Charles Osborn was one of the greatest of these leaders who left the state. He was born in North Carolina, August 21, 1795. At the age of 19, he moved with his parents to Tennessee, where he became a Quaker minister. In December, 1814 he organized the manumission movement in Tennessee, and was its leader until 1816, when he moved to Ohio, where he did his greatest work.[21] George Washington Julian makes Osborn the undoubted leader in the abolition movement of the Northwest, of which Ohio was the center and one of the two centers of the abolition movement in the nation. Osborn laid the foundation for his work in his new field, for which Tennessee had prepared him by environment and previous service, by establishing at Mount Pleasant, Ohio, in 1817, the Philanthropist, which Julian regards as the first anti-slavery publication in the United States.[22] In 1818, Osborn removed to Indiana, where he lived the remainder of his life. Rev. John Rankin was possibly the greatest of those leaders who saw fit to leave the State to find an environment more in harmony with his attitude toward slavery. He was a Presbyterian minister, “who was destined, during the three decades preceding the Civil War, to occupy a position of first importance among the anti-slavery workers of the United States. In 1825, he published his famous _Letters on Slavery_, which went through many editions and exerted a very great influence. Many western men have called him the ‘father of abolition,’ and it was not an uncommon thing in the thirties to hear him spoken of as ‘the Martin Luther of the Cause’.”[23] Rev. Rankin said that in his early boyhood a majority of the people of East Tennessee were abolitionists.[24] The first issue of the Emancipator, referring to the loss of anti-slavery leadership in Tennessee, said, Thousands of first-rate citizens, men remarkable for their piety and virtue, have within twenty years past, removed from this and other slave states to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, that their eyes may be hid from seeing the cruel oppressor lacerate the back of his slaves, and that their ears may not hear the bitter cries of the oppressed. I have often regretted the loss of so much virtue from these slave states, which held too little before. Could all those who have removed from slave states on that account, to even the single state of Ohio, have been induced to remove to, and settle in Tennessee, with their high-toned love for universal liberty and aversion to slavery, I think that Tennessee would ere this have begun to sparkle among the true stars of liberty.[25]