It was in fact just a month afterward that a call for a convention for the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society went out from New York to the friends of immediate emancipation throughout the North.

As an evidence of the dangerously excited state of the popular mind on the subject of slavery there stands in the summons the significant request to delegates to regard the call as confidential.
The place fixed upon for holding the convention was Philadelphia, and the time December 4, 1833.
Garrison bestirred himself to obtain for the convention a full representation of the friends of freedom.

He sent the call to George W.
Benson, at Providence, urging him to spread the news among the Abolitionists of his neighborhood and to secure the election of a goodly number of delegates by the society in Rhode Island.

He forthwith bethought him of Whittier on his farm in Haverhill, and enjoined his old friend to fail not to appear in Philadelphia.

But while the young poet longed to go to urge upon his Quaker brethren of that city "to make their solemn testimony against slavery visible over the whole land--to urge them, by the holy memories of Woolman and Benezet and Tyson to come up as of old to the standard of Divine Truth, though even the fires of another persecution should blaze around them," he feared that he would not be able to do so.