ven more, many of which sent to him engraved
resolutions or presented them in person through selected delegations.
The resolutions were much of the type of that adopted at Sheffield,
January 10:

"_Resolved_: that this meeting being convinced that slavery
is the cause of the tremendous struggle now going on in the
American States, and that the object of the leaders of the
rebellion is the perpetuation of the unchristian and inhuman
system of chattel slavery, earnestly prays that the rebellion
may be crushed, and its wicked object defeated, and that the
Federal Government may be strengthened to pursue its
emancipation policy till not a slave be left on the American
soil[947]."

Adams quoted the _Times_ as referring to these meetings as made up of
"nobodies." Adams commented:

"They do not indeed belong to the high and noble class, but
they are just those nobodies who formerly forced their most
exalted countrymen to denounce the prosecution of the Slave
Trade by the commercial adventurers at Liverpool and Bristol,
and who at a later period overcame all their resistance to
the complete emancipation of the negro slaves in the British
dependencies. If they become once fully aroused to a sense of
the importance of this struggle as a purely moral question, I
feel safe in saying there will be an end of all effective
sympathy in Great Britain with the rebellion[948]."

Adams had no doubt "that these manifestations are the genuine expression
of the feelings of the religious dissenting and of the working classes,"
and was confident the Government would be much influenced by them[949].
The newspapers, though still editorially unfavourable to the
emancipation proclamation, accepted and printed communications with
increasing frequency in which were expressed the same ideas as in the
public meetings. This was even more noticeable in the provincial press.
Samuel A. Goddard, a merchant of Birmingham, was a prolific letter
writer to the _Birmingham Post_, consistently upholding the Northern
cause and he now reiterated the phrase, "Mr. Lincoln's cause is just and
holy[950]." In answer to Southern sneers at the failure of the
proclamation to touch slavery in the border states, Goddard made clear
the fact that Lincoln had no constitutional "right" to apply his edict
to states not in rebellion[951]. On the public platform no one equalled
the