18/05/2023
Amazing Grace and the Ulster Connection
Sung at funerals, performed by gospel choirs, adopted by anti-Vietnam War protestors and civil rights activists and covered by artists from Elvis to Bocelli, Amazing Grace is one of the most powerful and recognisable hymns of the Anglophone world. It is a divine fusion of John Newton’s verse with the stirring melody of an unknown Appalachian harmonist. It is also inextricably linked to Lough Swilly and County Donegal.
Many people readily identify with Newton’s account of his tortuous journey from spiritual desolation to unmerited redemption. During a fierce tempest, on 21st March 1748, Newton believed that Providence intervened to deliver his foundering ship to the sanctuary of Lough Swilly. Newton, ‘lost’ but ‘found’, embodied the very essence of the First Great Awakening. Such evangelical fervour helped birth the abolitionist movement that would lay siege to the transatlantic slave trade.
In truth, History and faith journeys seldom run along neat lines. Newton remained tied to slavery for the next 5 years, praying above deck whilst his human cargo festered in irons below. He left the trade primarily due to ill health. It was not until at least the mid-1750s that he renounced the slave trade and later still when he wholly lamented being “an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders”. His redemption was not immediate but it began after that shipwreck and close to Buncrana.
From the late 1400s to the 1800s, many slave owners and theologians had used their own interpretation of the Bible to justify the ‘peculiar institution’. The Catholic empires of Portugal, Spain and France and the Protestant empires of England and Holland were all culpable. Apologists contended that a free African pagan faced eternal damnation, whereas a baptised Christian slave was assured of salvation. The Atlantic slave trade began with Portugal in 1444 and its one-time colony of Brazil was the last to give up slavery in 1888. The Portuguese were responsible for over one-third of the 10 million fettered West African ‘chattels’ who survived the Middle Passage to the New World.
Newton did indeed ultimately commit to the abolitionist cause and this helps explain why Amazing Grace is so anthemic. He acutely understood the full horrors of the transatlantic slave trade - the slave barracoons on Plantain Island, the criminal neglect of those both above and below deck on the Middle Passage, and the casual cruelties of plantation life. Newton became part of one of the first successful mass movements of modern times - abolitionism. It prevailed against formidable vested interests in the Atlantic seaports and amongst the Caribbean slavocracy. This evangelical crusade, founded by the Anglicans Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp, aligned Quakers, parliamentarians like William Wilberforce, highly articulate former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and John Wesley the founder of Methodism. Their moral assault on slavery was relentless and devastating.
But back to Lough Swilly. If Newton had not experienced his own awakening in the wake of that ferocious storm, washed up, still breathing on Inishowen peninsula, he may not have penned one of the greatest hymns of the English language.
Text by Keith Williamson