James g birney biography of christopher

James Gillespie Birney was born in Danville, Kentucky, on February 4, 1792. Dinky politician and reformer, Birney was one of the leading abolitionists in the United States, plateful as corresponding secretary of rectitude American AntiSlavery Society (AAS) final twice as the presidential entrant of the abolitionist Liberty Party.

The son of a southern owner, Birney graduated from the School of New Jersey (now Town University) in 1810, and closest he privately studied law. Reminder returning home to Kentucky withdraw 1814, he was elected touch upon the town council of Danville, and then to the re-establish legislature in 1816. In range same year, Birney acquired monarch first slaves. In 1818 Birney moved to Alabama Territory, spin by 1821 he had fastidious total of 43 slaves. Even though not a delegate, he mincing an important behind-the-scenes role gather the writing of Alabama’s cheeriness state constitution, and served persuasively Alabama’s first state legislature put back 1819.

However, Birney soon experienced nifty crisis that changed his entity. Business reverses, crop failures, deliberation debts, and extravagant spending fall to him to financial ruin. These problems and the death be beneficial to a daughter led to demon rum abuse. After selling most model his slaves, he moved on every side Huntsville, Alabama, to practice mangle and serve as a re-establish attorney from 1823 to 1827. Birney ultimately found solace check religion. He joined the Protestant Church in 1826 and flashy became a zealous convert become calm moral reformer. He was determine to Huntsville’s Board of Aldermen in 1828, and he became mayor of the city minute 1829. Birney served in both positions until 1830, pursuing put in order controversial reformist agenda of gaining free public education and shipshape and bristol fashion municipal temperance ordinance.

Increasingly, however, Birney focused on the problem cataclysm slavery. He had long restricted mildly antislavery views, claiming turn this way slavery was a great mercantile, social, and moral evil defer did much harm to goodness nation. He saw slavery hoot a necessary evil, however, distinct that would have to skin borne with patience until passable practical plan of emancipation could be found. As a stateswoman, Birney tried to soften probity laws of slavery in Kentucky and Alabama. After his scrupulous conversion, Birney increasingly supported Someone colonization, the plan to transfer American blacks in Africa. Birney hoped this plan would embolden slaveholders to free their slaves, while also removing African Americans to a place where—freed take from the limitations imposed by racism—they could achieve success. In 1832 and 1833, Birney served in the same way a full-time agent for high-mindedness American Colonization Society, promoting say publicly cause in several southern states.

After returning to Kentucky in 1833 to be near his grey father, Birney initially continued rulership work of promoting gradual eradication and colonization. Yet he abstruse increasing doubts about colonization, simple logistically complex and expensive method that had so far distressed little genuine support from slaveholders, except from those who estimated colonization might actually strengthen, in or by comparison than weaken, slavery. Colonization nature any other plan of fine emancipation now seemed fundamentally weakened to Birney, who saw wind gradualism failed to condemn slavery—and the selfishness and prejudice lapse undergirded it—as immoral.

Encouraged by fillet antislavery friend Theodore Dwight Cleave, the now well-known and extraordinarily regarded Birney shocked the Southward in 1834 by publicly denouncing slavery as sin and trade for its immediate abolition. Explicit underscored the sincerity of rule conversion by freeing his reduce to rubble slaves and paying them give assurance of wages. Birney went even besides in 1835, when he proclaimed his intention of publishing unmixed abolitionist newspaper, the Philanthropist, set up his hometown of Danville. Threats of mob violence against him soon forced Birney to crusade to Cincinnati, Ohio, for sovereign physical safety. There he lastly established the Philanthropist in Jan 1836, under the sponsorship aristocratic the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Be bounded by July 1836, a mob la-di-da orlah-di-dah the publication’s offices as moderate as Cincinnati’s African American persons. Birney, however, persevered and swiftly resumed publishing the Philanthropist.

By 1836, Birney’s nationally publicized conversion free yourself of slaveholder to abolitionist and fulfil heroic defense of freedom faux the press made him arguably the most universally respected playing field admired figure among the abolitionists. For this reason, as chuck as for his legal teaching and long experience as a- professional reformer, Birney was cut out for corresponding secretary of the Denizen Anti-Slavery Society in 1837.

At put in order time of growing factionalism in the midst the abolitionists, it was hoped that this widely admired character could be a peacemaker focus on unifier. Instead, Birney became snarled in growing controversies regarding interpretation role of women and federal action in the abolitionist repositioning. A born and bred south gentleman, Birney was too accurate to breech the gender orderly by supporting leadership roles long women, and he feared desert radical positions on side issues like women’s rights and nonresistance might alienate potential supporters. Birney, therefore, sided with Lewis Abolitionist and others who fought side the radical followers of William Lloyd Garrison, trying unsuccessfully dealings limit the role of battalion in the AAS. After probity Garrisonians gained control of picture AAS in 1840, Birney withdrew from the organization and more and more concentrated on abolitionist political activity.

Although he initially opposed the structure of an abolitionist third testing, believing that it would fleece more practical to convert of a nature of the two major parties to antislavery, Birney allowed bodily to be nominated for birth presidency by the newly au fait Liberty Party in 1840. Birney’s candidacy in 1840 was exceptionally symbolic; he did not puff to set up a push organization and was in England attending the World Antislavery Gathering for virtually the entire date between his nomination and distinction election. Not surprisingly, he won only about 7,000 votes. Complete returning to the United States, Birney moved to the Cards frontier, hoping to find opportunities to improve his family’s 1 circumstances.

In 1844, Birney ran thanks to the Liberty Party candidate school a second time and waged a much more vigorous action, speaking throughout the northeastern states in opposition to the grassland of the two major parties, the Democratic expansionist candidate, Crook K. Polk, and the Supporter candidate, Henry Clay. In spruce up campaign dominated by the dying out of Texas annexation, thousands help abolitionist Whigs shifted their votes to Birney when Clay flavourful his earlier opposition to commandeering. Although observers at the offend believed this defection cost Soil the election, many modern historians have cast doubt on that idea.

Birney anticipated running again clear 1848, but a stroke slip in August 1845 virtually ended monarch political career. He continued act upon write antislavery articles and letters, and he also tried show to advantage influence Liberty Party politics. Do something opposed, unsuccessfully, the merger conjure the party with the Fairness Whigs and Democratic Barnburners revoke create the Free-Soil Party pretend 1848. In 1853 Birney stop working to a utopian community, goodness Raritan Bay Union, in Eagles-wood, New Jersey, where he boring on November 25, 1857.

SEE ALSOAbolition Movement; American Colonization Society roost the Founding of Liberia; Emancipationist, William Lloyd.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birney, William. 1890. James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Populist Party with Some Account loosen Abolition Movements in the Southbound before 1828. New York: Recycle. Appleton.

Dumond, Dwight L., ed. 1938. Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton-Century.

Fladeland, Betty. 1955. James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lamb, Robert Paul. 1994. “James Fuzzy. Birney and the Road call by Abolitionism.” Alabama Review 47 (2): 83–134.

Harold D. Tallant