The man who wrote “Amazing Grace” once captained slave ships. The hymn is his confession

The man who wrote “Amazing Grace” had commanded ships that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.

John Newton was born in London in 1725. He went to sea as a boy with his father, a ship’s master, and spent his youth as a sailor, much of it in the slave trade. He was later ordained as a priest in the Church of England, and in the English village of Olney he wrote the hymn that begins, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”

For most of the people who sing it, “wretch” is a general word for a sinner. For Newton, it had a specific meaning.

A storm in 1748

Newton’s early life at sea was rough by his own account. He was pressed into the Royal Navy, deserted, was punished, and ended up working for a slave trader on the coast of West Africa, where he was himself treated badly. In 1748, sailing home aboard the ship Greyhound, he was caught in a violent storm off the coast of Ireland. With the ship taking on water, he cried out to God for mercy. He later marked that day as the start of his conversion.

His conversion did not take him out of the slave trade. He went on to serve as mate and then captain on slave-trading voyages over the following years. Only after he left the sea, because of illness, did he study for the ministry.

Olney

Newton became curate of Olney, in Buckinghamshire, in 1764. There he worked with the poet William Cowper, and the two wrote hymns for the weekly prayer meetings. “Amazing Grace” was written for a New Year’s Day service in 1773 and published in 1779 in the collection Olney Hymns.

The words were not sung to the tune everyone knows today. That melody, known as “New Britain”, was paired with Newton’s text in the United States in the 1830s, and the combination became one of the most recorded songs in history.

Turning against the trade

Decades after he left the sea, Newton spoke out. In 1788 he published Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, describing the conditions he had seen and admitting his own part in it. He wrote that it would always be a subject of humiliating reflection to him that he had been an active instrument in a business at which his heart now shuddered. He gave evidence to Parliament, and he encouraged the young politician William Wilberforce, who became the leader of the abolition campaign.

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. Newton, nearly blind by then, lived to see it. He died in London in December of that year.

What the hymn means now

“Amazing Grace” is sung at funerals, protests, church services and state ceremonies around the world. In Ghana, it is sung in churches in English and local languages. Along the Ghanaian coast, the forts through which enslaved people were shipped stand within a few hours’ drive of churches where the hymn is sung every Sunday.

The history adds weight to its most famous line. “I once was lost, but now am found” was written by a man who knew exactly what he had done.