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to Steubenville, to get the paper printed, and returned with the edition on his back.
Early in the following year the Genius was removed to1 Greenville, Tennessee, through the urgency of Elihu Embree's friends, and printed on the press of the late Emancipator. The untiring editor travelled half of the eight hundred miles thither on foot, his family following him a few months later.
He remained there till 1824, learning the printer's trade, so as to do his own work, and publishing the only anti-slavery journal in the country.2
It was a small monthly of sixteen pages, shabbily printed, but it was full of vigor and earnestness, and it gradually obtained a considerable circulation.
A trip to Philadelphia (distant six hundred miles) in the winter of 1823-4, for the purpose of attending the biennial meeting of the ‘American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery,’3 was made by him on horseback, and at his own expense.
1 1822.
2 He also published, at the same time, a weekly newspaper, the Greenville Economist and Statesman, and an agricultural monthly.
3 The first Convention of the Abolition Societies of the United States was held in Philadelphia, in January, 1794, under the immediate auspices of the ‘Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and Improving the Condition of the African Race,’ and the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, the two parent anti-slavery societies formed in the United States. The former, which was founded in April, 1775, five days before the Lexington and Concord fights, counted among its presidents Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush, both signers of the Declaration of Independence; and the first president of the New York Society (organized in 1785) was John Jay, subsequently Chief-Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Other State societies were formed in Delaware (1788), Maryland (1789), Rhode Island and Connecticut (1790). Virginia (1791), New Jersey (1792), all of which, with some local societies in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware, were represented in the Convention of 1794. Annual sessions of the ‘American Convention’ were held, with more or less regularity, for several years; afterwards it met biennially till 1825, then annually till 1829, when it suspended operations for nine years, holding its final meeting in 1838. The State societies devoted their efforts to gradual emancipation in their own States, the education and moral improvement of the free people of color, and their protection and rescue from kidnapping and reenslavement. The Pennsylvania Society was especially active and vigilant in this last work, but early in the present century, and especially after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, a paralysis fell on the anti-slavery sentiment of the country, and the societies gradually dwindled until most of them disappeared; the new societies formed during the decade from 1830 to 1840, on the basis of immediate and unconditional emancipation, absorbing the ablest and most energetic surviving members of the old organizations. See “An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.” etc., by Edward Needles (Philadelphia, 1848), and “Anti-slavery opinions before the year 1800,” by William F. Poole (Cincinnati, 1873).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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