Bib-Bir: Bibb through Birney

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Sources include: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.


BIBB, Henry Walton, 1815-1854, African American, author, newspaper publisher, former slave, anti-slavery lecturer.  Wrote Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, 1849.  Published Voice of the Fugitive: An Anti-Slavery Journal, in 1851.  Organized the North American League.  Lectured for Michigan Liberty Party. 

(Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, p. 338; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 220, 447, 489, 618-619, 632-634; Sinha, 2016; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 2, p. 717; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 1, p. 532; Minutes, Convention of the Liberty Party, June 14, 15, 1848, Buffalo, New York)


BIDWELL, Barnabas, 1763-1833, writer, lawyer, member of the U.S. Congress from Massachusetts, opposed slavery in U.S. House of Representatives.

(Locke, Mary Stoughton. Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808). Boston: Ginn & Co., 1901, pp. 93, 149, 151; Annals of Congress; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 246-247)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 246-247:

BIDWELL, BARNABAS (August 23, 1763- July 27, 1833), writer, lawyer, the son of Reverend Adonijah Bidwell and Jemimah Devotion Bidwell, was born in Tyringham (now Monterey), Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale in the class of 1785. During his senior year he wrote and published a tragedy, The Mercenary Match, which was acted by his college mates. Immediately after graduation he began teaching in a young ladies' school at New Haven, and in October 1787 he was appointed to a tutorship at Yale, a position from which he resigned in September 1790. He then took up the study of law and began to practise at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He was appointed treasurer of Berkshire County in September 1791. After serving as state senator from 1801 to 1805, he was elected to Congress, but here he disappointed those who expected leadership from him. President Jefferson, however, found him useful as a member of committees by which he aimed to carry out his plans, especially those having to do with the purchase of Florida from Spain. In this connection Bidwell, "timid indeed, but cunning, supple, and sly," as one historian describes him, incurred the contempt of John Randolph, who branded him and his kind as Jefferson's "back stairs favorites" and "pages of the presidential water-closet." When the abolition of the slave trade came up for discussion in the House in 1806, Bidwell strongly opposed a bill that would substantially make the government a dealer in slaves (Richard Hildreth, History of the United States of America, 1851, V, 566-71, 630). In 1807 he accepted an appointment as attorney-general of Massachusetts in place of returning to Congress. Three years later, at a time when President Madison was considering him for the Supreme Court of the United States, an investigation of his accounts as county treasurer, an office he had held for nineteen years, put an end to all further political aspirations by disclosing a shortage of about $10,000. In order to avoid trial Bidwell absconded to Canada and settled with his family on the north shore of Lake Ontario. Being an alien, he was barred from practising in the Canadian courts, and for the same reason he was not permitted to serve in the legislature, although elected to that body. In his last years he was described as "a profound jurist, a man of great culture and attainments outside the law as well as in it." Before his disgrace his abilities had won for him the honorary degrees of master of arts from Yale and Williams and of doctor of laws from Brown. He was married in 1793 to Mary Gray, a native of Stockbridge. To-day Bidwell is known chiefly as the author of an undergraduate tragedy. The Mercenary Match is a not unimportant specimen of early American drama. Designed, like other school plays of the time, to display the oratorical powers of the performers, it is filled with long, declamatory speeches as artificial as the improbable plot. It is distinguished, however, by the general smoothness of the blank verse and the occasional felicity of the phrasing-qualities seldom found in eighteenth-century American plays. Aside from this drama Bidwell's published writings consist of a few orations and political speeches. He is also said to have contributed eleven sketches to Robert Gourlay's Statistical Account of Upper Canada (1822).

[Edwin M. Bidwell, Genealogy to the Seventh Generation of the Bidwell Family in America (1884); Reminiscences of the Reverend Geo. Allen (1883); The Lit. Diary of Ezra Stiles (1901), ed. by Franklin B. Dexter; John F. Schroeder, Life and Character of Mrs. Mary Anna Boardman (1849); Franklin B. Dexter, Biography Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, IV (1907), 387 ff.]

O.S.C.


BIDWELL, Riverius, Trumbull County, Ohio, abolitionist, Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-39.


BILBO, William, circa 1815-1867, lawyer, journalist, entrepreneur.  Participated in lobbying effort in Congress for the passage of the Constitutional amendment banning slavery in the United States.  Worked with Secretary of State William H. Seward.


BINGHAM, John Armor, 1815-1900, Republican Congressman, judge, advocate, U.S. Army.  Bingham was one of the writers and sponsors of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  One of three military judges presiding in the Lincoln assassination trial. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888) B. B. Kendrick,; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 277-278; Journal of the Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction (1914)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 277-278:

BINGHAM, JOHN ARMOR (January 21, 1815-March 19, 1900), lawyer, Ohio politician, was born in Mercer, Pennsylvania, the son of Hugh Bingham, a carpenter. After securing such elementary education as his neighborhood offered, he spent two years in a printing office, a like period at Franklin College, then studied law, was admitted to the bar, and began practise at Cadiz, Ohio, in 1840. He soon became prominent as a stump speaker in Harrison's "log cabin, hard cider" campaign. In 1854 he was elected to Congress, and served continuously until 1873, except for the Thirty-eighth Congress, when, failing of reelection, he was appointed judge-advocate in January 1864, and solicitor of the court of claims the following August. When political fortunes failed him again in 1873 he was solaced by the appointment as minister to Japan, a position he held for twelve uneventful years.

Bingham was a clever and forceful speaker, overflowing with invective, rhetorical phrases, and historical allusions of varying degrees of accuracy. In two of the most dramatic episodes of the immediate post-war period-the trial of the assassins of Lincoln, and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson-he played a leading role. In the conspiracy trial his part as special judge-advocate was to bully the defense witnesses and to assert in his summary of the evidence that the rebellion was "simply a criminal conspiracy and a gigantic assassination" in which "Jefferson Davis is as clearly proven guilty. … as is John Wilkes Booth, by whose hand Jefferson Davis inflicted the mortal wound upon Abraham Lincoln" (Benn Pitman, Assassination of President Lincoln ..., 1865, pp. 351,380). In defending the legality of the military court set up by President Johnson, he argued that the executive could exercise all sorts of extra-constitutional powers, even to "string up the culprits without any court an argument which was somewhat embarrassing when he was selected by the House as one of seven managers to conduct the impeachment of President Johnson. He had voted against the first attempt at impeachment and had opposed the second, holding the President guilty of no impeachable offense (D. M. DeWitt, Impeachment, p. 506), but he finally yielded to party pressure and voted for impeachment after the Senate had declared the President's removal of Secretary Stanton illegal. It fell to him to make the closing speech at the trial. For three days (May 4-6) he rang the changes on the plea of the defense that the President might suspend the laws and test them in the courts-"the monstrous plea interposed for the first time in our history" (Trial of Andrew Johnson, II, 389 ff.). His confident manner carried conviction to the galleries, who pronounced it one of his greatest speeches.

