1. Amazing Grace

The Story Behind the Hymn

John Newton was born in London in 1725, the son of a shipmaster and a devout mother who died when he was six years old and had hoped he might one day become a minister.

Cut loose from her influence, Newton grew up largely at sea from his early teens, serving on his father’s ships and drifting into what he later described as a reckless, undisciplined youth.

He was pressed into the Royal Navy against his will, attempted to desert, was captured, publicly flogged, and demoted in punishment. Soon after, he was effectively handed over to a slave trader on the coast of West Africa, where for a time he was mistreated and held in conditions not far removed from slavery himself.

Rescued at his father’s request by a passing sea captain, Newton eventually became a captain in the slave trade in his own right, transporting enslaved people across the Atlantic for years.

On March 21, 1748, his ship nearly sank in a violent Atlantic storm. He had spent the previous night reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and amid the storm he cried out to God for the first time in years, expecting the ship to go down.

Newton always insisted this wasn’t an instant conversion but the beginning of one. He continued working in the slave trade for several more years afterward, teaching himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew during long voyages, before a sudden seizure in 1754 ended his career at sea for good.

He trained for ministry and was ordained in the Church of England in 1764, becoming curate of the small parish of Olney. There he partnered with the poet William Cowper — author of hymn 42 in this collection — to write hymns for the parish’s weekly prayer meetings.

This hymn, first titled ‘Faith’s Review and Expectation,’ was written to accompany a New Year’s Day sermon around 1773, one of hundreds Newton and Cowper produced together for the collection later published as the Olney Hymns.

In later life, Newton became an outspoken abolitionist, publishing a firsthand account of the slave trade’s horrors and mentoring a young William Wilberforce, urging him to stay in Parliament and fight for abolition rather than leave public life for the ministry. Wilberforce’s campaign finally succeeded in 1807, the same year Newton died, reportedly nearly blind.

The now-famous tune, ‘New Britain,’ was never Newton’s. It was paired with his words decades later in America, where it became a favorite of Southern shape-note singing before growing into one of the best-known hymns in the English language.