The convention was in session three days, and its proceedings were filled with good resolutions and effective work.  Arthur Tappan was elected President of the national organization, and William Green, Jr., Treasurer.  Elizur Wright, Jr., was chosen Secretary of Domestic Correspondence, William Lloyd Garrison Secretary of Foreign Correspondence, and Abraham L. Cox Recording Secretary.  Besides these officers there were a Board of Management and a number of Vice-Presidents selected.  For three days the hearts of the delegates burned within them toward white-browed Duty and the master, Justice, who stood in their midst and talked with divine accents to their spirits of how men were enslaved and cruelly oppressed by men, their own brothers, and how the cry of these bondmen came up to them for help.  And with one accord there fell upon the delegates a pang and pity, an uplifting, impelling sense of ‘woe unto us’ if we withhold from our brethren in bonds the help required of us.  This rising tide of emotion and enthusiasm gathering mass at each sitting of the convention, culminated during the several readings of the Declaration of Sentiments.  And when on the third day Beriah Green brought the congress to a close in a valedictory address of apostolic power and grandeur, and with a prayer so sweet, so fervent, and strong as to melt all hearts, the pent-up waters of the reform was ready to hurl themselves into an agitation the like of which had never before, nor has since, been seen or felt in the Union.  Thenceforth freedom’s little ones were not without great allies, who were “exultations, agonies, and love, and man’s unconquerable mind.”

Everywhere the flood of Abolitionism burst upon the land, everywhere the moral deluge spread through the free States.  Anti-slavery societies rose as it were, out of the ground, so rapid, so astonishing were their growth during the year following the formation of the national society.  In nearly every free State they had appeared doubling and quadrupling in number, until new societies reached in that first year to upwards of forty.  Anti-slavery agents and lecturers kept pace with the anti-slavery societies.  They began to preach, to remonstrate, to warn, entreat, and rebuke until their voices sounded like the roar of many waters in the ears of the people.  Wherever there was a school-house, a hall, or a church, there they were, ubiquitous, irrepressible, a cry in the wilderness of a nation’s iniquity.  Anti-slavery tracts and periodicals multiplied and started from New York and Boston in swarms, and clouds, the thunder of their wings were as the thunder of falling avalanches to the guilty conscience of the country.  There was no State, city, town, or village in the Republic where their voice was not heard.