William Birney

William Birney (1819-1907) was a noted attorney and educator who served as a commander and recruiter for the U.S. Colored Infantry during the Civil War. After the war, Birney lived in Florida for some time before moving back north, where he established a law practice in Washington, D.C., and later served as a U.S. attorney for the city. Additionally, Birney had a productive career as a professor of English literature and a writer. Birney’s biography of his prominent abolitionist father, James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican Party, embroiled him in a long-running public feud with noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Birney was born on May 28, 1819, in the Triana community of Madison County, to James Gillespie Birney and Agatha Birney, his father’s second wife. He had six brothers and a sister. James G. Birney was a prominent lawyer, and briefly a plantation owner, in Madison County. He used that prominence to become the representative for Madison County in the Alabama House of Representatives. Despite enslaving individuals himself, he worked to secure several antislavery provisions in the state’s first constitution in 1819. Eventually, he became an influential advocate for abolition. His abolitionist sentiments garnered the suspicion of his neighbors, leading him to move his family to Danville, Kentucky. William primarily grew up in Kentucky with his brothers David and James before attending college at Centre College in Kentucky and Yale University in Connecticut. Three brothers, including David, also served as officers in the U.S. Army during the Civil War; David and two others, Dion and Fitzhugh, died during the conflict. James served in the Michigan legislature and was elected lieutenant governor in 1860. He later served as foreign minister at the Hague, in present-day the Netherlands.

James G. Birney

After graduating from college, Birney was admitted to the Ohio bar and practiced law in Cincinnati. He also spent time giving anti-slavery lectures. He married Catharine Hoffman in Hamilton, Ohio, on November 12, 1846, before moving to Europe for five years to work and study. While in France, Birney taught English literature at the University of Bourges. During that time, France underwent the Revolution of 1848, or the February Revolution, as it is also known. Birney actively participated in the revolution in Paris, commanding a barricade on Rue Saint-Jacques, and was one of the first to enter the Tuileries Palace after the flight of King Louis Philippe I.

Birney returned to the United States sometime before the outbreak of the Civil War. A month after the Confederates fired the first shots at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Birney joined the U.S. Army and organized the First New Jersey regiment. He would later be elected as its captain. Birney participated in many of the major battles in Virginia during the first few years of the conflict, including the First and Second Battles of Bull Run/Manassas (1861 and 1862), Chantilly (1862), Fredericksburg (1862), and Chancellorsville (1863). During that time, he continued to rise through the ranks, becoming a major.

Later in 1863, Birney received a commission from the U.S. War Department to assist in organizing regiments of Black soldiers as part of the U.S. Colored Infantry (USCI). During his time as a superintendent of the USCI, Birney helped organize seven USCI regiments and liberated multiple enslaved individuals from slave prisons in Baltimore, Maryland. Around this time, he served as colonel of the 2nd USCI regiment. Birney eventually rose to the rank of brigadier general, commanding a brigade of Black regiments. His brigade spent time in South Carolina and Florida before transferring to Virginia. While there, Birney and his brigade participated in the 1864 Petersburg campaign, in which U.S. forces slowly besieged and encircled the cities of Petersburg and Richmond, as well as the 1865 Appomattox campaign that culminated in the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. Birney mustered out of the army on August 24, 1865. Afterward, Birney received a nomination to brevet major general from Pres. Andrew Johnson. On July 26, 1866, the U.S. Senate approved his appointment.

Birney and his wife then lived for a time in Florida before moving north to Washington, D.C., in 1874. There, Birney established a law practice and later served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1874 to 1877. He continued to practice law until 1900. In 1890, Birney published a biography about his father titled James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican Party. In the book, Birney criticized William Lloyd Garrison and claimed that his father had led the abolitionist movement. The book became a central element in the decades-long public feud between Garrison and his supporters and Birney.

On August 14, 1907, Birney died at his country home, Geddy Farm, near Forest Glen, Maryland, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.