In the work of reconstruction, Bingham's chief contribution was the framing of that part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment which forbade any state by law to abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, or to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or to deny the equal protection of the laws (Kendrick, Journal, p. 106).

Bingham was married to Amanda Bingham, a cousin, by whom he had three children. He died at his home in Cadiz, Ohio. He did not introduce the resolution at the Whig national convention of 1848 containing the spirited anti-slavery apothegm carved on his monument at Cadiz, the resolution ascribed to him having been introduced by Lewis D. Campbell. Stenographic reports fail to show that Bingham ever spoke on the floor of the convention (North American and United States Gazette, and Public Ledger, both Philadelphia, for June 8, 9, 10, 1848).

[B. B. Kendrick, Journal of the Comm. of Fifteen on Reconstruction (1914); Trial of Andrew Johnson, pub. by order of the Senate as a supplement to Congressional Globe 1868); Congressional Globe, 1854-73, passim; Ohio Arch. and History Publication, X, 331-52; D. M. DeWitt, The Judicial Murder of Mrs. Surratt (1895) and The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903); Evening Star (Washington), March 19, 1900; Cadiz Democrat Sentinel, March 22, 1900.]

T. D.M. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. p. 263;

BINGHAM, John A., lawyer, born in Mercer, Pennsylvania, in 1815. He passed two years in a printing-office, and then entered Franklin college, Ohio, but left, on account of his health, before graduation. He was admitted to the bar in 1840, was district attorney for Tuscarawas county, Ohio, from 1846 till 1849, was elected to congress as a republican in 1854, and re-elected three times, sitting from 1855 till 1863. He prepared in the 34th congress the report on the contested Illinois elections, and in 1862 was chairman of the managers of the house in the impeachment of Judge Humphreys for high treason. He failed of re-election in 1864, and was appointed by President Lincoln judge-advocate in the army, and later the same year solicitor of the court of claims. He was special judge-advocate in the trial of the assassins of President Lincoln. In 1865 he returned to congress, and sat until 1873, serving on the committees on military affairs, freedmen, and reconstruction, and in the 40th congress as chairman of the committees on claims and judiciary, and as one of the managers in the impeachment trial of President Johnson. On 3 May, 1873, he received the appointment of minister to Japan, which post he held until 1885, when he was recalled by President Cleveland.  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888.


BINNEY, Horace, 1780-1875, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, constitutional lawyer, member of the Philadelphia auxiliary of the American Colonization Society. 

(Burin, Eric. Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005, pp. 84, 112; Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 265-266; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, p. 280; Staudenraus, P. J. The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 40, 72)

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 265-266:

BINNEY, Horace, lawyer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 January, l780; died  there, 12 August, 1875. He was of English and Scotch descent. His father was a surgeon in the revolutionary army. In 1788, the year after his father's death, he was placed in a classical school at Bordentown, New Jersey, where he continued three years, and distinguished himself especially by his attainments in Greek. In July, 1793, he entered the freshman class of Harvard, and at graduation in 1797 he divided the highest honor with a single classmate. He had acquired the art and habit of study, and a love for it which never abated until the close of his life. This art he ever regarded as his most valued acquisition. He began the study of law in November, 1797, in the office of Jared Ingersoll, and was called to the bar in March, 1800, when he was little more than twenty years of age. His clientage for some years was meagre, but his industry continued unflagging, and gradually, in the face of a competition with eminent lawyers, such as no other bar in the country then exhibited, he became an acknowledged leader. In 1806 he was sent to the legislature of the state, in which he served one year, declining a re-election. So early as 1807 his professional engagements had become extremely large, and before 1815 he was in the enjoyment of all that the legal profession could give, whether of reputation or emolument. Between 1807 and 1814 he prepared and published the six volumes of reported decisions of the supreme court of Pennsylvania that bear his name. They are among the earliest of American reports, and are regarded as almost perfect models of legal reporting. Soon after 1830 Mr. Binney's health began to be impaired, and he desired to withdraw from the courts and throw off the business that oppressed him. It was this, in part, that made him willing to accept a nomination for congress; but there was doubtless another reason that influenced him—the hostility of President Jackson to the United States bank. The veto of the bill for its recharter aroused the deepest feeling of almost the entire business community of Philadelphia, and with that community Mr. Binney was closely associated, while his ability, combined with his well-known knowledge of the condition and operations of the bank, pointed him out as the fittest man to defend the institution in congress. He accepted a nomination, and was elected to the 23d congress. In the consideration of great subjects, notably that of the removal of the public deposits from the United States bank, he proved himself to be a statesman of high rank and an accomplished debater. But official life was distasteful to him, and he declined a re-election. On his return to Philadelphia he refused all professional engagements in the courts, though he continued to give written opinions upon legal questions until 1850. Many of these opinions are still preserved. They relate to titles to real estate, to commercial questions, to trusts, and to the most abstruse subjects in every department of the law. They are model exhibitions of profound and accurate knowledge, of extensive research, of nice discrimination, and wise conclusion, and they were generally accepted as of almost equal authority with judicial decision. Once only after 1836 did Mr. Binney appear in the courts. In 1844, by appointment of the city councils of Philadelphia, he argued in the supreme court of the United States the case of Bidal vs. Girard's executors, in which was involved the validity of the trust created by Mr. Girard's will for the establishment and maintenance of a college for orphans. The argument is in print, and it is still the subject of admiration by the legal profession in this country, and almost equally so by the profession in Great Britain. It lifted the law of charities out of the depths of confusion and obscurity that had covered it, and while the fulness of its research and the vigor of its reasoning were masterly, it was clothed with a precision and a beauty of language never surpassed. The argument was a fitting close to a long and illustrious professional life. Mr. Binney had a fine, commanding person, an uncommonly handsome face, a dignified and graceful manner, and a most melodious voice, perfectly under his control, and modulated with unusual skill. In fine, he was in all particulars a most accomplished lawyer. No words can better describe him than those which he applied to a great man, the friend of his early man-hood: “He was an advocate of great power; a master of every question in his causes; a wary tactician in the management of them; highly accomplished in language; a faultless logician; a man of the purest integrity and the highest honor; fluent without the least volubility; concise to a degree that left every one's patience and attention unimpaired, and perspicuous to almost the lowest order of understanding, while he was dealing with almost the highest topics.” If it be added to this that his mental power was equal to the comprehension of any legal subject, that his mode of presentation was the best possible, that his rhetoric was faultless, that he had an aptness of illustration that illuminated the most abstruse subjects, and a personal character without a visible flaw, it will be seen that he must have been, as he was, a most persuasive and convincing advocate. In 1827, by invitation of the bar of Philadelphia, he delivered an address on the life and character of Chief-Justice Tilghman; and in 1835, complying with a request of the select and common councils of the city, an address on the life and character of Chief-Justice Marshall. Until the close of his life he was a constant reader and an indefatigable student. He kept himself well informed of current events, and in regard to all public questions he not only sought information, but matured settled opinions. In 1858 he published a sketch of the life and character of Justice Bushrod Washington, in which he delineated the qualities that make up a perfect nisi prius judge, with singular acuteness. In the same year he published sketches of three leaders of the old Philadelphia bar, which were greatly admired. He also in 1858 gave to the press a more extended discussion, entitled “An Inquiry into the Formation of Washington's Farewell Address,” strikingly illustrative of the character of his own mind, and of his habits of investigation and reasoning. And in 1862 and in 1863 he published three pamphlets in support of the power claimed by President Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. His argument was not less remarkable than the best of his earlier efforts. Throughout his life Mr. Binney manifested a deep interest in many literary, scientific, and art institutions of Philadelphia, and in many of the noblest charities. He was also an earnest Christian, a devout member of the Protestant Episcopal church, and often a leading member of its conventions. The activity of his mind remained undiminished until his death. This occurred forty years after the age when most men are at the zenith of their reputation, forty years after he had substantially retired from public view and from participation in all matters that attract public notice, and at the end of a period when public recollection of most lawyers has faded into indistinctness. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888.


