Young James Birney of Cootehill, County Cavan, Ireland, may have been affected by conditions Benjamin Franklin saw on a visit to Ireland in 1771, when Birney was a four-year-old still in knee pants. The sage of the American colonies wrote his impressions: “I have lately made a Tour thro’ Ireland and Scotland. In these Countries a small Part of the Society are Landlords, great Noblemen and Gentlemen, extreamly opulent, living in the highest Affluence and Magnificence: The Bulk of the People Tenants, extreamly poor, living in the most sordid Wretchedness in dirty Hovels of Mud and Straw, and cloathed only...

After the Revolutionary War, Virginia gave big chunks of its western lands to former soldiers, but Tories also moved in from the Carolinas and Pennsylvania along Boone’s Trace and the Wilderness Road, setting the stage for long-term conflicts that persisted through the Civil War days. Kentucky County was so far from the capital at Richmond that government control was hard to assert, and the seat of justice was too far distant to be of practical value to the frontier populace. It was a situation that George Rogers Clark, “Conqueror of the Old Northwest,” had warned about in 1776. Clark had...

James G. Birney’s progress from slaveholder to abolitionist would proceed much like the nation would address slavery—excruciatingly slowly and with many missteps. At the root of his personal conflict lay the inexorable facts: slaves were property according to the laws of most states, and slavery apparently was sanctioned by the Bible. The wording of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights did not clearly state that slaves were individual citizens who were to be free. Jefferson’s pertinent phrase in the Declaration of Independence was “all men are created equal.” The loophole parsed out...

The green meadows and piney woods of frontier Alabama in the early 1800s offered great profit to settlers if they owned slaves, planted cotton, and were good managers. James G. Birney qualified on the first two counts, but he failed miserably on the third. He was too sympathetic, too softhearted while successful plantation owners and their whip-wielding overseers were hard drivers of their slaves. But being a softhearted humanitarian was not Birney’s only problem in Alabama.

After the War of 1812, as Alabama historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton has observed, a folk migration broke out, rivaling the California Gold...

The territory of Alabama was established in March 1817 on lands east of the present state of Mississippi. Just about that time James G. Birney and William Love, a fellow member of the Kentucky legislature, traveled to the territory to see if Alabama was the land of opportunity equal to their dreams. Convinced by his brief visit, Birney returned with his slaves in the spring of 1818 and went back that autumn to bring his wife, Agatha, and young son James Jr. to their new home.

Birney quickly found that prejudice against the Native Americans surpassed that aimed at Negroes....

Sending black men and women back to Africa was an idea that had been around for more than half a century before it was embraced by James G. Birney in 1832. There was a reason it had not caught on: it would involve wealthy Americans divesting themselves of their fortunes, or a substantial portion of their wealth, and paying extra to send the slaves back to their homeland. In the end, few of the New World plutocrats were willing to do that; but it was a brave idea that made the founders and others believe they were grappling with the...

Birney was not yet an abolitionist in the early 1830s, but recent events and his maturing attitudes had convinced him to escape the culture of slavery as soon as possible and to embrace the rising crusade against the practice. Besides the hostility his Alabama neighbors were showing toward him for his liberal attitudes about Negroes, there were other confirmations that slavery would not go away on its own, as his former Kentucky neighbor, political ally, and idol Henry Clay had predicted.

Within a few years, freedom of speech became impossible in the South, and Birney was forced to leave Alabama...

Birney felt by moving back to Danville he would have a better chance to launch the antislavery crusade that was becoming his consuming obsession now that it was apparent that there was little support, either white or black, for colonization. In May 1833 he began writing a series of essays on colonization to the newspapers in the South. The essays stressed that colonization was both patriotic and benevolent and would remove a rapidly growing evil—free people of color—thus approaching a pro-slavery position. Also, black American colonists could become missionaries to convert Africa’s millions to Christianity, he posited. Birney...

A grim-faced delegation banged on the door of Birney’s home on Race Street in Cincinnati. Birney opened to find Mayor Samuel W. Davies, City Marshal James Saffin, and Charles Hammond, the editor of theCincinnati Gazette, staring him down. The vicious glares and stiffly folded arms told Birney this was not a welcoming committee. Birney’s plans to publish an antislavery newspaper had instantly aroused the ire of the pro-slavery citizens of Cincinnati, and the delegation of officials was responding to their concerns. Cincinnati’s ties with the South were strong because of commercial ties, personal friendships, and family connections. Slave-bound Kentucky...

