In 1788, for the price of one shilling, interested readers could purchase a copy of John Newton’s Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade. His famous hymn, Amazing Grace, had been published some nine years earlier, and he was significantly involved in the abolitionist movement in England.
As the rector of St. Mary Woolnoth Church in London (pictured here), Newton made the church available for meetings of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. He also provided firsthand testimony to members of Parliament and others, based on his deep knowledge of the slave trade.
Before his well-documented conversion from being a captain of slave ships to becoming a minister, Newton participated in the infamous “Triangular Trade”—a three-legged system of commerce between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
The first “leg” involved ships being loaded with goods such as tools and textiles, which were then transported to ports in West Africa. Newton, in Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, recalls seeing the coast of Guinea in 1745. The second “leg” saw the ships filled with enslaved people, who were transported across the notorious “Middle Passage” to various ports in the Caribbean. The final “leg” involved the ships returning to England loaded with sugar and rum. Much has been written about the Middle Passage, including the immense death, destruction of human life, and despair it caused—not only for the enslaved but also for the ships’ crews.
Newton believed that many people did not truly comprehend the full nature of the slave business. He wrote this 50-page pamphlet to illuminate the harsh realities of the trade. For example, he described:
“I have seen them [enslaved people] sentenced to unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery, and hardly a sign of life has remained. I have seen them agonizing for hours, I believe, for days together, under the torture of the thumb-screws; a dreadful engine, which, if the screw be turned by an unrelenting hand, can give intolerable anguish.” (Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, 1788)
While Newton refrains from graphic details, he uses the language of the time to address the horrors of rape and abuse inflicted upon women and young girls. He writes:
“When the Women and Girls are taken on board a ship, naked, trembling, terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue, and hunger, they are often exposed to the wanton rudeness of white Savages.” (Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, 1788)
Newton’s dual role as a pastor and author had a profound impact on William Wilberforce, the principal architect of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Newton lived to see the passage of this historic Act, marking the beginning of the end for the transatlantic slave trade.
In the 1821 Volume III of the American periodical The Christian Spectator, an anecdote recounts a breakfast meeting with the aging and nearly blind Newton. After reading from a well-known devotional book, Newton reflected on his life, saying:
“I am not what I ought to be—ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be—I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be—soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, ‘By the grace of God, I am what I am.'” (The Christian Spectator, Volume III, 1821, p. 186)
Nick Walters, Founder – Center for Christian History
Photo credit: Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons