Sunday: John Newton's Abolitionist Campaign Against Slavery

NEWTON BECAME A PUBLIC campaigner for the abolitionist movement when in January 1788 he published his sensational and highly influential pamphlet "Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade."

Remorse was one of the motives behind Newton's decision to publish "Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade." "I hope 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 wrote in the pamphlet's opening paragraphs, declaring that even if his testimony was unnecessary, "yet perhaps I am bound in conscience to take shame to myself by a public confession."

Newton's testimony was of vital importance in converting public opinion to the abolitionist cause. He himself clearly had this motivation in mind when he prepared the pamphlet, for it was skillfully constructed to have a political as well as a moral and humanitarian appeal.

Newton may well have had politics in mind when he put forward as "the first evil" of the slave trade the loss of life among English seamen. Knowing that the Parliament of a maritime nation traditionally gave a high priority to the safely of its sailors and seafarers, Newton began the arguments in his pamphlet with a grim catalog of the causes of Englishmen's deaths on board slave ships. Terrible weather conditions, African fevers, fatal diseases, deliberate poisonings, and violent insurrections by the slaves were said by Newton to result in an annual death toll of over fifteen hundred sailors. It was not clear how this statistical calculation had been reached, but the figure was given credibility by Newton's firsthand experiences of the danger he described.

The second argument in "Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade" was a moral denunciation of the corrupting effects of being engaged in such a business. "I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility," declared Newton. With his old shipboard diaries for the years 1750-1754 beside him as he wrote, he described in horrendous detail the brutalizing treatment and tortures meted out to the one hundred thousand or more slaves who were transported each year in English vessels....

Newton asserted that African women deserved to be respected as much as their European equivalents in matter such as personal modest and honor was a revolutionary view for its time. But he and William Wilberforce and other leading figures in the abolitionist movement knew that they were in the business of overturning misguided attitudes toward the African people as well as putting an end to what Newton in the final line of the pamphlet called a "commerce so iniquitous, so cruel, so oppressive, so destructive as the African Slave Trade."

In his description of the conditions on board a slave ship, Newton did not pull his punches. He said that English sailors were more severe and cruel to the Africans than the sailors of any other nation. He explained that an English slave ship of one hundred tons usually carried over two hundred slaves, "always in chains, locked at intervals to the deck." This overcrowding resulted in a high death rate.

Communicating the butcheries and atrocities of the slave trade to Parliament was a task that Newton carried out with formidable power and effectiveness. In his writings and in his appearances as a witness his evidence against the trade carried great weight. This was because he combined unchallengeable authenticity, dignified restraint, and moral authority. These were the qualities that brought him close to Wilberforce's group of prayerful friends in south London who became known as the Clapham Sect. In cooperation with them, Newton played a crucial role in the abolitionist movement, particularly between 1787 and 1790. but his work for abolition was interrupted by a sad personal loss----the death of his beloved wife, Polly.

---Jonathan Aitken, John Newton, From Disgrace to Amazing Grace