While the men high up on the hills had no philosophic reflections nor any humanitarian hate towards slavery, a strong aversion to it had been manifested from an early period by some men of the valleys. “A powerful appeal for the abolition of slavery” was published as a communication in the _Knoxville Gazette_, 1797. It called a meeting of the citizens of East Tennessee at a town in Washington County, March, 1797, to form a Manumission Society. The communication bears internal evidence of having been written by a member of the Society of Friends. Not then, but in 1815 the proposed society was organized.[9] The Rev. John Rankin, born February 4, 1793, Jefferson County, East Tennessee, graduated at Washington College, was ordained a Presbyterian minister, but having imbibed anti-slavery sentiments from his mother in Rockbridge County, Virginia, he removed his residence from Tennessee to a free State and became a leading abolitionist. Before his recent death at the advanced age of nearly ninety years, at Ironton, Ohio, he gave authority to the statement that “the sentiment of abolitionism originated in Tennessee about 1814, there being then an anti-slavery society in Jefferson County, East Tennessee.”[10] The Manumission Society first mentioned, prosecuted its work diligently for years. In March, 1819, “_The Manumission Intelligencer_,” a weekly newspaper, was issued at Jonesboro, and its publication gave place, the year following, to “_The Emancipator_,” monthly, by Elijah Embree, one of two brothers, Friends, from Pennsylvania, who manufactured iron near Elizabethton. On his death, it was succeeded by “_The Genius of Universal Emancipation_,” at Greeneville, published by Benjamin Lundy, a Friend, from New Jersey. It lived until 1824.