John newton story

By Marylynn Rouse

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Biography

John Newton was born in Wapping in 1725 to a seafaring father and a godly mother.

The fact that he was once a slave trader is well known today. What is not so commonly known is that he left the slave trade more than thirty years before The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed.

Newton's association with the slave trade began when, at the age of 19, a failed attempt at desertion from the Royal Navy saw him exchanged on to a merchant ship bound for West Africa.

In his Authentic Narrative (1764) he wrote openly of his slave trading: 'I considered myself as a sort of gaoler or turnkey, and I was sometimes shocked with an employment that was perpetually conversant with chains, bolts, and shackles.'

It is a mark of those times that although the Authentic Narrative went into many editions and was translated into several different languages, it drew no censure or criticism from any of its nu