Reply to Did you know that “Amazing Grace” was written by a slave trader-turned abolitionist?

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Reply to "Did you know that “Amazing Grace” was written by a slave trader-turned abolitionist?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, and it's the reason I find its widespread inclusion in "diversity" events to be odd.[/quote]

OP here. Newton was himself a slave. At age 18, he was press ganged into the naval service. When he was stubborn and insubordinate, his employer and slave trader Amos Clow gave him to his African wife Princess Peye, who treated him cruelly. Newton had no shelter, his clothes deteriorated to rags, and to curb his hunger, he resorted to begging for food. His father even asked a captain friend to search for the missing Newton, and Newton was found and rescued off the coast of Africa. Yes, he continued slave trading but began questioning the ethics of it. When he applied to become a minister at the church of England, he was denied due to lack of religious education, but then went on to write the most popular hymn in the English-speaking world. When he did become a minister, he often spoke about how he sinned a lot in the past, and how someone like him was not qualified to preach. That is a lot of humility. Then he wrote a book to expose the public the horrendous things that went on in the slave trade. One of his ship mates purchased a woman with a child about a year old. The baby kept crying at night and disturbed the ship mates sleep, so he threw the baby in the ocean. The mother was inconsolable after that. He also said he witnessed captives beaten to death and many were chained to irons. He contradicted the common idea that African women were savages. He said, with his time with the Sherbro people, he seen many instances of modesty, and even delicacy, "which would not disgrace an English woman." He apologized for his role in the slave trade and was instrumental in getting it abolished in England.[/quote]

I understand that some people including scholars would say that Newton was a slave because he was force into labor. I don't agree with that language. By the 1700s, new world slavery had created a new and unusual kind of slavery (in the context of world wide slave systems across time and place). In the racial slavery of the Americas, an enslaved person generally had no legal identity as a person and their enslaved status would be passed down to their children and their children's children. Newton's forced labor was cruel and unfair, and he may have used the language of slavery to draw attention to his plight, but he was not legally a slave and called his time-limited forced labor slavery detracts from the full horror of slavery at the time.[/quote]

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