BINTLIFF, James, 1824-1901, abolitionist, newspaper editor, publisher, proprietor, businessman, Union Army colonel, helped found Republican Party. 

(Hunt, Roger, Brevet Brigadier, Generals in Blue. Gaithersburg, MD, 1990)


BIRCHARD, Matthew W., Vermont.  Vice president and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.

(Abolitionist, Volume I, No. XII, December, 1833)


BIRD, Francis William, 1809-1894, anti-slavery political leader, radical reformer.  Member of the anti-slavery “Conscience Whigs,” leader of the Massachusetts Free Soil Party.  Led anti-slavery faction of the newly formed Republican Party.  Supported abolitionist Party leader Charles Sumner.  Opposed Dred Scott decision.  “Bird Club” greatly influenced radical Republican politics in Massachusetts and in the U.S. Senate.  Organized Emancipation League.  Supported enlistment of African Americans in the Union Army and emancipation of Blacks in the District of Columbia.  Supported women’s rights, Indian rights, suffrage rights for Chinese, and other causes. Editor of the Free Soiler newspaper. 

(American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 2, p. 805, Raybach, 1970 p. 184,Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Volume 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, p. 343)


BIRNEY, David Bell (May 29, 1825-October 18, 1864), Union soldier.

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 290-291) 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 290-291:

BIRNEY, DAVID BELL (May 29, 1825-October 18, 1864), Union soldier, was the son of James G. Birney [q.v.], who was a native of Kentucky and a graduate of Princeton, but who later moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he became a successful planter as well as one of the leaders of the Alabama bar. Here it was that David Bell Birney was born. In the year 1838 the Birney family moved to Cincinnati-after the father had freed his own slaves and had actively identified himself with the emancipation movement. In 1844 James G. Birney became the national presidential candidate of the Anti-Slavery party. With such family influences, it was natural that the son should take an active part in the war between the states. Young Birney received his education at Andover, and after graduation, went into business, first in Cincinnati and later in Upper Saginaw, Michigan, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. But in the year 1848 he moved to Philadelphia and became a clerk in a mercantile agency, which position he held until 1856, when he engaged in law practise. The year preceding the Civil War found him a successful practitioner with many influential friends. He foresaw the outbreak of war, and late in the year 1860, entered upon an intensive study of military subjects. For some years he had been a member of the historic 1st Troop of Philadelphia City Cavalry, and in February 1860 he secured appointment as lieutenant-colonel of a regiment of Pennsylvania militia. The young civilian was better prepared for a military career than most of the inexperienced field-officers, hastily mustered into the United States service in the spring of 1861. Although it never assembled or paraded, his militia regiment formed the basis of the 23rd Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers, upon the President's call for volunteers; and, as such, performed guard duty north of the Susquehanna, and during the summer of 1861 engaged in minor operations along the upper Potomac. Birney received his baptism of fire at Falling Waters, West Virginia, and later his regiment occupied Winchester. The term of enlistment of the three-months volunteers expiring, a new regiment was formed from the old through consolidation and reenlistments; and within a few days after August 17, 1861, due to his energy and leadership, the regimental commander was able to parade a new 23rd Regiment through the streets of Washington, its soldiers sworn in for three years' service. Then began a long period of drill and training, and such was the favorable impression created by Birney's capacity for command and proper ideas of discipline, that early in 1862 he was appointed a brigadier-general of volunteers. His first assignment was to a brigade of General Kearny's division. As a brigade commander, he participated in the early operations of the Army of the Potomac, including Centreville and Manassas, and later in 1862 engaged with his brigade in the sanguinary battles of the Peninsular campaign-Yorktown, Williamsburg, Fair Oaks, Malvern Hill. At Fair Oaks, he was unjustly charged with having "halted his command a mile from the enemy," and was brought before a court martial. After careful consideration of the evidence, the court, composed in the main of regular officers, honorably acquitted him. Transported back to Alexandria, Virginia, Birney's brigade was pushed forward to the support of troops engaged in Pope's campaign, and on August 31, 1862, took an active part in the Union victory at Chantilly, Virginia, where Birney's warm friend and military superior, General Phil Kearny, lost his life. He succeeded Kearny as division commander, and led his division through the battles of the Army of the Potomac, until the middle of July 1864. At Fredericksburg, his -division was in support of Meade; and although it was charged that Birney failed to comply with urgent instructions, careful investigation at the time failed to substantiate such charges, and General Stoneman reported that Birney's division "probably saved the entire left wing from disaster." For his able leadership at Chancellorsville, Birney was promoted, May 5, 1863, to be major-general of volunteers. At Gettysburg, he commanded the 3rd Army Corps after General Sickles was wounded, and was struck twice by enemy's bullets,   but was only slightly injured (New York Herald, July 6, 1863). Thereafter, Birney's division followed Grant through his first campaign against Richmond until July 23, 1864, when Grant selected Birney to command the 10th Army Corps. After these major operations in which for months his system had been weakened by exposure and fatigue, Birney became seriously ill with malarial fever of an especially virulent type; and against his wishes to remain in the field, was ordered home for recuperation. He reached Philadelphia on October 11, 1864, where,   after acute suffering, he died on October 18, in the thirty-ninth year of his age. His last words in delirium were, "Boys ! Keep your eyes on that flag!" Resolutions of the Philadelphia Board of Trade characterized him as "an honest citizen, a gallant soldier, and a pure, chivalric, self-sacrificing patriot." So great was the esteem in which Birney's life and services were held, that during the fall of 1864 and the spring of 1865 a group of Philadelphia friends raised a trust fund of nearly thirty thousand dollars by popular subscription, which was wisely invested by trustees for the benefit of Birney's widow and six small children.

