There continued to be anti-slavery forces in the state as long as slavery existed. In 1835, there was organized at Rock Creek, in East Tennessee, an abolition society that advocated immediate abolition. It was one of three abolition societies at this time in the entire South, the other two being in Virginia and Kentucky. This society lasted only two years.[63] In 1836, fifty-five citizens of Rhea County sent a petition to the legislature, protesting against a law that the legislature had passed making it a penitentiary offence to receive abolition literature. This protest states, “that said law is too bloody, too tyrannical and too despotic to govern a free people which we profess to be in practice and should be in theory.” The petitioners further state that they are “opposed to the manner in which such law has curtailed our most sacred privileges, the free communication of thought upon any subject provided we tell the truth.”[64] The Maryville Intelligencer, issued at the seat of Maryville College, published reports of the synods of the Presbyterian Church, yet the editor remarked that “this publication, we must remember, is after a law making it penal in Tennessee to receive any anti-slavery paper or pamphlet, yes, making it a penitentiary offense to receive this very report of the Kentucky Synod.”[65] Hon. John M. Lea made one of the last anti-slavery addresses in Tennessee before the Apprentices’ Union at Nashville in 1841.[66] In 1849, the Jonesboro Whig said: “In Tennessee, the residence of James K. Polk, especially in East Tennessee, anti-slavery sentiments are strong and decided.” The Knoxville Tribune at this same time was publishing a series of papers on abolition, advocating the calling of a constitutional convention to amend the constitution to “open the way for the full and final redemption of the state.”[67] A correspondent from Tennessee in the New York Observer, writing on abolition in the state, said in 1849: The question is being a good deal agitated, and fully discussed. Many who own slaves oppose the institution, and non-slaveholders almost to a man. In my neighborhood of some five miles square, there are about eighty families, and a number of them own slaves, and there is but one advocate of slavery. A slaveholder said, “It is of no use to avoid the question any longer. The sooner it is settled the better, for God has declared that right shall prevail, and slavery must end.” Another individual who occupies a high station in society said, “Agitate the question and anti-slavery will prevail.” I might produce hundreds, yes, thousands of expressions of opinion equally strong and decisive. The great difficulty seems to be as to the means of getting rid of the evil.[68]