such complete victory as did William Lloyd Garrison, who, when he died in 1879, had been for fifteen years a national hero. His fame might be said to have come to him as a result of his having lived to complete his work, whereas his co-laborer, James G. Birney, dying before the Civil War began, failed to obtain even posthumous reward, although he so richly deserved it.
James Gillespie Birney was a native of Kentucky, bom about the time the first newspaper presses were being carried over the mountain roads. After graduating from Princeton, he had practiced law and, at the same time that Garrison was starting the Liberator, had become convinced, from his own accurate knowledge of slavery, that it was undermining the free institutions of the country and endangering the union of the states. He determined to liberate the few slaves that he owned and to move to Illinois, "the best site in the whole world for taking a stand against slavery."[1] His education, ability and firm Christian attitude had made him a national character, and when, in the spring of 1836, he began the publication of the Philanthropist in Cincinnati, interest was shown all over the country as to how far the threats of the pro-slavery element would be carried out.
Birney, in his paper, did more than a host of editors to show the North that the slave power in the South was not content with holding the black man in subjection. In issue after issue he set forth facts that showed that free speech and the free press were threatened by those in political control of the south. The speeches of the governors of Georgia, South Carolina and other states were printed with the speeches of Calhoun and other pro-, slavery statesmen; these he backed up with editorials from the leading papers in the slave states, and the laws passed
- ↑ Birney, James G. Birney and His Times, 131.
