The Old Slave Trader Who Taught a Young Man to Listen

In December 1785, twenty-five-year-old William Wilberforce knocked on the door of an aging clergyman in London, unsure why he had come. He had been a rising star in Parliament, elected at twenty-one, the close friend of Prime Minister William Pitt. But something was stirring — a restlessness he couldn't name, a persistent nudge toward something beyond political ambition. The clergyman was John Newton, the former slave ship captain who had penned Amazing Grace.…