Newton, Wilberforce, and the Spirituality of Abolition
Wilberforce’s friendship with John Newton was the major momentum behind abolition (Part 2 of 2)
The campaign to abolish the slave trade was driven by a small group of Christian leaders whose faith and conscience turned them into political activists. Thomas Clarkson, the country squire and church warden from the tiny East Anglian village of Playford, was perhaps the most ardent individual crusader for abolition. He was supported by an influential South London prayer group known as the Clapham sect, so named because they met in Holy Trinity Church, Clapham. But it is doubtful whether these abolitionist efforts would have gathered real momentum, let alone succeeded, if it had not been for the relationship between William Wilberforce and John Newton. Their spiritual friendship soon became a campaigning axis.
Wilberforce’s most famous statement at the start of his involvement in the abolitionist movement was, “God Almighty has placed before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners” (morals). These words were recorded by Wilberforce in his diary on Sunday, October 28, 1787, at the end of a long day, which he had spent in Newton’s company—the morning at the church where Newton was Rector and the evening dining alone with him.
The following morning Wilberforce wrote to the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, a group whose committee consisted largely of leading Quakers and members of the Clapham sect. This committee met the next evening to discuss the significant development of a letter received from a prominent Member of Parliament. The minutes of the meeting recorded: “The Treasurer reports that he has received a letter from Wm Wilberforce, Esq requesting information as speedily as possible relative to the slave trade.” It was resolved that a subcommittee should be set up to supply the MP with the information. This became a vital conduit of briefings for the Parliamentary campaign for abolition, which Wilberforce started in January 1788 when he presented to the House of Commons the first of eleven unsuccessful resolutions to end the slave trade.
Before these opening moves were made in Parliament, Newton was playing a pivotal role both privately and publicly. Privately he continued to meet and mentor Wilberforce in prayer. Newton also wrote several letters to the MP suggesting rules of life for him as a Christian leader. In one of them he warned Wilberforce that he would be attacked with nicknames, stigmas, and “the censure and dislike of the world,” adding the bleak statement “all who will live Godly in Christ Jesus must suffer persecution.”
In the early stages of the abolitionist campaign Wilberforce was losing the Parliamentary battles but Newton was doing as much as anyone to win the war of public opinion.
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. He had been privately outspoken on this topic to Wilberforce for some years previously. “We are not left to gather from mere probability that Mr Newton spoke upon the subject,” wrote Robert and Samuel Wilberforce in the preface to their 1840 filial edition of their father’s collected correspondence. “Remorse for his [Newton’s] own early share in its iniquity kept it so constantly before that holy man that Mr Wilberforce frequently declared that ‘he never spent one half hour in his company without hearing some allusion to it.’”
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.”
In fact, Newton’s confession was a vital ingredient in the success of the abolitionist campaign. For what made his pamphlet stand out so exceptionally was the authenticity of his eyewitness reporting as a former slave ship captain; the sincerity of his remorse for ever having been involved in the slave trade; the high moral and spiritual reputation he enjoyed as a renowned Church of England Rector and Christian author, and the linkage between his testimony and Wilberforce’s Parliamentary motions against slavery.
One of the principal foundations of 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 it on 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 1750–54 beside him as he wrote, he described in horrendous detail the brutalising treatment and tortures meted out to the 100,000 or more slaves who were transported each year in English vessels.
After giving a general but barbaric portrait of the “unmerciful whippings,” the thumbscrew tortures, and even the excruciating killings of insurgent male slaves, Newton paid particular attention to the plight of the African women. He told the heart-rending story of a young mother with a baby in her arms who had been taken into slavery on board a long boat. While being rowed out to the slave ship, the baby’s crying disturbed the long boat’s mate, who threatened to silence the child. Eventually this mate became so furious that he did indeed silence the child—by tearing it from the mother and hurling it into the sea.
“But why do I speak of one child?” was Newton’s rhetorical question immediately after writing about this horrific anecdote. He then told an even worse story of a hundred grown slaves thrown into the sea because fresh water was scarce. In the next sentence he pointed out this outrage had been committed for insurance purposes, “to fix the loss upon the underwriters, which otherwise, had they [the slaves] died on board must have fallen upon the owners of the vessel.”
With such revelations, it is easy to see why Newton’s Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade become an immediate and sensational best-seller. Public opinion began swinging behind the abolitionist cause and Parliamentary votes (although not enough of them) were changing too as Newton gave evidence to hearings before the House of Commons. Towards the end of his evidence Newton was asked by one Member of Parliament, “What opinion have you formed of the temper and disposition of the Negroes?”
Newton replied, “They are in a degree civilised, often friendly, and may be trusted where they have not previously been deceived by the Europeans. I have lived in peace and safety amongst them when I have been the only White man amongst them for a great distance.”
“What were the punishments usually inflicted on the slaves?” asked an MP.
“Most generally severe floggings, to which some commanders added the torture of the thumbscrews,” replied Newton.
“How does the slave trade produce this effect?” inquired one shocked questioner.
“The real or supposed necessity of treating the Negroes with rigour gradually brings a numbness upon the heart and renders most of those who are engaged in it too indifferent to the sufferings of their fellow creatures,” said Newton. He later made it clear that this indifference to suffering continued once the slave ships reached ports like Antigua and Charleston and put their cargo up for auction on the slave market.
Perhaps the most poignant moment in Newton’s evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee came when he was asked, “In selling the cargo was any care taken to prevent the separation of relations?”
