Here are all manner of people associated for one object, which has the primary advantage of being ostensibly benevolent. It has had Mr. Madison for its chief officer: Mr. Clay for its second. It has had the aid, for twenty years, of almost all the presses and pulpits of the United States, and of most of their politicians, members of government, and leading professional men and merchants, and almost all the planters of twelve states, and all the missionary interest. Besides the subscriptions arising from so many sources, there have been large appropriations made by various legislatures. What is the result?—Nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit. Out of a chaos of elements no orderly creation can arise but by the operation of a sound principle: and sound principle here, there is none.
In twenty years, the Colonisation Society has removed to Africa between two and three thousand persons;[19] while the annual increase of the slave population is, by the lowest computation, sixty thousand; and the number of free blacks is upwards of three hundred and sixty-two thousand.
The chief officers of the Colonisation Society look forward to being able, in a few years, to carry off the present annual increase, and a few more; by which time the annual increase will amount to many times more than the Society will have carried out from the beginning.
The leading Colonisation advocates in the south object to abolition, invariably on the ground that they should be left without labourers: whereas it is the Colonisation scheme which would carry away the labourers, and the abolition scheme which would leave them where they are. To say nothing of the wilfulness of this often-confuted objection, it proves that those who urge it are not in earnest in advocating Colonisation as ultimate emancipation.
As far as I could learn, no leading member of the Colonisation Society has freed any of his slaves. Its president had sold twelve, the week before I first saw him. Its vice-president is obsédé by his slaves; but retains them all. And so it is, through the whole hierarchy.
The avowal of a southern gentleman,—"We have our slaves, and we mean to keep them,"—is echoed on political occasions by the same gentlemen of the Colonisation Society, who, on politic or religious occasions, treat of colonisation as ultimate emancipation.
While labourers are flocking into other parts of the country, at the rate of sixty thousand per annum, and are found to be far too few for the wants of society, the Colonisation scheme proposes to carry out more than this number; and fails of all its ostensible objects till it does so. A glance at the causes of slavery, and at the present economy of the United States, shows such a scheme to be a bald fiction.
It alienates the attention and will of the people, (for the purposes of the few,) from the principle of the abolition of slavery, which would achieve any honest objects of the Colonisation Society, and many more. Leaving, for the present, the moral consideration of the case, abolition would not only leave the land as full of labourers as it is now, but incalculably augment the supply of labour by substituting willing and active service, and improved methods of husbandry, for the forced, inferior labour, and wasteful arrangements which are always admitted to be co-existent with slavery.
The greater number of eminent Abolitionists,—eminent for talents, zeal and high principle,—are converted Colonisationists.