Not one of those three score souls who made up the convention, who did not take his life in his hand by reason of the act.

It was not the love of fame surely which brought them over so many hundreds of miles, which made so many of them endure real physical privation, which drew all by a common, an irresistible impulse to congregate for an unpopular purpose within reach of the teeth and the claws of an enraged public opinion.
The convention, as one man might have said with the single-minded Lundy, "My heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress; and the iron entered my soul." The iron of slavery had indeed entered the soul of every member of the convention.

It was the divine pang and pity of it which collected from the East and from the West this remarkable body of reformers.
The story of how they had to find a president illustrates the contemporary distrust and antagonism, which the anti-slavery movement aroused among the men of standing and influence.

Knowing in what bad odor they were held by the community, and anxious only to serve their cause in the most effective manner, the members of the convention hit upon the plan of asking some individual eminent for his respectability to preside over their deliberations, and thereby disarm the public suspicions and quiet the general apprehensions felt in respect of the incendiary character of their intention.

So in pursuance of this plan six of their number were dispatched on the evening of December 3d to seek such a man.