Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 1).djvu/295

Rh 1818, he opposed the introduction of slavery into it. He was the author of " Notes on a Journey through France" (1815) and "Notes on a Jour- ney in America" (1818), in which he gave sanguine accounts of Illinois, and of " Letters from Illinois " (1818). [le was drowned while returning from a visit to Robert Owen at New Harmony, Ind.

BIRNEY, James Gillespie, statesman, b. in Danville, Ky., 4 Feb., 1792 ; d. in Perth Amboy. N. J., 25 Nov., 1857. His ancestors were Protestants of the province of Ulster, Ireland. His father, mi- grating to the United States at sixteen years of age, settled in Kentucky, became a wealthy mer- chant, 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 char- acter, he was liberally educated with a view to his becoming a lawyer and statesman. After prepara- tion at good schools and at Transylvania univer- sity he was sent to Princeton, where he was gradu- ated with honors in 1810. Having studied law for three years, chieily 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 rela- tives, connec- tions, and de- scendants, were the most influ- ential family in Kentucky. In the same year he was elected to the legisla- ture, 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 es- caping 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 Hunts- ville, 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 con- stitution, 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 amend- ments designed to secure humane treatment for that unfortunate class. In the legislature he voted against a resolution of honor to Gen. Jackson, as- signing his reasons in a forcible speech. This placed him politicallv in a small minority. In 1828, 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 lu- crative practice. In 1826 he made a public pro- fession 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 pre- paring the way for gradual emancipation. In 1827 he procured the enactment by the Alabama legis- lature 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 Ad- ams ticket in Alabama, canvassed the state for the Adams party, and was regarded as its most promi- nent 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 in- stitution, also by the trustees of the Huntsville female seminary to select and employ three teach- ers. In the performance of these trusts he spent several months in the Atlantic states, extending his tour as far north as Massachusetts. His selec- tions were approved. Returning home by way of Kentucky, he called on Henry Clay, with whom he had been on terms of friendship and political sym- pathy, and urged that statesman to place himself at the head of the gradual emancipation move- ment in Kentucky. The result of the interview was the final alienation in public matters and poli- tics of the parties to it, though their friendly per- sonal 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 Chero- kee nation, an experience that led him to sympa- thize 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 so- ciety 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 so- ciety. 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 eificacy 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 combi- nation 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 per- manence 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 Vir-