The main factor in promoting the work in Tennessee was, as in Kentucky, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock.  They opposed slavery in word and in deed, purchasing and setting free a number of colored men.  Among these liberal westerners was organized the “Manumission Society of Tennessee,” represented for years in the American Convention of Abolition Societies by Benjamin Lundy.[40] The Tennessee organization once had twenty branches and a membership of six hundred.[41] Among its promoters were Charles Osborn, Elihu Swain, John Underhill, Jesse Willis, John Cannady, John Swain, David Maulsby, John Rankin, Jesse Lockhart, and John Morgan.[42] They advocated at first immediate and unconditional emancipation, but soon seeing that the realization of this policy was impossible, they receded from this advanced position and memorialized their representatives to provide for gradual emancipation, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, the prevention of the separation of families, the prohibition of the interstate slave trade, the restriction of slavery, the general improvement of colored people through church and school, and especially the establishment among them of the right of marriage.[43] To procure the abolition of slavery by argument, other persons of this section organized another body, known as the “Moral Religious Manumission Society of West Tennessee."[44] It once had a large membership and tended to increase and spread the agitation in behalf of abolition.

In view of these favorable tendencies, it was thought up to 1830 that Tennessee, following the lead of Kentucky, would become a free State.[45] But just as the expansion of slavery into the interior of the Atlantic States attached those districts to the fortunes of the slaveholding class, it happened in some cases in the mountains which to some extent became indoctrinated by the teaching of the defenders of slavery.  Then the ardent slavery debate in Congress and the bold agitation, like that of the immediatists led by William Lloyd Garrison, alienated the support which some mountaineers had willingly given the cause.  Abolition in these States, therefore, began to weaken and rapidly declined during the thirties.[46] Because of a heterogeneous membership, these organizations tended to develop into other societies representing differing ideas of anti-slavery factions which had at times made it impossible for them to cooperate effectively in carrying out any plan.  The slaveholders who had been members formed branches of the American Colonization Society, while the radical element fell back upon organizing branches of the Underground Railroad to cooperate with those of their number who, seeing that it was impossible to attain their end in the Southern mountains, had moved into the Northwest Territory to colonize the freedmen and aid the escape of slaves.[47] Among these workers who had thus changed their base of operation were not only such noted men as Joshua Coffin, Benjamin