Meet James Bradley, the most important abolitionist you've never heard of

Bradley's story began with a tragic journey. He was abducted from his home in Africa at age 3, brought to America and sold as a slave in South Carolina. He was bought by a "Mr. Bradley" whose name he took and who "was considered a wonderfully kind master," he later wrote. But it didn't really matter how kind he was. James still wasn't free. He began saving to buy himself when he was 14, and his later writings on the insidious evils of slavery — how even a well-treated prisoner was a prisoner and even a soft-handed crime was a crime — helped recontextualize the practice in readers' eyes.