When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and held some enmity towards his mother for marrying him
Slave traders violently captured Africans and loaded them onto slave ships, where for months these individuals endured the “Middle Passage”—the crossing of the Atlantic from Africa to the North American colonies or West Indies. Many Africans did not survive the journey.