What inspired ‘Amazing Grace’, the “most beloved” American song?
Can art truly transcend its source? I’m not talking about something so basic as separating the art from the artist. I’m talking about a work of art taking on such a profound life of its own that one doesn’t need to separate it from its creator. The creator becomes a footnote. A particularly hard pub quiz answer whose legacy is no longer strengthened by the art they created. Given that the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ is one of the most popular and beloved songs on the planet and few people could name who wrote it, I would say it can.
This is important, especially in the case of ‘Amazing Grace’. This is a song so important to the Black community that the first-ever Black president sang it while giving a eulogy for lives taken in a white supremacist hate crime. Yet, it was written by an English slaver who, for many years at least, was fairly unrepentant about his past trafficking Africans over to the American colonies. A sign, if ever it was needed, that the most harrowing crimes against humanity can sometimes be as legal as a Sunday drive.
Even before he ever took to sea, John Newton was a scoundrel. Born in Wapping, East London, in 1725 to a mariner father, the call of the sea was in his blood. Unfortunately, he had to get through a misspent youth of violence, civil disobedience and debauchery before he ever got out there. Even when he did, it was hardly his choice to do so, being press-ganged into the Royal Navy when he was 18. This was an experience so brutal that he tried and failed to desert his post a few years into it, receiving public flogging for his troubles.
God knows he should have stayed there rather than take the out that came his way a few years later when a friend offered him a job on a slave ship bound for West Africa. The ultimate irony of his time spent as a literal slaver was the fact that he began reading the Bible on his travels. By the time he arrived back in Britain for the first time in years, he was a fully fledged Christian who accepted the teachings of Jesus Christ into his heart.
Yet, he continued to work as a slaver the entire time, and while he had sympathy for the human beings he bought and sold, he wouldn’t see a contradiction in those actions until much later in life. After a stroke in 1754, Newton retired from the sea. After a spell working as a tax collector for the port of Liverpool, seemingly on a quest to take on the most hateful jobs available to him at the time, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1764.
He was given a parish in Buckinghamshire, and in 1779, after making a name for himself as a charismatic and magnetic orator, he collaborated with the local poet William Cowper on a book called Olney Hymns. The most famous of which was titled Faith’s Review and Expectation, though it later began to be known as its opening phrase, ‘Amazing Grace’. Typically, it was looked down upon in Britain, being sniffed at as “far from being a good example of Newton’s hymn work.”
Newton himself would eventually become a devoted abolitionist, publishing the pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade in 1788. Newton had finally seen not only the error of his ways but his complicity both during and after his time at sea, writing that the pamphlet was “a confession, which… comes too late… It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” It’s the very least he could do, but it’s a place where few people complicit in atrocities ever get to.
