John Newton (1725-1807) Amazing Grace Lyrics. In Oct 1743, while going to visit friends, John Newton was captured and pressed into the naval service by the Royal Navy. He became a midshipman aboard HMS Harwich. Newton in his later years, In 1788, 34 years after he had retired from the slave trade, Newton broke a long silence on the subject with the publication of a forceful pamphlet Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships during the Middle Passage. He apologized for 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. He had copies sent to every MP, and the pamphlet sold so well that it swiftly required reprinting. Newton became an ally of William Wilberforce, leader of the Parliamentary campaign to abolish the African slave trade. He lived to see the British passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which enacted this event. Modern writers have criticised Newton for continuing to participate in the slave trade after his religious conversion, but Christianity did not deter thousands of slaveholders in the colonies from owning other men, nor many others from profiting by the slave trade. Newton later came to believe that, during the first five of his nine years as a slave trader, he had not been a Christian in the full sense of the term: I was greatly deficient in many respects. I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time later.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 08:02:35 +0000
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