Medieval Europe got rid of slavery, but it came back with a vengeance during the age of exploration. Before long, Christians from every sailing nation were rationalizing the practice of seizing non-Europeans, putting them in chains, and placing them on the auction block.

Fortunately, though, that’s not the end of the story. The story of how slavery was driven from the West a second time is a more complicated one. There were virtuous heroes like William Wilberforce and Harriet Tubman. There was a bloody American war costing over half a million lives, a war of strange and mixed allegiances: slave owners fighting in the North against southern slavery; racists and non-racists alike on both sides of the war; Christians disturbed by the growing power of the central government but horrified by the corrupting power of the slave master over the enslaved. Everywhere you had a fallen humanity and the tendency of power to corrupt. But winding through it all was one perfect man, a man that Christian author Flannery O’Connor once called “…the ragged figure of Christ.”