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xi introduction it was a strange sight in rural tennessee: a lone well-dressed man on horseback, jolting along a dusty road. it was December 1831, and the rider had been on a mission—to find a new home away from the south. He was a thirty-nine-year-old political maverick from Huntsville, Alabama , named James Gillespie Birney. After a southampton, Virginia, slave insurrection that August resulted in the death of sixty whites and more than one hundred blacks, including instigator Nat turner, Birney determined to seek a quieter place to rear and educate his children. He would not continue in Alabama nor return to Kentucky, his birthplace. He had visited ohio, indiana, and illinois and finally settled on Jacksonville, illinois, where Rev. edward Beecher, a noted eastern scholar, preacher, and educator, was to be president of a new college. the place was in southwestern illinois not far from sangamon County, where would-be politician Abraham lincoln was practicing law. Although vigorous and intent, Birney had failed as a plantation owner, primarily because of a major flaw: he was too sympathetic to his slaves and failed to demand the labor required to extract enough cotton from the rich, productive soil to make himself wealthy. unlike many slaveholders, he could not even order an unruly slave to be whipped, his son William had observed. Neighbors gossiped about deeper character issues. the outlander from Kentucky had succumbed to the aristocratic curses of strong drink, gambling, and horse racing that were the passion of his wealthy neighbors. Not only had he neglected his plantation, but he had also found himself deep in debt from losses on failed crops and multiple vices. Chastened and nearly bankrupt, Birney had subdued his pride and mortgaged his four dozen slaves, including his household favorites, Michael Matthews and his family, whom he had brought from Kentucky. He swore off liquor and gambling and joined the reformist presbyterian Church. elected mayor of Huntsville, he battled the saloon keepers who ran the town. slowly he was rebuilding the law practice and the fine reputation he had earned in his first years in Alabama as state solicitor for five counties, xii| Introduction prosecuting murderers and breaking up a lynch ring, and he had bravely defended the Cherokee who were being pushed off their land. His political career in Alabama had been virtually destroyed when he opposed the Democratic god of the frontier, General Andrew Jackson. the legendary “old Hickory,” now president, was idolized by frontier folk whose land he had wrenched from the Cherokee and other tribes and whose futures he had salvaged from the second British invasion in the War of 1812. it was either a courageous or foolhardy man who would openly oppose president Jackson politically. But such action was Birney’s nature. Birney was an idealist in the land of realists, a dreamer who took refuge in the words of the Declaration of independence “all men are created equal” to underpin his opposition to injustice against both white and black citizens. Although he had grown up owning slaves in Kentucky, his attitudes had been broadened by antislavery preachers of his youth and among the abolitionists of princeton university and the quakers of philadelphia, where he had studied law. At this point in history slavery had been part of the accepted order of things for more than two centuries, since the first Dutch ship carried African men and women into Virginia in 1619. As Birney rode slowly south along that lonely stretch of tennessee road, he suddenly heard wailing human cries from an outbuilding at the rear of a ramshackle inn. unable to ignore the agonizing screams, the curious and fearless lawyer reined up and strode to the building. throwing open the door, he was startled to see a Negro woman in her early twenties, stripped to the waist and bleeding from her back, arms, and legs. she was tied like a side of beef to an overhead beam so that only the tips of her toes reached the floor. the young woman slumped in her bonds, her body jerking as blood spurted with each slash of the cruel flat cowhide whip. the stocky, powerful abuser, whom Birney later learned was the wife of the innkeeper, was angrily beating the helpless black woman as the woman shouted defiantly. the cries did little to deter the assault, and the innkeeper’s wife barely looked up as the concerned lawyer entered the shed. A small biracial girl, perhaps five years...

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