James Miller McKim (American National Biography)

James Miller McKim was neither a gifted speaker nor an especially talented writer, but for twenty years he was the man who got things done for the antislavery cause in Pennsylvania. One antislavery colleague termed him a "prudent rash man," and he has been well described as an administrator who "applied a fundamentally conservative temperament to the prosecution of a radical cause" (Brown, p. 72). Once the Civil War began, McKim played a more independent and influential role in shaping events. He took the lead in urging his abolitionist colleagues to stop attacking the government from the outside and to instead become insiders with a say in shaping Reconstruction. He worked tirelessly to aid the freedmen, and he was the person most responsible for coordinating the postwar assistance efforts of the secular freedmen's aid societies.