborhood of Olney, for whose use the hymns were originally composed.” He wanted them “for the use of plain people,” and though he said openly that he held the views “which are called Calvinistic,” he hoped they would “coincide with the views of real christians of all denominations.” His plain people were lacemakers, farmworkers and tradespeople, and he often taught them from his own life, so that a sailor’s dangers, toils and snares became something any of them could sing as their own.

Nobody knows for sure what tune Olney sang it to, and for a long time it was seldom printed with music at all. Between 1779 and 1820 it appeared with a tune only three times, and twice the tune was one called Hephzibah. Meanwhile the words crossed the Atlantic. The hymn was printed in New York in 1790 and was taken up at revival meetings. The melody we sing now grew up on its own, an American folk tune known as New Britain, and the oldest copy anyone has is a manuscript of about 1828. In 1835 William Walker put the words and the tune together in his shape-note book Southern Harmony, with all six of Newton’s stanzas.

At the end of 1779 Newton moved to the City of London as rector of St Mary Woolnoth. Mary died on 15 December 1790, and he lived on without her for seventeen years. He died on 21 December 1807, a few months after the Act abolishing the slave trade throughout the British Empire had passed, and on the last day of the year he was buried in the vault of his church. In 1893 his body and Mary’s were moved to the churchyard at Olney.

He had left a letter for his executors with the words he wanted on “a plain marble tablet” by the vestry door of his church, and he asked “that no other monument, and no inscription but to this purport, may be attempted for me.”

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,
Preserved, restored, pardoned,
And appointed to preach the faith he
Had long laboured to destroy.

The last line is Galatians 1:23 told of himself, the verse that first made him want to preach. In the line above it he wrote “A servant of slaves in Africa” and left it standing, among the few words he wanted said of him. Paul’s next verse says what the churches did when they heard a story like his: “And they glorified God in me” (Galatians 1:24).

---

• What Is God’s Grace? A Free Gift We Could Never Earn
• 19 Bible Verses About God’s Grace
• Mercy vs. Grace: Understanding the Difference
• What the Church of England Is: a Prayer Book, and a Man Who Burned for It
• What Are Evangelical Church Beliefs?