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14 March 2023

6 min read

Aside from Amazing Grace

Helping win a historic victory for humanity was an influencer with a shocking back story. Biographer Jonathan Aitken discovers there’s more to John Newton than penning Amazing Grace.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan is a former politician, and now a prison chaplain.

John Newton is back in the news. 250 years ago in January 1773 he wrote the words of what has become the most recorded, performed and loved hymn of all time – Amazing Grace.

As a popular song it is right up there competing with Happy Birthday and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. And the spiritual power of its lyrics shines out at an estimated ten million annual weddings, funerals, celebrations and services across the world.

As a biographer of John Newton I have paradoxical feelings about Amazing Grace. I love the hymn as much as anyone particularly when it brings tears in the prison chapels where I serve as a chaplain.

Yet for historical reasons I am disappointed on this great man’s behalf that he is largely remembered only for this hymn.

For there is much more to John Newton than Amazing Grace.

For starters he was so close a mentor to William Wilberforce, and so important a witness as an ex-slave ship captain to the horrors of the evil trade, that without Newton the Abolition of Slavery Act 1807 would never have won the necessary Parliamentary votes to pass into law.

If this great historical achievement was not enough Newton’s colourful back story was the stuff of which best sellers and movies came to be made.

In his wild youth Newton was a serial rebel. He ran away from home, church, school and military service. He was jailed and publicly flogged for desertion from the Royal Navy.

After being thrown out of the Navy he ended up working as a slave trader in West Africa.

There the hard drinking, riotous and ruthless young Newton indulged in every imaginable vice. His business as a brutal kidnapper of natives, whom he sold to slave ships, made him a fortune.

Then came a dramatic change, Newton got religion. This happened on the 9th of March 1748. Newton was on board a ship, The Greyhound, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Suddenly a massive storm wave hit the ship and almost broke it apart. Newton was roused from sleep by a cry of “all hands on deck, the ship is sinking.”

The storm of gale force winds which ripped a huge hole in The Greyhound lasted for the next seven days. For most of that time Newton, a strong young seaman, took the helm. He was certain that he and everyone else on board would be drowned. In desperation he remembered some of the prayers he had learned from his mother, in his childhood, and started to pray for God to save his life.

So when, against all the odds, The Greyhound did not sink and limped into the Port of Londonderry, Newton decided that perhaps there might be a God and began going to church.

Although Newton did start praying and reading his Bible, he did not stop slave trading. Promoted to being a slave ship Captain he made five further voyages to West Africa. On his ships he indulged in many of the vicious cruelties that characterised the slave trade.

Newton kept diaries of these horrors which included chaining, shackling, flogging, thumb screwing and throwing overboard the slaves during their long and dangerous voyage from the West Coast of Africa to the East Coast of America.

Yet gradually, his self-educating Bible study and some teaching from Christian friends caused Newton to see the light. He gave up the slave trade. He got a good shore job in his home port of Liverpool, a city which was being targeted by Methodist preachers such as Wesley and Whitefield.

Newton, by now a soul on fire, became a preacher in dissenter chapels in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

After some years he applied for ordination in the Church of England. But he was turned down for ordination seven times in six years by various Bishops and Archbishops.

These rejections had nothing to do with Newton’s sinful past career as a slave ship Captain. For in the 18th Century, the Church of England was not merely tolerant of the slave trade. It reaped many benefits from its large investments in it and the large donations it received from it. All documented in a recent Lambeth Palace Library exhibition.

Astonishingly the reason why Newton was turned down for ordination was because he was thought to have ‘too much enthusiasm’.

This was a coded phrase meaning that he was felt to be too close to the Methodists whose evangelical preaching and hymn singing was disapproved of by the established church hierarchy.

But with the help of an admiring patron, the Earl of Dartmouth, Newton was ordained as a Church of England priest and appointed to a Dartmouth living at Olney church in Buckinghamshire.

As a Parish Priest Newton was a huge success. He trebled the size of his congregation to over 600 worshippers. As a result, the church had to build a gallery to accommodate them.

