James Gillespie Birney

• James Gillespie Birney
• Born: February 4, 1792
• Died: November 25, 1857

Antislavery lawyer and writer, was born in Danville, Kentucky, the only son of James Birney and Martha (Read) Birney. Both his maternal grandfather and his father, who became a wealthy merchant and manufacturer, were Irish immigrants. After his mother’s early death James G. Birney and his younger sister were reared by an aunt from Ireland, in luxurious surroundings with private tutors and many slaves. Birney attended Transylvania College and was graduated from Princeton, then the College of New Jersey, in 1810. After reading law in the Philadelphia office of Alexander J. Dallas, he was admitted to the bar in 1814 and returned to Danville to practice. In 1816 he was elected to the state legislature and married Agatha McDowell, whose uncle was governor of Kentucky. In 1818 the couple moved to Madison County, Alabama, and in 1819 Birney was elected to the first state legislature. Soon thereafter Alabama gained admission to the Union. Because of his opposition to Andrew Jackson he lost his bid for reelection. After a period of financial reverses brought on by drinking and gambling he sold his plantation —including most of the slaves—and moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he became moderately wealthy from his law practice and was active in politics.

Birney’s 1826 conversion from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism, which was inspired by his wife, coincided with his developing antislavery views and his conviction that a man should devote his life to some higher goal than wealth. In 1832 he became an agent for the American Colonization Society (founded to resettle free blacks in Africa) but resigned in 1834 when he became convinced that it really served the interests of the whites. Thus associated with more radical elements, Birney helped to establish the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 after freeing his last two slaves. Threatened by violence in Kentucky, Birney moved to Ohio in 1836, where he began publishing an antislavery newspaper, the Philanthropist. He came to national attention through his widely published accounts of the destruction of his press by a Cincinnati mob and his trial for harboring a fugitive slave in his household.

In 1837 Birney moved to New York City as executive secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. With his aristocratic bearing and his status as a converted ex-slaveholder, Birney was an important addition to the movement. The logic and eloquence of his arguments soon made him one of the leading advocates of a political solution to the slavery question and of separating it from the issue of women’s rights. These views, while undoubtedly those of most antislavery people, were sharply opposed by the more extreme, antipolitical Garrisonians, and brought about a split in the movement by 1840.

When Birney’s hope that the Whigs would take an antislavery stand was dashed by the nomination of William Henry Harrison, he helped to found the Liberty party and became its candidate for president. The party polled over 7,000 votes in 1840 even though Birney was then in England as a vice president of the World Anti-Slavery Convention. His most famous work, The American Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery, was published there in 1840.

Birney’s first wife died in 1839, having borne nine children, of whom James, William, Dion, David, George, and Florence survived her. In 1841 he married Elizabeth Fitzhugh, sister-in-law of New York reformer Gerrit Smith. Their son Fitzhugh was born in 1842. Having sacrificed his legal career and his property to the antislavery cause, Birney moved to the Michigan frontier in 1842 to take advantage of cheap land and give his sons a start in life. In 1843 he again accepted the presidential nomination of the Liberty party, which, although it polled only 62,000 votes, was widely credited with splitting the antislavery vote and throwing the election to James K. Polk.

In 1845 Birney became an invalid after a riding accident and was unable to work for the Liberty party’s successors, the Free Soil and Republican parties. In 1853 the Birneys moved to a New Jersey commune founded by Theodore Dwight Weld and other abolitionists, where he died at the age of sixty-five. His contributions to the antislavery movement, long underrated by historians impressed by its more radical members, have recently begun to be appreciated.

Among his writings is J. G. Birney, Addresses and Speeches (1835). For years the only full-scale biography was W. Birney (a son), James G. Birney and His Times (1890). A brief but scholarly recent treatment is B. Fladeland, James G. Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (1969), which lists all of Birney’s publications. D. L. Dumond’s ably edited Letters of James Gillespie Birney (1938) draws on the collections in the Library of Congress and the Clements Library of the University of Michigan. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1929).