[Oliver W. Davis, Life of David Bell Birney (pub. anonymously, 1867) is the principal source; see also Official Records, Army and Navy Journal, October 22, 29, November 19, 1864, and "Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War," Senate Report No. 142, 38 Congress, 2 Session. The honorable acquittal of Birney by court martial is in General Order No. 135, Headquarters Army of the Potomac, June 19, 1862 (War Department files).]

C.D.R.


BIRNEY, James (June 7, 1817-May 8, 1888), lawyer and diplomatist.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, p. 291:

BIRNEY, JAMES (June 7, 1817-May 8, 1888), lawyer and diplomatist, the eldest son of James G. Birney [q.v.] and brother of David Bell Birney [q.v.] and of William Birney [q.v.], was born at Danville, Kentucky. His academic education was obtained at Centre College, Danville, and at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, from which latter institution he graduated in 1836. In 1837-38 he taught in the Grammar School of Miami University; then he studied law at Yale for two years and began to practise at Cincinnati. He became a trustee of the Saginaw Bay Company, and in 1857 removed to Lower Saginaw (now Bay City), Michigan, where he made his home until his death. In 1859 he was elected to the state Senate as a Republican, and successfully opposed the transfer to the state school fund of the proceeds of the sales of swamp lands given to the state by the federal government in aid of the construction of roads. From January 1 to April 3, 1861, he was lieutenant-governor, resigning that office to accept an appointment as judge of the eighteenth judicial circuit to fill a vacancy. Although his standing as a lawyer was high, he appears to have been somewhat wanting in judicial temperament, and at the end of four years, notwithstanding that he had been nominated to succeed himself, he failed of election. In the state constitutional convention of 1867, of which he was a member, he was made chairman of a select committee on procedure, and of a committee which reported the provisions for the executive department. In 1871 he established the Bay City Chronicle, changing the paper from a weekly to a daily in 1873. In 1876 he was a commissioner from Michigan to the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia. Toward the end of that year he was appointed by President Grant minister resident at The Hague, a post which he retained until 1882, when he resigned. At the time of his death he was president of the Bay City board of education. He married, June 1, 1841, Amanda S. daughter of John and Sophia Moulton of New Haven, Connecticut, and cousin of Commodore Isaac Hull.

[There is a summary sketch of Birney's life in Michigan Biographies. (1924), I, 84; and there is a brief account by A. C. Maxwell in the Michigan Pioneer and History Colls., XXII, 227-30 (1893). See also the Journal of the Michigan Constitutional Convention of 1867.]

W.M.


BIRNEY, James Gillespie, 1792-1857, abolitionist leader, statesman, orator, writer, lawyer, jurist, newspaper publisher and editor, the Philanthropist, founded 1836.  On two occasions, mobs in Cincinnati attacked and wrecked his newspaper office.  Founder and president of the Liberty Party in 1848.  Third party presidential candidate, 1840, 1844.  Founder University of Alabama.  Native American rights advocate.  Member of the American Colonization Society.  American Anti-Slavery Society, Manager, 1835-1836, Vice President, 1835-1836, 1836-1838, Executive Committee, 1838-1840, Corresponding Secretary, 1838-1840. American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Secretary, 1840-1841, Executive Committee, 1840-1842.  His writings include: “Ten Letters on Slavery and Colonization,” (1832-1833), “Addresses and Speeches,” (1835), “Vindication of the Abolitionists,” (1835), “The Philanthropist,” a weekly newspaper (1836-1837), “Address of Slaveholders,” (1836), “Argument on Fugitive Slave Case,” (1837), “Political Obligations of Abolitionists,” (1839), “American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery,” (1840), and “Speeches in England,” (1840). 

(Birney, 1969; Blue, Frederick J. No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005, pp. 20-21, 25, 30, 32, 48-51, 55, 9-99, 101, 139, 142, 163, 186, 217; Drake, Thomas. Quakers and Slavery in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950, pp. 141, 149, 159; Dumond, 1938; Dumond, Dwight Lowell, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America, University of Michigan Press, 1961, pp. 90, 93, 176, 179, 185, 197, 198, 200-202, 257-262, 286, 297, 300-301, 303; Filler, Louis. The Crusade Against Slavery, 1830-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960, pp. 55, 73, 77, 89, 94, 107, 128, 131, 137, 140-141, 148, 152, 156, 176; Fladeland, 1955; Mabee, Carleton. Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 27, 36, 40, 41, 49, 54, 55, 60, 71, 92, 195, 228, 252,293, 301, 323, 328, 350; Mitchell, Thomas G. Antislavery Politics in Antebellum and Civil War America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007, pp. 4-5, 7, 8, 13-15, 18, 21-31, 35, 50, 101, 199, 225; Pease, William H., & Pease, Jane H. The Antislavery Argument. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965, pp. 43-49; Rodriguez, Junius P., Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 43-44, 46, 48, 163, 188-189, 364, 522; Sorin, Gerald. The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Corporation, 1971, pp. 25, 47, 51, 52, 65, 70n, 97, 103n; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 267-269; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 291-294; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 79-80; Birney, William, Jas. G. Birney and His Times, 1890; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 2; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume II. New York: James T. White, 1892, pp. 312-313). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 1, Pt. 2, pp. 291-294:

