I just found out yesterday that there is a strong possibility of proving a link of George Alexander Milton Renshaw, with the early antislavery movement in the US. Bear with me, this story is rather long winded. For anyone who doesn't know what the Manumissionist movement was, it was a group primarily endorsed by the Presbyterian, Quaker, and later Baptist, and Methodist churches from the 1790s (yes, you read that right, 1790s!) through the mid 1830s (when the concept began to evolve into the abolitionist movement). Manumissionists believed it was morally wrong to have slaves but it was also morally wrong to act illegally or to force anyone to emancipate against their will. They wrote and preached and tried to convince others to release slaves. They advocated laws to forbid selling slaves away from their families (no husband/wife or parent/child splits), for releasing slave families that had the skills and means to make their own livings, for giving free blacks full voting and citizenship rights, etc. This movement started and was strongest in North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. The connection with our Renshaws is this: a man named Isaac Anderson. Dr. Anderson received his doctorate from Princeton and later started Maryville College (near Knoxville TN) which is still around today. According to Presbyterianism in the Ozarks, Anderson personally went to the home of the widow Julia McCroskey Renshaw to request that he have her son, G.A.M. Renshaw, for training at college to become a Presbyterian minister. Renshaw was a ward of Anderson's and graduated with a masters in theology in 1834 and from sermons, a diary, and notes we still have, he always regarded Anderson as his role model. Renshaw went on to become a pioneer minister and establish the first Presbyterian church west of St. Louis....BUT The news I have is yesterday I received a photocopy of a manumission petition by convention attendees to the Tennessee state constitutional convention of 1817, and Dr. Anderson was a signer! That means not only my McLins were involved, but GAM Renshaw (as Anderson's No. 1 fan) was likely to be a follower as well. You might not know that Tennessee in its original constitution (1796) was the first state to grant full voting rights to free blacks and it also set up a court procedure for emancipating slaves (an act that had been outlawed in 1790 by its mother state of North Carolina). Admittedly, it did not adopt another manumission petition that year to constitutionally abolish slavery in TN, but I think it is significant that this petition to abolish slavery in 1796 was signed by 2000 of TN's white, land-owning men. I'm still looking into this for more info, but facts like these prove we have every right to be proud of the ancestors we have. Sheila McLin Endres