But his biggest break through was that Newton started writing articles, books and hymns. These bought him fame and a move to the strategically important church of St. Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London.

During his 28 years of service there, Newton continued to be a best-selling author, a campaigner for social reforms and a renowned preacher. Influential people flocked to hear his sermons including an unknown young MP called William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce first approached Newton to ask him to resolve what the young MP called “my anguish of soul”. He said he wanted to give up being a Member of Parliament in order to become a Minister of Religion.

Newton persuaded Wilberforce that it would be better for him to serve God by staying in Parliament. After taking that wise advice, Wilberforce developed a close friendship and mentoring relationship with Newton.

During the next 15 years there were periods when Wilberforce became depressed and wanted to give up his abolitionist campaign. It was Newton who persuaded him to keep going.

More importantly Newton became Wilberforce’s most vital witness about the horrors of the slave trade in front of a Select Committee in the House of Commons and in front of William Pitt and his Cabinet.

Newton’s authentic eye witness accounts of the suffering of the Africans on board slave ships were devastating.

His evidence and his best-selling pamphlet Thoughts on the African Slave Trade were game changers. Gradually the tide of public and parliamentary opinion turned against the slave trade. Eventually in 1807 when 82 year old Newton was still the Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth, William Wilberforce’s Abolition of Slavery Bill was voted into law by the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16.

It was an historic victory for humanity. And a political triumph for William Wilberforce. But that victory and that triumph would never have been achieved without John Newton’s mentoring, supporting and his giving of vital evidence to Wilberforce’s campaign.

In his last years John Newton was venerated as an iconic church leader, bestselling author, and abolitionist reformer.

Surprisingly, he was not well known in his lifetime for Amazing Grace which only became famous when American churches took it up and made it an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. So Newton was regarded as a great man long before he was recognised as a great hymn writer.

Fame was of little interest to John Newton. He remained endearingly humble. When he was on his deathbed the 18th century equivalent of a tabloid reporter burst into his bedroom and asked:

“Any last words Mr Newton?”

He replied:

“Sir I know only two things. That I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour!”

What an exit line! What a life!

Article

Change

3 July 2023

5 min read

Equiano: How an ex-captive became the voice of abolition

How did a formerly enslaved person think about their faith, freedom, and vocation? Luke Bretherton explores the politics and theology of Olaudah Equiano, whose story was central to the abolitionist movement and continues to resonate today.

Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton is a Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Portrait of Olaudah Equiano from the frontispiece of his biography

The most significant political revolution of the modern era was not that of America, France, Haiti, Russia, or China. It was the longer lasting, deeper rooted, and more pervasive revolution that is “humanitarianism.” Rather than a change in one form of political order, it was a revolution of moral sentiment that affects all political orders. The fruit of this revolution is that the acme of moral action is no longer love for a proximate “brother” but love for a remote “other.”

A foundational text in this revolution is Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789). Equiano, a formerly enslaved person, was a key activist in the movement to abolish slavery. Published on the eve of the Parliamentary enquiry into the slave trade and three months before the French Revolution, his autobiography was hugely popular, running to nine editions and numerous printings during his lifetime.

His autobiography is vital reading because the abolition movement in which he played such a key part is widely understood by historians as foundational to the birth of humanitarianism. It is also seen as providing the template for other, subsequent movements for social justice.

Equiano’s work and its impact needs situating within what is called the Second Great Awakening, a moment of religious fervour on both sides of the Atlantic. Dated as beginning in 1790, the Second Great Awakening represented a huge revival in popular Christianity. Out of it came modern evangelicalism. However, unlike its contemporary expression, the evangelicalism of the late 18th and early 19th century was a key influence on a number of movements for social reform, including the abolition movement.

In his narrative, he portrays himself as the true Christian and the true human. When he encounters the European slave traders on their slave ships, they are the real savages, and despite what they say, they are not Christians.

