But the British anti-slavery public, now recovered from its fears of an “abolition war” was of another temper.  Beginning with the last week of December, 1862, and increasing in volume in each succeeding month, there took place meeting after meeting at which strong resolutions were passed enthusiastically endorsing the issue of the emancipation proclamation and pledging sympathy to the cause of the North.  The Liberator from week to week, listed and commented on these public meetings, noting fifty-six held between December 30, 1862, and March 20, 1863.  The American Minister reported even more, many of which sent to him engraved resolutions or presented them in person through selected delegations.  The resolutions were much of the type of that adopted at Sheffield, January 10: 

“Resolved:  that this meeting being convinced that slavery is the cause of the tremendous struggle now going on in the American States, and that the object of the leaders of the rebellion is the perpetuation of the unchristian and inhuman system of chattel slavery, earnestly prays that the rebellion may be crushed, and its wicked object defeated, and that the Federal Government may be strengthened to pursue its emancipation policy till not a slave be left on the American soil[947].”

Adams quoted the Times as referring to these meetings as made up of “nobodies.”  Adams commented: 

“They do not indeed belong to the high and noble class, but they are just those nobodies who formerly forced their most exalted countrymen to denounce the prosecution of the Slave Trade by the commercial adventurers at Liverpool and Bristol, and who at a later period overcame all their resistance to the complete emancipation of the negro slaves in the British dependencies.  If they become once fully aroused to a sense of the importance of this struggle as a purely moral question, I feel safe in saying there will be an end of all effective sympathy in Great Britain with the rebellion[948].”

Adams had no doubt “that these manifestations are the genuine expression of the feelings of the religious dissenting and of the working classes,” and was confident the Government would be much influenced by them[949].  The newspapers, though still editorially unfavourable to the emancipation proclamation, accepted and printed communications with increasing frequency in which were expressed the same ideas as in the public meetings.  This was even more noticeable in the provincial press.  Samuel A. Goddard, a merchant of Birmingham, was a prolific letter writer to the Birmingham Post, consistently upholding the Northern cause and he now reiterated the phrase, “Mr. Lincoln’s cause is just and holy[950].”  In answer to Southern sneers at the failure of the proclamation to touch slavery in the border states, Goddard made clear the fact that Lincoln had no constitutional “right” to apply his edict to states not in rebellion[951].  On the public platform no one equalled the old anti-slavery orator, George Thompson, in the number of meetings attended and addresses made.  In less than a month he had spoken twenty-one times and often in places where opposition was in evidence.  Everywhere Thompson found an aroused and encouraged anti-slavery feeling, now strongly for the North[952].