A lawyer and presidential candidate, James Gillespie Birney (1792-1857) was the most influential American political leader of the antislavery movement in its early phases.

James G. Birney was born on Feb. 4, 1792, the son of a Scotch-Irish immigrant who settled in Kentucky in 1788 and became one of the state's richest men. He went to Transylvania University and graduated from Princeton in 1810. After studying law in Philadelphia, he was admitted to the bar in 1814 and settled in Danville, Ky. He married Agatha McDowell, of a prominent Kentucky family, in 1816 and was elected to the lower house of the Kentucky Legislature. He moved to Alabama in 1818 and bought a cotton plantation near Huntsville. Although he owned slaves, he favored the eventual abolition of the institution of slavery. Financial reverses forced him to sell his plantation in 1823, and he resumed his law practice in Huntsville.

Birney's conscience was increasingly troubled by slavery...