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.