John Newton was born in London in 1725, the son of a merchant sea captain and a devout Nonconformist mother who died before he turned seven. He went to sea as a young man and descended, by his own account, into a life of profanity and moral dissolution, eventually working in the Atlantic slave trade — first as a common sailor, then as the captain of vessels carrying enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage. A violent storm off the coast of Donegal in 1748 shook him toward a gradual religious conversion, though he continued working in the trade for several years afterward, a tension he would not fully reckon with until much later in life.
Newton eventually left the sea, settled in Liverpool, and under the influence of George Whitefield and John Wesley deepened his evangelical faith. After years of lay activity and study, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1764 and took the curacy of Olney in Buckinghamshire. There he formed a close friendship with the poet William Cowper, and together they produced the Olney Hymns of 1779, a collection of 348 hymns intended for congregational use rather than literary admiration. Among them was "Amazing Grace," a spare and searching lyric that drew directly on Newton's sense of his own wretchedness and undeserved redemption.
In 1780 he moved to the parish of St. Mary Woolnoth in London, where he preached for the remainder of his ministry and became a figure of considerable influence among younger evangelicals, including the young William Wilberforce, whom he counseled and encouraged in the campaign for abolition. Newton himself testified before a parliamentary committee in 1788 and published a pamphlet condemning the trade he had once served.
He died in 1807, the same year Britain abolished the slave trade — old, nearly blind, and unburdened at last of a silence he had kept too long.