“Your committee find that in the South and West the civil authorities render emancipation impracticable, and notwithstanding they are led to fear that some of our members are too easily contented with laws so unfriendly to freedom, yet, nevertheless, they are constrained to admit that to bring about such a change in the civil code as would favor the cause of liberty is not in the power of the General Conference. Your committee have attentively read and seriously considered a memorial on the above subject, presented from several persons within the bounds of the Baltimore Annual Conference. They have also made inquiry into the regulations adopted and pursued by the different annual conferences in relation to this subject, and they find that some of them have made no efficient rules on the subject of slavery, thereby leaving our people to act as they please, while others have adopted rules and pursued courses not a little different from each other, all pleading the authority given them by the General Conference, according to our present existing rule, as stated in our form of Discipline. Your committee conclude that, in order to be consistent and uniform, the rule should be express and definite, and, to bring about this uniformity, they beg leave to submit the following resolution: “_Resolved_, by the delegates of the annual conferences in General Conference assembled, That all the recommendatory part of the second division, ninth section, and first answer of our form of Discipline after the word ‘slavery,’ be stricken out, and the following words inserted: ‘Therefore, no slaveholder shall be eligible to any official station in our Church hereafter, where the laws of the State in which he lives will admit of emancipation, and permit the liberated slave to enjoy freedom.’” The following was enacted by the _General Conference of 1820_: “_Resolved_, That the Committee on Slavery be instructed to inquire into the expediency of expressing our approbation of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States, and of recommending the same. “_Resolved_, That no person shall hereafter be licensed as a local preacher or exhorter, nor shall the annual conference receive any one as a traveling preacher on trial or into the traveling connection, who holds slaves.”