On the 2d of October the New York City Antislavery Society was successfully organized, despite an active and organized effort to prevent it. A call had been issued for a meeting of the friends of immediate emancipation at Clinton Hall. A counter-notice was published, signed "Many Southerners," inviting a meeting at the same time and place. The proprietors of Clinton Hall, alarmed at the situation, refused to let it to the abolitionists, who then applied to the Clinton Hotel, where they were also refused. The Southerners and their Northern sympathizers, finding Clinton Hotel closed, held a meeting at Tammany Hall, with General Bogardus, the United States Marshal, in the chair, with speeches and resolutions against the abolitionists, when a report that the abolitionists were in session at Chatham Street Hall sent them there in haste, only to find the Hall closed and dark. An eye-witness described the crowd assembled by the Southern call as "a genuine drunken, infuriated mob of blackguards of every species, some with good clothes, and the major part the very sweepings of the city." The public was amused the next morning by a leading editorial in the _Courier and Enquirer_, congratulating the country on the failure of the "disorganizing fanatics to organize a society fraught with danger to the Union and based upon an open violation of the United States Constitution;" while the advertising column of the same sheet contained the official proceedings of the abolitionists at the Chatham Street Chapel, where with promptness, energy, and order they had received the report of a committee, adopted a constitution, elected officers, adjourned and closed the building before the arrival of the rioters from Tammany. The successful management of the affair was due chiefly to the coolness and skill of Lewis Tappan, to whose devotion and energy the antislavery cause was from this time constantly indebted. The peaceful and lawful aims of the society, its frank acknowledgment of the rights of the Southern States were set forth in its constitution: "While it admits that each State in which slavery exists has, by the Constitution of the United States, the exclusive right to legislate in regard to its abolition in said State, it shall aim to convince all our fellow-citizens, by arguments addressed to their understandings and consciences, that slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God, and that the duty, safety, and best interest of all concerned require its immediate abandonment, without expatriation. The society will also endeavour in a constitutional way to influence Congress to put an end to the domestic slave-trade and to abolish slavery in all those portions of our common country which come under its control, especially in the District of Columbia, and likewise to prevent the extension of it to any State that may hereafter be admitted to the Union.