“Amazing Grace” and the Story of John Newton (b 1725)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. And of course, our favorite subjects are music and history, and when they combine like they do in this story, that’s just a twofer. It’s often been said that grace, like water, always flows downward to the lowest place. Nobody embodies this principle better than John Newton, author of the best-loved hymn of all time. During his lifetime, Newton’s story was renowned as one of the most sensational, sinful, spiritual, and historically important sagas of the 18th century. And we’re telling this story because on this day in 1725, John Newton was born.

Here to tell the story is the A-team of John Newton biographers: Brian Edwards, Jonathan Aitkeen, and Tony Baker.

Newton was born in 1725 in Wapping, about a mile downriver from the Tower of London, right by the Thames. Wapping was at that time a little kind of hamlet, although it was a very busy waterfront. A thousand ships a day were coming in and out of London at that point. Newton, as a little boy, could walk down to Execution Dock and see mutineers and pirates hanging in chains until three tides had washed over them. His father was a sea captain. We don’t know much about his father. Newton held him in both fear, awe, and respect. His mother was a very godly woman, Elizabeth. She took John Newton, as a little boy up to the age of nearly seven, to the dissenting chapel of Dr. Jennings. And it was quite famous. It was full, and all kinds of interesting preachers came there, including Isaac Watts. John Newton, as a little boy, was more educated at his mother’s knee, simply because John Newton Senior, Captain John Newton, was away on these very long sea voyages, and so he was very much an absent father. She had taught him to read, and she was beginning to teach in Latin. She taught him Bible stories, Bible verses, and the hymns of Isaac Watts, which had just recently been published—one of the first hymn writers. His mother sadly died of consumption, or tuberculosis as we know it, just before Newton’s seventh birthday. When John Newton got the news of his mother’s death, he was obviously very upset, and he was more upset when his father came home and didn’t seem to spend any time mourning his dead wife. Captain John Newton married almost immediately, just within weeks of coming home again. And John really was a typical product of an unwanted stepson. I suppose, really, he only had, I think, two years formal education, that at a not very satisfactory boarding school. At the age of 11, he was a sailor on one of his father’s ships, and shortly afterwards, when he was a teenager, he was a sailor in his own right—no longer on his father’s ships, but plowing the Mediterranean trade and the European trade. But there was one extraordinary experience that John Newton had as about an 11- or 12-year-old boy on this first voyage with his father, which might be called a supernatural experience, and it’s the kind of dream which J. R. R. Tolkien might have scripted. He was just offshore from Venice, and a figure appeared and gave him a ring and told him to look after it. He was told that if he looked after this ring, all would be well with his life, but he must care for it. That figure disappeared, and another one came and mocked the value of that ring, telling him that it was a waste of time and he need not bother about it at all, and eventually inveigled the ring away from Newton, so that Newton threw it into the sea. And at that moment in his dream, he saw that the whole of Venice seemed to be engulfed in flames. Then the first person appeared in his dream came back to him and showed him the ring that he had rescued from the water. And Newton put out his hand and said, “Let me have that ring.” And the figure said, “No, you cannot be trusted with it, but at such a time as you need it, it and all that it represents will be available for you.” He thought very little more of that dream until quite later in life, when he came to realize that it was really a parable of his life. He went on with his voyaging, and then came back from one of his voyages as a merchant sailor. He decided he’d go down to the family in whose home his mother, Elizabeth, had died, and the eldest daughter was called Mary. And the moment John set eyes on Mary, he fell, in his own words, madly in love with her. And he mooned around in a lovesick sort of way the town of Chatham, and this mooning around got him into disaster. Newton was press-ganged in Chatham, and that word perhaps takes some explanation. It was the law of the land that the Royal Navy could impress—which meant compulsory recruitment under pressure—any able-bodied man, and John Newton was grabbed and impressed into service as a seaman. He now becomes a sailor on board a man-of-war. HMS Harwich was a fourth-rate man-of-war, but it had 300 men on board. Because his father was a well-known merchant captain, and because he himself was not exactly a landlubber, he had good nautical experience. He was immediately promoted to a midshipman, which was the bottom rung of the officer class. If you like, he progressively threw off this Christian background. His profanity was such, they say—his language—that even hardened sailors could keep their distance. But he had been reading a book called The Characteristics of Men, Manners, and so on. Now, it was a book that led his mind well away from any faith in God, and it helped him on his downhill spiral, morally and philosophically, because it now gave him the reasons why he was not a Christian. Morality was for John Newton to make up from now on.

