Great Faneuil Hall Meeting to Prevent Seizure of Slave, appoints Vigilance Committee

(Excerpted from Liberator, October 2, 1846, pg 2)  The great meeting on last Thursday night was the largest ever held in Faneuil Hall.   John Quincy Adams presided.  His progress to the platform was greeted with rapturous cheering. … The meeting was a brilliant, dense array of the weight and influence of the city and its environs, bent to the one point of preventing the illegal seizure of slaves on the soil of Massachusetts. … It is thought that 5000 persons were present, and every eye was turned with indignant reprobation upon the man at whose instance the slave was taken back into slavery ,   —JOHN H. PEARSON, Merchant, Long Wharf  … Dr. S. G. Howe stated the case of the slave Joseph, illegally returned to slavery by a Boston captain at the instance of a Boston merchant.   Reference to Pearson… no look of trouble clouded his face when in the course of the speeches, the necessity of instant withdrawal from participation with slaveholders in their iniquity was alluded to as the only sufficient remedy, in a national crisis like the present ….  The resolutions, branding Pearson with the ignominy of his deed, expressing the determination to put a stop to illegal seizures, and appointing a Vigilance Committee of 40, were adopted, and the great assembly dispersed …. Speeches were by several, including Samuel Gridley Howe,  Hon. Charles Francis Adams,  Charles Sumner, and Theodore Parker.