This yearning of the leader for increased activity in the cause of immediate emancipation was shared by friends and disciples in different portions of the country.  Few and scattered as were the Abolitionists, they so much the more needed to band together for the great conflict with a powerful and organized evil.  This evil was organized on a national scale, the forces of righteousness which were rising against it, if they were ever to overcome it and rid the land of it, had needs to be organized on a national scale also.  Garrison with the instinct of a great reformer early perceived the immense utility of a national anti-slavery organization for mobilizing the whole available Abolition sentiment of the free States in a moral agitation of national and tremendous proportions.

He had not long to wait after his return from England before this desire of his soul was satisfied.  It was in fact just a month afterward that a call for a convention for the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society went out from New York to the friends of immediate emancipation throughout the North.  As an evidence of the dangerously excited state of the popular mind on the subject of slavery there stands in the summons the significant request to delegates to regard the call as confidential.  The place fixed upon for holding the convention was Philadelphia, and the time December 4, 1833.

Garrison bestirred himself to obtain for the convention a full representation of the friends of freedom.  He sent the call to George W. Benson, at Providence, urging him to spread the news among the Abolitionists of his neighborhood and to secure the election of a goodly number of delegates by the society in Rhode Island.  He forthwith bethought him of Whittier on his farm in Haverhill, and enjoined his old friend to fail not to appear in Philadelphia.  But while the young poet longed to go to urge upon his Quaker brethren of that city “to make their solemn testimony against slavery visible over the whole land—­to urge them, by the holy memories of Woolman and Benezet and Tyson to come up as of old to the standard of Divine Truth, though even the fires of another persecution should blaze around them,” he feared that he would not be able to do so.  The spirit was surely willing but the purse was empty, “as thee know,” he quaintly adds, “our farming business does not put much cash in our pockets.”  The cash he needed was generously supplied by Samuel E. Sewall, and Whittier went as a delegate to the convention after all.  The disposition on the part of some of the poorer delegates was so strong to be present at the convention that not even the lack of money was sufficient to deter them from setting out on the expedition.  Two of them, David T. Kimball and Daniel E. Jewett, from Andover, Mass., did actually supplement the deficiencies of their pocket-books by walking to New Haven, the aforesaid pocket-books being equal to the rest of the journey from that point.