And you’ve been listening to some of the foremost experts on the life of John Newton. As we always do, we try to bring you the best historians on any given subject. When we come back, the author, the writer of “Amazing Grace,” John Newton’s story continues here on Our American Stories.

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And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of John Newton, who was born on this day in 1725. Let’s return to more of John Newton’s story.

Things got worse for him on the man-of-war at the very time when he thought they were going to get better. He was put on shore as a young midshipman in charge of a party of sailors to bring in stores for the ship. It was mainly fresh water that they required, and he saw his opportunity of deserting his ship and walking to Plymouth to reach his father. And he was captured by soldiers who were on the lookout for deserters. He was put into chains, was brought back to the Harwich, and he was publicly flogged. Thirty-nine lashes across his bare back for deserting his ship. Now, that was a very serious punishment for a very serious charge. He could have actually been put to death, and many died under the lash. He lay on his bunk, sore from the flogging. Furious with himself, very angry with his captain. He thought of suicide. He thought of killing his captain, and the ship sailed. Eventually, the ship arrived at Madeira, where, by quite a remarkable occurrence, he was able to be exchanged for some sailors on board a merchant ship. Back in the 18th century, the Royal Navy could not only press-gang young men; it could exchange or swap young sailors for better sailors whom they came across anywhere, provided they were subjects of the English Crown. But he had to go and serve on a merchant ship which was called the Pegasus, and the Pegasus was what was sometimes called a Guinea Man, which just meant a ship which went off to the coast of African Guinea to trade. He managed to get himself released from his duties as a merchant seaman and to start working as an apprentice to a white man who traded on the shores of Africa. The white slave traders operated from the coast, and it was the black chiefs that brought people from the inland and sold them to the white slave traders on the coast. But that wasn’t working fast enough, and so, fairly soon, the white slave traders were moving inland to do their own dirty work for themselves. So I think in these ways he thought he could make progress. But when the man with whom he was working was away, his wife, who was quite high up in the tribal hierarchy, she took a great dislike to John Newton, and she actually treated him as a white slave. She put him in chains, she starved him, she ill-treated him. He was kept out; so he was treated more like a dog than any kind of human being. And sometimes he was so hungry at nights that he had to go and try and find some roots to eat, which, of course, didn’t do him much good. And sometimes even some of the local slaves brought him some of their own limited supplies out of compassion. Another slave trader, who for some reason took a liking to the strange young man who was being treated like a white slave, bought his release from Amos Clow. John Newton then moved with his new boss, who treated him much more as a partner, to another part of the African coast. Really, he decided that he would simply stay in Africa, and eventually he went down the coast to somewhere called Keta. It was from there that a fellow trader tried to signal passing vessels. If you lit a fire and the passing vessel saw the smoke rising, then they took that as an invitation to come in and trade, and this fellow trader saw a vessel, so he lit a fire, and the timing was extraordinary. Newton’s colleague went on board the ship to do trade and pick up items that they needed, and almost the first question the ship’s captain asked was, “Do you happen to know of a man called Newton on the coast hereabouts?” Apparently, the ship’s captain had met up with John Newton’s father before he left England, and John Newton’s father had said, “If you ever find my son on the coast of Africa, I want you to bring him back.” Now, this sounded like a sort of seafarer’s version of looking for a needle in a haystack. The colleague of Newton said, “Well, as it happens, I know exactly where the man you’re looking for is.” Newton was reluctant to go on board. He was now just about to make, for the first time, some money for himself. He hadn’t made a penny so far, and he thought he could make some money. And there were only two things that enticed him back home. One was the story that the ship’s captain told him that he had information that Newton had inherited quite a small fortune, and if he were to come back, he could enjoy it—which was a whole load of rubbish. It was completely untrue. But the other thing attracted him was the thought of Mary, because, on his own account, not a day had gone by without him thinking of Mary. So he took passage on the Greyhound, and he upset the captain, and by the same token, pleased the crew by making up songs about the ship and the captain without actually mentioning the captain by name. And the captain was really fed up with him, and wished he had never taken him on board. And yet he did come in the course of the journey across Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. And at some point he started reading, and he just started asking the question, “Supposing all this is true?” Well, then came the great storm, and Newton was asleep but was called up on deck, and it obviously was a very big storm indeed. Now again, as on so many other instances, his life was quite extraordinarily preserved because just as he was going up on deck, I think the captain sent him back to get a knife or gain something like that. And the fellow who was following him up on deck was immediately swept overboard. As the ship, broken and wallowing in the Atlantic, struggled to keep itself afloat. The whole crew, including Newton, thought that this must be the end, and on one occasion Newton, in his rather calm, phlegmatic way, said, “Oh, this will be a good thing to talk about over a jug when we get back home!” And one of the crew members said, “No, it’s too late now!” And that got Newton thinking. And lashed to the tiller or the pumps—because they had to take turns at both—Newton began running over in his mind many of the verses of Scripture, and doubtless some of the hymns of Isaac Watts that he had learned from his mother as a little boy. He found himself condemned by the verses he knew, and it was at that time that, in his own words, God reached down and plucked him out of the depths. And he put a very wavering faith in God, acknowledging that his life had been a complete mess, and he had ruined all that God had given him and spoiled the treasure that his mother had taught him. And at some point he said to the captain something like, “If the Lord doesn’t have mercy on us, we’re all lost.” And I think the captain noticed that because to hear this particular profane infidel talking about the Lord was quite a surprise. But eventually they just kept afloat, and they went into Lough Swilly on the west coast of Ireland. One of the first things he did was to go to church and to pray and give thanks for the fact that he had been saved as a result of his prayer. So he goes back to Mary in Chatham, Kent, but still she gives him a little hope, but no certainty, and he’d got no money at all, because he got nothing for his time in Africa. He walked from Chatham, Kent, the 250 miles to Liverpool. He calls it his “long, lonely walk,” because that’s where he would be able to pick up another ship. This is a slave ship; he’s first mate, and it was on this ship that he, in his own words, backslid as bad as before. He would allow the life on board ship and the life in the evenings to drag him down, and it really was a bad journey for him, but he was determined to go on with Christ. Although the life on board a slave ship was probably the worst of all the merchant ships, and only the rough and ready ever ended up on board ship anyway.

