From an entirely different source, however, and prompted not by expediency but the purest altruism, came an impulse that finally told in the founding of Liberia.  The heart of a young man reached out across the sea.  Samuel J. Mills, an undergraduate of Williams College, in 1808 formed among his fellow-students a missionary society whose work later told in the formation of the American Bible Society and the Board of Foreign Missions.  Mills continued his theological studies at Andover and then at Princeton; and while at the latter place he established a school for Negroes at Parsippany, thirty miles away.  He also interested in his work and hopes Rev. Robert Finley, of Basking Ridge, N.J., who “succeeded in assembling at Princeton the first meeting ever called to consider the project of sending Negro colonists to Africa,"[1] and who in a letter to John P. Mumford, of New York, under date February 14, 1815, expressed his interest by saying, “We should send to Africa a population partly civilized and christianized for its benefit; and our blacks themselves would be put in a better condition.”

[Footnote 1:  McPherson, 18.]

In this same year, 1815, the country was startled by the unselfish enterprise of a Negro who had long thought of the unfortunate situation of his people in America and who himself shouldered the obligation to do something definite in their behalf.  Paul Cuffe had been born in May, 1759, on one of the Elizabeth Islands near New Bedford, Mass., the son of a father who was once a slave from Africa and of an Indian mother.[1] Interested in navigation, he made voyages to Russia, England, Africa, the West Indies, and the South; and in time he commanded his own vessel, became generally respected, and by his wisdom rose to a fair degree of opulence.  For twenty years he had thought especially about Africa, and in 1815 he took to Sierra Leone a total of nine families and thirty-eight persons at an expense to himself of nearly $4000.  The people that he brought were well received at Sierra Leone, and Cuffe himself had greater and more far-reaching plans when he died September 7, 1817.  He left an estate valued at $20,000.

[Footnote 1:  First Annual Report of American Colonization Society.]

Dr. Finley’s meeting at Princeton was not very well attended and hence not a great success.  Nevertheless he felt sufficiently encouraged to go to Washington in December, 1816, to use his effort for the formation of a national colonization society.  It happened that in February of this same year, 1816, General Charles Fenton Mercer, member of the House of Delegates, came upon the secret journals of the legislature for the period 1801-5 and saw the correspondence between Monroe and Jefferson.  Interested in the colonization project, on December 14 (Monroe then being President-elect) he presented in the House of Delegates resolutions embodying the previous enactments; and these passed 132 to 14.  Finley was generally