In summer 1850, the Edmonson sisters attended the Fugitive Slave Law Convention, an anti-slavery meeting in Cazenovia, New York, organized by local abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld and others, to demonstrate against the Fugitive Slave Act, soon to be passed by the U.S. Congress. Under this act, slave owners had powers to arrest fugitive slaves in the North. The convention declared all slaves to be prisoners of war and warned the nation of an unavoidable insurrection of slaves unless they were emancipated.