On the first day of January, 1832, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in the office of Samuel E. Sewall in Boston, the abolition of slavery through any such agency seemed impossible. Almost all the great interests of the country were combined to defend and sustain the system. The capital invested in slaves amounted to at least one thousand millions of dollars. This vast pecuniary interest was rapidly increasing by the growing demand for the cotton crop of the Southern States--a demand which continually overlapped the supply. The whole political power of the thirteen slave States was in the hands of the slaveholders. No white man in the South, unless he was a slaveholder, was ever elected to Congress, or to any important political position at home. The two great parties, Whig and Democrat, were pledged to the support of slavery in all its constitutional rights, and vied with each other in giving to these the largest interpretation. By a constitutional provision, which could not be altered, the slave States had in Congress, in 1840, twenty-five more Representatives in proportion to their number of voters than the free States. By the cohesion of this great political and pecuniary interest the slaveholders, though comparatively few in number, were able to govern the nation. The Presidents, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, the two great political parties, the press of the country, the mercantile interest, and that mysterious force which we call society, were virtually in the hands of the slaveholders. Whenever their privileges were attacked, all these powers rallied to their defense. Public opinion, in the highest circles of society and in the lowest, was perfectly agreed on this one question. The saloons of the Fifth Avenue and the mob of the Five Points were equally loyal to the sacred cause of slavery. Thus all the great powers which control free states were combined for its defense; and the attempt to assail this institution might justly be regarded as madness. In fact, all danger seemed so remote, that even so late as 1840 it was common for slaveholders to admit that property in man was an absurdity and an injustice. The system itself was so secure, that they could afford to concede its principle to their opponents. Just as men formerly fought duels as a matter of course, while frankly admitting that it was wrong to do so,--just as at the present time we concede that war is absurd and unchristian, but yet go to war continually, because we know no other way of settling international disputes,--so the slaveholders used to say, "Slavery is wrong; we know that: but how is it to be abolished? What can we do about it?"