[2] “Dealings,” II, 169.

[3] “Dealings,” I, 178.

[4] “Dealings,” II, 148.

[5] “Perambulations of Cosmopolite, or Travels and Labors in Europe and America,” 95.

[6] Ibid., 93.

[7] Ibid., passim.

[8] Biography and Miscellany, 30.

[9] “A Journey from Babylon to Jerusalem or the Road to Peace and True Happiness,” 71.

[10] “A Journey from Babylon and Jerusalem,” 71.

[11] Ibid., 72.

[12] “History of Cosmopolite,” 544-546.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE FREE NEGRO TOWARD AFRICAN COLONIZATION

In the midst of the perplexities arising from various plans for the solution of the race problem one hundred years ago, the colonization movement became all things to all men.  Some contended that it was a philanthropic enterprise; others considered it a scheme for getting rid of the free people of color because of the seeming menace they were to slavery.  It was doubtless a combination of several ideas.[1] Furthermore, the meaning of colonization varied on the one hand according to the use the slave-holding class hoped to make of it, and on the other hand according to the intensity of the attacks directed against it by the Abolitionists and the free colored people because of the acquiescent attitude of colonizationists toward the persecution of the free blacks both in the North and South.[2]

Almost as soon as the Negroes had a chance to express themselves they offered urgent protest against the policy of removing them to a foreign land.  Before the American Colonization Society had scarcely organized, the free people of Richmond, Virginia, thought it advisable to assemble under the sanction of authority in 1817, to make public expression of their sentiments respecting this movement.  William Bowler and Lenty Craw were the leading spirits of the meeting.  They agreed with the Society that it was not only proper, but would ultimately tend to benefit and aid a great portion of their suffering fellow creatures to be colonized; but they preferred being settled “in the remotest corner of the land of their nativity.”  As the president and board of managers of the Society had been pleased to leave it to the entire discretion of Congress to provide a suitable place for carrying out this plan, they passed a resolution to submit to the wisdom of that body whether it would not be an act of charity to grant them a small portion of their territory, either on the Missouri River or any place that might seem to them most conducive to the public good and their future welfare, subject, however, to such rules and regulations as the government of the United States might think proper.[3] Many Negroes, however, emigrated from this State during later years.  Subsequent accounts indicate, too, that this increasing interest in colonization among the colored people of that Commonwealth extended even into North Carolina.[4]