of this meeting.  Other such meetings held in Rochester, New York, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, about the same time, expressed similar sentiments.[53] On the occasion of the formation of a County Colonization Society as a result of a visit of J.B.  Pinney to Syracuse, resolutions expressing deep regret that the influence of the Society had extended to that section[54] were unanimously passed.  At another meeting at Providence, the same year, the Colonization Society was denounced because of the plea that its motive in promoting emigration to Africa was to Christianize the heathen.[55]

A series of meetings were held in Ohio to oppose the efforts of colonization agents.[56] A Columbus meeting of 1849 considered such workers inveterate enemies.  Another meeting in the same place in 1851 referred to one of their memorials as containing the false statement that the colored people of Ohio were prepared to go to Liberia.  They considered N. L. Rice and David Christy, promoters of the colonization scheme in that State, avowed friends of slavery and slaveholders.[57] In a subsequent State Convention in 1853, they urged every free black to use his influence against any bill offered in any State, or national legislature to appropriate money for this enterprise.[58] When “Cushing’s Bill” to facilitate colonization was offered, the free people of Cincinnati, Ohio, held an indignation meeting in 1853 to organize their friends to prevent its passage.[59]

The most distinguished Negroes of the country, too, were using the rostrum and the press to impede the progress of the American Colonization Society.  Prominent among these protagonists were Samuel E. Cornish, and Theodore S. Wright, who without doubt voiced the sentiments of the majority of the free colored people in the North.  These leaders took occasion in 1840 to attack Theodore Frelinghuysen and Benjamin Butler who had been reported as saying that the colonization project had been received with delight by the colored people.[60] Answering this assertion, they maintained that “if it was said of Southern slaves—­if it had been asserted that they yearned for Africa or indeed, any part of the world, even more unhospitable and unhappy, where they might be free from their masters, there probably would have been no one to dissent from that opinion.”  But to prove that this was not the situation among the free people of color these spokesmen related numerous facts, showing that in various conventions from year to year the free blacks had protested against emigration to Africa.[61]

The greatest enemy of the Colonization Society among the freedmen, however, was yet to appear.  This was Frederick Douglass.  At the National Convention of Free People of Color, held at Rochester, New York, in 1853, he was called upon to write the address to the colored people of the United States.  A significant expression in this address was:  “We ask that no appropriation whatever, State or national,