And you’re listening to the story of John Newton, who, of course, wrote the most popular hymn in history. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of a song and the man who wrote it, here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories and the remarkable story of John Newton, who, of course, wrote “Amazing Grace.” But the story of his life and what led up to it—well, that’s what’s interesting. Let’s return to this remarkable story with some of the best Newton biographers on the planet.

After Brownlow, he took three journeys as a slave ship captain, so he was actually in charge of the ship and the gathering of the slaves on what was known as the Triangular Trade: out from England with items for barter to the west coast of Africa, picking up slaves, taking them from there either to the West Indies or to North America, and then picking up cotton, rum, brandy—things that the home market wanted—and then coming back across the Atlantic. In the 1750s, when Newton was a slave ship captain, the general view of England, including Christian England, was that the slave trade was a respectable economic form of activity. And that sounds extraordinary, but it is historically true. In the 1750s and ’60s, almost nobody, not even the Quakers at that stage, had really got to grips with the issue of slavery. It wasn’t until you get right up into the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s that the groundswell of recognition of what was happening. And part of the reason for this is you have to realize that people in the home market, England, would be receiving all this cotton and brandy and sugar but had no idea really how it came. There wasn’t the media. Nobody was going out there taking films of slaves and the way they were treated and the cruelty and bestiality of it all, and so people didn’t know; as they began to know, so they stirred. He married Mary in 1750, and she was quite frail in health and often had to stay with her parents. And then, of course, eventually he met this very significant figure in his life, Captain Alexander Clunie, who was captain of a vessel but not of a slaver, and they recognized one another as Christians, and Clunie really instructed Newton in the basics of the faith, and that was a key turning point for Newton. But at the time, what disturbed Newton—and even when he writes his Authentic Narrative, he says, “I was increasingly perturbed—”