At the heart of Equiano’s Narrative are two stories of conversion. The first is his conversion to Christianity. The second is his conversion to abolitionism. These two conversions are interrelated. Through his conversion to Christianity, he discovers an understanding of what it means to be human that leads him to see all forms of slavery as wrong. This judgment against slavery includes not just the industrial scale form of slavery driven by the plantation economy, but also what some see as the more benign forms of his own Eboe society in West Africa.

Through his conversion narrative he gains possession of himself, his history, and his people as historical subjects able to speak and act for themselves. He becomes a political actor contributing to and a leading figure within a new political form – the social movement – that contested a dominant feature of the political economy – slavery. Crucially, he refuses and refutes the racialized ways in which Africans are negatively portrayed. Rather than a chattel, he is a Christian and a citizen with a story to tell. He is not merely biology to be exploited. He has a biography. And he is one whose testimony stands as evidence in the case against slavery. In staging this claim he reverses the order of who listens and who speaks – he speaks and English readers listen and take instruction from him.

In his narrative, he portrays himself as the true Christian and the true human. When he encounters the European slave traders on their slave ships, they are the real savages, and despite what they say, they are not Christians. He also represents himself in the text as a new St Paul. He’s an apostle calling others to discover both Christ and their humanity in their encounter with him through reading his story.

Equiano’s is a profound and original work that constantly draws on Biblical frames of reference to both denounce the world as it is and announce a new world. The Bible for him is simultaneously a means of demanding recognition and offering critique.

In the frontispiece of the book he is pictured as holding a Bible which is open at the Book of Acts in the New Testament. Acts chronicles the adventures of the apostles after Christ's death and resurrection. The frontispiece is the key to understanding the story Equiano tells. He is not Odysseus who returns home after many trials and tribulations. Rather, he is St Paul: one who becomes an apostle, taking on a new name and identity in the process. Like St Paul, Equiano suffers whipping, imprisonment (in the hold of a ship), storms, and travels in chains all for the sake of preaching the Gospel. And like St Paul, who ends his journey in Acts in Rome, Equiano’s journey leads him finally to London, the centre of his imperial world. From there he writes an epistle addressed to the churches who are failing to be faithful to the Gospel. In doing so, he appeals, like St Paul, to a universal humanity now available in Christ, in whom “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

The most significant political revolution of the modern era was not that of America, France, Haiti, Russia, or China. It was the longer lasting, deeper rooted, and more pervasive revolution that is “humanitarianism.”

There are those who read Equiano as simply a stooge for colonialism and capitalism. Yet they fail to convince. Such readings deny any connection to the abolition movement. And rather than being someone who is reclaiming his voice and agency, they turn him into a faceless and voiceless subject of forces beyond his control.

To dismiss Equiano is to fail to see the truly revolutionary nature of the text he wrote. In his autobiography, Equiano describes the Christian masters who brutally tortured their slaves for the slightest offense, the ubiquitous rape of women, including very young girls, and the theft from slaves who had little or nothing. Alongside and in stark contrast to this brutality, exploitation, and alienation, Equiano narrates an alternative world, one characterized by intimacy and connection. In this world, he becomes friends with women and children, and forms equal partnerships with white men. The vision of freedom he presents does not entail violently taking control of the state (as was the pattern set by the French revolution). That vision of revolution simply changes who is in control of the state and the economy but does not change the basic form and character of relations between people.

The freedom Equiano portrays is neither structural nor economic. Rather, he bears witness to a revolution of intimacy and sentiment. His life story embodies a changed structure of feeling, one where in place of the rape, whipping, chains, fear, disgust, and disdain that rules relations between blacks and whites there is the possibility of mutuality and respect. Equiano’s autobiography continues to reverberate as it calls us to a conversion of our hearts and mind so that we encounter others––no matter who they are or where they come from––as neither objects to exploit nor enemies to be feared but as neighbours in need of care. Such neighbour love may well be a fragile basis for hope in a world of carnage and desolation still living in the after lives of slavery. Nevertheless, it is as revolutionary now as it was in Equiano’s day.