James Bradley (former slave)

James Bradley
Born	c. 1810 Guinea, Africa
Died	Known to be alive in 1837.
Occupation(s)	Freedman (former slave); planned to study for ministry
Years active	1833—1837
Known for	Participating in Lane Theological Seminary's 1834 debates on slavery

James Bradley (c. 1810 – 1837) was a slave who purchased his own freedom. He went to Cincinnati in the free state of Ohio. He associated himself with Lane Theological Seminary and played a central role in the Lane Debates on Slavery in 1834. He wrote a short autobiographical statement that is the major source of information about him. With the Lane Rebels, he left Lane and moved to Oberlin, Ohio, and studied a year in an affiliated preparatory school of Oberlin College.

Nothing is known of his life after 1837. There is no known image of or physical description of Bradley.

Biography

James stated he was "from Guinea", a region of west Africa. He was captured as a small child — "the soul-destroyers tore me from my mother's arms" — and brought to America illegally, since legal importation of slaves had ended in 1808. After passing through the port of Charleston, South Carolina, he was purchased by a man named Bradley from Pendleton County, Kentucky, from whom he took his name. He was a "wonderfully kind master", although James was kicked and overworked to the point he became ill. His owner moved to Arkansas and then died, and his widow had James run her plantation.

He ran his owner's Arkansas plantation beginning at the age of 18. He lived near the Choctaw mission, which was near Fort Towson in modern Oklahoma, then in the Arkansas Territory. After five years of hard work and little sleep, he managed to earn enough to "purchase his own body", his freedom.

After toiling all day for my mistress, I used to sleep three or four hours, and then get up and work for myself the remainder of the night. I made collars for horses, out of plaited husks. I could weave one in about eight hours; and generally I took time enough from my sleep to make two collars in the course of a week. I sold them for fifty cents each. ...With my first money I bought a pig. The next year I earned for myself about thirteen dollars; and the next about thirty. There was a good deal of wild land in the neighborhood, that belonged to Congress. I used to go out with my hoe, and dig up little patches, which I planted with corn, and got up in the night to tend it. My hogs were fattened with this corn, and I used to sell a number each year. Besides this, I used to raise small patches of tobacco, and sell it to buy more corn for my pigs. In this way I worked for five years; at the end of which time, after taking out my losses, I found that I had earned one hundred and sixty dollars. With this money I hired my own time for two years. During this period, I worked almost all the time, night and day. The hope of liberty stung my nerves, and braced up my soul so much, that I could do with very little sleep or rest. I could do a great deal more work than I was ever able to do before. At the end of the two years, I had earned three hundred dollars, besides feeding and clothing myself. I now bought my time for eighteen months longer, and went two hundred and fifty miles west, nearly into Texas, where I could make more money. Here I earned enough to buy myself, which I did in 1833, about one year ago. I paid for myself, including what I gave for my time, about seven hundred dollars.

James taught himself to read.

My master had kept me ignorant of everything he could. I was never told anything about God, or my own soul. ...[H]ow I longed to be able to read the Bible! I made out to get an old spelling-book, which I carried in my hat for many months, until I could spell pretty well, and read easy words. When I got up in the night to work, I used to read for a few minutes, if I could manage to get a light. Indeed, every chance I could find, I worked away at my spelling-book.

He got one of his owner's children to teach him to write, but his mistress ended that after one day. He continued to try to write on his own by making different shapes.

He achieved his freedom in 1833 and headed for a free state. Apparently returning to Kentucky along the route he had traveled from Kentucky to Arkansas.

He crossed the Ohio River, which divided the slave states and the free states, and arrived first at Covington, Ohio.

When I arrived in Cincinnati, I heard of Lane Seminary, about two miles out of the city. I had for years been praying to God that my dark mind might see the light of knowledge. I asked for admission into the Seminary. They pitied me, and granted my request, though I knew nothing of the studies which were required for admission. I am so ignorant, that I suppose it will take me two years to get up with the lowest class in the institution. But in all respects I am treated just as kindly, and as much like a brother by the students, as if my skins as white, and my education as good as their own. Thanks to the Lord, prejudice against color does not exist in Lane Seminary. If my life is spared, I shall probably spend several years here, and prepare to preach the gospel.

A telling anecdote is that on an occasion in which the Lane president, Lyman Beecher, invited the students to his home, James felt it wiser not to attend.

After participating in the Lane debates, James went with the other Lane Rebels to Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College) in 1835. He enrolled in 1836 in the most important of the several satellite schools Oberlin set up to handle the great influx of students: the Sheffield Manual Labor Institute, in Sheffield, Ohio, 17 miles (27 km) northeast of Oberlin. Sheffield "stressed agricultural manual labor and preparatory [high school level] coursework". "The Sheffield Institute planned to grow mulberry trees on which to nurture silkworms in order to create silk. The project failed, and the institute only lasted for one year." The school closed when "amalgamated" ("racially" integrated) schooling, as it was called then, was effectively made illegal in Ohio, since the Legislature refused to charter the school if it admitted "colored" students.

Unfortunately, nothing is known about Bradley's life after 1837. The final reference to him is in a letter that year of another Lane Rebel, C. Stewart Renshaw, who refers to him as "our dear brother". He may be the "negro, late of Sheffield College", who helped in the liberation of fourteen slaves from one plantation.

The debates on slavery

Background

The arrival of James at Lane — James was Lane's first and only African-American student — coincided with the arrival of several dozen students who mostly had been studying at the Oneida Institute, near Utica, New York. The leader of this group, by consensus and acclamation, was the charismatic activist Theodore Dwight Weld.

