There were earnest men already engaged in a new and more vigorous crusade: Elias Hicks, the Quaker, who proclaimed boldly the sin of owning men or condoning the practice in others; Rev. John Rankin, of Tennessee, who removed with his congregation across the Ohio River, rather than acquiesce in slavery; William Goodell, of Providence, beginning a career of forty years; above all, Benjamin Lundy, who sacrificed to the cause all that men hold dear. Between 1815 and 1818 four abolition papers were being published, _The Emancipator_ in Tennessee, _The Abolition Intelligencer_ in Kentucky, _The Liberalist_ in Louisiana, and, most important, Lundy's _Genius of Universal Emancipation_ in Maryland. All of these papers were published in the South, and the majority of the manumission societies were there. Thus, in 1826, when William Jay began his labours, the line between freedom and slavery was not yet drawn. A few slaves were still held in New York. Many antislavery people were to be found at the South and many pro-slavery people at the North. The United States was a slaveholding nation. Jay was a deeply interested observer of the contest in Congress which resulted in the Missouri Compromise. In 1819, when he was thirty years of age, his attitude towards the extension of slavery was stated in a letter to Elias Boudinot: "I have no doubt that the laws of God, and, as a necessary and inevitable consequence, the true interests of our country, forbid the extension of slavery. If our country is ever to be redeemed from the curse of slavery the present Congress must stand between the living and the dead and stay the plague. Now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation. If slavery once takes root on the other side of the Mississippi, it can never afterwards be extiminated, but will extend with the future Western Empire, poisoning the feelings of humanity, checking the growth of those principles of virtue and religion which constitute alike the security and happiness of civil society." In the year 1826 occurred an incident which marks the beginning of a new phase in the antislavery struggle--the movement which demanded abolition in the District of Columbia. There, on territory exclusively under the jurisdiction of the National Congress, it could be claimed justly that the question of States rights was not involved and that the constitutional provisions did not apply. In this movement, which continued until its object was accomplished in April, 1862, William Jay was a pioneer. In August of the year 1826 John Owen, the proprietor of a paper-mill at Croton Falls, near the Jay farm at Bedford, received a parcel from New York which happened to have been wrapped in a Washington newspaper, _The National Intelligencer_, of the 1st of August. On looking it over his eye was caught by the following advertisement: