John Newton
July 24th, 1725
The Nazis were socialists. This really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone, considering that they called themselves the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, The National Socialist German Worker’s Party , although there does remain an element of people who flatly deny that the NSDAP were ever socialist and an element that insist that this fact means something totally different to what it actually means.
But yes, they were socialists. They were also hard-right nationalist thugs and what most people fail to understand was that there was a time when being a socialist, which at the end of the day is simply a socio-economic model, wasn’t the preserve of the left-wing. Particularly in the period leading up to the First World War, socialism embraced all aspects of the political landscape, including those who would go on the form such entities as the NSDAP. Antisemites, nationalists, warmongers and other far-right individuals were ousted from the British socialist movement (Britian being the crucible in which socialism was formed) in the years before 1914, leaving the movement almost entirely the preserve of the left-wing, where it has remained ever since.
However much some modern socialists try and deny the reality of the Nazis and however much some knuckleheads try and spin this as meaning that all socialism is Nazism, the fact remains that Nazis were socialists. They were very much not Marxists and the Marxists were first against the actual wall when the NSDAP came to power, but anyone that tries to tell you that the Nazis were socialists and this means all socialists are Nazis is a fucking idiot who more often than not harbors political sentiments that wouldn’t be out of place in 1930s Germany.
Similarly, there are a bunch of people who, when the ogre of black African slavery starts beating its chest, will scurry about the place screaming that Africans used to take slaves, too. Which they did. As if that somehow excuses the wholesale slaughter and genocide of Black Africans over centuries.
It’s not always wrong to claim that Whataboutism is a terrible argument, because, at the end of the day, y’know, people in glasshouses should be very careful where they throw their stones. But Whataboutism is a tactic usually employed by idiots in an attempt to avoid responsibility, not share in it.
In this manner, I once had an argument with a chap who, in pointing out that white people were sometimes enslaved by black people in Africa, that John Newton, the evangelical Anglican priest who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, spent a period of his life as a slave to Sherbro people of West Africa.
Which he did.
But John Newton, in one of those great ironies that Whataboutism can sometimes throw up, also spent a period of his life as the captain of a slave ship. Something that Internet Slavery Defender Bro seemed unaware of, or was unwilling to include in his special pleading.
John Newton was born on what was then August 4th, 1725, now July 24th under the Gregorian calendar, in Wapping, London. He was the son of a ship’s captain, also John, and Elizabeth who died of consumption when John Jr was only 7 years old.
He first went to sea with his father aged 11 and when his father retired in 1742, he signed up as a merchant sailor on a ship in the Mediterranean. In 1743, whilst on shore leave, he was pressganged into the Royal Navy, serving as a midshipman aboard HMS Harwich from where he tried to desert. Caught, flogged and reduced to the rank of seaman, he toyed with the idea of murdering the ship’s captain and throwing himself at the mercy of the sea
.
Instead, whilst on a trip to India, he transferred from the Harwich to a ship called the Pegasus, a slaver on route to West Africa. The Pegasus was a trader that would take goods from India to Africa and trade them for slaves that would then be taken to the Caribbean and the North American Colonies.
Newtown fell out with the crew of the Pegasus and in 1745, they abandoned him with a slave trader named Amos Clowe. Clowe then sold him to the Sherbro people of what is now Sierra Leone. According to Newtown, they treated him appallingly, as they did other salves they owned of all races. He recounted his time as “once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in West Africa.”
Meanwhile, his father had sent ships to look for him and he was discovered and rescued by a ship called the Greyhound, who in 1748 returned him to England. It was on the return voyage that Newton began a dramatic rebirth to the Christian faith. Awaking to find the ship being dashed in a storm, he began to pray for salvation and mercy, at which point the storm abated and made its way safely to port.
He immersed himself in the Bible and Christian teachings and by 21st March 1748, an anniversary he marked for the rest of his life, he had become a fervent Christian, renouncing ill language, gambling and drinking. He continued, however, to work in the slave trade.
Working out of one of the world’s primary slave hubs, Liverpool, Newton was first mate aboard the Brownlow, a ship that traded slaves to the West Indies via Guinea. He went on to captain several other slavers, ending his command on the African in 1754, when he was forced to retire from the sea following a stroke. He continued, however, to invest heavily in the slave trade.
In 1755 he was appointed as a tax collector for the Port of Liverpool and it was during this period that he began to study for the ministry. He read Latin, Aramaic and Syriac and applies to become a minister in the Anglican church in 1757. It took a while for him to be accepted and it wasn’t until 1764 that he was finally appointed a deacon in Olney, Buckinghamshire.
It was here that his reputation for pastoral care of the poor became well known and his yearly stipend of £60 was boosted to £200 by a rich merchant friend, John Thornton, to aid his work with the poor.
It was during this period that he began to express remorse for his previous slave trading past and remarked that whilst he had ‘converted’ in 1748, "I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time afterwards."
In 1767, the poet Thomas Cowper moved to Olney, where he worshipped at Newton’s church. Together they collaborated on a series of hymns, published in 1779 as Olney Hymns. They included Faith's Review and Expectation, the hymn that later became known by the opening line Amazing Grace.
Amazing Grace was included in the hymnal Sacred Harp, which was widely used in the American South during the great Protestant revival of the 19th Century known as the Second Great Awakening. Amazing Grace was particularly suited to the practice of shape note singing where four-part harmonies are employed by congregational choirs. As such, it was an easy and popular choice for ministers to teach to new congregations.
In 1787, 34 years after his retirement from the slave trade, Newtown published a damning indictment in a pamphlet called Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade. In it, he described the horrendous conditions and barbarity of the slave ships he had once captained.
He threw himself headfirst into the abolitionist movement, sending copies to every Member of Parliament and joining the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787. The pamphlet sold out in weeks.
Earlier in his ministry, he had met a young man by the name of William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament who had undergone his own conversion and would go on to be the driving force of the abolitionist movement in Britain. Wilberforce at first contemplated leaving politics and pursuing a career in the cloth, but it was Newton who persuaded him to stay, telling him the God had put him where He wanted him for a reason. He remained a staunch ally and supporter of Wilberforce’s drive to abolish the slave trade in Britain and The Empire.
Newton eventually came to believe that his conversion had been a false one and that for the first ten years he could not really have called himself a Christian.
He apologised 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 admitted that “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 afterwards."
John Newton married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Catlett, in 1750 and they adopted her two orphaned nieces, Elizabeth and Eliza. Mary died in 1790 after which Newton published Letters to a Wife (1793), detailing the grief of her loss.
In failing health, John Newton died on 21st December, 1807, just in time to see the enactment of Wilberforce’s 1807 Slave Trade Act that began the process of abolition in Britain. He was buried beside Mary in London.
The town of Newton in Sierra Leone is named after him. Not in recognition of the time he spent there as a slave himself, but in memory of the abolitionist work he did subsequently. There are strong links between Newton and Olney to this day.
Newton never sought forgiveness for his past during his lifetime and accepted that nothing he could do would atone for the things he had done before he changed his ways. But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t try. In the end all he wanted was for others to realize the error of their ways, as he had, and that by doing so, everyone could learn to be better humans.
Perhaps one day we will.