The efforts toward emigration too took organized form during the forties and fifties.  In 1848 the free colored people of Dayton, Ohio, held a meeting to express their sentiments in favor of emigration to Africa, and to ask the white citizens to aid them in going there.[72] The movement also reached the colored people of Cincinnati, Ohio.[73] At a meeting held in that city on the 14th of July, 1850, they adopted a preamble and resolutions expressing similar sentiments.  Going a step further, in 1850 a number of free Negroes of New York formed an organization called the New York and Liberian Agricultural and Emigration Society to cooeperate with the Colonization Society.  Considerable money was collected by the organization to aid emigrants whom they sent to Liberia.[74]

In July, 1852, there was held in Baltimore, a meeting of delegates from the city and different sections of the State of Maryland.  After heated discussion and much excitement they passed resolutions to examine the different foreign localities for emigration, giving preference to Liberia.  It seemed that although a majority of the delegates present desired to cooeperate with the American Colonization Society, they were afraid to do so because of the opposition of the Baltimore people, who in a state of excitement almost developed into a mob intent upon breaking up the meeting.[75] As this meeting of delegates from the whole State seemed to be favorable to the colonization enterprise, the people of Baltimore felt it incumbent upon them to hold another meeting a few days thereafter, maintaining that they did not know that a previous meeting was called for the consideration of the questions brought before it, and denounced it as being unrepresentative.  They said that they were not opposed to voluntary emigration but did not at any time elect delegates to the so-called Colored Colonization Convention.[76]

To carry out more effectively the work of ameliorating the condition of the colored people, a National Council composed of two members chosen by election at a poll in each State, was organized in 1853.  As many as twenty State conventions were to be represented.  Before these plans could be well matured, however, those who believed that emigration was the only solution of the race problem called another convention to consider merely that question.  Only those who would not introduce the question of African emigration but favored colonization in some other parts were invited.  Among the persons thus interested were Reverend William Webb and Martin R. Delaney of Pittsburgh, Doctor J. Gould Bias and Franklin Turner of Philadelphia, Reverend Augustus R. Greene of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, James M. Whitfield of New York, William Lambert of Michigan, Henry Bibb, James Theodore Holly of Canada, and Henry M. Collins of California.[77] Frederick Douglass criticised this step as uncalled for, unwise, unfortunate, and premature.  “A convention to consider the subject of emigration,” said he, “when