Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans, and the Civil War by D. Laurence Rogers (review)

144 The Michigan Historical Review D. Laurence Rogers. Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans, and the Civil War. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011. Pp. 315. Appendices. Bibliographic essay. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $39.95. D. Laurence Rogers’s insightful study makes clear the central political role James Gillespie Birney played in bringing an end to slavery in this country. Birney’s “courageous life journey” (p. xiii) reflects the evolution of the antislavery movement in the United States from the 1820s until Birney’s death three years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1839 when the American Antislavery Society split, Birney sided with those who favored political action and accepted the nomination of the Liberty Party to run for president in 1840. Birney again ran for president in the election of 1844, in which Democrat James K. Polk defeated Whig candidate Henry Clay. Birney was (and continues to be) unfairly blamed for splitting the vote and causing Clay’s defeat. This charge and the fact that his papers were inaccessible for more than a century after his death have obscured his name and his pioneering political abolitionism. Yet the tide of antislavery sentiment that Birney and the Liberty Party helped to create in the 1840s was largely responsible for carrying Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1861. Rogers argues that the Liberty Party and its successor, the Free Soil Party, “laid the foundation for the greatest shift in political opinion in American history, from a nation that supported slavery to one that opposed it” (p. viii). In his lifetime, Birney himself transitioned from slaveholder to abolitionist. Born in Danville, Kentucky, in 1792, he was the son of David Birney, a slaveholder but also an antislavery advocate. Thus from an early age James Birney was exposed to the contradictions surrounding the institution of slavery in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. His antislavery sentiments were nurtured in the East, at Princeton University, and in Philadelphia, where he studied law. As a member first of the Kentucky and then the Alabama legislatures, he stirred local hostility by speaking forcefully against slavery. After freeing his own slaves in 1835, Birney moved his family to Cincinnati, where he began publication of The Philanthropist, an antislavery newspaper. His response to the slavery issue changed rapidly after 1830, from supporting colonization (sending black Americans to Africa) to demanding the immediate emancipation of all slaves. Rogers connects Birney to others in the abolitionist movement and places him at the political center of their struggle to end slavery. Among Book Reviews 145 many other incidents, Rogers describes Birney’s 1837 legal battle against slave catchers, which he and Salmon P. Chase fought together and lost; Birney’s role in involving the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell in the abolitionist cause; his influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe; and his residence at Eagleswood, a utopian community established by New England transcendentalists at Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where Birney spent the last years of his life. In 1842 Birney purchased property along the Saginaw River. Michigan was favorable to antislavery, and in settling there Birney hoped to recover from the 1840 election and recoup earlier financial losses. Michigan readers will be especially interested in chapter 13, “Michigan’s ‘Wonderful Revolution.’” Here Rogers covers Birney’s years in Michigan in the 1840s and describes and explains the favorable support antislavery received in the state. In 1845, Birney was partially paralyzed after he was thrown from a horse, which curtailed some of his political activities. D. Laurence Rogers’s excellent biography is a long overdue tribute to Birney and to his sons, who played major roles as officers in the Union Army. (In the last three chapters of Apostles of Equality Rogers covers the Civil War careers of Birney’s descendants, primarily General William Birney and General David Bell Birney.) In truth, Rogers has provided us with more than a biography in this work. We now have a first-rate historical account that is as much about the period and the antislavery cause as it is about the Birneys. John Fierst, Librarian Clarke Historical Library JoEllen McNergney Vinyard. Right in Michigan’s Grassroots: From the...