In 1819 he went on a business errand to St. Louis, Missouri, where he found himself in the midst of an agitation over the question of the extension of slavery in the States. With great zest he threw himself into the discussion, making use of the newspapers in Missouri and Illinois. Having lost his property, he returned poverty-stricken to Ohio, where he founded in January, 1821, the Genius of Universal Emancipation. A few months later he transferred his paper to the more congenial atmosphere of Jonesborough, Tennessee, but in 1824 he went to Baltimore, Maryland. In the meantime, Lundy had become much occupied in traveling, lecturing, and organizing societies for the promotion of the cause of abolition. He states that during the ten years previous to 1830 he had traveled upwards of twenty-five thousand miles, five thousand of which were on foot. He now became interested in plans for colonizing negroes in other countries as an aid to emancipation, though he himself had no confidence in the colonization society and its scheme of deportation to Africa. After leading a few negroes to Hayti in 1829, he visited Canada, Texas, and Mexico with a similar plan in view.
During a trip through the Middle States and New England in 1828, Lundy met William Lloyd Garrison, and the following year he walked all the way from Baltimore to Bennington, Vermont, for the express purpose of securing the assistance of the youthful reformer as coeditor of his paper. Garrison had previously favored colonization, but within the few weeks which elapsed before he joined Lundy, he repudiated all forms of colonization and advocated immediate and unconditional emancipation. He at once told Lundy of his change of views. "Well," said Lundy, "thee may put thy initials to thy articles, and I will put my witness to mine, and each will bear his own burden." The two editors were, however, in complete accord in their opposition to the slave-trade. Lundy had suffered a dangerous assault at the hands of a Baltimore slave-trader before he was joined by Garrison. During the year 1830, Garrison was convicted of libel and thrown into prison on account of his scathing denunciation of Francis Todd of Massachusetts, the owner of a vessel engaged in the slave-trade.
These events brought to a crisis the publication of the Genius of Universal Emancipation. The editors now parted company. Again Lundy moved the office of the paper, this time to Washington, D.C., but it soon became a peripatetic monthly, printed wherever the editor chanced to be. In 1836 Lundy began the issue of an anti-slavery paper in Philadelphia, called the National Inquirer, and with this was merged the Genius of Universal Emancipation. He was preparing to resume the issue of his original paper under the old title, in La Salle County, Illinois, when he was overtaken by death on August 22, 1839.
Here was a man without education, without wealth, of a slight frame, not at all robust, who had undertaken, singlehanded and without the shadow of a doubt of his ultimate success, to abolish American slavery. He began the organization of societies which were to displace the anti-slavery societies of the previous century. He established the first paper devoted exclusively to the cause of emancipation. He foresaw that the question of emancipation must be carried into politics and that it must become an object of concern to the general Government as well as to the separate States. In the early part of his career he found the most congenial association and the larger measure of effective support south of Mason and Dixon's Line, and in this section were the greater number of the abolition societies which he organized. During the later years of his life, as it was becoming increasingly difficult in the South to maintain a public anti-slavery propaganda, he transferred his chief activities to the North. Lundy serves as a connecting link between the earlier and the later anti-slavery movements. Eleven years of his early 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 the Union, Birney used his influence to secure provisions in the constitution favorable to gradual emancipation. As a member of the first Legislature, in 1819, he was the author of a law providing a fair trial by jury for slaves indicted for crimes above petty larceny, and in 1826 he became a regular contributor to the American Colonization Society, believing it to be an aid to emancipation. The following year he was able to induce the Legislature, although he was not then a member of it, to pass an act forbidding the importation of slaves into Alabama either for sale or for hire. This was regarded as a step preliminary to emancipation.
The cause of education in Alabama had in Birney a trusted leader. During the year 1830 he spent several months in the North Atlantic States for the selection of a president and four professors for the State University and three teachers for the Huntsville Female Seminary. These were all employed upon his sole recommendation. On his return he had an important interview with Henry Clay, of whose political party he had for several years been the acknowledged leader in Alabama. He urged Clay to place himself at the head of the movement in Kentucky for gradual emancipation. Upon Clay's refusal their political cooperation terminated. Birney never again supported Clay for office and regarded him as in a large measure responsible for the pro-slavery reaction in Kentucky.
Birney, who had now become discouraged regarding the prospect of emancipation, during the winter of 1831 and 1832 decided to remove his family to Jacksonville, Illinois. He was deterred from carrying out his plan, however, by his unexpected appointment as agent of the colonization society in the Southwest—a mission which he undertook from a sense of duty.
In his travels throughout the region assigned to him, Birney became aware of the aggressive designs of the planters of the Gulf States to secure new slave territories in the Southwest. In view of these facts the methods of the colonization society appeared utterly futile. Birney surrendered his commission and, in 1833, returned to Kentucky with the intention of doing himself what Henry Clay had refused to do three years earlier, still hoping that Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee might be induced to abolish slavery and thus place the slave power in a hopeless minority. His disappointment was extreme at the pro-slavery reaction which had taken place in Kentucky. The condition called for more drastic measures, and Birney decided to forsake entirely the colonization society and cast in his lot with the abolitionists. He freed his slaves in 1834, and in the following year he delivered the principal address at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in New York. His gift of leadership was at once recognized. As vice-president of the society he began to travel on its behalf, to address public assemblies, and especially to confer with members of state legislatures and to address the legislative bodies. He now devoted his entire time to the service of the society, and as early as September, 1835, issued the prospectus of a paper devoted to the cause of emancipation. This called forth such a display of force against the movement that he could neither find a printer nor obtain the use of a building in Dansville, Kentucky, for the publication. As a result he transferred his activities to Cincinnati, where he