life belong to the century of the Revolution. Garrison recorded
his indebtedness to Lundy in the words: "If I have in any way,
however humble, done anything towards calling attention to
slavery, or bringing out the glorious prospect of a complete
jubilee in our country at no distant day, I feel that I owe
everything in this matter, instrumentally under God, to Benjamin
Lundy."

Different in type, yet even more significant on account of its
peculiar relations to the cause of abolition, was the life of
James Gillespie Birney, who was born in a wealthy slaveholding
family at Dansville, Kentucky, in the year 1792. The Birneys were
anti-slavery planters of the type of Washington and Jefferson.
The father had labored to make Kentucky a free State at the time
of its admission to the Union. His son was educated first at
Princeton, where he graduated in 1810, and then in the office of
a distinguished lawyer in Philadelphia. He began the practice of
law at his home at the age of twenty-two. His home training and
his residence in States which were then in the process of gradual
emancipation served to confirm him in the traditional conviction
of his family. While Benjamin Lundy, at the age of twenty-seven,
was engaged in organizing anti-slavery societies north of the
Ohio River, Birney at the age of twenty-four was influential as a
member of the Kentucky Legislature in the prevention of the
passing of a joint resolution calling upon Ohio and Indiana to
make laws providing for the return of fugitive slaves. He was
also conspicuous in his efforts to secure provisions for gradual
emancipation. Two years later he became a planter near
Huntsville, Alabama. Though not a member of the Constitutional
Convention preparatory to the admission of this Territory into