BIRNEY, JAMES GILLESPIE (February 4, 1792- November 25, 1857), anti-slavery leader, was the son of James Birney, an Irish expatriate who migrated to America in 1783 and in 1788 removed to Kentucky, where he eventually became one of the richest men in the state. Although a slaveholder, the elder Birney advocated a free state constitution for Kentucky and favored emancipation. He married about 1790 a daughter of John Read, also an Irish exile; she died in 1795. James Gillespie, the only son of the marriage, was born at Danville. He was educated at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky, and at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he graduated in 1810. He read law in the office of Alexander J. Dallas [q.v.] at Philadelphia, was admitted to the bar in 1814, and began what presently became an important practise at Danville. On February 1, 1816, he married Agatha, daughter of William McDowell, United States district judge, and niece of Governor George McDowell of Kentucky. The marriage brought him some slaves. In August 1816 he was elected to the lower house of the legislature. Two years later he removed to Madison County, Alabama. He was not a member of the Alabama constitutional convention, but he seems to have been largely responsible for the inclusion in the state constitution, in amended form, of certain provisions of the Kentucky constitution permitting the legislature to emancipate slaves and prohibiting the introduction of slaves into the state for sale. In October 1819 he took his seat as a representative in the first General Assembly of Alabama, but his opposition to a resolution indorsing the candidacy of Andrew Jackson for president was unpopular, and he was not reelected. He had already attained marked prominence as a lawyer, but by 1820 neglect of his plantation, together with gambling, brought financial embarrassment, and in January 1823 he removed to Huntsville, later selling his plantation with its slaves. At Huntsville his legal practise shortly recouped his finances, and thereafter, for most of his life, he was comparatively wealthy. For several years he acted as counsel for the Cherokee Nation. He had been brought up an Episcopalian, but in 1826, mainly through the influence of his wife, he became a Presbyterian. From about this time dated his interest in the colonization movement and the restriction of slavery and the domestic, slave trade. A bill which he drafted to give effect to the provision of the Alabama constitution prohibiting the importation of slaves for sale, although passed by the General Assembly in January 1827, was repealed in 1829, following the election of Jackson. He was nominated a presidential elector on the Adams ticket in 1828, but Birney strongly disapproved of the policy of attacking Jackson personally, and urged the Northern element of the party to direct their opposition to the annexation of Texas and the issue of nullification. A visit to New York and New England in the fall of 1829 impressed him with the superiority of free institutions, economic and social, to those of the slave states, but he was not yet an abolitionist, and his growing reputation as an anti-slavery supporter rested upon his repugnance to slavery in general and his advocacy of gradual emancipation. For reasons not divulged he parted company politically with Henry Clay, one of his father's intimate friends, in October 1830. Another antislavery bill, the passage of which in Alabama he secured in January 1832, was repealed in December. In August of that year he accepted a commission as agent of the American Colonization Society, and for some months traveled and lectured in the South in behalf of that organization. An idea that Kentucky was "the best site in our whole country for taking a stand against slavery" (letter to Gerrit Smith, in W. Birney, Life and Times of James G. Birney, p. 131) led him in November to return to Danville. Several of his occasional writings, among them two letters on slavery and colonization addressed to Reverend R. R. Gurley (1832), essays on slavery and colonization contributed to the Huntsville Advocate (1833), and two letters to the Presbyterian Church (1834), belong to this period. The emancipation of his six slaves in 1834 was later described in detail in a letter (1836) to Colonel Stone, editor of the New York Spectator (Birney, op. cit., Appendix D). Convinced that colonization would increase the interstate slave-trade, and unable to reconcile it with his views of religion and justice, he resigned in 1834 the vice-presidency of the Kentucky Colonization Society, stating his reasons in a Letter on Colonization (first published in the Lexington Western Luminary and later reprinted in several editions), which added to his reputation and definitely allied him with the more aggressive anti-slavery forces. March 1835 saw him active in forming the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society, but the membership of the American Anti-Slavery Society, whose meeting at Cincinnati he attended, did not seem to him effective. In a speech at the New York meeting of the Society in May 1835 he forcibly urged united action by all opponents of slavery. A second visit to New England, after the New York meeting, was interrupted by news of outspoken hostility to the publication in Kentucky of an anti-slavery weekly, the first number of which he had planned to issue on August 1. An attempt to mob him on his return was defeated, but the publication of the paper was delayed and his mail was repeatedly rifled. The continuance of opposition determined him to remove to Ohio, and at the beginning of January 1836 he issued at New Richmond, near Cincinnati, the first number of the Philanthropist, continuing the publication, with the editorial assistance of Gamaliel Bailey, until September 1837, when he removed to New York. In the Philanthropist Birney not only attacked both Democrats and Whigs for their attitude toward slavery, but also urged upon the abolitionists the necessity of political action. On July 30 another plan to assault him at a public meeting was frustrated; his Narrative of the Late Riotous Proceedings, published soon after, described the episode, and was followed in October by a letter To the Slaveholders of the South. On several occasions later he was exposed to personal danger, meetings at which he spoke were interrupted, and his paper suffered; his son and biographer, however, is authority for the statement that "no man ever laid an unfriendly hand upon him during his public career" (Birney, op. cit., p. 252). The convention of the New England Anti-Slavery Society at Boston, May 30-June 2, 1837, which he attended, found him an open dissenter from the "no government" or political abstention views of Garrison's followers, and a champion of organized political action and voting. For harboring in his home an escaped slave, Matilda, who was subsequently claimed and returned as a fugitive, he was indicted in Cincinnati, was acquitted after pleading his own case, and presently published his argument. In September, having been elected executive secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he removed to New York, and spent the winter of 1837-38 in visiting such of the state legislatures as were in session. A published letter to Representative F. H. Elmore of South Carolina, in response to a request for information regarding anti-slavery organizations, separated him still farther from the Garrisonians by establishing his position as an upholder of the Federal Constitution. A Letter on the Political Obligations of Abolitionists, prepared as a "report on the duty of political action" for the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May 1839 (published in the Boston Emancipator May 2; replied to at much length by Garrison May 31; the two reprinted as a pamphlet), was an incisive criticism of the constitution of the Society and of the Garrisonian policy, and brought appreciably nearer the ultimate breach in the abolition ranks. For the next few years Birney was the most conspicuous representative and the ablest spokesman of those who sought to get rid of slavery by political means as well as by moral suasion. On November 13, 1839, a state convention at Warsaw, New York, unanimously nominated him for president, but the nomination was declined, partly because the convention was not national in character, and partly because he thought it inexpedient to make an independent nomination until the candidate of the Whigs had been selected. In April 1840, the Whigs having nominated William Henry Harrison, Birney was again nominated at Albany, New York, by an anti-slavery convention representing six states. The new party, generally known as the Liberty party, had at first no name and adopted no platform. The popular vote polled was 7,069, drawn from the six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan (Edward Stanwood, History of the Presidency, I, 203). In the same year Birney went to England, where he was one of the vice-presidents of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention. His best known work, The American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery, was written and published in England (1840; 2nd, and first American, edition, "By an American," 1842; 3rd ed., 1885). He had already, in 1839, emancipated twenty-one slaves, a part of his father's estate, at a cost of $20,000 in the form of compensation for the interest of a co-heir. His wife died in 1839, and in 1841 he married Miss Fitzhugh, sister-in-law of Gerrit Smith. The next year he removed to Bay City, Michigan. In August 1843 he was again nominated for president, this time by a convention at Buffalo, New York, comprising 148 delegates from twelve states. The platform, by far the longest that any party had yet adopted, added to its denunciation of slavery an announcement of the purpose of the abolitionists, "whether as private citizens or as public functionaries sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, to regard and to treat the third clause of the fourth article of that instrument, whenever applied to the case of a fugitive slave, as utterly null and void, and consequently as forming no part of the Constitution of the United States, whenever we are called upon or sworn to support it." No electoral votes were won, but the popular vote of the Liberty party, drawn from the same states that voted for Birney in 1840, with the addition of Indiana, was 62,300. The "Garland Letter," issued on the eve of the election and purporting to solicit for Birney a Democratic nomination for the Michigan legislature and stating his intention to defeat Clay, was a forgery. Horace Greeley's charge in the New York Tribune that Birney had sought a Democratic nomination in New York and tried to catch the Democratic vote was widely believed at the time but appears improbable (Stanwood, op. cit., I, 224). In the summer of 1845 a fall from a horse, resulting in partial paralysis, made Birney an invalid and brought his public career to a close. His Examination of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Strader et al. v. Graham, concluding with an Address to the Free Colored People, advising them to remove to Liberia (1852), was written in 1850: the decision in question was one much relied upon by Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case (1857). About 1853 Birney removed from Michigan to Eagleswood, near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and died there November 25, 1857. In the history of the American anti-slavery movement he occupies a peculiar position. Never a supporter of slavery in principle, notwithstanding that he owned slaves, he accepted the institution for a time as he found it and worked earnestly to ameliorate its conditions. He early manifested an almost insuperable repugnance to selling slaves, and was at pains to explain and defend his course in disposing of the few that he held. Acquaintance with the North convinced him that the overthrow of slavery was as necessary for the whites as for the negroes, and he passed gradually, but on the whole rapidly, from advocacy of gradual emancipation, reinforced by colonization in Africa, to a conviction that abolition must be secured by constitutional political means. He was too reasonable, and perhaps too good a lawyer, to follow Garrison in the latter's denunciation of the Constitution, but he was nevertheless willing at last, as the party platform on which he stood in 1844 showed, to nullify so much of the Constitution as gave countenance to fugitive slave legislation or identified the federal government with the support or extension of slavery. The assertion of his biographer that he "voted Free Soil or Republican tickets, state and national, except Van Buren, as long as he lived," helps ------ to explain the distrust with which Garrison and other radical abolitionists regarded him, although the statement could hardly have applied to the elections of 1840 and 1844.

