Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted
by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting
strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight.
Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost his
place by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentration
in keeping with an intellect keen as a Damascus blade, closely watched
the proceedings through his spectacles, opening his mouth only to speak
directly to the purpose. The portly form of Dr. Bartholomew Russell, the
beloved physician, from that beautiful land of plenty and peace which
Bayard Taylor has described in his Story of Kennett, was not to be
overlooked. Abolitionist in heart and soul, his house was known as the
shelter of runaway slaves, and no sportsman ever entered into the chase
with such zest as he did into the arduous and sometimes dangerous work of
aiding their escape and baffling their pursuers. The youngest man
present was, I believe, James Miller McKim, a Presbyterian minister from
Columbia, afterwards one of our most efficient workers. James Mott, E.
L. Capron, Arnold Buffum, and Nathan Winslow, men well known in the anti-
slavery agitation, were conspicuous members. Vermont sent down from her
mountains Orson S. Murray, a man terribly in earnest, with a zeal that
bordered on fanaticism, and who was none the more genial for the mob-
violence to which he had been subjected. In front of me, awakening
pleasant associations of the old homestead in Merrimac valley, sat my
first school-teacher, Joshua Coffin, the learned and worthy antiquarian
and historian of Newbury. A few spectators, mostly of the Hicksite
division of Friends, were present, in broad brims and plain bonnets,
among them Esther Moore and Lucretia Mott.

Committees were chosen to draft a constitution for a national Anti-
Slavery Society, nominate a list of officers, and prepare a declaration
of principles to be signed by the members. Dr. A. L. Cox of New York,
while these committees were absent, read something from my pen eulogistic
of William Lloyd Garrison; and Lewis Tappan and Amos A. Phelps, a
Congregational clergyman of Boston, afterwards one of the most devoted
laborers in the cause, followed in generous commendation of the zeal,
courage, and devotion of the young pioneer. The president, after calling
James McCrummell, one of the two or three colored members of the
Convent