t. The marked superiority of
their new friends in education, experience, culture, piety, liberality
of view, statesmanship, decision of character, and energy in action, to
the Philadelphia Quakers and Charleston slave-holders, must have been
to them a surprise and a revelation. Working with a common purpose,
these men were of varied accomplishments and qualities. William Jay and
James G. Birney were cultured men of the world, trained in legal
practice and public life; Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, John Rankin, and
Duncan Dunbar, were successful merchants; Abraham L. Cox, a physician
in large practice; Theodore D. Weld, Henry B. Stanton, Alvan Stewart,
and Gerrit Smith were popular orators; Joshua Leavitt, Elizur Wright,
and William Goodell were ready writers and able editors; Beriah Green
and Amos A. Phelps were pulpit speakers and authors, and John G.
Whittier was a poet. Some of them had national reputations. Those who
in December, 1835, protested against the false charges of publishing
incendiary documents calculated to excite servile war, made against the
Society by President Jackson, had signed names almost as well known as
his, and had written better English than his message. Several of them
had been officers of the American Anti-Slavery Society from its
formation. Their energy had been phenomenal: they had raised funds,
sent lecturers into nearly every county in the free States, and
circulated in a single year more than a million copies of newspapers,
pamphlets, magazines, and books. Their moderation, good judgment, and
piety had been seen and known of all men. Faithful in the exposure of
unfaithfulness to freedom on the part of politicians and clergymen,
they denounced neither the Constitution nor the Bible. Their devotion
to the cause of abolition was pure; for its sake they suppressed the
vanity of personal notoriety and of oratorical display. Among them, not
one can be found who sought to make a name as a leader, speaker, or
writer; not one who was jealous of the reputation of co-adjutors; not
one who rewarded adherents with flattery and hurled invectives at
dissentients; not one to whom personal flattery was acceptable or
personal prominence desirable; not one whose writings betrayed egotism,
self-inflation or bombast. Such was their honest aversion to personal
publicity, it is now almost impossible to trace the work each did. Some
of their noblest arguments for Freedom were published anonymously. They
made no