[The chief authority, except for the presidential campaigns of 1840 and 1844, is Jas. G. Birney and His Times (1890), by his son, Wm. Birney. The book was inspired by what the writer believed to be the misrepresentations of W. P. and F. J. Garrison's William Lloyd Garrison (1885-89), with which its statements and comments should be compared; it is extremely hostile to Garrison and to much of the view of the abolition movement which Garrison's biographers present. The latter, in turn, are persistently hostile to Birney. A review of Wm. Birney's book in the Nation (New York), L, 206, is informing. An earlier life by Beriah Green, Sketches of the Life and Writings of las. Gillespie Birney 1844), written as a campaign document and laudatory, contains many extracts from Birney's writings; see especially pp. 100-04, a summary of Birney's letter of acceptance in 1840, and pp. 105-15, virtually the whole of the letter of acceptance in 1843, dissecting the claims of John Quincy Adams to the support of abolitionists. See also the anonymous Tribute to Jas. G. Birney (Detroit, Michigan, n. d., c. 1865). References in the voluminous literature of the anti-slavery movement are many, but usually brief. Most of Birney's writings appeared first as contributions to newspapers or magazines, subsequently in pamphlets to those already mentioned are to be added Vindication of the Abolitionists (1835), a reply to resolutions of an Alabama committee proposing drastic dealings with abolition agitators; Addresses and Speeches (1835); various articles in the Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine and the Emancipator (1837-44), and Speeches in England (1840).]

W.M.

His chief writings were as follows: “Ten Letters on Slavery and Colonization,” addressed to R. R. Gurley (the first dated 12 July, 1832, the last 11 December, 1833); “Six Essays on Slavery and Colonization,” published in the Huntsville (Alabama) “Advocate” (May, June, and July, 1833); “Letter on Colonization,” resigning vice-presidency of Kentucky colonization society (15 July, 1834); “Letters to the Presbyterian Church” (1834); “Addresses and Speeches” (1835); “Vindication of the Abolitionists” (1835); “The Philanthropist,” a weekly newspaper (1836 and to September, 1837); “Letter to Colonel Stone” (May, 1836); “Address to Slaveholders” (October, 1836); “Argument on Fugitive Slave Case” (1837); “Letter to F. H. Elmore,” of South Carolina (1838); “Political Obligations of Abolitionists” (1839); “Report on the Duty of Political Action,” for executive committee of the American anti-slavery society (May, 1839); “American Churches the Bulwarks of American Slavery” (1840); “Speeches in England” (1840); “Letter of Acceptance”; “Articles in Q. A. S. Magazine and Emancipator” (1837-'44); “Examination of the Decision of the U. S. Supreme Court,” in the case of Strader et al., v. Graham (1850). —His son, James, born in Danville, Kentucky, 7 June, 1817; was a state senator in Michigan in 1859, and was lieutenant-governor of the state and acting governor in 1861-'3. He was appointed by President Grant, in 1876, minister at the Hague, and held that office until 1882.—Another son, William, lawyer, born near Huntsville, Alabama, 28 May, 1819. While pursuing his studies in Paris, in February, 1848, he took an active part in the revolution, and he was appointed on public competition professor of English literature in the college at Bourges. He entered the U. S. national service as captain in April, 1861, and rose through all the grades to the rank of brevet major-general of volunteers, commanding a division for the last two years of the civil war. He participated in the principal battles in Virginia, and, being sent for a short time to Florida after the battle of Olustee, regained possession of the principal parts of the state and of several of the confederate strongholds. ln 1863-'4, having been detailed by the war department as one of three superintendents of the organization of U. S. colored troops, he enlisted, mustered in, armed, equipped, drilled, and sent to the field seven regiments of those troops. In this work he opened all the slave-prisons in Baltimore, and freed their inmates, including many slaves belonging to men in the confederate armies. The result of his operations was to hasten the abolition of slavery in Maryland. He passed four years in Florida after the war, and in 1874 removed to Washington, D. C., where he practised his profession and became attorney for the District of Columbia.— The third son, Dion, physician, entered the army as lieutenant at the beginning of the civil war, rose to the rank of captain, and died in 1864 of disease contracted in the service.—The fourth son, David Bell, born in Huntsville, Alabama, 29 May, 1825; died  in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 18 October, 1864, studied law in Cincinnati, and, after engaging in business in Michigan, began the practice of law in Philadelphia in 1848. He entered the army as lieutenant-colonel at the beginning of the civil war, and was made colonel of the 23d Pennsylvania volunteers, which regiment he raised, principally at his own expense, in the summer of 1861. He was promoted successively to brigadier and major-general of volunteers, and distinguished himself in the battles of Yorktown, Williamsburg, the second battle of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. After the death of General Berry he commanded the division, receiving his commission as major-general, 23 May, 1863. He commanded the 3d corps at Gettysburg, after General Sickles was wounded, and on 23 July, 1864, was given the command of the 10th corps. He died of disease contracted in the service.—A fifth son, Fitzhugh, died, in 1864, of wounds and disease, in the service with the rank of colonel—A grandson, James Gillespie, was lieutenant and captain of cavalry, served as staff officer under Custer and Sheridan, was appointed lieutenant in the regular army at the close of the war; and died soon afterward of disease contracted in the service. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I. pp. 267-269.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, pp. 267-269:

