Amazing Grace: The Slave Trader Who Turned
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The candles gutter every time the door opens, and it opens all through that first morning of the year, cold air pushing in with each new pair of clogs on the flagstones. I am wedged between the lace-frame women on the bench nearest the stove, the one that never throws enough heat to matter. Outside, Olney is white with frost, the Ouse frozen at its edges, the lace bobbins silent for once because it is a feast day and nobody works. Inside, we wait for Mr. Newton to climb into the pulpit, and I know, the way you know a storm is coming by the smell of the air, that he means to say something he has been carrying a long time.
I had heard him tell pieces of it before, in dribs, over the nine years he had been our curate. He was not like the vicars who stood a mile above you and preached of sin as though it belonged to someone else. He told us his own. He would stand up there in that plain black gown and say he had been a blasphemer worse than any man in this room had ever heard, and half of us laughed nervously because we believed him, and the other half went quiet because we could hear that he meant it.
He was born in Wapping, by the London docks, in 1725, the son of a ship's captain who was gone two or three years at a stretch and a mother who taught him his letters and his catechism before she died of the wasting sickness when he was six. After that there was a stepmother who kept her distance and a boarding school where the masters used the strap freely, and then, at eleven, the sea itself, apprenticed to his own father, learning to be a sailor the way other boys learn a trade, by having it beaten into the hands.
He told us how he had lost his faith on purpose, egged on by a shipmate and a book by a lord named Shaftesbury, and how he came to take a kind of pride in being the foulest-mouthed man aboard any vessel he sailed in — not merely swearing as sailors do, he said, but inventing oaths past what the language already had, until even hardened captains flinched to hear him. He said it the way another man might confess to murder.
The navy took him against his will, pressed off the street the way they pressed so many, and he answered that indignity the way he answered most things at that age — badly. He overstayed his leave to see a girl named Mary Catlett, whom everyone at Olney simply called Polly, the family friend from Kent he had loved since he was a boy of seventeen, and when they caught him for it they flogged him before the ship's company and stripped him of his rank. Not long after, in humiliation, he was traded off like cargo himself, to the crew of a slave ship.
That was where the story turned dark even by his own telling. He said he had mocked the captain of that vessel with filthy songs he composed himself, verses so cutting that the whole crew learned them and sang them behind the man's back, and that his own recklessness cost him — starved near to death, clapped in irons at sea like the men chained below the deck he served on. In Sierra Leone he fell into the hands of a Sherbro trader's mistress on a river plantation, and for months he was treated little better than the human property he had come there to buy and sell, until his own father, reached at last by letter, arranged for a passing ship to find him and bring him off.
Even then, he said, he did not want rescue. He had grown almost used to Sierra Leone. It was Polly, and Polly alone, that drew him back toward England, back toward a life he had not yet earned.
The ship that carried him home was called the Greyhound, and it was aboard her, in March of 1748, in the black water of the North Atlantic, that everything he had been ran up against everything he might become. A storm hit that tore the sea to pieces. A man standing at the very spot where Newton had stood minutes before was swept overboard and lost. For hours the crew bailed water they were sure would sink them regardless, and Newton lashed himself to the ship's pump alongside another sailor, working until his hands would not close, and at some point, turning to the captain in the howling dark, he said the words he would carry the rest of his life: if this will not do, then Lord have mercy upon us.
He told us that when the words left his mouth he was startled by them, that a man who had spent years perfecting blasphemy had just prayed, without deciding to. He rested only a little before going back up to steer the broken ship for eleven straight hours, and in that darkness, hand on the wheel, he began turning over what he had said, whether a man like him had any right to ask mercy of anyone at all.
Two weeks after, the Greyhound limped into Lough Swilly on the Irish coast, crew half-starved, ship barely afloat. He had been reading, before the storm, an old book called The Christian's Pattern, and now, safe on land, its lessons would not leave him. He wrote to Polly's family and told them plainly he intended to marry her. Her parents knew his reputation and were slow to trust it, but they let him write to her, and for her sake, he said, he began — only began — to bring himself under some kind of rein.
Here is the part he never made easy for us to hear, and never tried to. His change of heart did not stop him from going back to the slave trade. He sought out another ship bound for the African coast and served on it much as before, buying and selling captive men and women along those same shores, and the only vice he claimed to have shed entirely in that period was his cursing. The rest, he told the congregation plainly, took years. God's mercy had found him, he said, long before he had found any mercy of his own to extend to others.
