I love discovering fascinating, little-known stories from history. Authors such as Erik Larson, Hampton Sides, and Candice Millard have made careers from unearthing “hidden treasures” among the caverns of time.

In “The Abolitionist Hero You’ve Never Heard Of,” Steve Bateman performs a similar service. He introduces us to Granville Sharp, an 18th-century British abolitionist whose influence spanned the seas. In 1773 he initiated correspondence with Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician who’d later sign the Declaration of Independence. That same year Rush penned a popular tract denouncing slavery, taking aim at American pastors: “In vain will you command your flocks to offer up the incense of faith and charity, while they continue to mingle the sweat and blood of Negro slaves with their sacrifices.” So three years before the birth of the United States, Bateman writes, “the nation’s founders and their pastors had been duly warned.”

The legacy of Granville Sharp should deter us from hyperfixating on our national sins or our national achievements. The past is too complex for simple reductionisms. Still, American believers must reckon with the fact that abolitionist fervor didn’t begin with us: “Before John Newton wrote ‘Amazing Grace,’ before William Wilberforce petitioned the English Parliament, and before Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Granville Sharp was fighting slavery.”

Thank God for hidden heroes.