BIRNEY, James Gillespie, statesman, born in Danville, Kentucky, 4 February, 1792; died  in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 25 November, 1857. His ancestors were Protestants of the province of Ulster, Ireland. His father, migrating to the United States at sixteen years of age, settled in Kentucky, became a wealthy merchant, manufacturer, and farmer, and for many years was president of the Danville bank. His mother died when he was three years old, and his early boyhood was passed under the care of a pious aunt. Giving promise of talent and force of character, he was liberally educated with a view to his becoming a lawyer and statesman. After preparation at good schools and at Transylvania university he was sent to Princeton, where he was graduated with honors in 1810. Having studied law for three years, chiefly under Alexander J. Dallas, of Philadelphia, he returned to his native place in 1814 and began practice. In 1816 he married a daughter of William McDowell, judge of the U. S. circuit court and one of several brothers who, with their relatives, connections, and descendants, were the most influential family in Kentucky. In the same year he was elected to the legislature, in which body he opposed and defeated in its original form a proposition to demand of the states of Ohio and Indiana the enactment of laws for the seizure, imprisonment, and delivery to owners of slaves escaping into their limits. His education in New Jersey and Pennsylvania at the time when the gradual emancipation laws of those states were in operation had led him to favor that solution of the slavery problem. In the year 1818 he removed to Alabama, bought a cotton plantation near Huntsville, and served as a member of the first legislature that assembled under the constitution of 1819. Though he was not a member of the convention that framed the instrument, it was chiefly through his influence that a provision of the Kentucky constitution, empowering the general assembly to emancipate slaves on making compensation to the owners, and to prohibit the bringing of slaves into the state for sale, was copied into it, with amendments designed to secure humane treatment for that unfortunate class. In the legislature he voted against a resolution of honor to General Jackson, assigning his reasons in a forcible speech. This placed him politically in a small minority. In 1823, having found planting unprofitable, partly because of his refusal to permit his overseer to use the lash, he resumed at Huntsville the practice of his profession, was appointed solicitor of the northern circuit, and soon gained a large and lucrative practice. In 1826 he made a public profession of religion, united with the Presbyterian church, and was ever afterward a devout Christian. About the same time he began to contribute to the American colonization society, regarding it as preparing the way for gradual emancipation. In 1827 he procured the enactment by the Alabama legislature of a statute "to prohibit the importation of slaves into this state for sale or hire." In 1828 he was a candidate for presidential elector on the Adams ticket in Alabama, canvassed the state for the Adams party, and was regarded as its most prominent member. He was repeatedly elected mayor of Huntsville, and was recognized as the leader in educational movements and local improvements. In 1830 he was deputed by the trustees of the state university to select and recommend to them five persons as president and professors of that institution, also by the trustees of the Huntsville female seminary to select and employ three teachers. In the performance of these trusts he spent several months in the Atlantic states, extending his tour as far north as Massachusetts. His selections were approved. Returning home by way of Kentucky, he called on Henry Clay, with whom he had been on terms of friendship and political sympathy, and urged that statesman to place himself at the head of the gradual emancipation movement in Kentucky. The result of the interview was the final alienation in public matters and politics of the parties to it, though their friendly personal relations remained unchanged. Mr. Birney did not support Mr. Clay politically after 1830 or vote for him in 1832. For several years he was the confidential adviser and counsel of the Cherokee nation, an experience that led him to sympathize with bodies of men who were wronged under color of law. In 1831 he had become so sensible of the evil influences of slavery that he determined to remove his large family to a free state, and in the winter of that year visited Illinois and selected Jacksonville as the place of his future residence. Returning to Alabama, he was winding up his law business and selling his property with a view to removal, when he received, most unexpectedly, an appointment from the American colonization society as its agent for the southwest. From motives of duty he accepted and devoted himself for one year to the promotion of the objects of that society. Having become convinced that the slave-holders of the gulf states, with few exceptions, were hostile to the idea of emancipation in the future, he lost faith in the efficacy of colonization in that region. In his conversations about that time with southern politicians and men of influence he learned enough to satisfy him that, although the secret negotiations in 1829 of the Jackson administration for the purchase of Texas had failed, the project of annexing that province to the United States and forming several slave states out of its territory had not been abandoned; that a powerful combination existed at the south for the purpose of sending armed adventurers to Texas; and that southern politicians were united in the design to secure for the south a majority in the U. S. senate. The situation seemed to him to portend the permanence of slavery, with grave danger of civil war and disunion of the states. Resigning his agency and relinquishing his Illinois project, he removed, in November, 1833, to Kentucky for the purpose of separating it from the slave states by effecting the adoption of a system of gradual emancipation. He thought its example might be followed by Virginia and Tennessee, and that thus the slave states would be placed in a hopeless minority, and slavery in process of extinction. But public opinion in his native state had greatly changed since he had left it; the once powerful emancipation element had been weakened by the opposition of political leaders, and especially of Henry Clay. His efforts were sustained by very few. In June, 1834, he set free his own slaves and severed his connection with the colonization society, the practical effect of which, he had found, was to afford a pretext for postponing emancipation indefinitely. From this time he devoted himself with untiring zeal to the advocacy in Kentucky of the abolition of slavery. On 19 March, 1835, he formed the Kentucky anti-slavery society, consisting of forty members, several of whom had freed their slaves. In May, at New York, he made the principal speech at the meeting of the American anti-slavery society, and thenceforward he was identified with the Tappans, Judge William Jay, Theodore D. Weld, Alvan Stewart, Thomas Morris, and other northern abolitionists, who pursued their object by constitutional methods. In June, 1835, he issued a prospectus for the publication, beginning in August, of an anti-slavery weekly paper, at Danville, Kentucky; but before the time fixed for issuing the first number the era of mob violence and social persecutions, directed against the opponents of slavery, set in. This was contemporaneous with the renewed organization of revolts in Texas; the beginning of the war for breaking up the refuge for fugitive slaves, waged for years against the Florida Seminoles; and the exclusion, by connivance of the postmaster-general, of anti-slavery papers from the U. S. mails; and it preceded, by a few months only, President Jackson's message, recommending not only the refusal of the use of the mails, but the passage of laws by congress and also by the non-slaveholding states for the suppression of “incendiary” (anti- slavery) publications. Mr. Birney found it impossible to obtain a publisher or printer; and as his own residence in Kentucky had become disagreeable and dangerous, he removed to Cincinnati, where he established his paper. His press was repeatedly destroyed by mobs; but he met all opposition with courage and succeeded finally in maintaining the freedom of the press in Cincinnati, exhibiting great personal courage, firmness, and judgment. On 22 January, 1836, a mob assembled at the court-house for the purpose of destroying his property and seizing his person; the city and county authorities had notified him of their inability to protect him; he attended the meeting, obtained leave to speak, and succeeded in defeating its object. As an editor, he was distinguished by a thorough knowledge of his subject, courtesy, candor, and large attainments as a jurist and statesman. The “Philanthropist” gained rapidly an extensive circulation. Having associated with him as editor Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, he devoted most of his own time to public speaking, visiting in this work most of the cities and towns in the free states and addressing committees of legislative bodies. His object was to awaken the people of the north to the danger menacing the freedom of speech and of the press, the trial by jury, the system of free labor, and the national constitution, from the encroachments of the slave-power and the plotted annexation of new slave states in the southwest. In recognition of his prominence as an anti-slavery leader, the executive committee of the American anti-slavery society unanimously elected him, in the summer of 1837, to the office of secretary. Having accepted, he removed to New York city, 20 September, 1837. In his new position he was the executive officer of the society, conducted its correspondence, selected and employed lecturers, directed the organization of auxiliaries, and prepared its reports. He attended the principal anti-slavery conventions, and his wise and conservative counsel had a marked influence on their action. He was faithful to the church, while he exposed and rebuked the ecclesiastical bodies that sustained slavery; and true to the constitution, while he denounced the constructions that severed it from the principles contained in its preamble and in the declaration of independence. To secession, whether of the north or south, he was inflexibly opposed. The toleration or establishment of slavery in any district or territory belonging to the United States, and its abolition in the slave states, except under the war power, he held was not within the legal power of congress; slavery was local, and freedom national. To vote he considered the duty of every citizen, and more especially of every member of the American anti-slavery society, the constitution of which recognized the duty of using both moral and political action for the removal of slavery. In the beginning of the agitation the abolitionists voted for such anti-slavery candidates as were nominated by the leading parties; but as the issues grew, under the aggressive action of the slave power, to include the right of petition, the freedom of speech and of the press, the trial by jury, the equality of all men before the law, the right of the free states to legislate for their own territory, and the right of congress to exclude slavery from the territories, the old parties ceased to nominate anti-slavery candidates, and the abolitionists were forced to make independent nominations for state officers and congress, and finally to form a national and constitutional party. Mr. Birney was their first and only choice as candidate for the presidency. During his absence in England, in 1840, and again in 1844, he was unanimously nominated by national conventions of the liberty party. At the former election he received 7,369 votes; and at the latter, 62,263. This number, it was claimed by his friends, would have been much larger if the electioneering agents of the whig party had not circulated, three days before the election and too late for denial and exposure, a forged letter purporting to be from Mr. Birney, announcing his withdrawal from the canvass, and advising anti-slavery men to vote for Mr. Clay. This is known as “the Garland forgery.” Its circulation in Ohio and New York probably gave the former state to Mr. Clay, and greatly diminished Mr. Birney's vote in the latter. In its essential doctrines the platform of the liberty party in 1840 and 1844 was identical with those that were subsequently adopted by the free-soil and republican parties. In the summer of 1845 Mr. Birney was disabled physically by partial paralysis, caused by a fall from a horse, and from that time he withdrew from active participation in politics, though he continued his contributions to the press. In September, 1839, he emancipated twenty-one slaves that belonged to his late father's estate, setting off to his co-heir $20,000, in compensation for her interest in them. In 1839 Mr. Birney lost his wife, and in the autumn of 1841 he married Miss Fitzhugh, sister of Mrs. Gerrit Smith, of New York. In 1842 he took up his residence in Bay City, Mich. In person he was of medium height, robust build, and handsome countenance. His manners were those of a polished man of the world, free from eccentricities, and marked with dignity. He had neither vices nor bad habits. As a presiding officer in a public meeting he was said to have no superior. As a public speaker he was generally calm and judicial in tone; but when under strong excitement he rose to eloquence.


