The convention to establish the New York State Anti-Slavery Society met in Utica because Oneida County had strong abolitionist leadership, the influence of religious revivalism, the city’s advantageous location, and a concentration of abolitionist organizations and printing activity. The movement took root in Oneida County in 1833 when Beriah Green arrived at Whitestown’s Oneida Institute and committed the school to becoming the nation’s first multi-racial college devoted to Manual Labor and Abolition. By 1835, Green and Utica’s Alvan Stewart had gained national recognition for anti-slavery work, and when they called for a convention in Utica, abolitionists from across New York came. In the 1830s, the Erie Canal was America’s most important transportation system, and Utica’s central position between Buffalo and New York City made it a convenient meeting place. After William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator in 1831, abolitionist literature spread quickly through Oneida County, including The Utica Standard and Democrat in 1835 and The Friend of Man in 1836. Oneida County also lay within the Burned-Over District of early 1800s religious revivalism, where many believed that faith required action and worked for the abolition of slavery. Gerrit Smith, born in Utica, became an active abolitionist after attending the 1835 convention and went on to become one of the nation’s most important abolitionist leaders, using his wealth and influence to support social justice, donating over 8 million dollars, sending agents into the South to negotiate with slaveholders, purchasing liberty for many people, and aiding freedom seekers at his family’s home in Peterboro, an Underground Railroad station. Hiram Huntington Kellogg, born in Clinton, developed his abolitionist views in Oneida County, graduated from Hamilton College in 1822, attended Auburn Seminary, opened the Young Ladies Domestic Seminary in Clinton in 1833 as one of only 8 interracial schools in the country between 1840 and 1860, attended the 1835 convention as a delegate from Clinton, and in 1841 became the first president of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, an anti-slavery, multi-racial college. Amos Freeman attended the Utica convention while studying at the Oneida Institute, later became an ordained Presbyterian minister, and with his wife Christiana operated an Underground Railroad station in Portland, Maine, aiding fugitives through the Abyssinian Congregational Church and in their home. Beriah Green, one of New York’s most outspoken and influential abolitionists, taught at the Oneida Institute, where black and white students established anti-slavery societies nationwide, produced anti-slavery circulars, printed The Friend of Man, and also used the institute as an Underground Railroad station.