William Garrison had just begun in 1831 what would be the longest-running and most influential anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator. In 1832 he published a book continuing a topic he had already raised in the newspaper, Thoughts on African Colonization, Or, An Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. In both, he attacks the American Colonization Society and its project of sending free blacks to Africa. Garrison said the Society was "pernicious, cruel, and delusive", that it was a deceitful organization devoted not to eliminating slavery but to protecting it. Sending blacks to Africa was not what they themselves wanted; they said they were no more African than Americans are British.

The effect of these publications was cataclysmic. At Oberlin's rival, Western Reserve College, nothing else was talked about on the campus. Beriah Green preached four sermons on them, which led to his resignation under pressure, to become president of Oneida. Two of Western Reserve's other three professors left shortly afterwards. Weld was well informed about this.

So as to bring the issue to the forefront of the Lane community as well, shortly after his arrival at Lane, Weld organized a series of "debates" on the topic of colonization versus abolitionism, which took place on 18 days in February, 1834.

Further information: Lane Theological Seminary § The slavery debates, and American Colonization Society

Bradley's role in the debates

In 1834, Bradley enrolled at Lane Seminary and he participated in the debates they held on slavery and abolitionism. The only former slave to speak, he stressed equality for all and that his and other slaves desire education and freedom. One attendee found Bradley's speech to be the most important one of the debates. As Bradley wrote it down later:

How strange it is that anybody should believe any human being could be a slave, and yet be contented! I do not believe that there ever was a slave, who did not long for liberty. I know very well that slave-owners take a great deal of pains to make the people in the free states believe that the slaves are happy; but I know, likewise, that I was never acquainted with a slave, however well he was treated, who did not long to be free. There is one thing about this, that people in the free states do not understand. When they ask slaves whether they wish for liberty, they answer, "No"; and very likely they will go as far as to say they would not leave their masters for the world. But at the same time, they desire liberty more than anything else, and have, perhaps all along been laying plans to get free. The truth is, if a slave shows any discontent, he is sure to be treated worse, and worked harder for it; and every slave knows this. This is why they are careful not to show any uneasiness when white men ask them about freedom. When they are alone by themselves, all their talk is about liberty – liberty! It is the great thought and feeling that fills the minds full all the time.

After telling his life story, in the words of his classmate Henry B. Stanton (future husband of Elizabeth Cady Stanton):

James Bradley, the emancipated slave above alluded to, addressed us nearly two hours; and I wish his speech could have been heard by every opponent of immediate emancipation — to wit: first, that "it would be unsafe to the community"; second, that "the condition of the emancipated negroes would be worse than it now is — that they are incompetent to provide for themselves — that they would become paupers and vagrants, and would rather steal than work for wages." This shrewd and intelligent black cut up these white objections by the roots, and withered and scorched them under the sun of sarcastic argumentation for nearly an hour, to which the assembly responded in repeated and spontaneeus roars of laughter, which were heartily joined in by both Colonizalionists and Abolitionists. Do not understand me as saying, that his speech was devoid of argument. No. It contained sound logic, enforced by apt illustrations. I wish the slanderers of negro intellect could have witnessed this unpremeditated effort.... He is now a beloved and respected member of this institution. Now, Mr. Editor, can slaves take care of themselves if emancipated? I answer the question in the language employed by brother Bradley on the above occasion. "They have to lake care of, and support themselves now, and their master, and his family into the bargain; and this being so, it would be strange if they cculd not provide for themselves, when disencumbered from this load." He said the great desire of the slaves was — "liberty and education." And shall this heaven-born desire be trampled in the dust by a free and Christian nation?

"I doubt there was a dry eye in the house," wrote an eyewitness.

"I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Bradley's contribution was critical to the debates. Theodore Weld had the impassioned fervor and unassailable logic; William T. Allan and Huntington Lyman generated sympathy and outrage with their tales of victimization and abuse; but someone needed to attack the pervasive stereotypes and demonstrate that the John C. Calhouns were wrong. Only James Bradley could do that, and by all accounts he did it masterfully.

After the debates, Bradley became 'a manager' of the newly formed student anti-slavery society."

In Bradley's audience was Harriet Beecher (Stowe); her father Lyman Beecher was president of Lane. Famously called by Lincoln "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war", her commitment to exposing the horrors of slavery began, so far as is known, with the Lane debates, to which Bradley was central.

Bradley and Oberlin College

The Trustees of Lane, with the acquiescence of Beecher, then prohibited any future discussions of topics not in the curriculum, and most of the students, including all the leaders, withdrew. James did so as well. When Shipherd came to Cincinnati and invited the "Lane Rebels" to attend Oberlin College instead, Bradley was interested. But there was one hitch: Oberlin College had never had a Black student, and there was hostility in some parts to doing so, most notably from Oberlin's co-founder Philo Stewart. The most controversial condition the Lane Rebels imposed on Oberlin as a condition of their enrollment, was that Oberlin must accept African-American students on an equal basis, and especially their "beloved" James. So it is in part because of James that Oberlin, reluctantly and under pressure, agreed to admit African-American students.

Statue and plaque

External images
Photo of statue of James Bradley
Photo of accompanying plaque

A statue of Bradley was erected in 1988 by the Greater Cincinnati Bicentennial Commission. It is located in Covington, Kentucky. The statue, by George Danhires, shows Bradley sitting on a riverfront bench, facing north across the Ohio River to Cincinnati, reading a book. In 2016, the statue was restored.