Emissaries soon came out from Great Britain to the United States and began the agitation of the abolition of slavery there. The preponderance of women in the New England States caused them to be selected as proselytes for the new crusade. There was also a class of men in that section, offshoots of the old persecuting theocracy who furnished recruits to the agitators. There were doubtless many who really believed slavery to be a great sin and wrong, who joined in the crusade from conscientious motives. Knaves there were in plentiful supply, gowned and ungowned, who were ready for anything which would tend to their personal advancement in position or their pecuniary profit. Out of these materials abolition societies were formed and petitions began to pour into Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and other places within the Federal jurisdiction, while the mails were filled with incendiary publications calculated to stir up insurrections. John Quincy Adams, who had held political office from his earliest manhood, until he became President, obtained a return to political life by his election to the lower House of Congress. Shortly after his return there, in presenting one of the chronic petitions of the Quakers for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, he had taken occasion to notify the House and the country that he had no sympathy with the views of the politicians, yet he joined the new agitators. This new agitation in Congress began about 1834-5 and was continued with great violence for several years, a petition being presented by Mr. Adams, during the time, for the dissolution of the Union. After much exasperation of feeling growing out of the presentation of the petitions in both Houses of Congress and the circulation of incendiary publications, some respite from the excitement in Congress was obtained by the adoption of a rule in the lower House for laying petitions on the table on their presentation, without debate, and by the conservative action of the Senate. The agitation, however was continued at the North and began to have an important influence upon the canvass for the presidential elections. The law for the recovery of fugitive slaves, always inefficient because of the refusal or failure of the states' officers to enforce it, had now become a dead letter by the resistance to its execution by mobs and the still more mischievous action of several of the legislatures of the free states. The circulation of incendiary publications through the mails had been forbidden by Congress, but the Northern press was prolific in the production of gross libels upon the character of the people of the Southern states and misrepresentations of the institution of slavery as it existed there; even the Constitution of the United States was denounced by the new lights as "a league with hell and a covenant with death."