BIRNEY, William, 1819-1907, lawyer, Union soldier, abolitionist leader, strong opponent of slavery, commander of U.S. Colored Troops.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume I, p. 269; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936 Volume 1, Pt. 2, p. 294; Who’s Who in America, 1899-1907; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 2, p. 819).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936 Volume 1, Pt. 2, p. 294:

BIRNEY, WILLIAM (May 28, 1819-August 14, 1907), Union soldier, author, was born in Madison County Alabama, the son of James G. Birney [q.v.] and Agatha McDowell. At some time prior to 1845 he was practising law in Cincinnati, Ohio. In February 1848, being a member of a Republican student organization in Paris, he commanded at a barricade in the Rue St. Jacques during the revolutionary outbreak. In the same year he won in a competitive examination an appointment as professor of English literature at the Lycée at Bourges, where he remained for two years. During his five years' residence abroad he wrote for English and American papers, among other things reporting the first World's Fair at London (1851). He appears also to have paid some attention to the history of art and current activities in art education (see his Art and Education, a lecture before the Washington Art Club, February 6, 1878). Upon his return to the United States he established the daily Register at Philadelphia (1853) and edited it for two years. At the outbreak of the Civil War he raised a volunteer company in New Jersey, and became in succession captain of the 1st New Jersey Infantry and major and colonel of the 4th New Jersey Infantry. In 1863 he was, appointed one of the superintendents of the enlistment of colored troops, in which capacity he organized seven regiments. On May 22, 1863, he was made brigadier-general of volunteers. While in command of colored troops he freed the inmates of the slave prisons at Baltimore. He took part in a number of important engagements, and after the battle of Olustee, Florida (February 20, 1864), aided in recovering the state from the Confederates. During the last two years of the war he commanded a division. On March 13, 1865, he was made brevet major-general of volunteers "for gallant and meritorious service during the war," and on August 24 was mustered out. After a residence of four years in Florida he removed to Washington, where he practised law, wrote fortnightly letters to the New York Examiner, and served for a time as United States attorney for the District of Columbia. His best-known writing, James G. Birney and His Times, appeared in 1890. In his later years he interested himself in religious controversy, publishing Functions of the Church and State Distinguished: A Plea for Civil and Religious Liberty (1897); Revelation and the Plan of Salvation (1903); Creeds not for Secularists (1906); Hell and Hades (Truth Seeker Tracts, New Series, No. 51; New York, n. d.), and How Christianity Began (Ibid., No. 54, n. d.). He was twice married: in 1845 to Catherine Hoffman, and in 1891 to Mattie Ashby.

[Who's Who in America, 1899-1907; F. B. Heitman, History Register (1903); Official Records, see Index; Washington Post, and Evening Star, August 15, 1907.]

W.M.



Sources:
Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.