He married Polly in 1750, and after that each voyage grew harder to sail into, each parting from her harder to bear. He served as captain now, on three more slave-trading voyages out of Liverpool, sailing to the African coast to gather men and women already brought down to the ports, then across to the Americas, once as far as Charleston, where by his own later account one crossing alone had cost sixty-two of the two hundred and eighteen captives aboard, dead of sickness or killed for resisting. He was promised, after that, a captaincy with a different cargo entirely. He never sailed again. At thirty years old, his body simply gave out beneath him, and that door closed.
He took a post ashore in Liverpool, in the customs house, and it was there, in a life finally still enough to allow it, that he taught himself Latin and Greek by candlelight, working through theology books the way he had once worked a ship's rigging, out of sheer bent will. Friends who saw the change in him urged him toward the priesthood, and he tried, and the Archbishop of York turned him away, on paper for lack of a university degree, though we in Olney always understood it was really his Methodist friendships that told against him. He did not give up. A nobleman, the Earl of Dartmouth, read what Newton had written of his own life and was moved enough to see him ordained after all, by the Bishop of Lincoln, and to hand him this very curacy, this small lace-making village of some two and a half thousand souls, most of them poor, most of them unable to read their own names.
That was 1764. Nine years before that January morning I am telling you about.
He was not a smooth preacher. His delivery could be rough, his writing plain to the point of bluntness, and the learned men who came through sometimes smiled behind their hands at his want of polish. But we did not need polish. We needed a man who would stand in our pulpit and admit he had been the worst sinner in the room, and mean it, and then tell us there was a way out of what we carried. He used to say his whole purpose was to break a hard heart and mend a broken one, and in Olney, God knows, there was no shortage of either kind.
Around 1767 a new man came to live among us, a poet named William Cowper, gifted with words in a way Newton never claimed to be, and troubled in his mind in a way that frightened those who loved him — he had tried more than once to end his own life. The two men found something in each other. Cowper had been through his own wrenching turn toward faith, and between the pair of them our little prayer meetings began drawing more people than the room could easily hold, so many that by 1768 they had to start a second gathering each week just to make space.
It became their habit, the curate and the poet, to set a new hymn before the congregation for nearly every meeting, verses built plain enough that a lace-maker who had never read a book straight through could take hold of the words and keep them. That New Year's morning, the first of January in 1773, Newton had one ready that he had been shaping since the tail end of the old year, tied to an old verse from the first book of Chronicles about a king named David and a promise from God that would outlast him.
He did not so much perform it as speak it out over us, and we took up the lines after him the way we always did, no instrument, no settled tune that I could tell you the name of even now — some among us have said since it was more chanted than sung. But I remember the shape the words made in that cold room, remember the phrase that struck me hardest, wretch, a word he used for himself without hesitation, a man who had once mocked God for sport now standing before us saying grace had found a wretch like him and taught his heart to fear, and then taught the same fear to rest. Blind, he said, and now made able to see. There was not a soul on that bench who did not know exactly what road had brought him to say it.
We had no idea, singing it that morning, that it was going anywhere beyond our own walls. It sat quietly for years after, one hymn among hundreds, until 1779 when Newton and Cowper gathered what they had written together and had it bound and printed without either man's name on the cover, a fat little book called Olney Hymns, two hundred and eighty of its poems his, the rest his friend's, this one filed under the same old verse from Chronicles that had first suggested it to him. In England it settled into a kind of quiet afterward, one hymn among the crowd, while other verses of theirs were praised above it.
Newton left Olney in the 1780s for a London parish, and it was there, away from us, that the last part of his turning came due. He had spent years admitting his sins from the pulpit without ever quite calling the trade itself a sin against the men and women he had bought and sold — that reckoning came slower than his own salvation had. When it came, it came in full. He wrote out an account of the slave ships in brutal, unsparing detail, naming his own part in it without softening a line, and he gave himself over to the cause of ending it, standing beside a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce, who would spend decades pushing the abolition of the trade through a Parliament in no hurry to hear him.
I was an old woman by 1807, my hands too stiff by then for the bobbins, when the word came down through Olney that Parliament had finally voted the slave trade out of English law. Newton did not have long left himself; he died that same year, having lived just long enough to see the thing he had once done for a living struck from the books of his own country.
The tune we know now, the one that carries those words across oceans and centuries, was not wedded to them until 1835, decades after Newton was in the ground, matched to a shape-note melody called New Britain that some other congregation, in some other country he never saw, found fit the words better than any tune we had at Olney. It went on from there into churches and marches and funerals for people he never met, sung by voices descended from the very ships he once commanded. I only know the room it started in, the cold of that January morning, the smell of tallow candles, and a man who had once composed filthy songs to mock his captain, standing up instead to say that grace had reached him anyway.
