About sixty delegates found their way to Philadelphia and organized on the morning of December 4th, in Adelphi Hall, the now famous convention.  It was a notable gathering of apostolic spirits—­“mainly composed of comparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond that period.”  They had come together from ten of the twelve free States, which fact goes to show the rapid, the almost epidemic-like spread of Garrisonian Abolitionism through the North.  The Liberator was then scarcely three years old, and its editor had not until the second day of the convention attained the great age of twenty-eight!  The convention of 1787 did not comprise more genuine patriotism and wisdom than did this memorable assembly of American Abolitionists.  It was from beginning to end an example of love to God and love to men, of fearless scorn of injustice and fearless devotion to liberty.  Not one of those three score souls who made up the convention, who did not take his life in his hand by reason of the act.  It was not the love of fame surely which brought them over so many hundreds of miles, which made so many of them endure real physical privation, which drew all by a common, an irresistible impulse to congregate for an unpopular purpose within reach of the teeth and the claws of an enraged public opinion.

The convention, as one man might have said with the single-minded Lundy, “My heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress; and the iron entered my soul.”  The iron of slavery had indeed entered the soul of every member of the convention.  It was the divine pang and pity of it which collected from the East and from the West this remarkable body of reformers.

The story of how they had to find a president illustrates the contemporary distrust and antagonism, which the anti-slavery movement aroused among the men of standing and influence.  Knowing in what bad odor they were held by the community, and anxious only to serve their cause in the most effective manner, the members of the convention hit upon the plan of asking some individual eminent for his respectability to preside over their deliberations, and thereby disarm the public suspicions and quiet the general apprehensions felt in respect of the incendiary character of their intention.  So in pursuance of this plan six of their number were dispatched on the evening of December 3d to seek such a man.  But the quest of the committee like that of Diogenes proved a failure.  After two attempts and two repulses the committee were not disposed to invite the humiliation of a third refusal and must have listened with no little relief, to this blunt summary of the situation by Beriah Green, who was one of the six.  “If there is not timber amongst ourselves,” quoth Green, “big enough to make a president of, let us get along without one, or go home and stay there until we have grown up to be men.”  The next day Green was chosen, and established in a manner never to be forgotten by his associates that the convention did possess “timber big enough to make a president of.”