Birney was “Lincoln’s Prophet”—his candidacy in 1840 forecasting the antislavery position the nation would take by electing Lincoln in 1860. In quick succession Birney had lost his father and his wife, Agatha, both of whom died in 1839, but he was no more deterred by personal problems than by almost universal political opposition. Nevertheless, it took a public show of animosity from an old friend, perhaps, to push Birney into a hopeless third party presidential campaign.

The clash with Henry Clay over slavery may never have propelled Birney into a run for president, especially one that would put him...

James Gillespie Birney has been blamed by politicians and historians for the defeat of Henry Clay in the 1844 presidential race, a factor that perhaps more than any other led him to be castigated while he lived and ignored after his lifetime. Birney’s contribution to the progression of antislavery philosophy and voter sentiment has been pushed aside by emotions over candidates and by long-standing anti-abolitionist attitudes related to political strategies of the Republicans.

According to many historians, it is clear that the proposed annexation of Texas was the major issue in the 1844 election. It also marked the high-water mark...

Despite the apparent futility of the effort, there was an important outcome to James G. Birney’s abolitionist activities: his battles with the mobs in Cincinnati provided some of the inspiration to Harriet Beecher Stowe to write her monumental 1852 book,Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mrs. Stowe’s biographer, Joan Hedrick, explains how Mrs. Stowe was influenced by Birney’s trials when both were living in Cincinnati: “During the anti-Birney agitation, Harriet wrote to [her husband] Calvin, ‘For my part, I can easily see how such proceedings may make converts to abolitionism, for already my sympathies are strongly enlisted for Mr. Birney.’” Her distress...

Michigan in the 1840s was an unlikely place for the start of a revolution that would shake the civilized world by ending slavery, which had persisted for two centuries in America. The state was remote and sparsely populated with scattered crude frontier settlements. In prehistoric days, groups of Paleo-Indians had subsisted by hunting mastodon, musk ox, giant bison, elk, moose, caribou, and wooly mammoth. Roaming the peninsula were saber-tooth tigers and huge wolves, along with beaver, bear, and small game like deer and rabbits in what had once been a giant lake gouged into the land by glaciers. The French,...

It was an ironic twist of history that placed one of the nation’s leading abolitionists, James G. Birney, at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, which had been the state’s leading port for the slave trade. And that irony was compounded after his death when two of radical abolitionist John Brown’s accomplices in the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, were buried there. One of Brown’s most vocal supporters, transcendentalist author and poet Henry David Thoreau, also came to Perth Amboy to do surveys of the property for the landowners who were developing the Eagleswood community, the Birneys’ new home.

Despite his failing...

Just how did an unknown politician like Abraham Lincoln, who had won only brief terms in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, attain the presidency of the United States in 1860? Lincoln was able to catch the rising tide of antislavery sentiment initiated in 1840 by Birney and the Liberty Party, which was carried on by the Free Soil and Republican parties for two decades, and in 1860 he won a plurality in an election split among four candidates. Fortunately for the Republicans, the pro-slavery reaction to the antislavery movement resulted in two new parties, the Southern...

The “solid South,” which William Birney later observed had been emerging since 1824, exploded with the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860. Lincoln’s election was the signal bell for Southern states to declare outrage over the antislavery platform of the Republican Party, secede from the Union, and form the Confederate States of America. The decision had been shaping for over several decades, but it was reinforced by “Apostles of Disunion” who fanned out across the South, according to the author of a book by that name, Charles B. Dew. Professor Dew, of Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, takes pains to...

Despite vicious derogation of their efforts that began during the war and has persisted in Civil War historiography, the military abolitionists played an important role in that they were willing to recruit and lead Negro troops, thus providing the Union with an extra 10 percent of manpower that may have been the key to victory. The Birneys were invaluable leaders because they had been raised with slaves on their father’s Alabama plantation and understood, perhaps better than most other Northern officers, how to motivate black soldiers. The flood of former slaves and freedmen to the Union Army deprived the Confederacy...

Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia had fought on long after any reasonable expectation that the Confederate cause could be successful, according to historian Clifford Dowdey, who estimated 30 September 1864 at Fort Harrison near Richmond (where major generals David and William Birney had been among the commanders of black Union troops) as “close as any to the date when nothing remained to support the most desperate hope.”¹ So the war went on for six more months and thousands more died in vain for the “lost cause.” Apparently Lee had realized for months the situation was hopeless,...