"san culottes ... are too ignorant for any thinking man to see in power", Russell was perhaps closer to Martha McTier in his estimate. In 1795 she wrote approvingly to her brother of the Belfast's plebeian Jacobin Club (United Irishmen among them), describing it as composed of "persons and rank long kept down [who] now come forward with a degree of information that might shame their betters". Less controversially for Belfast, Russell had made clear his uncompromising opposition to slavery. Yet, presaging difficulty that Daniel O'Connell's campaigning abolitionism was to create for some of his followers, a Northern Star editorial (17 March 1792) agreed with Russell in principle but directed attention to the liberation of three million "slaves" in Ireland. The veteran anti-slavery campaigner, Henry Joy McCracken's sister Mary Ann, remembered that as a young officer in Belfast Russell had "abstained from the use of slave labour produce until slavery in the West Indies was abolished, and at the dinner parties to which he was so often invited and when confectionery was so much used he would not take anything with sugar in it". But Russell, with his experience in India, had a broader critique of the iniquities of the colonial trade in which Belfast was engaged. He cautioned:If the English, or any other people, think gold a sufficient cause to shed blood—if they are satisfied to fill the world with carnage and misery, that they may acquire cloves and nutmegs, and contracts, and slaves—let it not be so with us. State prisoner Russell's uncompromising radicalism earned him the respect of the more extreme democrats in Belfast and, in time, was to be in line with Tone's new conviction that "if the men of property will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property". With his close friend Henry Joy McCracken, Russell was a key figure in forming the alliance between the northern United Irishmen and the greatest body, existing, of "men of no property", the Defenders. A vigilante response to Peep O'Day raids upon Catholic homes in the mid 1780s, by the early 1790s the Defenders (drawing, like the United Irishmen, on the lodge structure of the Masons) were a secret oath-bound fraternity ranging across Ulster and the Irish midlands. Such activities increasingly alarmed the authorities and on 16 September