Some of his travel was in slave states. What he saw there, together with what he read in Garrison's newspaper The Liberator (1831) and book "Thoughts on African Colonization" (1832), turned him into a committed abolitionist. He first worked, in 1833, at convincing the other students at Lane that immediatism, ending slavery completely and immediately, was the only solution and what God wanted. Successful, he next, with the Tappans' connivance, sought to bring immediatism to a larger audience. He announced that the public was invited to a series of public debates, over 18 evenings in February 1834, on abolition versus colonization. In fact, the debates were not debates at all, as no one spoke in favor of colonization. They were instead presentations of the horrors of American slavery, together with an exposé of the inadequacy of the American Colonization Society's project of helping free blacks migrate to Africa and its intent to preserve, rather than eliminate, slavery. At the end, the audience's views were highly supportive of immediate abolition.