The Negroes in Alabama had also become interested in the movement during these years.[17] In writing to Mr. McLain, of Washington, S. Wesley Jones, a colored man of Tuscaloosa, said that save the Christian religion there was no subject of so much importance and that lay so near his heart as that of African Colonization.  All that was necessary to change the attitude on the part of the colored people was a “move by some one in whom the people have confidence to put the whole column in motion,” and just “when there is a start made in Alabama the whole body of the free people of color will join in a solid phalanx.”  As for himself he had fully made up his mind to go to Liberia, but could not leave the United States until he had closed up a ten years’ business, and if successful in collecting “tolerably well” what was due him he would be able to go without expense to the Society.[18]

In July, 1848, this same writer addressed to Mr. McLain another letter in which he gave details of a trip he had made in an adjoining county in the interest of emigration to Liberia.  During this trip he said he had found a few free colored people who, after he had talked with them on the subject, were of one accord that the best thing they could do for themselves was to emigrate to Liberia.[19] In another letter addressed to McLain by the same writer December 29, 1851, it was stated that the colonization movement was still growing in the State.  He also said that “those of us who want to go to Liberia are men who have been striving to do something” for themselves and consequently have “more or less business to close up.”  Mention was also made of the fact that there were at Huntsville, in the northern part of the State, several who had in part “made up their minds to go and only wanted a little encouragement to set them fully in favor of Liberia."[20]

Although thus favorably received in the South, however, the Colonization Society met opposition in other parts.  The spreading of the immediate abolition doctrine by men like Garrison and Jay had a direct bearing on the enterprise.  The two movements became militantly arrayed against each other and tended to inflame the minds of the colored people throughout the country.  The consensus of opinion among them was that the Colonization Society was their worst enemy and its efforts would tend only to exterminate the free people of color and perpetuate the institution of slavery.[21] So general was this feeling that T. H. Gallaudet, a promoter of the colonization movement, writing to one of its officers in 1831, said that something must be done to calm the feelings of the colored people in the large cities of the North.[22] Their resentment seemed to be due not so much to the fact that they were urged to emigrate, but that a large number of the promoters of the enterprise seemed to feel that the free Negroes should be forced to leave.[23] Considering themselves as much entitled to the protection of the laws of this country as any other element of its population, they took the position that any free man of color who would accept the offers of the colonization movement should be branded as an enemy of his race.  They not only demonstrated their unalterable opposition but expressed a firm resolve to resist the colonizationists even down to death.