John Newton had previously been a captain of slave ships and an investor in the slave trade.
35 Facts About John Newton
2.
John Newton served as a sailor in the Royal Navy and was himself enslaved for a time in West Africa.
3.
John Newton is noted for being author of the hymns Amazing Grace and Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.
4.
John Newton was rescued, returned to sea and the trade, becoming Captain of several slave ships.
5.
Some years after experiencing a conversion to Christianity, John Newton later renounced his trade and became a prominent supporter of abolitionism.
6.
John Newton lived to see the British Empire's abolition of the African slave trade in 1807, just months before his death.
7.
John Newton was born in Wapping, London, in 1725, the son of John Newton the Elder, a shipmaster in the Mediterranean service, and Elizabeth.
8.
John Newton spent two years at a boarding school, before going to live at Aveley in Essex, the home of his father's new wife.
9.
John Newton sailed six voyages before his father retired in 1742.
10.
At that time, John Newton's father made plans for him to work at a sugarcane plantation in Jamaica.
11.
In 1743, while going to visit friends, John Newton was pressed into the Royal Navy.
12.
At one point John Newton tried to desert and was punished in front of the crew of 350.
13.
John Newton abused and mistreated Newton just as much as she did her other slaves.
14.
In 1748, during his return voyage to England aboard the ship Greyhound, John Newton had a spiritual conversion.
15.
John Newton awoke to find the ship caught in a severe storm off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland and about to sink.
16.
John Newton began to read the Bible and other Christian literature.
17.
John Newton returned in 1748 to Liverpool, a major port for the Triangle Trade.
18.
John Newton adopted his two orphaned nieces, Elizabeth Cunningham and Eliza Catlett, both from the Catlett side of the family.
19.
In 1755 John Newton was appointed as tide surveyor of the Port of Liverpool, again through the influence of Manesty.
20.
John Newton became well known as an evangelical lay minister.
21.
John Newton mailed applications directly to the Bishops of Chester and Lincoln and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
22.
John Newton soon became well known for his pastoral care, as much as for his beliefs.
23.
John Newton's preaching was so popular that the congregation added a gallery to the church to accommodate the many persons who flocked to hear him.
24.
John Newton was instrumental in converting Scott from a cynical 'career priest' to a true believer, a conversion which Scott related in his spiritual autobiography The Force of Truth.
25.
John Newton was one of only two evangelical Anglican priests in the capital, and he soon found himself gaining in popularity amongst the growing evangelical party.
26.
John Newton was a strong supporter of evangelicalism in the Church of England.
27.
John Newton remained a friend of Dissenters as well as Anglicans.
28.
The younger man consulted with John Newton, who encouraged Wilberforce to stay in Parliament and "serve God where he was".
29.
In 1792, John Newton was presented with the degree of Doctor of Divinity by the College of New Jersey.
30.
John Newton worshipped in Newton's church, and collaborated with the priest on a volume of hymns; it was published as Olney Hymns in 1779.
31.
Many of John Newton's hymns are preserved in the Sacred Harp, a hymnal used in the American South during the Second Great Awakening.
32.
John Newton became an ally of William Wilberforce, leader of the Parliamentary campaign to abolish the African slave trade.
33.
John Newton lived to see the British passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which enacted this event.
34.
John Newton 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.
35.
John Newton was buried beside his wife in St Mary Woolnoth in London.