His sentiments, however, with respect to the wisdom and necessity for colonizing the manumitted slaves were equally decided. In an address before the Colonization Society of Kentucky at Frankfort, December 17, 1829, Mr. Clay presented at length his reasons for supporting the movement to colonize all ex-slaves in the Republic of Liberia. In the course of this address he said:
"If the question were submitted, whether there should be either immediate or gradual emancipation of all the slaves in the United States, without their removal or colonization, painful as it is to express the opinion, I have no doubt that it would be unwise to emancipate them. For I believe, that the aggregate of the evils which would be engendered in society upon the supposition of such general emancipation, and of the liberated slaves remaining promiscuously among us, would be greater than all the evils of slavery."[[101]]
Continuing, he said:
"Is there no remedy I again ask for the evils of which I have sketched a faint and imperfect picture? Is our posterity doomed to endure forever not only all the ills flowing from the state of slavery, but all which arise from incongruous elements of population, separated from each other by invincible prejudices and by natural causes? Whatever may be the character of the remedy proposed, we may confidently pronounce it inadequate, unless it provides efficaciously for the total and absolute separation, by an extensive space of water or of land, at least of the white portion of our population from that which is free of the colored."[[102]]
In conclusion he said:
"If we were to invoke the greatest blessing on earth, which Heaven, in its mercy, could now bestow on this nation, it would be the separation of the two most numerous races of its population and their comfortable establishment in distinct and different countries."[[103]]
VIEWS OF LINCOLN
The biographers of Abraham Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay, declare:
"The political creed of Abraham Lincoln embraced among other tenets, a belief in the value and promise of colonization as one means of solving the great race problem involved in the existence of slavery in the United States.... Without being an enthusiast, Lincoln was a firm believer in colonization."[[104]]
Speaking at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857, Mr. Lincoln said: