Lucretia Mott was made president, and the Syracuse Standard said:  “It was a singular spectacle to see this Quaker matron presiding over a convention with an ease, grace and dignity that might be envied by the most experienced legislator in the country."[13] Susan B. Anthony and Martha C. Wright were the secretaries.  Delegates were present from Canada and eight different States.  Letters were received from Angelina Grimke Weld, William Henry Channing and others; Horace Greeley sent much good advice; Garrison wrote:  “You have as noble an object in view, aye and as Christian a one too, as ever was advocated beneath the sun.  Heaven bless all your proceedings.”  Rev. A.D.  Mayo said in a long letter: 

I have never questioned what I believed to be the central principle of the reform in which you are engaged.  I believe that every mature soul is responsible directly to God, not only for its faith and opinions, but for its details of life.  The assertion that woman is responsible to man for her belief or conduct, in any other sense than man is responsible to woman, I reject, not as a believer in any theory of “woman’s rights,” but as a believer in that religion which knows neither male nor female in its imperative demand upon the individual conscience.

George W. Johnson, of Buffalo, chairman of the State committee of the Liberty party, sent $10 and these vigorous sentiments:  “Woman has, equally with man, the inalienable right to education, suffrage, office, property, professions, titles and honors—­to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  False to our sex, as well as her own, and false to herself and her God, is the woman who approves, or who submits without resistance or protest, to the social and political wrongs imposed upon her in common with her sex throughout the world.”  Mrs. Stanton’s letter, read with hearty approval by Miss Anthony, raised the usual breeze in the convention.  She suggested three points: 

Should not all women, living in States where they have the right to hold property, refuse to pay taxes so long as they are unrepresented in the government?...  Man has pre-empted the most profitable branches of industry, and we demand a place at his side; to this end we need the same advantages of education, and we therefore claim that the best colleges of the country be opened to us....  In her present ignorance, woman’s religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more helpless and complete.

In the course of her argument Lucy Stone said: