A few days before the meeting of the Kalamazoo convention, but after its probable course had become apparent, a call had appeared in the columns of the Detroit _Tribune_ (it was copied, after the Kalamazoo action, by the Detroit _Free Democrat_ also) for a mass-meeting at Jackson, on July 6, of all the opponents of slavery extension. This was signed by several thousand leading citizens of Michigan, in all parts of the State, including Zachariah Chandler, Jacob M. Howard, H. P. Baldwin, H. K. Clarke, Franklin Moore, John Owen, Jacob S. Farrand, Shubael Conant, J. J. Bagley, E. B. Ward, R. W. King, James Burns, Charles M. Croswell, Allen Potter, Austin Blair, Isaac P. Christiancy, Chas. T. Gorham, and others. The signatures filled two newspaper columns in close type, and it was announced on the last day that several hundred names had been received too late for publication. The text of this document was as follows:
A great wrong has been perpetrated. The slave power of this country has triumphed. Liberty is trampled under foot. The Missouri compromise, a solemn compact, entered into by our fathers, has been violated, and a vast territory dedicated to freedom has been opened to slavery.
This act, so unjust to the North, has been perpetrated under circumstances which deepen its perfidy. An administration placed in power by Northern votes has brought to bear all the resources of executive corruption in its support.
Northern Senators and Representatives, in the face of the overwhelming public sentiment of the North, expressed in the proceedings of public meetings and solemn remonstrances, without a single petition in its favor on their table, and not daring to submit this great question to the people, have yielded to the seductions of executive patronage, and, Judas-like, betrayed the cause of liberty; while the South, inspired by a dominant and grasping ambition, has, without distinction of party, and with a unanimity almost entire, deliberately trampled under foot the solemn compact entered into in the midst of a crisis threatening to the peace of the Union, sanctioned by the greatest names of our history, and the binding force of which has, for a period of more than thirty years, been recognized and declared by numerous acts of legislation. Such an outrage upon liberty, such a violation of plighted faith, cannot be submitted to. This great wrong must be righted, or there is no longer a North in the councils of the nation. The extension of slavery, under the folds of the American flag, is a stigma upon liberty. The indefinite increase of slave representation in Congress is destructive to that equality between freemen which is essential to the permanency of the Union.