BIRNEY ON PBS: Bay City Pioneer Recognized as Alabama Abolition Leader
Liberty Party Leader Organized Abolitionists in Michigan Leading to GOP
December 13, 2012
By: Dave Rogers
Topper Birney emotes for crowd re-enacting his great-great-grandfather James G. Birney at Maple Hill Cemetery Stroll in Huntsville, Alabama.
It's been more than 180 years since Kentucky-born lawyer and Bay City pioneer James G. Birney defied his neighbors and launched the movement to free the slaves.
Finally, recognition has come in the form of a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) program marking sites important to the abolitionist crusade. PBS recently posted this information at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/lincolns-abolition/:
"As a legislator in Alabama, Birney proposed measures that would allow the legislature to emancipate slaves and prohibit selling slaves brought into the state. Driven from the South after trying to set up an abolitionist newspaper, he moved North, where he was elected executive secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
"Birney's ideas about achieving abolition using political means and moral suasion caused friction with William Lloyd Garrison, who encouraged his followers to boycott politics and adopted an anti-clerical position. In 1840, Birney joined those who left Garrison's group to form the Liberty Party."
The full story of Birney and his family, including four sons and a grandson who fought with the Union Army, is recounted in a new book, "Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans and the Civil War," published by Michigan State University Press.
Herman H. "Topper" Birney, of Huntsville, Alabama, was interviewed by PBS and is featured on the website showing his great-great-grandfather's home and law office.
Susanna Leberman, archivist at the Huntsville-Madison County Library, contributed information about Birney for an interactive map that is part of a website for a three-part "American Experience" program "The Abolitionists" to be broadcast Jan. 8, 15 and 22 on PBS.
Scholars writing in Duke University Law School journals have identified Birney's representation of the Cherokee Indians in Alabama beginning in 1826 as the seminal moment sparking the nationwide abolition movement.
Indians of all tribes were driven from Southern states on foot to Indian Country, later Oklahoma, in 1832. Thousands died under the lash of President Andrew Jackson's soldiers.
Outrage mounted among White Christian sympathizers and free blacks and activist women quickly joined the abolitionists, giving energy to the campaign that shifted to the goal of freeing slaves of African descent.
Birney's hapless campaign as the first Presidential candidate in history to advocate abolition in 1840 drove him to seek solace away from civilization.
The fact that he was in the British Isles lecturing about the evils of slavery during the campaign and didn't return soon enough even to vote for himself didn't enhance his effort. Birney received no votes in his future home of Saginaw County and only 321 in Michigan among 7,453 nationally.
He landed in Saginaw in 1841 and moved 12 miles north to Bay City, then known as Lower Saginaw, in 1842. He bought hundreds of acres of land at tax sales and promoted the new community to friends back east.
Birney traveled widely on horseback, wrote for newspapers and made speeches to rally Michigan abolitionists to the nascent Liberty Party.
After a second try for President in 1844 caused defeat of former family friend from Kentucky, Sen. Henry Clay, the abolition movement gained momentum. It morphed into the Free Soil Party and then the Republican Party that sprang up at a meeting "Under the Oaks" in Jackson in 1854.
Birney became the philosophical and psychic prophet of Abraham Lincoln, the second Republican to seek the Presidency, who won a four-way race in 1860.
We all know what happened next: the Civil War. Birney was long since dead, expiring finally from injuries and paralysis suffered in a fall from a horse 12 years earlier in Bay City.