“It was never thought of,” answered Newton, pausing before he concluded this part of his evidence with the chilling sentence: “They were separated as sheep and lambs are separated by the butcher.”
Communicating the butcheries and atrocities of the slave trade to Parliament was a task Newton carried out with formidable power and effectiveness.
But the great vested interest behind the slave trade—shipbuilders, ship owners, plantation owners, and mercantile trading businesses—kept on persuading Parliamentarians to block Wilberforce’s Bills. One of the abolitionist campaign’s worst reversals occurred in March 1795 when, contrary to general expectations, Wilberforce’s motion to abolish the trade with effect from January 1, 1796 was defeated in Parliament by seventeen votes. As the proposer of the motion, Wilberforce was devastated by this defeat and for a while thought of giving up his campaign. So he must have been comforted by the letter he received from Newton with its reminder of the sovereignty of God:
You have acted nobly, Sir, on behalf of the poor Africans. I trust you will not lose your reward. But I believe the business is now transferred to a higher hand. If men will not redress their accumulated injuries, I believe the Lord will. I shall not wonder if the Negative lately put upon your motion should prove a prelude to the loss of all our West India islands. . . . But I would leave a more favourable impression on your mind before I conclude. The Lord reigns. He has all hearts in His hands. He is carrying on His great designs in a straight line and nothing can obstruct them.
Despite this wise spiritual reminder that God’s plans would not be obstructed, a few weeks later an evidently despondent Wilberforce replied to Newton saying that he was considering retirement from public life. If this letter had received a reply supporting the suggestion that Wilberforce should leave Parliament, the loss to the abolitionist campaign would have been devastating. Fortunately, Newton strongly opposed Wilberforce’s urge to end his political career, writing back to him on July 21, 1796 to say that his recent re-election as MP for Hull was a sign that God had further work for him to do.
“Nor is it possible at present to calculate all the advantages that may result from your having a seat in the House at such a time as this,” continued Newton:
The example and even the presence of a consistent character may have a powerful though unobserved effect upon others. You are not only a representative for Yorkshire, you have the far greater honour of being a representative for the Lord in a place where many know Him not, and an opportunity of showing them what are the genuine fruits of that religion which you are known to profess.
Newton’s final appeal in his letter was based on a comparison between Wilberforce and Daniel:
You live in the midst of difficulties and snares and you need a double guard of watchfulness and prayer. But since you know both your need of help and where to look for it, I may say to you as Darius to Daniel, “Thy God whom Thou servest continually is able to preserve and deliver you.” Daniel likewise was a public man and in critical circumstances. But he trusted in the Lord, was faithful in his departments and therefore, though he had enemies, they could not prevail against him.
It is hard to imagine a more shrewdly written letter than Newton’s effort to stop Wilberforce thinking about retirement. In political terms the reminder of recent achievements on the road of slave trade reform was a good nudge to keep Wilberforce persevering on towards the ultimate goal of abolition. The comparison with Daniel (“likewise a public man”) could not have been more timely. For although Wilberforce had not literally followed Daniel’s path of being exiled and put in the lion’s den, nevertheless in the mid-1790s he was at best an isolated figure in the House of Commons. At worst, he was regarded as a political pariah on account of his opposition to the government’s policies. So for Newton to draw on these Biblical images coupled with a plea to stay in Parliament to serve the Lord’s purposes was an appeal that would have resonated with his correspondent. The result was that for the second time in eleven years, Newton’s wise counsel persuaded Wilberforce not to leave Parliament but to stay there in order to accomplish the will of God.
Eventually the will of God was accomplished and the great breakthrough came when Newton was still alive to see it. He died nine months after the first Bill for abolition of the slave trade passed through the House of Commons in 1807. It is this vote that the world is commemorating with 200th anniversary celebrations on March 25 this year. In fact, there were still another twenty-six years of Parliamentary infighting before Wilberforce and his supporters achieved their ultimate goal, making slavery illegal throughout the British Empire. Nevertheless Newton had the prescience and prophetic vision to know that victory had been achieved before he died, for he wrote to Wilberforce:
Though I can scarcely see the paper before me, I must attempt to express my thankfulness to the Lord and to offer my congratulations to you for the success which he has so far been pleased to give to your unwearied endeavours for the abolition of the slave trade, which I have considered such a millstone sufficient, to itself sufficient, to sink such an enlightened and highly favour’d nation as ours to the bottom of the sea. . . . Whether I who am within two months of entering my eightieth year shall live to see the accomplishment of the work is known only to Him in whose hands are all our times and ways, but the hopeful prospect of its accomplishment will, I trust, give me daily satisfaction so long as my declining faculties are preserved.
These moving words have echoes of Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis in the Temple at Jerusalem, when he realised that the birth of Christ meant that all his prayerful dreams and visions had been fulfilled. In a similar way Newton understood that his patient mentoring and spiritual guidance of Wilberforce had been part of God’s plan and that God had given him the farewell blessing of living to see it. The spiritual journey Newton and Wilberforce travelled throughout the legislative process of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Bill is central to the abolition legislation and the campaign that accompanied it.
Jonathan Aitken is an author, broadcaster, and Executive Director of The Trinity Forum in Europe. His twelfth book, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace is to be published by Crossway in the US and by Continuum in the UK in March 2007.
Features, Meaning and Calling, Society, Fri 23 Mar 2007
