The committee having dispersed five hundred circular letters, giving an
account of their institution in London and its neighbourhood, the
Quakers were the first to notice it. This they did in their yearly
epistle, of which the following is an extract:--"We have also thankfully
to believe there is a growing attention in many, not of our religious
society, to the subject of negro slavery; and that the minds of the
people are more and more enlarged to consider it as an aggregate of
every species of evil, and to see the utter inconsistency of upholding
it by the authority of any nation whatever, especially of such as
punish, with loss of life, crimes whose magnitude bears scarce any
proportion to this complicated iniquity."
The General Baptists were the next; for on the 22nd of June, Stephen
Lowdell and Dan Taylor attended as a deputation from the annual meeting
of that religious body, to inform the committee, that those whom they
represented approved their proceedings, and that they would countenance
the object of their institution.
The first individual who addressed the committee was Mr. William Smith,
the late member for Norwich. In his letter, he expressed the pleasure he
had received in finding persons associated in the support of a cause in
which he himself had taken a deep interest.
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