INTRODUCTION.
                   BY PARKER PILLSBURY.
  The following work is reproduced without apology. It
is needed as authentic anti-slavery history, and as showing
beyond all dispute who were most zealous defenders of
American slavery, and the most virulent opponents of the
active abolitionists.
  The author, Hon. James G. Birney, the only truly anti-
slavery man ever nominated for the presidency while slavery
lasted, was a native of Kentucky, and connected both by
birth and marriage with many of its first families. His ed-
ucation completed, he spent fifteen years in Huntsville, Ala-
bama, a successful lawyer, and for a time solicitor-general,
besides beingf tendered a seat on the bench of the supreme
court.
  He was appointed by the legislature to nominate, at his
sole discretion, the faculty of the State University. Return-
ing to Kentucky, he was called to the Professorship of Polit-
ical Economy, Rhetoric, and Belles-Lettres in Centre Collegye
at Danville in that state. And those who knew him testified
that " his character and Christian influence were quite equal
to his public standing."  But public and private virtues,
intellectual eminence, and the hi(ghest lay official positions
in the Presbyterian church, were all lost in becoming a
repentant slaveholder and an active, earnest abolitionist.
  About the comnmencement of the wondrous career of Will-
iamn Lloyd Garrison and the establishment by him of The
Liberator in Boston, Mr. Theodore D. Weld, one of our most
eloquent and powerful anti-slavery lecturers and writers, en-
countered Mr. Birney while yet a slaveholder, and held some
searching discussions with him and his minister, also a slave-
holder, on the right of one man to hold absolute property in
his fellow-man. The; argument began with the minister in
the absence of Birney, who welcomed Weld to the parson-
age till he should return. He came in a few days, and