Two thousand citizens of Baltimore petitioned against admitting Missouri as a slave State in 1820; and several avowed abolitionists ran for the Legislature shortly before 1830. At this time there were annual anti-slavery conventions in Baltimore, with prominent Whigs among the officers, and nearly two hundred affiliated societies in the Border States. There were fifty in North Carolina, where two thousand slaves had been freed in 1825, and three-fifths of the whites were reported as favourable to emancipation. Henry Clay was openly so in 1827; and the Kentucky Colonisation Society voted in 1830 that the disposition towards voluntary emancipation was strong enough to make legislation unnecessary. The abolition of slavery as "the greatest curse that God in his wrath ever inflicted upon a people" was demanded by a dozen members of the Virginia Legislature, as well as by the _Richmond Inquirer_, in 1832; and similar efforts were made shortly before 1850 in Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, Western Virginia, Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, and Missouri. From 1812 to 1845 the Senate was equally divided between free and slave States; and any transfer, even of Delaware, from one side to the other would have enabled the North to control the upper House as well as the lower. The plain duty of a Northern philanthropist was to co-operate with the Southern emancipationists and accept patiently their opinion that abolition had better take place gradually, as it had done in New York, and, what was much more important, that the owner should have compensation. This had been urged by Wilberforce in 1823, as justice to the planters in the West Indies; the legislatures of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New. Jersey recommended, shortly before 1830, that the nation should buy and free the slaves; and compensation was actually given by Congress to loyal owners of the three thousand slaves in the District of Columbia emancipated in 1862. Who can tell the evils which we should have escaped, if slavery could have continued after 1830 to be abolished gradually by State after State, with pecuniary aid from Congress or the North? This was the hope of Benjamin Lundy, who passed much of his life in the South, though he was born in New Jersey. He had advocated gradual emancipation in nearly every State, visiting even Texas and Missouri, organising anti-slavery societies, and taking subscriptions to his _Genius of Universal Emancipation_, which was founded in Tennessee in 1821, but afterwards was issued weekly at Baltimore. He published the names of nine postmasters among his agents, and copied friendly articles from more than forty newspapers. One of his chief objects was to prevent that great extension of slavery, the annexation of Texas.