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Benedict Cumberbatch as Rev. William Ford, preaching in the hit movie "Twelve Years a Slave."

BIRNEY PROFILED: Bay City Pioneer Compared to Character in 12 Years a Slave

March 5, 2014       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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Bay City pioneer James G. Birney has been compared by a Southern writer to one of the characters in the Academy Award winning movie "Twelve Years a Slave."

According to Atlanta author Charles O'Halloran Boyd, the character in the movie "Twelve Years a Slave" comparable to Birney is a Baptist preacher, William Ford, of Louisiana, the only master who treated protagonist Solomon Northrup kindly.

In the movie, plantation owner William Ford is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a British actor noted for his portrayal of legendary detective Sherlock Holmes in a current television series.

The book "Twelve Years a Slave" was recorded by David Wilson, a white lawyer and legislator from New York who claimed to have presented "a faithful history of Solomon Northup's life, as received from his lips."

The first scholarly edition of Northup's memoir, co-edited in 1968 by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon, carefully retraced and validated the account and concluded it to be accurate, according to a 1969 article in the Civil War History magazine by Robert Brent Toplin, film historian at the University of North Carolina.

Dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe and introduced as "another Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin," Northup's book was published in 1853, less than a year after his liberation. It sold over 30,000 copies. It is therefore not only one of the longest North American slave narratives, but also one of the best-selling.

"Supporting Stowe's fictional narrative in detail, Northup's first-hand account of his twelve years of bondage proved another bombshell in the national political debate over slavery leading up to the Civil War, drawing endorsements from major Northern newspapers, anti-slavery organizations, and evangelical groups," wrote one reviewer.

Mrs. Stowe also consulted Birney, who recounted his experiences with slavery, in writing her blockbuster novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Birney's recollections mainly concerned his experience with intransigent preachers who continued to support the "peculiar institution," contending it was sanctioned by the Bible.

The "Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin" was Mrs. Stowe's answer to Southerners who claimed most of the book was based on false claims about the evils of slavery. In that "Key" she detailed her sources for the story, including Mr. Birney.

Birney corresponded with Mrs. Stowe, noting that he was circulating the book in Bay City -- making it perhaps the first book, after the Bible, to influence the settlers here.

Author Joan D. Hedrick, Mrs. Stowe's biographer, wrote that Birney's battles with slavery forces in Cincinnati provided Mrs. Stowe the inspiration to become an abolitionist and to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Pro-slavery mobs destroyed the press that printed Birney's abolitionist newspaper, "The Philanthropist," in 1834.

Birney was charged in Cincinnati in 1837 with harboring a fugitive slave named "Matilda," and was fined $50 by a judge of the Court of Common Pleas despite his defense by Salmon P. Chase, later Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln.

Birney's part in organizing abolitionists in Michigan, leading to formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854 in Jackson, is documented in a book "Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans and the Civil War," published by Michigan State University Press in 2011.

Boyd wrote:

"There was only one type of 'kind master' in slavery: the type like Edward Coles, and James G. Birney. These masters acknowledged that blacks had a right to be free and refused to keep holding their slaves in bondage, even when their states had laws designed to prevent emancipation.

"Because the law in Coles's native Virginia expelled free blacks, he took his slaves to the Illinois Territory, where he freed them and gave them land.

"Birney freed all of his slaves and went on to run for president on an abolitionist platform (1840 & 1844). Those masters who did not take the Coles-Birney path and instead decided to treat their slaves 'humanely' while still refusing to free them or allow them to assert their freedom were simply genteel tyrants," wrote Boyd.

Conducting a Presidential campaign while living in remote Bay City proved to be a difficult task for Birney, who got only about 62,000 votes nationwide and none in what was then Saginaw County. A false charge that he was in league with the Democrats levied in Genesee County by opponents just before the election proved impossible to refute in those early days of journalism. The incident became known as "the Garland Forgery," named after one of the perpetrators of the fraud.

Edward Coles (1786-1868) was a neighbor and anti-slavery associate of Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, as well as secretary to James Madison (1810 to 1815), and the second Governor of Illinois (1822 to 1826).

An anti-slavery advocate throughout his adult life, and who inherited a plantation and slaves, Coles left Virginia for the Illinois Territory in order to set them free. He manumitted his slaves in 1819, and twice led political campaigns that prevented the legitimization of slavery in the new state of Illinois.

Coles corresponded with and advised both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to free their slaves, and in his final years in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania helped shape early historians' views of their republican ideals.

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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