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49 ChAPter 4 trapped in the Golden Circle The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force. —u.s. supReMe CouRt CHief JustiCe JoHN MARsHAll the green meadows and piney woods of frontier Alabama in the early 1800s offered great profit to settlers if they owned slaves, planted cotton, and were good managers. James G. Birney qualified on the first two counts, but he failed miserably on the third. He was too sympathetic, too softhearted while successful plantation owners and their whip-wielding overseers were hard drivers of their slaves. But being a softhearted humanitarian was not Birney’s only problem in Alabama. After the War of 1812, as Alabama historian Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton has observed, a folk migration broke out, rivaling the California Gold Rush that came decades later. it was a biblical-like exodus from more populous states created by “Alabama fever.”1 And the young Birneys had caught the fever. it was a land of plenty, where farmers boasted of corn that grew so fast they could feed their own razorback hogs, scarcely ever have to buy meat, and have enough corn left over to brew up vats of moonshine. the jug stashed in the barn was always full, even though drinking didn’t exactly fit with the more temperate admonishments of their Methodist or Baptist faiths. the cavalcade of rickety horse-drawn carriages and wagons piled with furniture jolted on muddy roads and corduroy causeways heading south from Kentucky to Alabama. the conveyances carried a stream of immigrants seeking opportunity in the virgin territory of the tennessee Valley. 50| Chapter 4 one of the jolting wagons contained exuberant James G. Birney, twenty-six, glad to be free of the social strictures of Danville; Birney’s boyhood slave and companion, Michael; and Michael’s wife and three children. several other wagons carried two dozen family slaves of all ages—from two-yearold toddler polly, to tom, a white-thatched forty-four-year-old, worn from years of work in the fields—who Birney intended would be the foundation of a successful cotton plantation. they were the lucky ones being able to ride. A British traveler cited by Hamilton told of seeing nearly a thousand foot-weary slaves along a trail to Montgomery and chained coffles shuffling perhaps twenty-five miles a day into Huntsville under the lash of a slave trader from Mobile.2 it was spring 1818 when Birney moved to Alabama seeking a fresh place to settle his family and escape the disapproval he was facing in Danville. He had committed a cardinal sin: showing sympathy for slaves by opposing a fugitive slave law as a member of the Kentucky state legislature. the slaverysaturated white social structure immediately rose up like an angered dragon and blew its hot breath on the infidel who dared raise a spear against it. there was no defense except to flee, and Alabama was seen as ideal to begin anew. fertile land could be had for as little as $1.25 per acre, and compliant slaves to work it were plentiful. After the land was purchased, Birney returned for his pretty, delicate wife, Agatha, and son, James Jr., not yet one year old. they arrived in the autumn of 1818 in a new carriage purchased for him by his brother-in-law John Marshall for $400. fatherly advice was given in a letter from James sr. from Danville: “it is a neat, light comfortable little carriage and i think very cheap; Mr. Marshall ought to be indemnified and the payment of his note with gratitude when it is fully due.”3 the family hemp business, in which young Birney had become a partner with his aging father, who then was fifty-one, was a major source of his finances for a time. Noting that Gratz and Brothers had paid $1,800 for cordage, his father wrote, “Half this sum will be due to you and you may apply to your use that amount of the last of the sales of rope which may be made by you, or should it so happen that funds cannot be raised in time for your purpose from that source you may draw on me at sight or direct the payment of that sum in any way which will be most agreeable to you.”4 But the rope business was in for a readjustment. Russian cordage...

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