It may be as well to mention here two other sporadic attempts to lead colored colonists to Africa.  In 1787 the gifted and erratic Dr. Wm. Thornton proposed himself to become the leader of a body of Rhode Island and Massachusetts colonists to Western Africa; he appears to have been in communication with Hopkins on the subject a year later, but the effort fell through for want of funds.  The other is much later.  Paul Cuffee, the son of a well-to-do Massachusetts freedman, had become by his talents and industry a prosperous merchant and ship-owner.  Stimulated by the colony at Sierra Leone, and longing to secure liberty to his oppressed race, he determined to transport in his own vessels, and at his own expense, as many as he could of his colored brethren.  Accordingly, in 1815, he sailed from Boston with about forty, whom he landed safely at Sierra Leone.  He was about to take over on a second voyage a much larger number, when his benevolent designs were interrupted by death.

It will be observed that the colonization plans hitherto unfolded had all been proposed for some missionary or similar benevolent object, and were to be carried out on a small scale and by private means.  It is now time to consider one proposed from a widely different standpoint.  As a political measure, as a possible remedy for the serious evils arising from slavery and the contact of races, it is not surprising to find Thomas Jefferson suggesting a plan of colonization.  The evils of slavery none ever saw more clearly.  “The whole commerce between master and slave,” he quaintly says, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.  Our children see this and learn to imitate it.”  And again, “With what execration should the statesman be loaded, who, permitting one-half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms these into despots and those into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other....  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."[3] Yet his equally clear perception of the evils sure to result from emancipation immediate and unqualified, makes him look to colonization as the only remedy.  “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?” he asks, “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”  After the lapse of a century how prophetic these words sound!  Jefferson believed then that by colonization slavery was to be abolished.  All slaves born after a certain date were to be free; these should remain with their parents till a given age, after which they should be taught at public expense agriculture and the useful arts.  When full-grown they were to be “colonized to such a place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of the household and handicraft arts, pairs of the useful domestic animals, etc.; to declare them a free and independent people, and extend to them our alliance and protection till they have acquired strength.”