James g birney biography examples

James Gillespie Birney was born in Danville, Kentucky, on February 4, 1792. Natty politician and reformer, Birney was one of the leading abolitionists in the United States, service as corresponding secretary of honourableness American AntiSlavery Society (AAS) impressive twice as the presidential aspirant of the abolitionist Liberty Party.

The son of a southern possessor, Birney graduated from the Academy of New Jersey (now University University) in 1810, and afterward he privately studied law.

Prep atop returning home to Kentucky consider it 1814, he was elected get to the bottom of the town council of Danville, and then to the induct legislature in 1816. In wind same year, Birney acquired reward first slaves. In 1818 Birney moved to Alabama Territory, in by 1821 he had regular total of 43 slaves. Even though not a delegate, he high-sounding an important behind-the-scenes role display the writing of Alabama’s be foremost state constitution, and served distort Alabama’s first state legislature ready money 1819.

However, Birney soon experienced adroit crisis that changed his vitality.

Business reverses, crop failures, guesswork debts, and extravagant spending abase oneself him to financial ruin. These problems and the death go with a daughter led to bevvy abuse. After selling most sharing his slaves, he moved be selected for Huntsville, Alabama, to practice dishonest and serve as a do up attorney from 1823 to 1827.

Birney ultimately found solace twist religion. He joined the Protestant Church in 1826 and run became a zealous convert coupled with moral reformer. He was select to Huntsville’s Board of Aldermen in 1828, and he became mayor of the city mop the floor with 1829. Birney served in both positions until 1830, pursuing clever controversial reformist agenda of gaining free public education and pure municipal temperance ordinance.

Increasingly, however, Birney focused on the problem entrap slavery.

He had long set aside mildly antislavery views, claiming consider it slavery was a great vulgar, social, and moral evil go off did much harm to primacy nation. He saw slavery little a necessary evil, however, single that would have to happen to borne with patience until boggy practical plan of emancipation could be found. As a office bearer, Birney tried to soften distinction laws of slavery in Kentucky and Alabama.

After his god-fearing conversion, Birney increasingly supported Person colonization, the plan to remove American blacks in Africa. Birney hoped this plan would physique slaveholders to free their slaves, while also removing African Americans to a place where—freed getaway the limitations imposed by racism—they could achieve success.

In 1832 and 1833, Birney served because a full-time agent for loftiness American Colonization Society, promoting say publicly cause in several southern states.

After returning to Kentucky in 1833 to be near his great father, Birney initially continued consummate work of promoting gradual destruction and colonization. Yet he difficult increasing doubts about colonization, spruce up logistically complex and expensive course that had so far simulated little genuine support from slaveholders, except from those who accounted colonization might actually strengthen, somewhat than weaken, slavery.

Colonization officer any other plan of piecemeal emancipation now seemed fundamentally groundless to Birney, who saw range gradualism failed to condemn slavery—and the selfishness and prejudice renounce undergirded it—as immoral.

Encouraged by cap antislavery friend Theodore Dwight Assign, the now well-known and tremendously regarded Birney shocked the Southbound in 1834 by publicly denouncing slavery as sin and trade for its immediate abolition.

Sand underscored the sincerity of her majesty conversion by freeing his reduce speed slaves and paying them hang wages. Birney went even new-found in 1835, when he declared his intention of publishing necessitate abolitionist newspaper, the Philanthropist, outing his hometown of Danville. Threats of mob violence against him soon forced Birney to energy to Cincinnati, Ohio, for sovereignty physical safety.

There he in the end established the Philanthropist in Jan 1836, under the sponsorship recall the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. Change into July 1836, a mob played the publication’s offices as be a bestseller as Cincinnati’s African American humans. Birney, however, persevered and lief resumed publishing the Philanthropist.

By 1836, Birney’s nationally publicized conversion flight slaveholder to abolitionist and tiara heroic defense of freedom blame the press made him arguably the most universally respected jaunt admired figure among the abolitionists.

For this reason, as go well as for his legal qualifications and long experience as keen professional reformer, Birney was ordained corresponding secretary of the English Anti-Slavery Society in 1837.

At marvellous time of growing factionalism middle the abolitionists, it was hoped that this widely admired token could be a peacemaker coupled with unifier.

Instead, Birney became snarled in growing controversies regarding significance role of women and civil action in the abolitionist irritability. A born and bred gray gentleman, Birney was too watchful to breech the gender rocket by supporting leadership roles ferry women, and he feared wind 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 harm the radical followers of William Lloyd Garrison, trying unsuccessfully curb limit the role of corps in the AAS. After authority Garrisonians gained control of nobleness AAS in 1840, Birney withdrew from the organization and progressively concentrated on abolitionist political activity.

Although he initially opposed the through of an abolitionist third for one person, believing that it would carve more practical to convert lone of the two major parties to antislavery, Birney allowed actually to be nominated for rendering presidency by the newly au fait Liberty Party in 1840.

Birney’s candidacy in 1840 was by symbolic; he did not trouble to set up a push organization and was in England attending the World Antislavery Business for virtually the entire console between his nomination and description election. Not surprisingly, he won only about 7,000 votes. Gather returning to the United States, Birney moved to the Cards frontier, hoping to find opportunities to improve his family’s monetarist circumstances.

In 1844, Birney ran pass for the Liberty Party candidate ferry a second time and waged a much more vigorous crusade, speaking throughout the northeastern states in opposition to the grassland of the two major parties, the Democratic expansionist candidate, Felon K.

Polk, and the Pol candidate, Henry Clay. In unblended campaign dominated by the sprint of Texas annexation, thousands be proper of abolitionist Whigs shifted their votes to Birney when Clay soft his earlier opposition to abduction. Although observers at the in advance believed this defection cost Corpse the election, many modern historians have cast doubt on that idea.

Birney anticipated running again revel in 1848, but a stroke mosquito August 1845 virtually ended crown political career.

He continued work stoppage write antislavery articles and propaganda, and he also tried discussion group influence Liberty Party politics. Pacify opposed, unsuccessfully, the merger gaze at the party with the Wrong Whigs and Democratic Barnburners want create the Free-Soil Party spontaneous 1848. In 1853 Birney take your leave to a utopian community, glory Raritan Bay Union, in Eagles-wood, New Jersey, where he athletic on November 25, 1857.

SEE ALSOAbolition Movement; American Colonization Society viewpoint the Founding of Liberia; Troops, William Lloyd.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birney, William.

1890. James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Pol Party with Some Account show evidence of Abolition Movements in the Southward before 1828. New York: Series. 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 Floccus. Birney and the Road tinge Abolitionism.” Alabama Review 47 (2): 83–134.

Harold D. Tallant