helped by the effort of Mercer, and on December 21, 1816, there was held in Washington a meeting of public men and interested citizens, Henry Clay, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, presiding.  A constitution was adopted at an adjourned meeting on December 28; and on January 1, 1817, were formally chosen the officers of “The American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States.”  At this last meeting Henry Clay, again presiding, spoke in glowing terms of the possibilities of the movement; Elias B. Caldwell, a brother-in-law of Finley, made the leading argument; and John Randolph, of Roanoke, Va., and Robert Wright, of Maryland, spoke of the advantages to accrue from the removal of the free Negroes from the country (which remarks were very soon to awaken much discussion and criticism, especially on the part of the Negroes themselves).  It is interesting to note that Mercer had no part at all in the meeting of January 1, not even being present; he did not feel that any but Southern men should be enrolled in the organization.  However, Bushrod Washington, the president, was a Southern man; twelve of the seventeen vice-presidents were Southern men, among them being Andrew Jackson and William Crawford; and all of the twelve managers were slaveholders.

Membership in the American Colonization Society originally consisted, first, of such as sincerely desired to afford the free Negroes an asylum from oppression and who hoped through them to extend to Africa the blessings of civilization and Christianity; second, of such as sought to enhance the value of their own slaves by removing the free Negroes; and third, of such as desired to be relieved of any responsibility whatever for free Negroes.  The movement was widely advertised as “an effort for the benefit of the blacks in which all parts of the country could unite,” it being understood that it was “not to have the abolition of slavery for its immediate object,” nor was it to “aim directly at the instruction of the great body of the blacks.”  Such points as the last were to prove in course of time hardly less than a direct challenge to the different abolitionist organizations in the North, and more and more the Society was denounced as a movement on the part of slaveholders for perpetuating their institutions by doing away with the free people of color.  It is not to be supposed, however, that the South, with its usual religious fervor, did not put much genuine feeling into the colonization scheme.  One man in Georgia named Tubman freed his slaves, thirty in all, and placed them in charge of the Society with a gift of $10,000; Thomas Hunt, a young Virginian, afterwards a chaplain in the Union Army, sent to Liberia the slaves he had inherited, paying the entire cost of the journey; and others acted in a similar spirit of benevolence.  It was but natural, however, for the public to be somewhat uncertain as to the tendencies of the organization when the utterances