Music Video: Amazing Grace - the story & John Newton

The words to the popular hymn "Amazing Grace" were written by a man who was both a slave trader and abolitionist. John Newton was a man of paradoxes: for many years he earned his living from the slave trade, and yet he was for a short while a slave himself, planting lime trees in Sierra Leone.

In 1748 John almost lost his life at sea in a dreadful storm off the coast of Newfoundland. He prayed, "If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us." The ship survived the storm. This led Newton to his new life as a minister and anti-slavery activist. He recollected both his deliverance from the storm, and his life without God, in his most famous creation.

1754

John Newton resigned from his job as captain of a ship that transported slaves.

1763

John became a clergyman in Olney, England.

1771

Together with his friend William Cowper, a poet, John published a book of hymns, which included the one known as "Amazing Grace.

1788

John wrote a pamphlet that described his "Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade." He was trying to convince the government that slavery was an unlawful and evil thing.

1807

John Newton died at the age of 82. That same year, Britain abolished the slave trade, meaning that slaves would not be "imported" as cargo from other countries.

A marble plaque at St. Mary Woolnoth carried the epitaph which Newton himself wrote:

		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, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the Gospel which he had long laboured to destroy. He ministered, Near sixteen years in Olney, in Bucks, And twenty-eight years in this Church.