[Footnote 8:  Ibid., pp. 7 and 8 and African Repository, vol. iv., p. 375.]

[Footnote 9:  What would become of this plan depended upon the changing fortunes of the men concerned.  Kosciuszko died in 1817; and as Thomas Jefferson refused to take out letters testamentary under this will, Benjamin Lincoln Lear, a trustee of the African Education Society, who intended to apply for the whole fund, was appointed administrator of it.  The fund amounted to about $16,000.  Later Kosciuszko Armstrong demanded of the administrator $3704 bequeathed to him by T. Kosciuszko in a will alleged to have been executed in Paris in 1806.  The bill was dismissed by the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, and the decision of the lower Court was confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in 1827 on the grounds that the said will had not been admitted to probate anywhere.  To make things still darker just about the time the trustees of the African Education Society were planning to purchase a farm and select teachers and mechanics to instruct the youth, the heirs of General Kosciuszko filed a bill against Mr. Lear in the Supreme Court of the United States on the ground of the invalidity of the will executed by Kosciuszko in 1798.  The death of Mr. Lear in 1832 and that of William Wirt, the Attorney-General of the United States, soon thereafter, caused a delay in having the case decided.  The author does not know exactly what use was finally made of this fund.  See African Repository, vol. it., pp. 163, 233; also 7 Peters, 130, and 8 Peters, 52.]

The schemes failed, however, on account of the unyielding opposition of the free Negroes and abolitionists.  They could see no philanthropy in educating persons to prepare for doom in a deadly climate.  The convention of the free people of color assembled in Philadelphia in 1830, denounced the colonization movement as an evil, and urged their fellows not to support it.  Pointing out the impracticability of such schemes, the convention encouraged the race to take steps toward its elevation in this country.[1] Should the colored people be properly educated, the prejudice against them would not continue such as to necessitate their expatriation.  The delegates hoped to establish a Manual Labor College at New Haven that Negroes might there acquire that “classical knowledge which promotes genius and causes man to soar up to those high intellectual enjoyments and acquirements which place him in a situation to shed upon a country and people that scientific grandeur which is imperishable by time, and drowns in oblivion’s cup their moral degradation."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Williams, History of the Negro Race, p. 67.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 68; and Minutes of the Proceedings of the Third Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color, pp. 9, 10, and 11.]